Oral history interview with Charles G. Cochrane

2025-02-19T11:58:01-05:00

Charles (Charley) G. Cochrane begins his interview discussing his family, his childhood, and his adolescence in Berkeley, California. His father emigrated from England and attended the University of California, Berkeley, where he and Cochrane’s mother met. Though his father’s investment business ran into difficultly at the outset of the Great Depression, necessitating his father’s temporary move to Mexico, life in Berkeley was quite enjoyable with good weather and plenty of opportunities to spend time outdoors to play tennis with friends and classmates. Cochrane had an early interest in science and his parents supported his, and his older brother’s, interest in pursuing undergraduate and graduate education on the East Coast. Cochrane’s brother attended Yale University for undergraduate studies and Cochrane the University of Rochester. Cochrane used their general proximity to visit his brother during long weekends whenever the opportunity arose. Interested in pursuing medicine, Cochrane ultimately decided to attend the University of Rochester Medical School in large part due to the changes that George H. Whipple established during his deanship there.

During medical school, Cochrane decided to pursue Internal Medicine as his specialty, but upon graduating his interests shifted to immunology and he wanted to undertake scientific research—not clinical—related to that topic. Finding a wonderful group of immunological researchers, Cochrane moved to Frank J. Dixon’s lab at the University of Pittsburgh to begin his career in research; he did so with support from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). After a time spent at the Institut Pasteur in Paris, France, Cochrane joined most of his colleagues from Dixon’s lab when they all moved to the Scripps Clinic in California. The five of them founded Scripps Research in 1961.

Cochrane and his colleagues had complete independence at Scripps to pursue whatever research they desired with the funds they received from the NIH and other granting institutions. It is at Scripps that Cochrane began his work on inflammation and inflammatory responses, now working with postdocs who came from all over the world to study with him. It is at Scripps that Cochrane discovered what protein is responsible for keeping the alveolus open and functioning, which had great importance for treating premature babies who suffered from oxygen deprivation soon after birth. Cochrane spends the rest of the interview discussing this research and the therapy developed from it, as well as his life and work post retirement.