00:00:00 The

00:00:26 1988 ACS Priestley Awardee, Dr. Frank H. Westheimer, was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1912,

00:00:35 and received his B.A. from Dartmouth in 1932. He received his Master's from Harvard University

00:00:41 in 1933, and his Ph.D. in 1935. He was appointed Research Associate at the University of Chicago

00:00:50 in 1936, and became full professor in 1948. During World War II, he was Research Supervisor

00:00:59 at the Explosives Research Laboratory of the National Defense Research Committee. In 1954,

00:01:06 he went to Harvard University, where he continued active research until his retirement in 1982.

00:01:13 Currently, he is Leo Professor of Chemistry Emeritus at Harvard University.

00:01:19 Dr. Westheimer first applied his training as a physical organic chemist to very fundamental

00:01:26 chemical problems, such as electrostatic effects in solvents. His early work in enzyme reduction

00:01:33 eventually led to the development of photoaffinity labeling, an enzyme mapping technique which

00:01:40 allows researchers to trace activities of biological macromolecular systems. Dr. Westheimer

00:01:48 has served on numerous science policy panels, and in 1965, was Chairman of the National

00:01:54 Academy of Sciences' Survey of Chemistry, which produced the renowned Westheimer Report.

00:02:02 More recently, Dr. Westheimer has been concerned with the problems of science education for

00:02:07 the non-scientist. He has proposed curricula which would provide non-science students with

00:02:13 the same appreciation and understanding of the sciences that they have of the humanities

00:02:18 and of the social sciences. In this interview, which was recorded over the course of two

00:02:24 days at his offices at Harvard University, Dr. Westheimer is joined by Dr. Leon B. Gortler,

00:02:32 Professor of Chemistry at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York.

00:02:37 I know you were born in Baltimore in January 1912. Maybe you could tell me a little bit

00:02:43 about your family and your early education, the influence of your parents.

00:02:48 Well, my father was very good at arithmetic. He had learned arithmetic in the German-American

00:02:59 high school in St. Joe, Missouri, and learned it thoroughly. He had only one year of college.

00:03:05 He had a year of business school in New York. So he had never studied any higher mathematics,

00:03:15 but he understood mathematics. My mother graduated from Goucher College in 1908. I don't think

00:03:24 that there were a great many women in 1908 who went to college or graduated from it.

00:03:35 She had learned Latin in the girls' Latin school in Baltimore and learned it very well.

00:03:44 My parents were people of modest intellectual accomplishment and placed a very high value

00:03:55 on learning. I went to Dartmouth College. I didn't know much about college. I was very

00:04:05 young. I graduated from high school at 16. I didn't really know what to expect in college,

00:04:15 but I knew that I was going to college because it was obvious that my parents expected me

00:04:20 to go to college. That was just never in question. I didn't apply to Harvard or Yale

00:04:34 because to go to them you had to take college board exams. If you took college board exams

00:04:39 you had to be able to spell. I had never learned properly to spell, possibly because I'm slightly

00:04:48 dyslexic, but the word dyslexic didn't exist really in those days. And I never took the

00:04:55 time and effort to sit down to learn to spell, which I'm sure I could have done. But everyone

00:05:04 realized that if I took the college boards I would fail. It's also true that although

00:05:14 I can do all sorts of tricks with mental arithmetic that would seem quite advanced,

00:05:27 I make a lot of mistakes in the simple business of adding two and two. My handwriting is pretty

00:05:34 poor. I didn't really learn to write good English. I wrote moderate English, but I didn't

00:05:43 learn to write really good English until I was on the faculty of the University of

00:05:48 Chicago. So I would say that in school I didn't learn to read, write, spell, or do arithmetic.

00:05:56 But I did learn algebra. I became quite interested in science at Dartmouth. I'd always been interested

00:06:05 in science and math, I guess, but I'd never really thought of it as a career. I'd assumed

00:06:10 that I would graduate from college and go in my father's brokerage business. Dartmouth

00:06:19 had a business school, the Tuck School, and a five-year program where you did three years

00:06:26 of ordinary academic work and then two years at the Tuck School for a five-year total program.

00:06:35 And at the end of my, near the end of my junior year, I wrote my parents, or maybe

00:06:45 I phoned them, I don't remember, to tell them that I really was interested in chemistry

00:06:51 and I would like not to go in my father's business, but to become a chemist. My parents

00:07:00 were quite satisfied. My father in particular would have loved it if I had gone to do business

00:07:09 with him. But so long as I was willing to work hard at whatever I did, he was perfectly

00:07:19 content. He would have been furious with me if I hadn't been a worker. But as long

00:07:30 as I was willing to work, he was willing to go along and he was in a position where he

00:07:42 could really help me in that he was willing to pay for me to go to graduate school. There

00:07:52 were very few fellowships in those days for graduate school. And most of the people who

00:08:03 went to graduate school earned their way by teaching.

00:08:08 Was there anything in particular that made you lean toward chemistry as opposed to physics

00:08:13 or math? Was it the laboratory work? Was it some individual, some textbook, anything you

00:08:23 point your finger to?

00:08:25 I took chemistry and physics. I don't know why I like chemistry more. Certainly when

00:08:36 I got as far as organic chemistry, I found that absolutely fascinating and splendid.

00:08:45 And even then when we had to learn all the organic chemistry by rote, I knew that there

00:08:52 had to be a theory for organic chemistry and it was going to be possible to understand

00:08:59 all of this.

00:09:00 After Harvard, you were awarded a National Research Council Fellowship and you went to

00:09:05 Columbia and while you worked on your own problems, you worked in the laboratory of

00:09:10 Louie Hammett. Why did you opt to go to Columbia and tell me a little bit about the effect

00:09:19 of the Columbia experience on your later research, your later career?

00:09:30 The number of theoretical organic chemists in the world at that time was small. And of

00:09:44 them all, I think Hammett was by far the most prominent. Professor Lucas at Caltech

00:09:57 was a first-rate physical organic chemist. Julius Stieglitz at Chicago was a second-rate

00:10:08 physical organic chemist. Morris Karasch was a first-class chemist, but I didn't know

00:10:15 about it. I guess I did know at that time, but the sort of things that Hammett was doing

00:10:24 were much more interesting to me. And his papers with Alden Derup on super acidity were

00:10:35 I thought the most exciting papers in physical organic chemistry at the time. So I think

00:10:47 Hammett was the absolutely obvious choice of a person with whom to work if one had the

00:10:57 opportunity. I went to Brewston and for two years I was doing things that were unrelated

00:11:04 to my academic career in any way. We were looking for better inhibitors for the decomposition

00:11:14 of nitroglycerin so we could stabilize nitroglycerin propellants and measuring as a service the

00:11:31 stability of various propellants that were being manufactured in the laboratory, principally

00:11:41 in Kincaid's group. So he was very different from my academic research, but quite interesting.

00:11:55 You were doing sort of applied chemistry in a way that you had never done before.

00:11:59 I had never done before and didn't do much since. But it was good applied chemistry.

00:12:09 I noticed in a Harvard newspaper that you had prepared a teaching manual for graduate

00:12:17 students here at Harvard and that you were involved in a program to guide graduate students

00:12:27 in their teaching. And I know that you've thought a good deal about teaching and learning.

00:12:35 Can you tell me a little bit about the conclusions drawn from your thinking?

00:12:42 First, that the psychologists do not have a sound, well-developed theory of learning.

00:12:51 This is what they themselves tell me. I was fortunate enough to know some of the important

00:13:00 psychologists, and in particular George Miller, and learned that learning theory is in bad shape.

00:13:10 Second, since learning theory is in bad shape, one has to reach out on his own.

00:13:19 My observation is that, a very profound observation, that different people are different.

00:13:26 When I was at the University of Chicago, Robert Maynard Hutchins used to say that

00:13:36 if there was anything that we didn't have in a textbook, we should write it up for the students,

00:13:45 mimeograph it, back in the days before Xerox, distribute it to the students, and use our

00:13:51 classroom hours for discussion, that he could see no purposes in a lecture.

00:13:59 It was clear to me even then that he was a man who learned exclusively through his eyes,

00:14:06 and didn't realize that there were other people who learned through their ears, or perhaps in other ways.

00:14:14 Many scientists learn best what they've done in the laboratory, because they remember

00:14:20 what they've done with their hands. And I am absolutely convinced that the best learning for

00:14:30 a great number of people occurs when they themselves explain something. I think professors

00:14:37 generally don't know a subject well until they've taught it, and that discussion sections provide

00:14:43 a different mode of learning than either reading a textbook or listening to a lecture.

00:14:51 Certainly solving problems, in science at least, is a different learning mode,

00:14:57 and one which for many scientists is the most important. And what I said in this teaching manual

00:15:06 is that what one should do in teaching is to offer a smorgasbord.

00:15:14 Looking at your crystal ball, what do you see, I guess in general, as the future of chemistry,

00:15:23 and in particular, what lies out there for bio-organic chemistry?

00:15:29 I see this from two ends of the spectrum. One is, what are the immediate opportunities for research?

00:15:38 And what are the wild goals that one could have for research in the distant future?

00:15:50 For the distant future, one of the major problems would be to unravel the biochemistry of thought.

00:16:02 If we knew what happened in our brains when something was recorded in memory,

00:16:10 we might, or might not, be able to improve our memories enormously.

00:16:19 We don't know what happens when we think.

00:16:23 And the process of thinking has got to be a biochemical process of some sort,

00:16:31 because there isn't anything else it could possibly be.

00:16:34 You might say it's electrical, but if it's electrical, then we have to look at the electrical cells and the storage

00:16:44 and how all that works, but my guess is it's all laid down in molecules in biochemistry.

00:16:52 So, that is a relatively distant goal.

00:16:59 Along with that distant goal would come our ability to cure the various biochemical diseases.

00:17:14 Much closer to the research laboratory today are studies on the way proteins are put together.

00:17:34 Thank you very much.

00:17:36 Thank you for this opportunity.