Page 1 HUNTER-LASCOSKIE: […] Okay. Today is Tuesday, December 6th, 2011. I am Sarah [L.] Hunter-Lascoskie. We’re here at Siemens Healthcare Diagnostics in Flanders, New Jersey. I’m joined by David [J.] Caruso, and we’re here with Arthur [L.] Babson.

As Dave mentioned before, we like to start at the beginning. I know you were raised near or in Newark, New Jersey, but I don’t know much else. So when and where were you born?

BABSON: I was born in Orange, New Jersey. Since two years old, I was raised in Essex Fells, [New Jersey], in a new house my parents built. I’ve been a New Jersey resident all my life, except for the Second World War—a year in Japan—and, of course, going away to college at Cornell [University], and a year of postdoc in the University of Iowa.

HUNTER-LASCOSKIE: But otherwise, all in New Jersey …

BABSON: All in New Jersey, yeah.

HUNTER-LASCOSKIE: So…

BABSON: I like New Jersey. New Jersey is a good, well-kept secret from the rest of the world.

HUNTER-LASCOSKIE: So had your family been in New Jersey for a long time? What were your parents doing?

BABSON: My mother, [Julia Norton Babson], was born in Chicago, [Illinois]. My father, [Rea Edwin Babson], was born in Brooklyn, [New York]. Where they lived prior to my arrival, I Page 2 don’t really remember, because obviously I wasn’t here. [laughter] But they pretty much lived in New Jersey all their life. Of course, they’re dead now.

HUNTER-LASCOSKIE: Did you have siblings?

BABSON: Yes. I had a brother, [Rea Norton Babson], one brother, who was eighteen months older than I was. We fought like cats and dogs, as siblings will.

HUNTER-LASCOSKIE: And what did your parents do for a living?

BABSON: My father had a General Electric appliance store in Montclair, New Jersey. He was a dealer, General Electric dealer, in home appliances until he got put out of business by the Second World War, because GE was making armaments, not appliances, home appliances, at that time. So he worked for a couple of years during the war as a expeditor in Washington, [D.C.]. He’d commute every week on the train. Then, after the war, he went back and started his business again until he retired.

HUNTER-LASCOSKIE: Was your mother working too, or was she…

BABSON: No.

HUNTER-LASCOSKIE: …at home?

BABSON: My mother never worked. Well, she did work before I was born, but she never worked since I had been born.

HUNTER-LASCOSKIE: So you’re growing up in New Jersey, and what did you like to do? Did you have any kind of early interest in science or technology? Did you visit your dad at work?

BABSON: Not really. But I did have an early interest in science, I think, because…I started school when I was four years old, which was too early, a year too early. I was always the smallest person in the class, including the girls, and always the youngest. Not very good at athletics, so I was always the last one to be chosen when choosing up sides for teams. I hated Field Day, when we had…we were obligated to compete in various activities. Page 3 So I was a bit of a loner. I think that might have sparked my scientific curiosity, because…well, I’m not sure why. As I say, I wasn’t…I’m kind of a social misfit. So I went to science as a retreat, you might say.

HUNTER-LASCOSKIE: Now with this early interest in science, how was that…was it nature? Was it building things…?

BABSON: Nature mostly. We had about a square mile of woods behind our house in Essex Fells. I just loved 00:05:00 being out in the woods. Actually, I’m still very much a nature boy. Currently I live in Mendham Township, [New Jersey], with… on a six-acre wooded lot. So I do love the woods, and I like to be out in nature.

HUNTER-LASCOSKIE: Did you kind of collect animals, do any kind of…?

BABSON: Yes. Well, I got interested in birds very early on. I remember a single incident that sparked my interest. I was walking home from school in Essex Fells one day, and I saw a little gray bird in the snow. It was obviously in distress, and I picked it up. Before I got home, it died. My brother and I had given to our parents an Audubon’s Birds of America for Christmas the prior year.1 We went in on it together, because neither of us could afford it ourselves.

So I looked up this bird in the Audubon’s. I just leafed through it, and it was a Tufted Titmouse. As I say, it sparked my interest in birds, and I would memorize the entire Audubon’s Birds of America, the pictures and the names. Every year I would go out into [the field]…and I’d keep lists of birds I had seen, and all the way through adulthood, really.

HUNTER-LASCOSKIE: Did this interest in nature and science translate into school? Was school something you liked when you were younger?

BABSON: Well, I didn’t really like school until I took chemistry in high school, which was my favorite subject [and] also the easiest course I ever took, because I think I had a natural bent for it. But general science I also took in ninth grade, and that was very interesting. But chemistry really kind of turned me on.

HUNTER-LASCOSKIE: Did you have any particular teachers or labs that were really interesting when you were in high school that helped you?

Page 4 BABSON: Yeah. My chemistry teacher was—and I don’t recall his name, unfortunately—but he was great. My favorite teacher in grade school, in the eighth grade, was a person by the name of Grace Kass , [who] was a mathematics teacher. She was great, and I loved arithmetic.

HUNTER-LASCOSKIE: Was this an interest that your brother shared as well, or…?

BABSON: Not particularly, no. No, he was more into sports. He played hockey growing up. He actually played hockey at Cornell, [he was a] letterman at Cornell in hockey, ice hockey. But no, we didn’t share that many interests actually.

HUNTER-LASCOSKIE: So going through school and being interested in nature, were you into anything like Scouts [Boy Scouts of America] or any other activity?

BABSON: Yeah. I was in the Boy Scouts. I collected a number of merit badges, but Scouts was too regimented for me. I didn’t really like the militaristic approach, but I liked being out in nature. So I never got past Second Class Scout, I don’t think. So, I can’t say it was one of my major successes.

CARUSO: You never made it to Eagle Scout.

BABSON: No. I never made it to Eagle Scout, despite the fact that I had a number of merit badges under my wing.

HUNTER-LASCOSKIE: So since you were kind of more along the lines of being self-guided in your interest in nature and science, when you were in high school in your chemistry courses, did you have opportunity for maybe 00:10:00 a lab, or self-guided study, or experiments?

BABSON: No. I don’t…not that I recall. But I just liked the course, everything about it.

HUNTER-LASCOSKIE: In these chemistry courses did it become clear that it was something you wanted to pursue, or was it just an interest?

Page 5 BABSON: I had no idea what I wanted to do when I graduated from high school. I graduated at seventeen, and had a year to put in before I had to go into the [United States] Army, the draft. So I got a job at American Dyewood [Company], in the research lab actually, doing quantitative analysis of guanidine hydrochloride, which was an experimental […] chemical, that they were making. I learned a lot in that job. I got the job because my father knew the president of the company. So that was a lot of fun and interesting.

HUNTER-LASCOSKIE: Did you enjoy that job?

BABSON: Oh, yeah, very much so

HUNTER-LASCOSKIE: Was it something you could see yourself doing?

BABSON: Yes. I very much enjoyed it.

HUNTER-LASCOSKIE: Since your dad basically had the connection for the job, did they know about your interest in chemistry? Was it something that they were enthusiastic about?

BABSON: I don’t know if MacKinney, who was the president of the company, [Paul] MacKinney…[knew anything about me], but as a favor to my father, and they were shorthanded, obviously, so he gave me a shot at the job. I think I did quite well at it, and enjoyed it very much. I worked for a man named Wallace Peck, who lived in Caldwell, [New Jersey]. I would walk the half mile to Bloomfield Avenue in Caldwell every morning, and he would pick me up on the way to work, and then drop me off and I’d walk home. He was a delightful gentleman.

CARUSO: One thing, I’m a little curious about given when you were born…. I mean you were growing up during part of the [Great] Depression.

BABSON: Yeah.

CARUSO: Did that have…I know you said that your father had this General Electric appliance store. I’m assuming he was doing pretty well. I know he had to close because of the war. Did the Depression affect your family or the people around you in any way? Page 6 Arthur Babson at age 17 working the analytical balance at the research

lab at American Dyewood, 1944.

BABSON: Oh, yeah.

CARUSO: In what ways?

BABSON: Yeah. Well, we didn’t have any spare money. We would go on el cheapo vacations.

CARUSO: Like where?

Page 7 BABSON: Well, we’d go out to…they had a friend that had a house in Montrose, Pennsylvania, on a little lake. We would rent that house, or maybe we got it for nothing. I’m not even sure. We did vacations at my uncle [Durand van Doren]’s farm in Vermont. Let’s see…. We also went out to Montauk, [New York], where we’d rent a house […] that didn’t even have any running water—from another friend of my father’s. My brother and I would […] have to earn all of our spending money, which we did in a number of ways, which kids nowadays don’t even relate to. I mean raking leaves, shoveling snow, and…

CARUSO: I put my son to work.

BABSON: You …

CARUSO: Yeah. If he wants to buy toys, or at least, you know, when it’s not a birthday or something, he needs to do work around the house.

BABSON: Good.

CARUSO: He’s only four.

BABSON: Good.

CARUSO: So, I’m breaking him in slowly, but yeah, he definitely has to do a bit of work. When you were a bit younger, clearly you had to go to school….

BABSON: Yes.

CARUSO: Were there 00:15:00…you enjoyed exploring the woods, right. Were there other things that you would do after school to help the family out, or were there…were you interested in reading or any other sort of hobbies at that time?

BABSON: I…well, some of the other jobs that I had, because it was gas rationing at the time, and most people had A-cards, which would allow you to buy one gallon a week of gas, which didn’t get very far. I had a business. The post office in Essex Fells didn’t deliver mail at that Page 8 time. You had to go to the post office to pick it up. So I started a little business myself, delivering [a number of people’s] mail on my bike. Every afternoon after school I would get on my bike, got to the post office, pick up everybody’s mail, and deliver it.

CARUSO: How much did you charge for that service?

BABSON: I don’t remember, but it wasn’t very much, I’m sure. I had another, a regular job, working the traps for the gun club, where […]I would fire the clay pigeons that they would shoot with shotguns. That was kind of a fun job, and that was every week. But we were pretty resourceful, actually, at making money. We would set up a soft drink stand for example, […] along the fifth hole of the Essex Fells Country Club golf course, where we would sell soft drinks at a premium to the thirsty golfers. We also caddied, both of us, my brother and myself, at the country club. Anything to make a buck.

CARUSO: So it sounds like you were always quite busy.

BABSON: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

CARUSO: When you were…?

BABSON: We didn’t have time on our hands.

CARUSO: When you were actually home with your family, let’s say at dinnertime, was there anything that your family talked about on a regular basis? Did your family like debating about politics, or talking about contemporary issues of the day? Or was it more just, “Did you make some money?” “Yeah.” “Great.”

BABSON: Yeah. I don’t recall actually having deep conversations at the dinner table. I’m sure that my mother and father participated in [discussions] other than mundane matters, but I have no recollection of it to tell you the truth.

CARUSO: Did they have any opinions about your schooling? Were they, “You need to get an education,” sort of parents?

Page 9 BABSON: Oh, yeah absolutely. Absolutely. It was a foregone conclusion that I would go to college. Not necessarily graduate school, which I ended up doing, but by that time I was kind of in charge.

CARUSO: Did they, I mean when you got home at night, did they make sure that you sat down and did your homework? Did they work with you at all?

BABSON: Oh, yeah.

CARUSO: Okay.

BABSON: Oh, yeah. I had to do homework. That was…

CARUSO: So they were involved, making sure things got done.

BABSON: My mother particularly. Yes.

CARUSO: One other thing that, then—sorry about…

HUNTER-LASCOSKIE: No…

CARUSO: I’ll turn it back to Sarah. In reading through some of the materials that you sent, you talked a little bit about—I’m assuming this was during your childhood, [but], I guess it could have been when you were older—but shooting off fireworks that the ingredients…

BABSON: Did I send you my memoirs?2

CARUSO: I don’t…No, it wasn’t memoirs. It was a piece that you wrote about kids today.3 It talked about bike helmets and…

Page 10 BABSON: Oh, that was one of the essays I sent you.

CARUSO: Yes. Yeah. So in that you talk about using…you could get the ingredients for black gunpowder at the local pharmacy. You liked making bombs…

BABSON: Yeah.

CARUSO: …using spent CO2 [cartridges].

BABSON: Yeah, I did.

CARUSO: How did that…was that when you were a little kid? Was that when you were older?

BABSON: Not too little, but probably started in grammar school.

CARUSO: Okay.

BABSON: But…and continued through junior high and high school.

CARUSO: And was that just something fun that you did, or were you…?

BABSON: Mostly.

CARUSO: Okay.

BABSON: Yeah 00:20:00, mostly fun. I mean the Fourth of July was my second favorite holiday after Christmas. Of course, you could buy any kind of fireworks back then, and it wasn’t restricted at all. So we were…I loved to blow things up.

HUNTER-LASCOSKIE: Did you have an audience to blow things up, or was this just on your…?

Page 11 BABSON: Oh, sometimes I did. But sometimes I just did it by myself.

CARUSO: How did you go about figuring out how to do some of these things? I mean you mentioned home-brewed seltzer water. You used a spent CO2 cartridge, and you detonated it electrically. I mean these…

BABSON: Yeah.

CARUSO: …aren’t necessarily things you pick up in school.

BABSON: No.

CARUSO: So I was wondering how…?

BABSON: Well, once you have the formula for black powder, black gunpowder, then the sky’s the limit. These little CO2 cartridges, which would make home charged water, sparkling water, when they were spent you’d knock out the plug and fill it with black powder, put in two electric wires, which are shorted out. So when you plugged it in to the wall socket, they would…it would explode.

CARUSO: So you were doing this at home.

BABSON: Oh, yeah absolutely.

CARUSO: Did your parents know that you were doing this?

BABSON: Yes, they did.

CARUSO: Okay.

BABSON: They were very tolerant.

Page 12 CARUSO: Tolerant of explosions. What about the…you also mention putting explosives on the trolley tracks on Bloomfield Avenue.

BABSON: Yeah. These would…I would use .22 long, spent cartridges, cartridge casings. Fill them with black powder. Put in a blue tip match head, which ignites on just anything. Crimped […] the .22 cartridge shell casing over and stick it on the trolley tracks. The trolley would run over them, and they’d explode with a very big report.

CARUSO: Did you ever get in trouble doing such things?

BABSON: No.

CARUSO: No.

BABSON: No. Never got caught.

CARUSO: Never got caught, even better. So I guess while you were making money at the local gun club, you were also…that’s where you were collecting your shells for your explosions.

BABSON: No. No […], I had a .22 caliber rifle, and we used to shoot stuff: tin cans, and squirrels, and whatever we could shoot. So that’s where I’d get my cartridge casings.

CARUSO: Okay, all right. So explosions, shooting things, that was part of your childhood …

BABSON: Yeah.

CARUSO: Interesting.

BABSON: Absolutely.

Page 13 HUNTER-LASCOSKIE: So obviously you have this interest in science, chemistry, technology. Your parents know it’s a foregone conclusion that you would go to college. What was the process like of figuring out where you were going to go? Did you want to stay close? Did you want to finally get out of New Jersey for a little while? What was that process like?

BABSON: Well, I applied at Cornell when I was seventeen, and was accepted. [Both my father and brother had gone to Cornell]. I applied in the School of Electrical Engineering, because my brother was a chemical engineer and I wanted to do something different than him. I thought you had to be an engineer to make a living. That’s how little I knew. I really didn’t know much about electrical engineering. I didn’t even know the difference between an electrician and electrical engineer at the time.

But at the same time, I applied at Rutgers, [The State University of New Jersey], [which] had what they called ASTRP, Army Specialized Training Reserve Program, which was the forerunner of the […] ASTP, Army Specialized Training Program, which was where most of the officers came from. I figured if I had to go into the Army that it would be better if I was an officer than an enlisted man. It didn’t work out that way, because I got kicked out of Rutgers because I cut a chemistry class of all things 00:25:00. The program was quite easy, I thought. I didn’t really have to study at all, and I was still on the Dean’s List.

But one afternoon, my friend and myself decided we didn’t want to go to chemistry lab, we wanted to sack out. We knew the routine of the officer there, or probably the sergeant, I’ve forgotten…no, maybe it was an officer. We knew his routine pretty well, so we knew he wouldn’t come around during that afternoon. So we decided to sack out in bed. Well, what we didn’t know was that day, that very day, there was a new officer that was assigned to the group. He came around. He caught us in the sack, and an hour later we were […] hitchhiking home.

So that’s when my father really laid into me and said, “You have two weeks to get a job.” Actually, I got a job at Cullen’s Photography working in the back room […] making prints and developing film. I had that job for a couple of weeks before I got the job at American Dyewood through my father’s contact with Mr. MacKinney. I may be the only person in the world that was kicked out of Rutgers and went back to earn a Ph.D. [laughter] I don’t know.

HUNTER-LASCOSKIE: You said your brother was in the chemical engineering program.

BABSON: Yeah.

HUNTER-LASCOSKIE: Were you aware of what he was doing? Did you talk about coursework at all?

Page 14 BABSON: Not particularly, I don’t think. I don’t recall at least. He […] was a year ahead of me, but his education was interrupted by the war, too. He went into the [United States] Navy. Matter of fact, we were in Nara, Japan, at the same time. But never were able to…or no, it was Nagoya, Japan. But we were never able to contact each other, unfortunately.

HUNTER-LASCOSKIE: So when did you get enlisted and go into the war?

BABSON: When I got my “Greetings” from President [Franklin D.] Roosevelt on March the 4th, dated March the 2nd […]. I turned eighteen on March the 3rd. So they were waiting for me. So that’s when I […received orders to report to Camp Kilmer, New Jersey]. I arrived after about two weeks thereafter. So I spent almost two years in the Army.

HUNTER-LASCOSKIE: Where did you go first? I know you said you were in Japan.

BABSON: Well, I did my basic training in Camp Blanding in Florida in the summer of 1944. Hiking through sand with a full field pack for miles and miles, oh, it was awful. Then I went to Camp Gordon in Georgia for advanced basic training. Then I shipped across the country to Camp Adair, Oregon, where I was going to be shipped out to Japan. […I] was on the first troop ship to cross the Pacific unescorted, not as part of a convoy.

So 00:30:00 I got to Japan right after the atomic bomb was dropped, and I have a feeling it might have saved…[President] Harry [S.] Truman might have saved my life. Because at that time the Japanese were, even though they were obviously defeated, they were going to fight to the last man defending their country.

CARUSO: That definitely was some of the hardest fighting with all the islands that people had to…

BABSON: Mmm.

CARUSO: …that the U.S. military had to take.

BABSON: Absolutely.

CARUSO: So just that I’m clear on the timeline of things, you finished high school.

Page 15 BABSON: Yeah.

CARUSO: You applied to Cornell and Rutgers.

BABSON: Right.

CARUSO: You decide to go to Rutgers […].

BABSON: Yeah, because it was free, mainly.

CARUSO: When you were going into Rutgers, did you have any idea of what sort of career you wanted to pursue? Or…

BABSON: No.

CARUSO: …it was just, you were going to go in and figure it out there.

BABSON: Yeah.

CARUSO: Okay. But soon into your time at Rutgers, because of your deciding to skip a class once, and having it be absolutely the wrong day to do so, you were thrown out. So you spent a year, about, working after that.

BABSON: No. It was less than a year …

CARUSO: Less than a year.

BABSON: Because it was probably July until March that I spent working […] at Cullen Photography for two weeks, and then American Dyewood for probably nine months or so until I went into the Army.

Page 16 CARUSO: And so…

BABSON: Of course, then when I came back out of the Army, I realized I knew a little bit more. I knew the difference between an electrical engineer and an electrician. I decided I didn’t want to be an electrical engineer. But that was the school I was accepted in, so after I got out of the war, that’s where I had to start. I started in the spring term of 1946 […].

CARUSO: Okay.

BABSON: I didn’t have a lot of the prerequisites for the engineering course, so I had a lot of electives, one of which was ornithology, another which was freehand drawing, another which was foundry. So I had a ball, but I realized that I really didn’t want to be an electrical engineer, so I switched to zoology in my second year of Cornell, and had a ball.

Matter of fact…I used to take sugar and cream in my coffee. I learned […] to drink it black when we had an all night field trip in an ecology course studying ecological succession over the twenty-four hour period, the activity of different animals at different times of day and night. Somebody forgot to bring the cream and sugar for the coffee, and that’s where I learned to drink it black.

CARUSO: So before we turn to your time at Cornell, I’d actually like to hear a little more detail about your time in the military, if you feel that there’s more to say about it. Hear more about…I mean what was it like going to basic training? What were you doing in advanced basic?

BABSON: Well, I do remember…I still remember my Army serial number […12102461]. I used to remember my rifle [serial] number for many years […] that I had in basic training and advanced basic. Then when I went overseas to Japan, I was in four different field artillery outfits. I never saw an M-1 Garand the whole time I was over there. So memorizing my rifle serial number didn’t help.

So I was in…I had a number of different jobs in the field artillery, different outfits. One of which 00:35:00 was cook. I remember the conversation I had with the CO [commanding officer], who called me into his office—verbatim. He said, “Babson, have you ever cooked?” I said, “No, sir.” He said, “Would you like cook?” I said, “No, sir.” He said, “Report to the kitchen tomorrow morning at four a.m., you’re a cook.”

Actually, I knew…a friend of mine was the mess sergeant, and he was in charge of not only the enlisted men’s mess, but the officers’ mess. He arranged for me to get assigned to Page 17 officers’ mess, which was a much better deal, because it was only two of us cooked for about thirty-five officers. We only worked every other day, but we worked a long day, about a fourteen or sixteen hour day. But we ate much better than the enlisted men, because we ate the same thing that the officers did. So that’s why it was a good deal.

I was also in the wire crew. I had a few experiences, some not very pleasant in there, because I was assigned to the—and this was in Nara, Japan, I believe—I was assigned to the switchboard. The switchboard was fairly primitive. You had about a dozen lines that...and a little thing would drop down when a call came in. You’d push it up and you’d plug in a cord to the thing, and answer the phone. I was assigned to cover the switchboard at night on my first day, because at nighttime it’s not so busy, so it would allow me to get used to the operation. They had a night alarm on the switchboard which would…besides this little thing coming down and flipping down, and going [Babson makes a noise that sounds like pprrrtt], they would turn on an alarm. They had a bed there, so that you could go to sleep periodically, because it was…I remember being awakened on my first night by a fire alarm going off. I woke up and the night alarm was on on the switchboard and was buzzing away barely. It […] didn’t wake me up at all. I looked out and headquarters battalion was on fire, the whole building. Fortunately, nobody was hurt but there was a number of 55-gallon fuel drums sitting next to the building that went off one by one. It was this spectacular fireworks. I was terrified that I was going to get in trouble. The fire warden showed up the first time in the morning—he was a second lieutenant— and he was as worried as I was, because this was his first day as fire warden. But we escaped punishment out of that.

But one memorable occasion was, we used to go out on field trips and we’d have…the battery had four howitzers and they would be setup. Then we’d have…we’d have to run lines to the different parts of the battalion—battalion headquarters, the battery, the field forward observation posts, and so forth. The normal way of running these lines was you’d have a reel on the back of a three-quarter ton truck, which would be moving at about three miles an hour. Somebody walking behind the truck would push the wire off the road. Well 00:40:00, the forward observation post was probably almost a mile ahead of the gun battery. If…and there were four different…what do you call them? Not battalions, batteries, I guess, yeah. Four different batteries, so there were sixteen howitzers in a battalion. We had to pick up after the exercise. We had to pick up all the wire. This was kind of tedious, because you’d have to have somebody on the [truck] cranking up the reel, while somebody else was walking behind them making sure that the wire was [straight]. Well, the four wires on the side of the road, if your wire got tangled up with anybody else’s, guess whose wire got cut?

CARUSO: Yeah.

BABSON: So if you were the last one to pick up your wire, you’d be spending an extra hour or two out there just splicing it back where somebody else had cut it. So I got an idea one day that I would figure out a way to lay the line way off the road. I cut down a bamboo tree about twenty feet long. I attached it to the side of the truck, turned the reel sideways, so we’d feed it Page 18 out off the thing. I had a pulley at the end of the bamboo pole, and a rope that you could raise it up and down so that you could go past the bushes and what not.

So we would lay our wire down at about twenty miles an hour […] instead of three miles an hour, and that was great. It would be far enough away from the other lines that it wouldn’t get tangled up. So that was kind of a clever approach. I overhead one officer one day explaining to somebody else that…saying how clever he thought that was. He didn’t say it to me, though.

CARUSO: So is there anything else from your military career that you remember as being significant or…I mean, I guess you were there after the fighting had pretty much stopped…

BABSON: Yeah. It…

CARUSO: …so you weren’t seeing any action…

BABSON: Well, it was totally over. I mean…

CARUSO: So it was mostly just kind of hanging out, keeping routine?

BABSON: It was…well, it was the occupation, Army of Occupation. We did mostly guard duty there, which was boring as hell. But I did have one experience of guard duty. Well, we had an ammunition dump. We called it the “ammo dump,” where we would store the howitzer shells. One of the [guard] posts […] was this ammo dump […]. I would always vie for this duty, because nobody else wanted it. It was kind of spooky in this…this was a manufacturing…I don’t know what it was. They had a lot of lathes in it, and pits where we stored the ammo. But I would…I liked this duty because it gave me an opportunity to sit down and read, [to] read a book. To do this, I had to booby trap, essentially, all the entrances to the building, which I did by a number of different clever arrangements.

I remember one day, one typical day, there was a front entrance and a rear entrance, and I had a number of different booby traps that I would…I would salvage wire from these motors, you know 00:45:00, undo the windings and get these tiny copper wires and set up traps. I had one that was several yards away from the building, where if you walked about it, you’d trip this wire. The wire would go into a…come through the window, go into a shelf on top of the window, and trip a huge lampshade, which would come down, a metal lampshade, which would come down and make a terrible racket. Then I had at the front door, I had another trip wire which would send a wire reel bouncing down the steps. I had a sheet metal there that you couldn’t avoid stepping on, which would make a racket. The backdoor I had another wire Page 19 which…I’ve forgotten what it…oh, yeah. I had a big metal sheet tipped up on a barrel, 55- gallon drum, and the wire would stick out, pull out a stick and the […] metal would come down on top of the barrel. I had a number of these things.

So I was pretty well protected, so that I would get advance warning of any inspection.

CARUSO: So…

HUNTER-LASCOSKIE: Did anyone set it off at all?

BABSON: Oh, yeah. Yeah. It was one…I remember one time during the day, and I was still walking around, because I hadn’t finished setting up all my booby traps. I saw this officer come down and sneak by the windows. He thought he’d come in the back way and surprise me. I timed my walk until I was…until he and I would end up at the same backdoor. He had to crouch down to come in the backdoor. Bang, the thing came down, and I was right past him. I took my rifle off my shoulder, and spun around, and pointed it at his head and said, “Halt. Who goes there?” He was kind of scared.

But another time, the lights went off—and this was at night—I heard somebody come in the front door, because I heard the metal plate and the spool come down the stairs. I couldn’t see. I was scared. So I yelled, “Halt. Who goes there?” No answer. No answer at all. I was about ready to let loose, when a little dog walked up to me, who had obviously set off the booby traps. But that was kind of interesting.

HUNTER-LASCOSKIE: Anything else from this time period, or…?

BABSON: Isn’t that enough?

HUNTER-LASCOSKIE: They’re great stories. So, any…?

BABSON: No. I can’t think of any.

HUNTER-LASCOSKIE: So when did you return, then, from Japan?

BABSON: I returned…well, let’s see. It was […] about December of 1946 […]. I started Cornell in the spring term, January that year. I remember I was going across the ocean and Page 20 coming back, both times, on Halloween. So, basically, I spent a year there, and then mustered out.

HUNTER-LASCOSKIE: So then you entered Cornell.

BABSON: So I entered Cornell…

HUNTER-LASCOSKIE: And…

BABSON: In the field…in the School of Electrical Engineering, which I already decided I didn’t want to do.

HUNTER-LASCOSKIE: Right.

BABSON: But that’s all they would let me…

HUNTER-LASCOSKIE: Right. So even though you weren’t maybe as interested in 00:50:00 your main coursework, did you get to take anything else that was interesting before you switched in your second year?

BABSON: Yeah. I took ornithology. I took freehand drawing. I took foundry. But…

HUNTER-LASCOSKIE: So you at least had a good time…

BABSON: But, then I…but in my second year I switched to zoology, because I liked animals. And that was a blast. I had a lot of courses, some courses, which were a lot of fun.

HUNTER-LASCOSKIE: Did you have to do a lot of fieldwork, and…

BABSON: Yeah.

HUNTER-LASCOSKIE: …go out on trips?

Page 21 BABSON: Yeah. Yeah, a lot of fieldwork. But my last year I took biochemistry and that was a blast too. That’s when I decided that I really needed to go to graduate school and get an advanced degree in biochemistry. So I went to Rutgers. Of course, I’d gone on the G.I. Bill [Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944], so it didn’t cost my parents much of anything. I started out at Rutgers to get a master’s degree in biochemistry and assuming that would be the end of my education. Actually, as I finished my first year in biochemistry, I had a job lined up with Squibb [Corporation], a laboratory job.

My boss at that time [James B. Allison] decided, or offered me a fellowship to go on to my Ph.D. This was a fellowship that had been started by Arthur McCollum who invented Flako Pie Crust. I don’t know if it’s even still available anymore in the stores. But he set up this fellowship, and I was the first McCollum Fellow. So that paid me a stipend, which was more than the graduate assistants were getting. I think they were getting like fourteen hundred dollars a year, and [for] which they had to teach a third of the time. I was getting two thousand dollars a year, I believe, and didn’t have any teaching obligations. So it was great.

HUNTER-LASCOSKIE: So I want to go back, only a little bit. So why Rutgers? Why did you want to go back?

BABSON: Well, it was…why Rutgers? I believe I had applied for Rutgers and Cornell in graduate school. I was only accepted at Rutgers, so…

HUNTER-LASCOSKIE: And were your parents excited you were going on to graduate…

BABSON: Oh, yeah sure. Yeah.

HUNTER-LASCOSKIE: Who were you working with when you were at Rutgers?

BABSON: A gentleman by the name of Jim Allison, who was my advisor. He was a great guy. But he was in charge of the, what at that time was, Bureau of Biological Research, so-called, which was on top of a roller skating rink. [laughter] Yeah, in fact.

HUNTER-LASCOSKIE: An active roller skating rink?

Page 22 BABSON: Yeah. I believe so. Now it’s a huge building, independent building and very prestigious. But then, it was pretty primitive. But it was okay.

HUNTER-LASCOSKIE: What kind of work were you doing? What was…?

BABSON: It was…he had done…he was interested in protein nutrition in 00:55:00 tumor bearing rats, in cancerous rats. It was not a terribly exciting project, actually. But it…I got a couple of publications out of it, I think.4 I sent you a list of my….

HUNTER-LASCOSKIE: Mm-mm.

BABSON: Yeah. You have that. But it wasn’t very earth shattering.

CARUSO: How was it transitioning from being an undergraduate to being a graduate student? Was it any different for you?

BABSON: Was it any different? No, I don’t think so.

CARUSO: Okay.

BABSON: I don’t think so.

CARUSO: And what was the structure of the graduate program like? Did you go straight in and start doing research? Did you…?

BABSON: Yeah.

CARUSO: I mean I know you…well, you started in a master’s…

BABSON: I had a number of courses I had to take. Yeah. But I also started off in…I believe started off the first year in…. Well, no. No. It’s not right, because when I was getting my Page 23 master’s degree, I don’t believe I had any independent research to do. I think I only did coursework. Yeah. I believe that. When I started…when I got my Ph.D., I started doing also research projects. Yeah.

HUNTER-LASCOSKIE: I know from your essays, during this time you also got engaged, and…

BABSON: Yeah.

HUNTER-LASCOSKIE: Now…

BABSON: Well, yes. I got engaged. This was before I graduated, actually, from…well, maybe it was about the time I graduated from Cornell and with degree in zoology. Well, how are you going to make a living with a bachelor’s degree in zoology? My father-in-law, my potential father-in-law was not too pleased that his daughter, [Doris Lelong], was marrying this…engaged to this deadbeat that didn’t have any means to make a living. So that’s one of the reasons I decided I had to go back to graduate school.

HUNTER-LASCOSKIE: Did you meet her at Cornell?

BABSON: No. She lived in my home town. I met her in high school, and we’d stayed in touch for a long time. When I came back from the war, we got together again, and…

HUNTER-LASCOSKIE: So while you’re in graduate school, obviously you’re engaged. You have to think a little bit more about your career. What in the research you were doing was really piquing your interest? You said your research with your advisor, at first, maybe wasn’t interesting. But was there something that was really getting you interested?

BABSON: I don’t recall to tell you the truth. I like biochemistry as a field. But I don’t remember one thing that piqued my interest, particularly.

HUNTER-LASCOSKIE: So when you were doing research did you collaborate a lot? Were you working with a lot of different students? Were you…?

BABSON: No. No. I was working on my own. Yeah.

Page 24 CARUSO: Was that typical for students there? I mean…

BABSON: For graduate students.

CARUSO: Graduate students.

BABSON: Yeah.

CARUSO: So at the time it was [that] you worked with your advisor, or you had a project with your advisor…

BABSON: Right. Yeah.

CARUSO: …and then you were just in the lab doing your own stuff.

BABSON: Yeah. Right.

CARUSO: Okay.

BABSON: Pretty much.

HUNTER-LASCOSKIE: So while you’re in graduate school, obviously I know that you went on to do a postdoc. Was that kind of the natural trajectory? Or was it something you looked for or you were recruited for while you were in graduate…?

BABSON: Well, to tell you the truth, it was a job. I went to the Federation [of American Societies for Experimental Biology and Medicine] meetings in Chicago, in the spring of 19…oh, what year was it 01:00:00? Well, the year before I got my Ph.D.

CARUSO: It was around ‘52?

Page 25 BABSON: […] Was it ‘52 or ‘53?

CARUSO: I think you got your degree in ‘53.

BABSON: Yeah, ‘53. Yeah.

CARUSO: Yeah.

BABSON: Yeah, ‘53. I went out to the Federation meetings in Chicago to interview for whatever job I could find. One of my interviews was with Ted [Theodore] Winnick, who is from the University of Iowa, who I ended up working for. He gave me […] an offer, and it was one of the best offers I’d had, so that’s the reason, major reason, I decided to do a postdoc.

HUNTER-LASCOSKIE: Right. So when you were looking, you were just looking for a job.

BABSON: Any, any…

HUNTER-LASCOSKIE: It wasn’t a…

BABSON: …job. Yeah, looking for a job. Jobs were few and far between at that time, as I recall. So this was something to do.

HUNTER-LASCOSKIE: And so…

BABSON: And I already had a wife and a child, [Betsy Linda Babson], at that time, so…

HUNTER-LASCOSKIE: Oh, so you already had a child.

BABSON: Yeah. She was six months old…

HUNTER-LASCOSKIE: Oh, okay.

Page 26 BABSON: My daughter. And so we drove out to Iowa City, [Iowa].

HUNTER-LASCOSKIE: And how did your wife feel about the prospect of moving to Iowa City?

BABSON: I don’t think she…she wasn’t terribly excited about it, but she was okay with it. Yeah. As I recall, she was okay with it.

HUNTER-LASCOSKIE: And was she…so she was at home, then, with your child at the time when you first…

BABSON: Yeah.

HUNTER-LASCOSKIE: …took the position.

BABSON: Yeah. We were living in Metuchen on the second floor […] apartment of a private home. She was…she had worked at the telephone company as an operator, I guess. I’ve forgotten…no, sort of a technical service representative. But when we had Betsy, my daughter, she quit and stayed home and we managed on my salary from my doctoral program. Didn’t live high on the hog, but we survived.

HUNTER-LASCOSKIE: So then you make the move to Iowa City.

BABSON: Yeah.

HUNTER-LASCOSKIE: And as you said, you’re working with Ted Winnick. What was that transition like? What were you doing there?

BABSON: Well, I was doing…that was…I was doing protein metabolism in tumor bearing rats, again, but using isotopes, using C14 amino acids. It was an interesting project, but again, not earth shattering. So…

Page 27 HUNTER-LASCOSKIE: Did you have a lot of interaction with your advisor? Did you work closely with him, or were you pretty independent?

BABSON: As I recall, I was working pretty independently. But we would chat, obviously, frequently. One of the things that he sparked my interest in is in mineralogy. He was a collector of minerals. I became very much interested in that, and still have a mineral collection at home.

HUNTER-LASCOSKIE: Now you have…obviously we have your publication list. We know you have some publications coming out at the end of your graduate career, and the beginning of your postdoctoral. Was it something you were kind of thrown into, or was somebody helping you figure out how to write a paper, how to publish?

BABSON: Oh, I was able to figure it out myself, pretty much. I mean obviously I read a lot of papers. This was before the Internet, and you had to do library researches by 01:05:00…

CARUSO: Card catalogues and….

BABSON: Yeah, right. It wasn’t as easy with…as it is now.

CARUSO: More broadly, did you notice any changes going on in these scientific worlds around this period of time? I mean in the post-war world, right, the U.S. is heavily invested in science. You have the rise of the National Science Foundation around this period of time. You’re working with your postdoc…. You’re in the radiation research lab…

BABSON: Right.

CARUSO: …which, I think, is significant as well. Did you see science as a good career choice at this period of time, or was it simply just that you were interested in it, and so you were going to make it your career?

BABSON: A little of both. […] I mean this was at the time when [James D.] Watson and [Francis] Crick came out with the double helix. Of course, I got to know Jim Watson personally, later, because he was on the board of directors of the Diagnostic Products Corporation. So it was an exciting time in science. Page 28 Arthur L. Babson with Nobel Laureate, James D. Watson at a

DPC distributors meeting circa 2000.

CARUSO: Was your…I guess your father-in-law was approving of…

BABSON: Oh, yeah.

CARUSO: Yeah.

BABSON: Yes.

CARUSO: Okay.

Page 29 BABSON: Yeah. He certainly approved of my actions in getting a Ph.D.

CARUSO: Did having a family change your relationship to your work at all?

BABSON: No. I don’t think so.

CARUSO: So while you’re pursuing your postdoc, you’re working with Winnick. Was it the same sort of relationship that you had with Allison in terms of, he gave you a project you worked on it? Or did you have more freedom to do investigations?

BABSON: I think I probably had more freedom with the postdoc, but it was essentially his project that he was interested in. But I had more freedom in terms of how I pursued the project, absolutely.

CARUSO: Okay. Yeah. When you were at Cornell, you had an interest in science. You switched to zoology. I’m assuming you were doing laboratory courses. You had mentioned going out…

BABSON: Oh, yeah.

CARUSO: And doing that. So you’re learning, I assume, some laboratory techniques…

BABSON: Yeah.

CARUSO: …during that period of time. The techniques that you learned in college, were they things that prepared you well for your work in graduate school? Or did you have to learn something new in graduate school to do the experiments that you were doing?

BABSON: Well, the newest thing…well…

CARUSO: Because I’m thinking of it from my experience in college laboratory courses, where, you know, there’s a lab manual. You have an experiment. You follow the protocol and Page 30 you write up some data. That didn’t necessarily prepare me in any way to go and do research on my own, right.

BABSON: Yeah.

CARUSO: Because you have to be creative. You have to start thinking of new ways. In college classes, you don’t necessarily get introduced to the newest laboratory techniques. You’re kind of doing things that everyone knows.

BABSON: Right. Yes, sure.

CARUSO: So I’m assuming in graduate school, or I’m wondering if in graduate school you had to learn new things? And if you did, how did you go about learning those?

BABSON: That’s a good question, and I don’t remember to tell you the truth. [laughter]

CARUSO: Okay.

BABSON: That was a long time ago.

CARUSO: Yeah. Well, just in case, I wanted to ask. You know that also led me to wonder with your postdoctoral years, if you’re doing research on your own…. I think there’s a lot in doing scientific research that’s about being creative, right. Trying to come up with ways to answer questions that people can’t…that haven’t been answered yet.

BABSON: Right.

CARUSO: So I’m wondering how it is a scientist goes about doing that. I mean during the war, you were rigging up booby traps, right. As a kid, you were exploding things. You were coming up with your ignition devices. It seems like there is a certain level 01:10:00 of creativity, and I was wondering if that mapped into your scientific and laboratory experiences at that time?

Page 31 BABSON: I can’t think of any specific examples, to tell you the truth. No. I can’t think of any specific examples.

CARUSO: Okay. During the time in graduate school and as a postdoc, what sort of hours did you have? Was it like a nine-to-five thing for you? Or were you, “I was up all night doing research”?

BABSON: Yeah. Well, no. I never stayed up all night doing research. But no, I put in pretty regular hours, probably longer than most.

CARUSO: But it was still just sort of a very sort of routine Monday through Friday?

BABSON: Yeah.

CARUSO: Did you do weekends?

BABSON: Don’t remember…

CARUSO: Okay.

BABSON: …to tell you the truth.

CARUSO: I think that also it was during your postdoctoral years, you met—I’m going to probably mispronounce this last name—George Kalnitsky.

BABSON: Yes.

CARUSO: Was it during your postdoc years that you…?

BABSON: George was…yeah. I was a postdoc. He was a professor at the University of Iowa.

CARUSO: Okay. So you just struck up a friendship with him…

Page 32 BABSON: Yeah.

CARUSO: …or were you collaborating with him at this time?

BABSON: No. We never collaborated, but it was just a personal friendship.

CARUSO: Okay. Now during this period of time, you had this offer from Squibb, right, while you were…

BABSON: Yeah.

CARUSO: …doing your master’s. Did you have a vision of…and the research that you were doing for your graduate advisor and for your postdoctoral position, it didn’t…the way you made it sound, it wasn’t necessarily research that you were interested in.

BABSON: No.

CARUSO: Right.

BABSON: No. It was the professor’s projects really.

CARUSO: So did you know what you wanted to do in science?

BABSON: No.

CARUSO: No.

BABSON: No.

CARUSO: No, not at all.

Page 33 BABSON: I had no idea. I had no idea.

CARUSO: So you just wanted to do something in science…

BABSON: I wanted to do science. Yes.

CARUSO: Okay. But you were open to doing anything?

BABSON: Right.

CARUSO: And mostly with biochemistry systems…

BABSON: Yeah.

CARUSO: …along those lines?

BABSON: Yeah.

CARUSO: Okay. So while you were doing your postdoc, which was just for one year…?

BABSON: It was just one year. I had just started, actually, started my second year, when I got a call from Ulrich [V.] Solmssen, who was then head of research at what was then Chilcott Lab or, no, maybe it was Warner-Chilcott Laboratories.

CARUSO: Warner-Chilcott, I think.

BABSON: Yeah. It was Warner-Chilcott Laboratories at that time. And [he] offered me a job as a biochemist in the research department. I had no idea who my boss was going to be. I didn’t meet him until the first day of the job. I didn’t meet my assistant until the first day on the job. It just sounded like a good opportunity.

Page 34 CARUSO: How did Warner-Chilcott find out about you, then?

BABSON: Well, I knew, personally, Ullie Solmssen, who lived in Essex Fells…

CARUSO: Okay.

BABSON: …who was the…and, actually, I interviewed with him in his house, before, I think, before I went to Iowa. Yeah.

CARUSO: And so he just out of the blue calls you up one day…

BABSON: Yeah.

CARUSO: And says…

BABSON: He just out of the blue called me up one day. Of course, he knew my father very, very much. I expect my father had some influence on him. My father bailed me out a number of times. But he just…they were looking for a biochemist, Ph.D. biochemist at the time. I guess he must have been impressed with me, because I hadn’t really spoken to him in like a year. He called me up and offered me a job.

CARUSO: Okay. Well, I guess that works.

BABSON: And it sounded good, so I accepted.

CARUSO: Did you know anything about Warner-Chilcott before then?

BABSON: I had applied there before I got my master’s degree. I’d interviewed with a couple of gentlemen 01:15:00, not George Phillips, who ended up being my boss, but a couple of gentlemen there. I’m sure that they…and they didn’t have a job at the time. But I’m sure that they influenced Ulrich Solmssen, or I’m sure he checked on them before he blithely offered me a job on the telephone.

Page 35 CARUSO: And how did your wife feel about heading back to New Jersey?

BABSON: Oh, she was fine with it. Yeah.

CARUSO: Yeah. Okay.

BABSON: She wasn’t crazy about Iowa either. There’s nothing out there but corn […].

CARUSO: All right, so this is around 1954, 1955.

BABSON: Nineteen fifty-four. Yeah.

CARUSO: Nineteen fifty-four, okay. So you travel back across the country, and still just one child.

BABSON: Still one child, yeah.

CARUSO: And you mentioned just a couple of minutes ago that you took a job without knowing anything…

BABSON: Anything…

CARUSO: …about the position.

BABSON: Except that I had…I knew the facilities, because I had interviewed a year before.

CARUSO: Right. Did you know your salary or anything like that? Or was it…?

BABSON: Yeah. He gave me my salary, which was much more than I was getting as a postdoc.

Page 36 CARUSO: Okay. So…

BABSON: But…

CARUSO: Tell me about…

BABSON: …piddly now.

CARUSO: So tell me about your first day.

BABSON: My first day I walked in and met my boss, [George Phillips]. He introduced me to my assistant, Sylvia Malament, and that’s as much as I remember of my first day.

CARUSO: Okay. You…were you given any specific projects to work on immediately?

BABSON: Yes, I was. The then president of the research institute, a fellow by the name of George Mangum, had this idea that—and this was before there was a diagnostics industry, so to speak—had this idea that what the clinical laboratory really needed to improve the quality of their testing was a serum control, a known serum control, basically as a standard rather than making up aqueous standards, which was the routine at the time. Also, all these standards were made up by the laboratory, because, as I say, this was before there was a real diagnostics industry…

CARUSO: Right.

BABSON: …to serve this. So he had this idea that a serum standard, a standard in serum would be very useful for the laboratory and improve the quality of their testing. So that was assigned to me and Sylvia, as our first project.

CARUSO: Okay.

BABSON: And we…and it ended up as a product called Versatol that was successful for many, many years, and spawned a number of different products, serum quality control products, Page 37 particularly Versatol-E, which is something which led me…got me into […] enzyme assays. Versatol-E (E for enzyme), which was…so that was essentially my first project.

CARUSO: Okay.

BABSON: Sylvia and I would go out and routinely make a circuit of the local blood banks, who would give us their outdated blood. That’s when it wasn’t…once it was outdated you couldn’t infuse it anymore, transfuse it, so it was worthless. They would throw it out. So we would say, “Don’t throw it out, we’ll take it.”

CARUSO: So you went on blood gathering missions.

BABSON: We went on blood gathering missions, and that would be our raw material for what ended up as Versatol serum standard.

CARUSO: Now was this an area of science that you were at all familiar with before having to work on it? I mean, did what you learn or what you did during the…

BABSON: No. No.

CARUSO: Okay.

BABSON: It was totally new. Totally new 01:20:00.

CARUSO: Then can you take me through, because I mean Versatol was introduced in ‘56.

BABSON: Yeah, I believe so.

CARUSO: So there wasn’t…it seems like you worked pretty fast on…

BABSON: Yeah.

Page 38 CARUSO: …all this stuff. So can you take me through the process of how you figured all this out? I mean…

BABSON: Well, we decided to start with outdated blood plasma, because it was free.

CARUSO: Right. Free is always good.

BABSON: Free is good. But we had to process it, because, for instance, some levels were way out of physiological range, like potassium for example, which leaks out of the erythrocytes on blood storage, which is way elevated. So we had to get rid of it. So we figured we’d dialyze it. So we’d dialyze it, but then we had a problem that if you just used...dialyzed against distilled water, some of the proteins would precipitate out, because they weren’t stable under the low ionic strength. So we figured out that we would dialyze it against magnesium acetate at, I think 10 or 20 millimolar, I’m not sure which.

CARUSO: How did you…?

BABSON: Because this was before magnesium was a routine analyte in clinical labs.

CARUSO: So how did you come to using magnesium? I mean…

BABSON: Well, we realized we couldn’t use distilled water, and we had to use something with ions in it to save the proteins from being precipitated.

CARUSO: And so is this just you experimented and found out magnesium worked? I was just wondering if there was a specific reason why you chose magnesium to begin with or if it was just…?

BABSON: Well, magnesium…we chose magnesium because it wasn’t an analyte of interest in the laboratory at the time. It is now, but at that time it wasn’t, and acetate, obviously, is just a counter-ion, which has no significance.

CARUSO: Okay.

Page 39 BABSON: And we’d take the outdated plasma, and the first thing we would do with it was lyophilize it, freeze-dry it in bulk. Then, because we wanted to precipitate out those proteins which were unstable to lyophilization, to freeze-drying, and that was nifty way to do it is to denature them, essentially. Then, we’d dissolve this out, this precipitated, or lyophilized, protein in a concentrated form, about twice the concentration that it was initially, because every subsequent step we would have would be a dilution of the thing. The dialysis would add water and what not.

CARUSO: Right.

BABSON: So we’d dialyze it, the concentrated proteins. First, we’d centrifuge it to get rid of the [denatured proteins] after-bulk lyophilization. We’d centrifuge it. We’d make it in a concentrated form, centrifuge it, and get a clear solution, and dialyze it. Then we’d add back weighed-in quantities of the constituents for which we wanted to analyze, urea, and uric acid, for example, bilirubin, sodium, potassium, chloride, and uric acid, whatever. There were a number of ways.

CARUSO: And was there a specific proportion that you were adding in for each of these?

BABSON: Yeah.

CARUSO: What was the portion based on?

BABSON: It was a concentrate based on the final concentration we wanted the lyophilized product to have.

CARUSO: Okay. Now you’re talking about doing this research. Again, are you pretty much, it’s just you and Sylvia working on…

BABSON: Yeah.

CARUSO: …your own in the lab?

BABSON: Pretty much, yeah.

Page 40 CARUSO: Given that you’re in a company, did you have a lot of oversight from your supervisor at the time? I mean did you have to give regular reports, or was this a very sort of open experimental…?

BABSON: Well, it was pretty much my project. He would oversee it to a certain 01:25:00 extent, but I was the one making the decisions for it.

CARUSO: Okay. And did you…you were provided with enough resources at the time to accomplish anything? You didn’t have to like…I know you were getting free blood.

BABSON: Yeah.

CARUSO: And, you know, that probably cut down the costs quite a bit. But did you…did they give you sort of a specific research budget that you were allocated for the project? Was it sort of a…

BABSON: I don’t recall a specific budget for the project. Now at Siemens [Healthcare Diagnostics], of course, we have budgets for everything.

CARUSO: Right. Well, times do change.

BABSON: Yes.

CARUSO: Yeah. So it took you about two years to get all of this done. What was their response to this at Warner-Chilcott? I don’t know when it became Warner-Lambert.

BABSON: I don’t remember either, to tell you the truth.

CARUSO: So I’ll probably say Chilcott for a while, and then I’ll revert to Lambert every so often. But was the response…?

BABSON: They were very excited about it.

Page 41 CARUSO: Okay.

BABSON: Yeah.

CARUSO: Did they have anyone else working on a similar project? Or was it just you…?

BABSON: No, it was just me…

CARUSO: You were the only one, okay.

BABSON: Just me…well, and Sylvia, of course.

CARUSO: Were they doing any other research into in vitro diagnostics at the time.

BABSON: No. No, this was…

CARUSO: Okay, so this was like…

BABSON: This was it.

CARUSO: This was it.

BABSON: Well, they had four products that they…were left over from other companies that they’d acquired. One was [Simplastin], a thromboplastin, used in [prothrombin time determinations]…and I’ve forgotten where that came from, maybe Chilcott Laboratories. One was a beta glucuronidase, […] called Ketodase, which was used in urinary steroid assays. Another was Evans blue [dye], which was [used in] an in vivo test for blood volume, [the fourth was Inulin, another sterile in vivo product used to measure kidney glomerular filtration rate…].

They gave these products…they didn’t know what to do with them. They gave them to a gentleman called Raphael Cohen, […] and they called it the Laboratory Supply Division of Warner-Chilcott Laboratories, which was the forerunner of General Diagnostics. Ray was in Page 42 charge of these four products, and, basically, was in charge of any future products that would come out in the diagnostic arena.

CARUSO: Okay.

BABSON: And he was excited about it, very much excited about it.

CARUSO: Excited in what way? As new business?

BABSON: He thought it was a new…well, he’d get very excited…. When I came out with my first enzyme product called PhosphaTabs, which was a tablet of phenolphthalein diphosphate in a Tris buffer for a single test. We had test wells, we called them, which were little tiny […] test tubes. You’d add four drops of blood [serum]. You’d crush a tablet with a glass rod. Then you’d incubate it for a period of time depending upon the room temperature. Then you’d add a drop of sodium hydroxide to develop the phenolphthalein color after a timed incubation, and measure it […] against a color chart.

It was semi quantitative, but it was actually pretty accurate. […] Ray was so excited about this he thought I should get a Nobel Prize. Really.

CARUSO: Well, I mean…

BABSON: And he arranged for Life magazine to come in and interview me. They had a photographer, Life photographer, magazine photographer taking pictures of this little test. Of course, they never ran the article. But…

CARUSO: So it sounds like you really were at the forefront of a new type of developing…or a new type of industry.

BABSON: Yes. I like to say that I was in the diagnostics industry since before there was a diagnostics industry 01:30:00.

CARUSO: And so is this an industry…so given that your other research endeavors before this point weren’t things that necessarily interested you, was this something that was finally…

Page 43 BABSON: Yeah.

CARUSO: …interesting you?

BABSON: Yeah.

CARUSO: Why?

BABSON: Because I could see the potential. I could see the potential for products that would be…I mean the clinical lab at the time, the clinical chemist made up all of his reagents, all of his standards by weighing out chemicals. I could see that that was not the best way to do it. There was a commercial need for reagents and standards, and that it was wide open.

CARUSO: One thing that I find somewhat interesting is that—and we can talk about this a little more as we go through your time at Warner-Chilcott-Lambert—is that you’re also publishing articles…

BABSON: Yes.

CARUSO: …during this period of time. Were these articles directly related to the research that you were doing?

BABSON: Yeah.

CARUSO: I could also see that as being potentially a big loss for a company, if they’re letting you publish the exact thing they’re trying to capitalize on.

BABSON: Well, in most cases the products were patented.

CARUSO: Okay. So you were allowed to publish after patenting.

BABSON: Yeah.

Page 44 CARUSO: Why were you publishing? What was the relevancy of publishing those articles? Was it just something that you wanted to do?

BABSON: Yeah. It was something I wanted to do. It increased my stature in the clinical lab.

CARUSO: Okay, so it was a way for you…

BABSON: I became a household word you might say, because, at the time, when I finished with Versatol and started Versatol-E (for enzymes), because I realized that the state of enzyme assays in the clinical lab was abysmal, they really needed an enzyme control or standard. I’d started…that got me interested in enzyme assays and the simplification of enzyme assays. At that time the units were, of course, arbitrary units that you’d get, because you can’t say there’s so many milligrams of alkaline phosphatase or whatever, in a deciliter or whatever.

So it became the inventor’s name or the describer’s name associated with that, like they were Karmen units, there were Bodanski units, and there were Babson units. If you look at a label of Versatol-E, and I don’t know if they even exist anymore, you would see there are all of these different enzymes. You could see so many Babson units. There were Babson units for just about anything. So…

CARUSO: So once…

BABSON: [There] was a little ego invested in this, too, I’m sure.

CARUSO: Well, there has to be, right. Otherwise, it’s not as interesting.

BABSON: Yeah.

CARUSO: So you came out with Versatol. You were also becoming interested at the time with standardizing enzymes, right.

BABSON: Yes.

Page 45 CARUSO: But where—if I remember reading correctly in some of the materials that you sent—where were your ideas about moving in this direction coming from? Because I think you had mentioned some work by Felix Wroblewski…

BABSON: Wroblewski, yeah.

CARUSO: So can you tell me how you sort of started to move into the specific field?

BABSON: Well, Felix Wroblewski was a researcher/clinician, essentially, who had a chap working for him called Arthur Karmen, who invented the spectrophotometric […] assays for GOT and GPT, which are glutamic oxaloacetic [and glutamic pyruvic] transaminase, now called aspartate [and alanine] amino transferase 01:35:00, and these respective spectrophotometric [assays] measured the absorbance of NADH at 340 nanometers. [They] required a spectrophotometer.

I got an idea, which was a purely serendipitous idea, that I could come up with a colorimetric assay, by reading…you mentioned George Kalnitsky earlier. I was reading an article by George in Biochemical Journal—maybe you’ve read this before—I was reading it just for interest, because I was just wondering what George was up to. It was an article on a method for measuring acetoacetic acid in tissue extracts. He mentioned that he had to heat the extracts to prevent interference from oxaloacetic acid. As soon as I read that, my…a light bulb went off. I realized that oxaloacetic acid was one of the products of the transaminase reaction. He was measuring […] acetoacetic acid by coupling it with a diazotized paranitroanaline, I believe. At that time, […] stabilized diazonium salts were used in the dying industry quite frequently. I figured that this is a good reagent. This is a good, reactive colorimetric reagent. So I collected a whole bunch of free samples of stabilized diazonium salts. We screened all of them and found one that reacted very well with oxaloacetic acid.

I got a patent on that.5 As a matter of fact, that’s the only patent out of the twenty-five patents I got at Warner-Lambert, that’s the only one that ever produced any kind of income through licensing.

CARUSO: After the first Versatol came out—in some ways that was started at the instigation of George Mangum…

BABSON: Right.

Page 46 CARUSO: …did your relationship…

BABSON: Well, he had the idea.

CARUSO: Right.

BABSON: And he just turned it over to…

CARUSO: Right. But for this second project, was this just something that you said to your supervisor, “You know what, I want to work on this.” And he said, “Go ahead.”

BABSON: Yeah, pretty much. Pretty much.

CARUSO: So you were given free rein after your success with the first project…

BABSON: Right. It led to a whole line of different products.

CARUSO: Okay. So the company itself, did they start investigating much more? Did they have other researchers at the time also going into this new field of diagnostics? Or…?

BABSON: No. Pretty much, it was…

CARUSO: So it was just you…

BABSON: Well, yeah, they did. Well, George Phillips, my boss, he had another lady working or reporting to him called Jane Lenahan, who was really directed at coagulation reagents. I mean she had…I mentioned that we had a product called Simplastin, which was a thromboplastin reagent used in […prothrombin time determinations]. But she also worked on other coagulation projects. Eventually, I took over that responsibility, but at the time of my hiring, she was also working on diagnostic reagents in the coagulation field […].

Page 47 CARUSO: Okay. Okay. So you’re given a little more free rein to do your research. Were you given…did you need more resources? I know you mentioned that you were getting some free samples again to do some of the initial work. But did 01:40:00 you have any budget per se at this period of time? Or is it just…?

BABSON: No.

CARUSO: No.

BABSON: Well, there was a budget that was for the entire biochemistry department. George Phillips had a budget. But budgeting at that time was done, mostly, by a chap that had no…was in charge of research administration. So he figured out everybody’s budget. It was a crazy system to tell you the truth. But I had no budgeting responsibility at all.

CARUSO: Okay. You just had a little sort of free rein.

BABSON: Yeah. I had free rein, essentially.

CARUSO: When you started your work into enzymes were you still working with Sylvia. I remember reading about a Prunella Reid.

BABSON: Yeah. Prunella Reid was my second assistant.

CARUSO: Second as in you had two assistants, or second as in Sylvia had moved onto something else.

BABSON: No. Sylvia stayed with me for several years. Then she basically moved to another group, but by that time I had a number of people working for me.

CARUSO: Okay. What training did Sylvia and Prunella have? Were they just college- educated?

BABSON: Yeah. None, none at all. No specialized training.

Page 48 CARUSO: So how did they work with you? I mean you at least had some experience in grad school…

BABSON: Yeah. They were working pretty much under my direction.

CARUSO: Okay. So were you training them…

BABSON: Yeah.

CARUSO: …what to do and things like that?

BABSON: Right. Yeah.

CARUSO: Okay. So there was a mixture of…it wasn’t just…when I think of a technician today, technicians come in with a certain level of training. They might have to adapt somewhat to a new environment, but they’re kind of pre-trained, whereas, to a certain degree you needed to do some of that teaching, some of that training for them.

BABSON: Yeah. Absolutely.

CARUSO: So let’s see. So you and Prunella developed the tablet of Tris buffer.

BABSON: Yeah.

CARUSO: And the phenolphthalein phosphate and that became…

BABSON: PhosphaTabs.

CARUSO: …PhosphaTabs. And that was the first serum enzyme test.

BABSON: Right.

Page 49 CARUSO: Right. That was, to a great extent, independent of sample size.

BABSON: Yeah.

CARUSO: Yeah. Okay.

BABSON: What are you reading from?

CARUSO: We develop what we call an interview protocol, where we take notes to make sure that we have a good sense of everything that we want to cover.

BABSON: See, I don’t…this is not for me.

CARUSO: No. We read and digest everything that we can to incorporate into something that makes sense to us.

BABSON: Oh, all right.

CARUSO: It’s crib sheets.

BABSON: Yeah, okay. I was curious.

CARUSO: Yeah. So how long did the work on the serum enzyme tests take approximately? Was that another like two-year project? Or…?

BABSON: Well, yeah, probably a two-year project. Well, there were a number of projects going on simultaneously. We had PhosphaTabs Acid, which was a test for acid phosphatase. Then we had…well, we had transaminase tests going on, TransAc. Page 50 Arthur L. Babson with assistant, Prunella Reid, celebrating the

introduction of PhosphaTabs Acid, May 1958.

CARUSO: TransAc. Were you also doing the work with the reactive dyes?

BABSON: Yeah.

CARUSO: At the same…

BABSON: Yeah.

CARUSO: Okay. So you had a lot of simultaneous projects…

Page 51 BABSON: Yes.

CARUSO: …going on.

BABSON: Oh, yeah.

CARUSO: You’re essentially…

BABSON: Oh, yeah, a lot of projects going on simultaneously.

CARUSO: So you’re building the industry…

BABSON: Essentially.

CARUSO: Essentially. What was…I mean, in some ways, we’ve taken a tack that has focused principally on your scientific career for the past little while. What was going on for you personally? Or was anything relevant going on in your life outside of work at this period of time? I guess another question to, sort of, ask about is, how is your family—your parents, your brother—responding to, if in any way, to the work that you were doing?

BABSON: I think they were pretty much oblivious.

CARUSO: Okay. Did your brother go back into chemical engineering 01:45:00? Or did he…?

BABSON: […] Yes, he got a job in chemical engineering, a couple of jobs actually for a long period of time. I’m trying to think of the name of the companies that he worked for, and it escapes me. But he’s still alive. I can ask him.

CARUSO: And your parents, they were just, you know: you have a job; they’re happy.

Page 52 BABSON: Yeah. Yeah.

CARUSO: And what about your wife, and your daughter? Was your family growing at all? Or…?

BABSON: Well, yeah. We had a son, Jim [James Norton Babson], which we started soon after I got the job.

CARUSO: Okay. Did having additional kids or…I guess, how did you balance your family life with your work life? It seems like you’re getting a lot done at work. Were you working long hours, or…?

BABSON: No. Not particularly.

CARUSO: Okay.

BABSON: Regular hours.

CARUSO: Regular hours.

BABSON: Yeah, just pretty productive, I guess.

CARUSO: Okay. When you came home…I’m always curious to see…the way you grew up there was a lot of freedom. You were playing outside. You were playing in the woods. You were blowing things up. What was it like for your kids at that time? Were you involved in their schoolwork? Were you a soccer coach …

BABSON: No.

CARUSO: …or anything along those lines?

BABSON: No. I was never a coach. Was I involved in their schoolwork? Probably minimally.

Page 53 CARUSO: Okay. Did they—I realize they were quite young at this time…

BABSON: They didn’t have any scientific bent.

CARUSO: Okay. I was going to ask if they ever came to work, and played in your lab or anything.

BABSON: No.

CARUSO: No.

BABSON: No.

CARUSO: No. Okay. So I know that you were at Lambert—I’ll just use Lambert now—for a total of 25 years.

BABSON: Twenty-five years almost to the day. Yeah.

CARUSO: I don’t know the various positions that you held while there.

BABSON: Well, I was hired as a Senior Scientist. I got promoted to a Senior Research Associate, which was the highest laboratory position. Then I got promoted to Director of Diagnostic Research, then Vice President of Diagnostic Research, which was the top position I held there.

CARUSO: Do you have a rough timeframe for when those promotions occurred? Was it like every five years, every…?

BABSON: No, I don’t remember to tell you the truth.

CARUSO: Okay.

Page 54 BABSON: I could probably reconstruct that if necessary.

CARUSO: That’s just…I was just going to try to have you go through your reflections of your career history. I thought maybe having some dates could serve nicely as a way to reconstruct the ways in which, not only your responsibilities were changing, but the ways in which I think the industry more broadly was developing, right. I mean clearly, you had some things that people were quite interested in coming out of Lambert. I’m assuming there are other companies that started to move in that direction.

BABSON: Yes.

CARUSO: So I’m just trying to get a sense of this twenty-year period where a lot of change is going on, what those changes are. I’m just trying to have a better understanding of all that was going on during this period of time.

BABSON: Well, the changes…the biggest change, I think, the most significant change was the invention of the AutoAnalyzer by Technicon [Corporation], now part of Dade Behring, now part of Siemens. At the time, we were also involved in automating clinical chemistry. We had a project which we hadn’t developed. It was developed outside, called the Robot Chemist 01:50:00. We were neck-and-neck with Technicon, too. But when Technicon found that they could add analytes, channels, to their system, which was based on moving flow of reagents and samples just by bifurcating the stream, and they ended up with like the twelve-channel autoanalyzer, where we were using discrete reagent systems, and discrete cuvettes, there was no way we could keep up with them, and they [Warner-Lambert] dropped the ball.

CARUSO: Okay.

BABSON: Because the Robot Chemist was very similar in concept to a lot of the instruments that are in existence today. But they screwed it up.

CARUSO: So based on the various positions that you had, can you tell me a little bit about how your responsibilities changed over time at Warner-Lambert?

BABSON: Yeah. Well, when I was just a group leader, and we had another group that was doing microbiology reagents in a different department, not George Phillips’s department, the Page 55 microbiology department—of course [George] had Jane Lenahan’s group in coagulation reagents. Then we’d hired…no that was after I was promoted. We took Jane’s group and Don Kronish’s group, the microbiology, and my group, which was then several subgroups, and we put them together as the General Diagnostics Research. That’s when I became Director of Research, and then subsequently, Vice President of Research for General Diagnostics.

So we combined these three groups under me…

CARUSO: When you say, “We combined”…

BABSON: Well…

CARUSO: …is that…?

BABSON: The company combined.

CARUSO: The company, so…

BABSON: Yeah.

CARUSO: Okay. So they were interested. They saw value in…

BABSON: They saw value and the future in diagnostics. They saw me as a valuable asset that was very productive in generating new products. So they decided that, well, it makes more sense to have this in one group rather than in…rather…

CARUSO: Separated.

BABSON: Separated. Yeah.

CARUSO: How did your work in the lab change as you moved up the ladder? You know, with Versatol and Versatol-E, you were…

Page 56 BABSON: I was in there.

CARUSO: Doing the experiments.

BABSON: I was doing the experiments. Yeah, with Sylvia’s [help], obviously…

CARUSO: Right. And so…

BABSON: …assistance.

CARUSO: Did that change? I mean as you became responsible…

BABSON: Sure.

CARUSO: …for a group, were you now behind a desk giving orders, or…?

BABSON: Yeah. Yes, pretty much.

CARUSO: Okay. Did you miss…?

BABSON: Didn’t like it that much.

CARUSO: I was going to ask if you…yeah.

BABSON: No. I liked the hands-on work.

CARUSO: Were you able to get out sometimes, and do your…

BABSON: Yeah.

Page 57 CARUSO: …own…? Okay.

BABSON: Yeah.

CARUSO: So did you have your own like mini projects that you kept to yourself? Or did you just go out and help…?

BABSON: Well, one of the things that I did was, I had…[the woman who became my second] wife was working at the time in my department. She was working with a chap called [Bob Megraw…]. At the time, Ray Cohen, who was then the head of General Diagnostics, decided that there wasn’t any future in coagulation. So he transferred Jane Lenahan and her whole group over to marketing, which was a dumb idea because there was a future in coagulation, obviously. For many years, we didn’t…or for several years, we didn’t have any effort in coagulation, and the market was passing us by.

So that’s when I took and gave it to my wife, my second wife now 01:55:00, Susan—the one in the pictures downstairs on the wall—the responsibility for coagulation. She developed a number of different products. Actually, she was one of my most productive scientists.

CARUSO: So did you…I assume you met…so, just so I have a very general time frame. When Susan was working, was she your wife before she started working for you, or was it something that…?

BABSON: No. She was working at Warner-Chilcott or Warner-Lambert in the pharmacology department. She became allergic to the rabbits that she had to work with.

CARUSO: Well, that would be problematic.

BABSON: So she had to transfer to a different department, so I took her on. Bob Megraw was the guy, the chap, that she was working with.

CARUSO: Okay. Okay. So then she’s working on the coagulation…

BABSON: So after…yeah, I took her away from Bob Megraw and gave her responsibility for coagulation.

Page 58 CARUSO: Okay. This was around 1970, 1972, just as an estimate […].

BABSON: Yeah, early ‘70s. Yeah.

CARUSO: Okay. You were the director at this point…

BABSON: Yeah.

CARUSO: …in the early ‘70s? […] What was the difference in terms of your responsibilities between being director and being vice president? Were you…?

BABSON: Very little.

CARUSO: Were you now making up budgets?

BABSON: Very little...

CARUSO: Okay.

BABSON: …actually. It was essentially the same responsibilities, just at a higher pay and higher…

CARUSO: Okay.

BABSON: […] title.

CARUSO: And were you now completely out of the lab at this point? Kind of?

BABSON: Yeah, pretty much. Pretty much.

Page 59 CARUSO: Could you give me a little bit of information about how Lambert fit into the general industry at this time? I mean you were coming out with all these products. I’m sure there were other companies coming…

BABSON: Well, General Diagnostics was one of the leaders of the in vitro diagnostics industry. Another leader was Dade in Florida, which is now part of Siemens. There was another company out on the West Coast—or was it in Texas?—called Highland Laboratories, [Inc.]. There was a…those were our main competitors, I think at the time, in the early ‘70s.

CARUSO: Okay. Were you all trying to establish your own standards for the…you had mentioned the Babson units, and all this earlier on. Was there a general consensus at this point that there was an overall standard, and people were just coming up with tests to match that standard? Or were these individual companies still saying, “Look. There’s the General Diagnostics’s standard. There’s the Highland Lab standard”? Was there a codification or a simplification standardization going on in industry generally?

BABSON: No. I don’t think so. Each commercial organization was trying to establish its own product lines. Now the Feds were getting more and more involved in creating standards for the laboratories. So and…

CARUSO: Was this coming out of the FDA [United States Food and Drug Administration], the standards?

BABSON: Yeah.

CARUSO: Okay.

BABSON: Yeah, right.

CARUSO: And what sort of responses from your 02:00:00 users were you getting about the products that you were producing? I mean you’re talking…

BABSON: They obviously liked them or they wouldn’t be buying them.

Page 60 CARUSO: Okay, and…

BABSON: Because they had alternatives.

CARUSO: And at this time were you selling directly to physicians or was it…?

BABSON: No. We were selling to the hospital laboratory.

CARUSO: Hospital labs.

BABSON: Right.

CARUSO: Okay.

BABSON: And the private clinical lab, too, but mostly hospital labs.

CARUSO: Okay. Did General Diagnostics…was there any sort of regional aspect to it? You know let’s say if Highland happened to be in Texas, did they handle the southwest and General Diagnostics…

BABSON: No.

CARUSO: No. So it was…

BABSON: It was all over…

CARUSO: …all over.

BABSON: And all over the country, and pretty much all over the world. We had a international division, which had a diagnostics responsibility, headed by a gentleman by the name of Luis Patinio. Luis basically was responsible for all the international sales of General Diagnostics’s products.

Page 61 CARUSO: Okay, all right. Looking at the time, this might be a good place to stop…

BABSON: You haven’t partaken of any of our treats here.

CARUSO: We were busy talking. But I think on Thursday when we take up again, it might be a nice point to sort of finish up…I know that you received the American Association for Clinical Chemistry Award in 1975.

BABSON: Was that the Gerulat Award?

CARUSO: Yeah.

BABSON: Yeah, and the more prestigious Van Slyke Award a couple of years later. The other, third award, on my wall is the New Jersey Inventors Hall of Fame.

CARUSO: Right.

BABSON: Inventor of the Year Award.

CARUSO: Right. I remember seeing that as well. I think that might be a good place to pick up. It’s a nice transition point, because, after your time as vice president, I guess by 1980, or maybe in 1980 exactly, is when you left to start, well, Babson Labs.

BABSON: Babson Research Labs, yes.

CARUSO: So I think that would be a good place to…

BABSON: Okay.

CARUSO: …probably pick up. Thank you. Page 62 [END OF AUDIO, FILE 1.1]

[END OF INTERVIEW]

Page 63 CARUSO: […] So today is the 8th of December 2011. This is the second interview with Arthur Babson at Siemens in Flanders, New Jersey. I am David Caruso, and with me is Sarah Hunter, as well. I think, Sarah, you have a question.

HUNTER-LASCOSKIE: I was curious about the end of your time at Warner-Lambert. You’d spoken so much about working independently, and all of your scientific work in graduate school and postdoctorate, you’re working by yourself. Suddenly over the course of some years at Warner-Lambert you have a huge group. What was that adjustment like going from working by yourself to managing a growing group of people?

BABSON: Well, I think […I had] fifty people or more. They were less productive than when I had five people, because…. I don’t know, I just…I was a lot more productive when I was hands-on, totally hands-on, I think.

CARUSO: So you were productive as in, when you were working on something, you were literally productive with it.

BABSON: Right, yeah.

CARUSO: But as you became more and more responsible for a group of people, I guess there was a lot less of your own hands-on work?

BABSON: Right. It was a lot of administration, administrative work, and what not.

CARUSO: So directing…

Page 64 BABSON: It was…

CARUSO: …directing other people what to do.

BABSON: Yeah.

CARUSO: Okay.

BABSON: Yeah.

CARUSO: Did you have as much input about things at that point with what was being designed and what was being investigated? Or were you essentially just relying on reports from people about the work getting done?

BABSON: Well, I had a lot of input, but not as much as I did when I was doing it myself, obviously. So I had to rely on other people. Other people weren’t as reliable as I was. [laughter]

CARUSO: I know during this period of time, you have…you meet Susan, your second wife. How did…I mean she was in your group, so you were responsible for her. Were there any issues at Warner-Lambert in terms of you supervising someone whom you were married to?

BABSON: Yes.

CARUSO: Okay.

BABSON: Yes, definitely. There were a lot of petty jealousies. Susan was very productive; she wasn’t given the credit for it that she deserved, because they said, “Oh, that’s just Art,” you know. It wasn’t just me. She was a very productive scientist. But there were a lot of petty jealousies. When I was made Vice President of Research, my boss, George…

CARUSO: Is it…

Page 65 BABSON: Masters. George Masters…

CARUSO: George Masters.

BABSON: …who was the president of the General Diagnostics Division, wisely told me not to have Susan reporting to me. So I had her reporting to Jim Turner for a while. Then she got a job in the international division of Warner-Lambert, and then eventually left and went to work for MedPath.

CARUSO: Okay. So she shifted around and…

BABSON: Yeah.

CARUSO: Okay. Now, again, as you moved up the corporate ladder and you were becoming more distanced from the…

BABSON: The bench.

CARUSO: …the bench, I’m sure that you had a lot of ideas about what could happen in the diagnostic realm. And I’m curious to know what it is that you thought was important to do in terms of standardizing diagnostics, and what sort of tests did you think needed to come up for physicians and things like that? I mean what was your thinking during this period of time about what you wanted to accomplish?

BABSON: Well, I wanted to simplify the tests that the laboratory was already running, and improve them if possible, to provide better results, to provide easier 02:07:37 procedures. But the tests themselves, the analytes that were tested for, that were measured, were pretty much dictated by the need, you know.

CARUSO: Right, the medical field has its own…

BABSON: Right.

Page 66 CARUSO: “We need to know something.”

BABSON: Need to know what your glucose level is. We need to know what your uric acid level is, and so forth.

CARUSO: So were you…how did you keep abreast of what it is that physicians wanted or needed? Where you attending American Medical Association conferences? Or…?

BABSON: Well, I was very active in the American Association for Clinical Chemistry, let’s say. That was the main meeting for the field I was working in, which was essentially clinical chemistry.

CARUSO: How long had you been involved in that?

BABSON: I was one of the early members. My membership number is two hundred forty-six, which only two hundred forty-[five] members before I joined. That was in early…oh, gosh, when would that be, a year or two after I joined Warner-Lambert.

CARUSO: Okay.

BABSON: Actually the Clinical Chemistry, American Association for Clinical Chemistry, they were kind of prejudiced against people from industry.

CARUSO: Why is that?

BABSON: [It’s] because they thought it was their business. It was their…I don’t know, to tell you the truth.

CARUSO: Was it mostly academics in the Association?

BABSON: Yeah, it was academics.

Page 67 CARUSO: Okay.

BABSON: And they thought that people from industry were kind of like harlots.

CARUSO: So when you were involved with this group, were you just presenting your research initially at the meetings? Or was it…?

BABSON: No. Actually, I was on the board of directors of…what do they call it? I’m not sure whether it’s board of directors. But of the New York Metropolitan Section, and then the New Jersey Section, so I was involved in the organization itself.

CARUSO: Okay. Were you one of the only industry individuals in the organization?

BABSON: I was one of the earliest industry individuals, I think. But now it’s dominated by people from industry.

CARUSO: Okay. What was the purpose—I’m assuming the organization had annual meetings. What was the…

BABSON: Yes.

CARUSO: …purpose of the annual meetings?

BABSON: To present research results and whatnot, present papers. Initially they had…they didn’t have commercial exhibits. It was just technical papers that were presented. But now it’s totally dominated by commercial exhibits, essentially.

CARUSO: The work that was being done by the academics, was it any different from the type of work that you or, once more industry people started to come in, was it different from the work that they were trying to accomplish? Was there some fundamental difference between them?

BABSON: Not really. They were working on methodologies, new methodologies, and stuff. But the people from industry were working on products that performed the same function, so…

Page 68 CARUSO: So the academics were coming up with ways to do things…

BABSON: Right.

CARUSO: …but industry was figuring out ways to bring it to market.

BABSON: Right.

CARUSO: So to realize what the sort of theoretical or experimental things…. Okay. So you were involved with the AACC for quite some time. In some ways…

BABSON: I’m still an emeritus member.

CARUSO: Okay. And you did receive…

BABSON: I don’t have to…being emeritus member, I don’t have to pay dues anymore.

CARUSO: So in the 1970s, you’re vice president. Susan moves off. You’re more removed from bench work. Almost completely removed, would you say?

BABSON: Pretty much. Yeah.

CARUSO: Pretty much. You received, in 1975, the American Association for Clinical Chemistry Award. Is it Gerulat 02:12:37…?

BABSON: Gerulat Award, yeah…

CARUSO: Gerulat Award. What is that award for, and…?

Page 69 BABSON: Bernie Gerulat was a very early member of the Association, and particularly from the New Jersey Section. He died, and so this was kind of a memorial award for him. It was presented annually to a member of the association that they thought deserved it, I guess.

CARUSO: Sort of outstanding achievement in the field?

BABSON: Yeah, right.

CARUSO: So did you know that you were going to be receiving the award?

BABSON: No. Well, yes, I knew…

CARUSO: I mean did you well in advance…

BABSON: No, not…

CARUSO: That…no.

BABSON: …well in advance…

CARUSO: Okay.

BABSON: No.

CARUSO: Okay. So why is it that you received it in 1975? What was the reasoning behind…?

BABSON: You’ll have to ask the committee.

CARUSO: Okay. I was just wondering if they had an award presentation, they might have mentioned was it for a specific patents that you’d come up with?

Page 70 BABSON: No. I don’t think it was for any specific…

CARUSO: Specific.

BABSON: One thing.

CARUSO: Okay. How did you feel about receiving that award?

BABSON: Oh, I was pleased, obviously.

CARUSO: Getting recognized for the work you had done…

BABSON: Yeah.

CARUSO: …up to that point. Now it’s also - I’m assuming 1975 might be an interesting year in other respects, because within five years of that point you’re leaving Warner-Lambert. So I’m kind of curious to know if there was something going on in the company that sort of led you to wanting to leave by 1980…

BABSON: Yes.

CARUSO: …or was it just…okay.

BABSON: Yes. They hired a person between me, and George Masters, who was the…what was his title? Bob Schiff, who I immediately took an instantaneous dislike to, and it’s all spelled out in the memoirs. Are you reading that section?

CARUSO: I was looking for his name. I couldn’t remember. But yeah, I just came up with Bob Schiff’s name.

BABSON: Yeah. So he was the Senior Vice President for Research. He had responsibility for a number of different locations where at that time research was on the…main research was done Page 71 at Morris Plains, [New Jersey], of course. But he had…we had a group in Germany and then another group in Texas, I think.

CARUSO: So he was sort of this supervisor for all the vice presidents of research at…

BABSON: Yes.

CARUSO: …various locations.

BABSON: Right, senior vice president.

CARUSO: Okay. Was that…was he filling in for someone else who was already in that position?

BABSON: No. It was a new position.

CARUSO: It was a new position, okay.

BABSON: Yeah.

CARUSO: Did you know that the position was going to…

BABSON: No.

CARUSO: No. So this was…

BABSON: No.

CARUSO: …a surprise.

BABSON: It was a surprise. Yes.

Page 72 CARUSO: And not a happy surprise.

BABSON: Not a happy surprise

CARUSO: Not a happy surprise. You mentioned that you took an instantaneous dislike to him. What was it about…I mean was it something about his management style that didn’t fit well with…?

BABSON: You have to know the man. [laughter]

CARUSO: Oh, it’s that kind of…

BABSON: Yeah.

CARUSO: …dislike. So was that the main reason that precipitated your leaving Warner- Lambert?

BABSON: Yes.

CARUSO: Yes. Okay.

BABSON: Yes, definitely.

CARUSO: Were there other things that no longer fit well? You know, Sarah mentioned the fact that you were…you kind of liked working on your research projects. Were you tired of the management aspect of things?

BABSON: Well, I never really enjoyed management, as such. It went with the territory though.

Page 73 CARUSO: Okay. Did you ever consider asking to be demoted, so that way you could be back at the bench?

BABSON: No.

CARUSO: No. Okay. So 1980, after twenty-five years at Warner-Lambert, you decide to leave. Did you have a…?

BABSON: Well, I decided soon after Schiff arrived, but I didn’t…I wanted to be 02:17:37 vested in the Warner-Lambert medical plan, for example, before I retired. So I had to be a certain age. I’ve forgotten what it…was it fifty-five, I guess? I think. At that time, I had accumulated…my boss realized that, George Masters realized that Schiff was not going to be…there was a possibility that he and I would not see eye-to-eye. So he said, and I told him pretty much, that, “Hey, this guy is bad news.”

He offered me severance if I decided after working…trying to work with Schiff for several months or whatever, that if I wanted to leave, he would give me severance. So I figured out that the day my severance would take me to the fifty-five years old, that was the day I was going to leave.

CARUSO: Were there other people at Warner-Lambert that had similar feelings towards…?

BABSON: Yes. Ken Sumner, who was my manager of, or director of clinical investigation. He left almost immediately.

CARUSO: Okay, wow.

BABSON: And he said, “I don’t trust Schiff.” That’s just what I remember him saying to me exactly. He turned out to be right, because two years after I left, or within two years after I left, Schiff was summarily canned, along with all the people he brought in with him, for lying about results on a cancer test…

CARUSO: Oh, wow.

BABSON: …which the data showed that it wasn’t going to work, and he hid that from…

Page 74 CARUSO: And I guess it was kind of good you got out when you did.

BABSON: Yes.

CARUSO: Did you have a plan for what you wanted to do when you were leaving?

BABSON: Yeah. Well, I knew I wanted to be my own boss. I knew I wanted to stay in the medical field. So that’s why I essentially started the Babson Research Laboratories, which was an S corporation. I made…actually built a lab in my house, which I provisioned with leftover stuff from Warner-Lambert to a great extent. And I started working on projects.

CARUSO: So what was your home-built lab like? I mean what sort of devices did you find you needed to start your new company?

BABSON: Well, I needed a spectrophotometer, for example. I needed balances. I needed a water bath. Some of these things, a lot of these things, I was able to purchase, and some I was able to get from my prior employer.

CARUSO: Okay. So you had spent so much time studying diagnostics, and you wanted to continue it, was there a specific area that had interested you? You had mentioned when we were first talking, the success of Versatol. You became interested in enzymes. Then there was Versatol-E. Then there was an interest in coagulation for you. Was there a new area that interested you? Or it was just like a continuation of…?

BABSON: Well, the most successful product in General Diagnostics was Blood Gas Control, which was an ampouled control for pH, PCO2, PO2 for blood gas controls, for controlling blood gas measurements. I had an idea…and these all had to be…they had a gas phase 02:22:37, and they had to be equilibrated at […] 37° [C], for example, before they could be used. They were essentially injected in the blood gas analyzer.

I had an idea for coming up with a…and they were single use ampoules. I think, in the second year of sales, they were like a six million dollar product, which was unusual, unprecedented you might say, for General Diagnostics. I came up with an idea for making a multiple use [control], which didn’t require equilibration, because it didn’t have a gas phase […].

Page 75 CARUSO: Okay.

BABSON: And I got a patent on it, and tried to peddle it, and had a number of companies that were interested in it.6

CARUSO: So my first question is, how did you come up with the idea? Again, yesterday when we were talking about Versatol-E, you’d mentioned some of the work of other scientists, their publications. Your friend, who was publishing some interesting stuff, you were just looking up what he was up to. How is it that you came about with this idea? I mean was it just again…?

BABSON: I don’t know. [laughter]

CARUSO: So it just came to you.

BABSON: Yeah, just came to me.

CARUSO: Okay. So it’s a problem that needed to be solved.

BABSON: Problem that needed to be solved, and…

CARUSO: And you were going to solve it.

BABSON: I thought it was…I thought I could come up with a good solution, and I did. But, unfortunately, I was never able to sell it. It gave me a lot of contacts in different companies in the diagnostics industry.

CARUSO: So you saw yourself selling your ideas to diagnostic companies, not that you would necessarily become a diagnostics company.

BABSON: No. No. I didn’t want to sell to customers.

Page 76 CARUSO: Okay. So you wanted to be sort of a…

BABSON: Individual laboratories, let’s say.

CARUSO: Okay. So you were going to be a researcher that contracted with or sold your inventions, your ideas, to the diagnostic…

BABSON: Right.

CARUSO: …companies, which would then sell it on to the users.

BABSON: Right, yes. Although I did end up selling to MetPath, which was then the largest laboratory in the world, in New Jersey, a couple of products, which together were worth ten thousand dollars a month to me: [prostatic acid phosphatase and urinary alcohol]

CARUSO: Wow. Okay. Was that in the early portion of Babson, or was this…?

BABSON: No. That was…well, I’ve forgotten exactly when. No, it was later on, I think. I had sold one product, a non-isotopic immunoassay for prostatic acid phosphatase, which I developed, and to Ortho [Diagnostics] [Johnson & Johnson] down in Raritan, New Jersey. They marketed it for a while. But then they really screwed up the marketing and they abandoned it for a while, or after about less than a year, I think, and gave it back to me, the marketing rights. So I made a presentation to MetPath and said, “This is a good test. You ought to have it. You ought to use it.” I convinced them, and they started selling it, or they started using it, I mean, not selling it.

CARUSO: So in the early years of Babson Laboratories, initially it was you, right.

BABSON: Yeah.

CARUSO: How did that company grow in the first few years? I know you eventually moved out of your…

Page 77 BABSON: It was always me. I was the sole…the first employee, and the only employee. So I did…I was making reagents for Becton Dickinson, [and Company], for the Clay Adams Division, several reagents—four, I think—and selling them in bulk, which they repackaged in 02:27:37 single test units for their Accustat analyzer, which was sold to the physician’s office marketplace. I was also consulting for them for like five years. I ended up, after selling the prostatic acid phosphatase test to Ortho [Diagnostics], I ended up consulting for them for many years.

CARUSO: Okay. So, really, in those first several years, it was just you.

BABSON: Just me.

CARUSO: It was you in your home lab…

BABSON: Just in my home lab.

CARUSO: …your home lab with…the contacts that you were able to make in the diagnostics industry, was that because people knew you from Warner-Lambert?

BABSON: Yeah, pretty much.

CARUSO: Okay. So you had this reputation…

BABSON: Oh, yeah.

CARUSO: …people knew about you.

BABSON: Right.

CARUSO: Now one thing I did notice was that—and I think I probably know the answer to this next question—but I noticed that once you left Warner, I’d say for most of the 1980s, you really stopped publishing.

Page 78 BABSON: Right. Yeah.

CARUSO: Is that just because you were so focused on your own…

BABSON: I was so busy making money.

CARUSO: Okay. Making money. But if you had the chance, would you have been? Would you have continued publishing, do you think?

BABSON: Maybe, I don’t know. I already had a number of publications…

CARUSO: You did.

BABSON: Quite a few.

CARUSO: That’s true. That’s true.

BABSON: There wasn’t any money in publishing, right. At that time I was interested in earning a living.

CARUSO: Okay. So outside of the initial work and the consulting work that you were doing in those first few years of Babson Laboratories, did you have any specific vision for what you wanted to achieve with the company? Or was it just, “Whatever work needed to be done, I was going to do it”?

BABSON: Pretty much. You know, I didn’t have any high vision.

CARUSO: Okay.

BABSON: I wanted to make a buck any way I could.

Page 79 CARUSO: Were you doing…so putting work aside, were you doing anything in your own personal time, your leisure time, that was interesting you? I mean yesterday, or the last time, we spoke about you liked to go for walks in the woods. When we were having lunch the other day, I commented how there’s beautiful land behind the building here. It seems like you could go for walks here. Were there things that you were pursuing in your own personal life at the time that…what were you doing when you weren’t working? Or were you just working full-time?

BABSON: I was working pretty much full-time. Yeah.

CARUSO: Full-time, seven days a week, no breaks.

BABSON: Seven days a week, probably. Yeah.

CARUSO: Okay. So after those first few years, I know that eventually, and I don’t know if I have a clear understanding of when everything happened, but there was Pegasus Technologies. There was Cirrus Diagnostics. There was sort of an evolution of what you were doing, and also…

BABSON: Well, this is totally separate from Babson Research Labs.

CARUSO: Okay. Can you…?

BABSON: This was a new company. Well, I had an idea for automating immunoassays by spinning a tube on its vertical axis to do separations. I got a patent on that.7 I actually wrote the patent application myself, because I already had twenty-five patents, so I knew…

CARUSO: You had some experience.

BABSON: Yes. I had…I knew what the routine was. With the idea of selling it outright or licensing the technology, because I didn’t want to…I didn’t visualize myself developing it, Babson Research Labs.

Page 80 CARUSO: Why not?

BABSON: Well, I didn’t want to be in the manufacturing…

CARUSO: Okay.

BABSON: I made bulk reagents for MetPath, and for Clay Adams, Becton Dickinson, but that was great business. But I didn’t want to have employees, for example 02:32:37. I like working for myself. So I got this idea. I wrote up a patent application, and got a patent on it, and that’s the basis of the technology you see here. I was doing a lot of consulting with a chap by the name of John Underwood. John was…and I was essentially a technical backup for John. John was a consultant for marketing and whatnot, but he knew his way around the diagnostics industry pretty well. So I showed John this idea. I said, “John, who do you think’s a good customer for this?” He took one look at it, and he said, “Art, this is too good. You don’t want to sell this. You want to start a company.” And I didn’t. I didn’t want to start a company. But he was very persuasive, and he convinced me.

He introduced me to an early stage venture capitalist, Art Kydd, when we were on a consulting trip to a company in Minneapolis [called London Diagnostics…]. Art was a director of this company, and I showed it to Art, and he said, “Yeah, this is pretty good.” So, in a subsequent visit to Minneapolis…and I had taken a battery-driven model of a tube spinner. As a matter of fact, I have—it doesn’t exist anymore—but this was my first wooden model. I have a metal model that simulates or almost exactly the same design, which I had a model-maker make for me here. But so I had this, and this up at a restaurant, which Art Kydd had invited a few of his wealthy investors to, and I demonstrate the principle of axial centrifugation to do separations in immunoassays on the dining room table in the restaurant. On the basis of that, and subsequent investigations Art made on my background, he decided to start the…put up the early stage of venture capital.

CARUSO: So…

BABSON: And that was incorporated as Babson Technologies [on March 17, 1987]. But before we had our first hire, besides me—I was the only employee at the time—I decided that, and John Underwood agreed, that we don’t…this is not a good name for a company, because I don’t want people thinking they’re working for me. I [want] them to think they’re working for their own company. So we changed the name to Pegasus Technologies.

[…] At a Clinical Chemistry meeting, in Philadelphia I think it was, in 1991, ‘92, I walked into the exhibit hall, and there on a huge banner on the wall, “Pegasus: Automation in Immunoassay.” So we figured we’d had to change the name of the company, and this was after Page 81 we had several employees. So I got all the employees together, and I solicited names for the new company from all the employees. We had seventy or so submissions. We all sat down at the conference room table, which was a four-by-eight sheet of plywood, in the schoolhouse. We went through this list and IMMULITE was one of the suggestions. But we decided, “Oh, no, that’s…we’ll save that name for the…

CARUSO: The product.

BABSON: …the product.” Sirius, the star, the main star in, I think it’s Orion, was suggested. “Yeah.” We kind of liked that, but then somebody said, “Well, how about Cirrus?” “Yeah.” We liked that even better. So we changed the name to Cirrus Diagnostics. I cleared it through my lawyer to make sure that there wasn’t any other…

CARUSO: No other company with…

BABSON: …companies named that, at least in this industry.

CARUSO: So I’ll probably to refer to things as Cirrus…

BABSON: Yes.

CARUSO: …acknowledging that there were some name changes over time. What was the relationship between Babson Laboratories and Cirrus? Or is it that Babson Labs shut down?

BABSON: None.

CARUSO: None.

BABSON: None. Well, Babson [Research Labs] survived for the first couple of years after [Pegasus], but eventually…

CARUSO: Just shut it down.

Page 82 BABSON: Just shut it down. Yeah.

CARUSO: And during the time when both existed, were you…was Babson Labs still you in your home lab? Or…>

BABSON: Yeah.

CARUSO: Okay. Then you would go offsite when you working at Cirrus?

BABSON: Well, when we first rented a room in the schoolhouse, we rented one room in the second floor. It was the chemistry lab, I think, [because it was the only room with a sink].

CARUSO: At this point, who is the “we”? Is it just John, and…?

BABSON: No. Well, the board of directors of Pegasus, then Cirrus, was John Underwood, Art Kydd, and myself. I was the President, CEO, Treasurer…

CARUSO: Chief Technical Officer.

BABSON: Chief bottle washer. And we didn’t have any other employees for a long time. I mean this…we incorporated in [March 1987…]. We didn’t have any employees except me. I decided that my first employee should be a mechanical engineer.

CARUSO: Why is that? Because you had to build a device?

BABSON: We had…I had the idea, and the concept, but we didn’t have any mechanical design except for my wooden model, which obviously wasn’t adequate.

CARUSO: Was this your first foray into actually building devices? So previously, when you were at Warner, it was coming up with tests, not necessarily devices.

BABSON: Yeah [except for Simplate, General Diagnostics’s bleeding time device]. Page 83 The Old Schoolhouse, Chester, New Jersey Page 84 The Original Office, including Chemistry, Drafting, Engineering, Management

The Original Chemistry Lab

Page 85 CARUSO: All right, so this is your first device.

BABSON: This is my first actual instrument, you might say.

CARUSO: Instrument. Okay.

BABSON: Yeah. So I had a hard time convincing…I had one room in the schoolhouse. I bought two secondhand desks. I had built a drafting table. And that was essentially 02:42:37 the company. So how would I convince a mechanical engineer, who were a pretty conservative bunch anyhow, to come to work for a fly-by-night diagnostics? It took me a while. My first hire was Tom Palmieri, a mechanical engineer. He started on [March] 15th, 1988 […]

CARUSO: Okay.

BABSON: And…

CARUSO: So almost a year after the incorporation.

BABSON: Yeah, almost a year.

CARUSO: What were you doing in the time between incorporating and hiring Tom? Was it just searching for people? Were you…?

BABSON: No. I was actually sketching out concepts for…

CARUSO: For the design.

BABSON: …the mechanical design, so that when I eventually did get a designer, I’d have some direction for him to start in. But we…but after that, the company grew, in terms of people, by leaps and bounds. It’s that first threshold going from one employee to two…

CARUSO: To two…

Page 86 BABSON: …employees, convinced other people that it wasn’t a bad idea.

CARUSO: Did you necessarily know that you had a market for this device?

BABSON: Oh, yeah.

CARUSO: Had you been shopping the idea around to anyone at this point? Was it still…?

BABSON: I had…I don’t know if I had shopped it around. No. I don’t think I was shopping it around. I don’t remember shopping it around. Once John convinced me that I shouldn’t shop it around, that I should start a company, I didn’t.

CARUSO: Okay. So you have your first hire in [March of] ’88 […].

BABSON: Yeah.

CARUSO: So how did the company grow at that point?

BABSON: Well, I had a mechanical engineer. Then I needed an electrical engineer. I needed a biochemist to do the assay development. I hired Arthur Ross, who was an electrical engineer. He responded to an ad we ran in the New York Times.

CARUSO: Really.

BABSON: I got Doug Olson, who was…eventually turned out to be president of the company, when we were acquired by DPC [Diagnostic Products Corporation]. I got him through a series of contacts. […] Johnny Teipel, […] who I met at Ortho [Diagnostics] when I was consulting for them. He knew of somebody, of Doug, who was working with a startup at that time, which failed. He knew him through a third party. So nobody…it was a strange chain of events. I called Doug up, and he was interested. We had an immediate rapport.

I remember he was…I was interviewing him in my house in Mendham, because we just had the empty room at the schoolhouse. My wife, Susan, also participated in the conversation. Page 87 Then she excused herself, and went out of the room. The telephone rang. It was Susan. She said, “Hire him.” So she recognized his talent, too. And so I did.

CARUSO: Okay. So how long did it take you to effectively create your first instrument to go from these ideas, and these plans to making something…

BABSON: A working model?

CARUSO: A working model.

BABSON: Yeah. Well, it took about nine months.

CARUSO: Nine months. Okay 02:47:37.

BABSON: Yeah, because we had venture capitalists, also called vulture capitalists. They have…they’re very much concerned about targets, target dates. You have to…they say…well, they offered me a whole bunch of stock in the company, but only if I met these milestones. They had a milestone at the end of the year, that first year, to have…to demonstrate the feasibility. So we did. [On December 31, 1988 Doug Olson was able to produce an acceptable dose/response curve for digoxin].

I remember we were concerned about the label that we were going to use, whether or not it was going to be acridinium esters, which is a [chemiluminescent] label used by some of our colleagues here at Bayer [AG], or an enzyme label with a chemiluminescent substrate, which had just been announced in the literature. So we built our first [breadboard] models such that it could use either.

CARUSO: Oh, really.

BABSON: We evaluated both of them, actually, as labels. We decided that the enzyme label was much preferred.

CARUSO: Based on just general testing results?

BABSON: Yeah, based on actual results.

Page 88 CARUSO: Okay. Now, how did you go about manufacturing this first device? Was this like…?

BABSON: We built three units. The gentleman on Tuesday that hosted us for lunch [Gene Hochmuth], was one of the major builders. He was an electrical engineer, but he actually constructed the first units in the schoolhouse. We had…we made three units, we called the A units. Basically one of these we took to a Clinical Chemistry meeting in [1990]. We also then, by this time, we’d grown so much, we took over essentially the entire schoolhouse…

CARUSO: Oh, okay. Wow.

BABSON: …the schoolhouse building. We had the entire second floor, and most of the first floor, and part of the basement even. We built twelve instruments we called the B units. Those were actually…we sold one of those to our first customer, which was Morristown Memorial Hospital, in Morristown, New Jersey. Then we contracted for the C units, which were twenty- five, which we […] paid a million dollars for, forty thousand apiece, to a company in Mountain Lakes, New Jersey [called Lydo]. Then we moved out of the schoolhouse into our own facilities in Randolph, New Jersey, where we set up the manufacturing area ourselves.

CARUSO: So I mean was it…in terms of actually manufacturing the device, did the school have a machine shop that you were…

BABSON: No.

CARUSO: …making all…?

BABSON: No, we worked outside, with outside machine [shops]…we essentially did the final assembly. We weren’t doing any machining at all.

CARUSO: Okay. No in-house machining…

BABSON: No. Page 89 Cirrus Diagnostics employees at the old Chester schoolhouse—March, 1989.

BACK ROW: Jack Amato, Ray Hicks, Doug Olson, Greg Giter, Tom Palmieri,

George Feldstein, Pradip Dutta; front row: Art Babson, Arthur Ross, John

UNDERWOOD. MISSING: Earl Nause. Page 90 First IMMULITE Breadboard completed in 1989

Second IMMULITE Breadboards completed in 1990 for display at AACC Page 91 First American Association for Clinical Chemistry display San Francisco, California, 1990. Left to right: Arthur Babson, Arthur Ross,

Robert Fennell, Pam Eden, and Douglas Olson.

Page 92 CARUSO: So you were getting the parts made for you, and reassembling them onsite.

BABSON: Yes.

CARUSO: Okay. Now for someone who liked to work on his own, rose through the ranks and had to do a lot of managing without being hands-on anymore, leaving that position, so that way he could work hands-on with things again, to then have another company or have a company that you were building and was growing and expanding, how did you respond to those changes? I mean, you said that Underwood convinced you that you needed a company. You have a company, and now you have tons of people that you’re responsible for again. Was this in some ways different from what you were experiencing at Warner? Or…?

BABSON: Much different.

CARUSO: How so?

BABSON: Much different, because 02:52:37 Cirrus Diagnostics was a tightly knit organization. It wasn’t…and there was no politics involved. It wasn’t part of a huge corporation, like Warner-Lambert, a division, small division of a huge corporation. So it was…and it was our baby, you know.

CARUSO: So there was a different, complete culture there.

BABSON: Yeah, totally different culture.

CARUSO: Okay. Was there any formalized structure to Cirrus at that time? I know that you obviously were in charge, but did you start creating a hierarchical structure in any way?

BABSON: No.

CARUSO: Or is it…it was very, just like…

BABSON: It was…

Page 93 CARUSO: …like people coming up with a name for the company. You were sitting around a table.

BABSON: Yeah, right. .

CARUSO: And just…

BABSON: Well, there were different functions, I mean like…

CARUSO: Right, right.

BABSON: Mechanical engineering, and electrical engineering, but it was a very collegiate group of so-called equals, and we all pitched in.

CARUSO: Okay. So you make your A units, your B units, your C units.

BABSON: Well, we contracted for the C units…

CARUSO: Contracted for the C units.

BABSON: Yeah.

CARUSO: But it was still something you were producing. That’s all I…

BABSON: Yeah.

CARUSO: …really meant. Did you see this as being the device that Cirrus was going to make? Or did you start thinking about what the next thing was going to be for Cirrus?

BABSON: Well, we started on the…actually, I had started on the next thing, before we completed the IMMULITE, which was what we called the CRP, or the Cardiac Risk Profiler.

Page 94 CARUSO: Right. That was the automated lipid…

BABSON: Yeah.

CARUSO: …profiling system.

BABSON: Yeah, because at that time, good cholesterol, bad cholesterol, and triglycerides were all the rage, you know, for screening for susceptibility for potential heart attacks. At that time, we had…. The venture capitalists…Art Kydd had limited resources. I thought that we could put something together pretty quickly—and we did—that would, based on the same principle of axial centrifugation—by moving fluids around—we could come up with a lipid profiler, which did these LDL [low-density lipid, (bad) cholesterol], HDL [high-density lipid, (good) cholesterol, total] cholesterol, and triglycerides […].

CARUSO: There’s nothing on the market for this at the time?

BABSON: There was a…. Yeah, there was one product, […Cholestech LDX]. I don’t think there was a dedicated analyzer for this, that just did these analytes. We came up with one, and we went to Becton Dickinson. They said, “Yeah. That’s great.” But…oh, we went to them initially with a [prototype that used] modified IMMULITE [assay tubes], which would do twenty serum samples in about thirty minutes, do a profile, complete lipid profile. We built this. We went to Becton Dickinson, demonstrated it. It worked very well, but they convinced us that, “No, we don’t really want an instrument that does twenty serum samples in thirty minutes. We want an instrument that does one blood sample, whole blood sample in twelve minutes,” because they wanted to market it to the physician’s office laboratory, and the physician wants to have the results while the patient is still there. The average patient visit was like twelve minutes, or something like that.

CARUSO: Twenty minutes, yeah.

BABSON: Yeah. So they said, “This is what we really need.” So we went back to work, and 02:57:37 then in several…in a few months, we came up with the thing, which is in my office. I don’t know if you remember… Page 95 Batch Analyzer

Cardiac Risk Profiler

Page 96 CARUSO: Yeah.

BABSON: …you saw it.

CARUSO: Yeah.

BABSON: We built three of those, or had them built for us, really (we didn’t build them). Went back to Becton Dickinson and they said, “Well, that’s pretty good. But how much?” We had an estimated manufacturing cost which was too high for their method of distribution, because they had several layers of distribution that they went through before they sold to the actual physician office laboratory. So it was too expensive for them.

CARUSO: Did you think of trying to market this directly yourself?

BABSON: No. No. The strategy was to work with a third party that would bring in some early cash flow into the company to make us less dependent on the venture capital. But we had no intention of manufacturing it or marketing it ourselves.

CARUSO: Okay.

BABSON: But…so when Becton Dickinson pulled out, we started scrounging around for other potential customers. [Unipath in Mountain View, California] was very interested. [The president of Unipath was Chris Monahan, an old colleague of mine from General Diagnostics. We made a presentation to Chris and ten of his top people in May 1990]. The lawyers were actually putting the final papers together, when the FDA released the proposed CLIA, Clinical Laboratory Improvement Act, regulations. So this Act was in 1988, CLIA 88 it was called.8 But they didn’t release them until [1990], and these proposed regulations would essentially put the physician’s office market out of business, because they didn’t differentiate between different size laboratories. Every laboratory had to have a clinical chemist or…

Page 97 CARUSO: Oh, so they were instituting specific standards that would have made it too expensive for a physician to have…

BABSON: Yes.

CARUSO: …a laboratory in his or her office…

BABSON: Well, of course, these were the proposed regulations, but by the time they got adopted, they were much less onerous. But so Chris Monahan […] did an about face and said, “No thanks.”

CARUSO: No thanks.

BABSON: So we never were able to find another customer.

CARUSO: What about for the original idea that you had for getting twenty samples done in thirty minutes? Was there any way to revert back to that? Because now it sounds like that would be much more useful…

BABSON: Well…

CARUSO: …in terms of a…

BABSON: It had limited use in the clinical lab, I think. But, no, we never explored that again.

CARUSO: Okay. So after the Cardiac Risk Profiler, what is it that you wanted to do with Cirrus? What was the next idea?

BABSON: Well, the main idea was the IMMULITE, the immunoassay analyzer. Yeah.

CARUSO: Okay. So you decided just to continue with that.

Page 98 BABSON: Yeah, right. We just continued with that.

CARUSO: Okay. So how did that change and grow over time? I mean, you know, clearly you had your original device. But it’s…

BABSON: Well, we had…at the time we had one customer, Morristown Memorial Hospital. At that time, we were looking for an acquirer, because the venture capitalists, they didn’t want to start a standalone company. They wanted to get in and get out.

CARUSO: Right. They wanted someone to buy you up.

BABSON: Yeah, right. Yeah.

CARUSO: Make profits off of it. Right.

BABSON: Yeah. So we…now how did we get…I’m trying to think how we made contact with Diagnostic Products Corporation initially, and I don’t recall to tell you the truth 03:02:37. But they were…oh, yeah. I had written Sigi Ziering, who was the President of Diagnostic Products Corporation, and asked him if he was interested in marketing or making reagents for the instrument. I think maybe we were considering going it on our own. He said, “No.” He had their own division, had their own things they were working on. Well, it’s a joke, the instrument they were working on. But…

CARUSO: In what sense? It just was not a good instrument.

BABSON: No. It was terrible, terrible idea. So I wrote to him again, and he came out and visited. He got…he had a spark of interest. He…so we were visited by three people from DPC, one of which was a woman that brought a whole bunch of samples. There were like two hundred samples with her, which [had been assayed at DPC]. She ran them on the IMMULITE in the schoolhouse. She was…the results were beautiful.

At that time, we had a little offsite manufacturing operation for the reagents. We had developed seven. We had approval, government approval, FDA approval, for seven different analytes at the time—TSH [thyroid-stimulating hormone], LH [luteinizing hormone], FSH [follicle-stimulating hormone], HCG [human chorionic gonadotropin], digoxin, T4 [thyroxine] and T-uptake]. We were going to go it alone. But then, Sigi came in and he got…basically, we Page 99 had a visit from several of his international distributors. They were…they convinced him that, “Hey, this is a good thing.” So he made us an offer, and which we took.

CARUSO: You couldn’t refuse.

BABSON: Well, no, we wanted…actually, he offered us twenty-eight million dollars for the company, and we thought it was worth more. We had one of our venture capitalists negotiating with him, but he wouldn’t budge. We tried to get him up to at least thirty. But…so he acquired us in 19…

CARUSO: Ninety-two.

BABSON: Ninety-two, yeah.

CARUSO: Okay. So…

BABSON: Ninety-two or ‘93?

CARUSO: I had 1992 listed, but again, I can always be off by a little bit. What did the acquisition mean for your operations? I guess one question is, when did you move out of the schoolhouse?

BABSON: Shortly thereafter. Shortly…

CARUSO: Shortly after the acquisition.

BABSON: Yeah.

CARUSO: Okay. So the…was that because DPC wasn’t really happy with having their…having you work out of a schoolhouse?

BABSON: Yeah.

Page 100 CARUSO: Or was it just that the company needed a change?

BABSON: No. Well, we needed…once were acquired, we obviously weren’t working with third parties to manufacture anything. We wanted to manufacture it ourselves, and there was no way we were going to manufacture [in the schoolhouse]. Even though we built twelve units there, […] the B units, one of which is down in the lobby, B-1. I don’t know if you…

CARUSO: Is that one of the ones that…right in the entryway?

BABSON: Yeah.

CARUSO: Okay.

BABSON: Right next to…on the same side as the receptionist, that’s the first IMMULITE that we sold to Morristown Memorial, which was the first one that was built in the schoolhouse.

CARUSO: Oh, wow.

BABSON: That was built in the schoolhouse. So we had to set up…find a manufacturing facility. And that’s why…

CARUSO: So why…

BABSON: …we moved to a rental unit 03:07:37 in Randolph, New Jersey.

CARUSO: Okay. So why is it that you wanted to do the manufacturing in-house? Did you just find that better quality control? Or…?

BABSON: Better control, yeah, all the way around. Sure.

CARUSO: Okay. What was your role in the company, then, after the acquisition? Did it change in any effects? I guess what I’m curious about is, since I don’t know…I mean with Page 101 acquisitions you could have a situation where everything is taken, you’re really incorporated into this new company, and what you had previously stops existing. But there is also the chance that you’re bought by a new company, and they see that you work well as is, and they kind of leave you alone, as long as you…

BABSON: Yeah. They pretty much did leave us alone. Although, the President of DPC, [Sid Aroesty, also] became President of Cirrus [Diagnostics, which became DPC Cirrus…].

CARUSO: So there was the name change…

BABSON: So he divided his time between the…

CARUSO: The two.

BABSON: Between the East Coast and the West Coast.

CARUSO: Okay. So nothing else changed with how…

BABSON: No, pretty much…

CARUSO: …it functioned.

BABSON: Well, we…

CARUSO: You moved.

BABSON: Obviously, we moved, and we added a whole lot of people, mostly in manufacturing.

CARUSO: Did you have specific factors that went into your choice of the new site in Randolph? Is there anything…?

Page 102 BABSON: Yeah.

CARUSO: What was…what were those?

BABSON: Well, it had to close by, because we didn’t want the existing employees, which we were about thirty by then, in the schoolhouse, didn’t want [them] to have to commute long distances. So it was close by. It […] was a nice facility. We could essentially fit it out—what do you call it?—fit it out to our own…

CARUSO: Specifications, needs.

BABSON: Specifications. So it was essentially empty space, and that was desirable. So we essentially designed the space. […] The front part was administration or research labs and what not; and the back was manufacturing.

CARUSO: Were you still…okay. Were you still working nonstop as you had been?

BABSON: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I didn’t slow down at all.

CARUSO: You didn’t slow down, you didn’t take a break or anything like that?

BABSON: No.

CARUSO: No. Okay. Were you still at the bench doing work? Or were you away from the bench more?

BABSON: I was pretty much away from the bench…

CARUSO: Away from…

BABSON: …at this time.

Page 103 CARUSO: …the bench. Okay.

BABSON: Yeah.

CARUSO: So you were back…

BABSON: Very heavily involved, though, in all of the plans.

CARUSO: Okay. Were you handling a lot of the research aspects of things…

BABSON: Yeah.

CARUSO: …or the administrative?

BABSON: No, a lot of the research, too.

CARUSO: Okay. And after the acquisition, after you moved to the new location, what were your responsibilities to your parent company? Is it that you had to manufacture a…did you have to drum up your own business? Did you…?

BABSON: No. Did we have to drum up our own business? Well, we weren’t…DPC had…they had a very strong marketing group, including in there a number of international divisions. So they had marketing. They did the marketing for us, essentially.

CARUSO: So you just had to build the devices and refine their operation?

BABSON: And they also—DPC—had reagent manufacturing. As a matter of fact, they initially made a decision that they didn’t…and we had a reagent group here in New Jersey, too. And 03:12:37 they said, “Well, we don’t need these people anymore.” So they let them go and shortly thereafter they had to hire them back, because they realized, “Hey this was a dumb idea. All of the expertise was resident in these reagent manufacturing people.” Page 104 IMMULITE

IMMULITE 1000 Page 105 IMMULITE 2000

IMMULITE 2000 SMS Page 106 So they shut down the…we had a small reagent manufacturing facility, where we coated beads and packaged them, and whatnot. But we had…the expertise was resident in the people. So they had to hire them back.

CARUSO: So what did you see DPC Cirrus doing? Or I guess the way to phrase this is, what did you want to change about your product?

BABSON: Well, we had the IMMULITE, which we’re not manufacturing anymore. We’re manufacturing a second generation, IMMULITE 1000 we call it. But I realized we needed…this was a relatively small analyzer that required a lot of operator interface, had to load the different tests on, that it didn’t have, essentially, a reagent carousel, because reagents were essentially loaded on manually. So I thought we needed a higher-throughput, second generation instrument, which turned out to be the IMMULITE 2000. So we were already starting to work on that.

CARUSO: Okay. So was it…so it sounds like you wanted to automate things.

BABSON: Yeah, totally automate it.

CARUSO: So was there a reason for automating it? Did you…

BABSON: Sure.

CARUSO: …have feedback from people saying that, “We’re making mistakes when we’re loading these things into the machine,” or…?

BABSON: Not particularly, but the laboratories were, at that time, getting…well, right now, they’re totally automated. You walk into a laboratory, you don’t see anybody working at the bench.

CARUSO: Right.

BABSON: They’re just…

Page 107 CARUSO: Machines in the background making noise. Yeah.

BABSON: Yeah. They’re just loading samples on the machines. So we could see that was coming. Yeah.

CARUSO: Okay. So you were getting on the automation track because it was happening more…

BABSON: Yeah.

CARUSO: …generally in the medical field. So what aspects did you want to, of this device, did you want to automate? You mentioned one thing, the loading. Were there other parts that you wanted to automate more, or change in some respect?

BABSON: No, not really. We increased the throughput. […] We totally automated the sampling and whatnot.

CARUSO: Okay. Now, the device is…the models on the wall here…9

BABSON: Yes.

CARUSO: …are those the devices from this period of time, or did we pass by the devices that we were talking about earlier?

BABSON: Kind of concurrent. Yeah.

CARUSO: Concurrent. So could we spend a couple of minutes just talking about these various…

BABSON: Sure.

Page 108 CARUSO: …wooden designs, because, as I mentioned, I find them quite interesting. I guess part of what I’m curious about is how you were using these models? Were they simply just a way to convey your ideas to other people? Were you just comfortable…did you like building models, and so…?

BABSON: Well, it was a lot cheaper to build it out of wood, than to build it in a machine shop out of metal.

CARUSO: So this was sort of a proof of concept device.

BABSON: Proof of concept, essentially. Yeah. These were all proof of concept devices.

CARUSO: Okay. So could we talk about 03:17:37 them, possibly in sequence, like we did earlier?

BABSON: Okay.

CARUSO: You can sit down, or we could stand up, whatever you prefer.

BABSON: We don’t need to stand up. [These models are all] for the IMMULITE 2000 […]. The IMMULITE Test Unit has the bead packaged in it. The IMMULITE 2000 used bulk beads and bulk reagents on the carousel, and bulk assay tubes. These are the assay tubes for the IMMULITE 2000.

CARUSO: Okay.

BABSON: We needed a way to orient the tubes [so they can be transferred to] the incubation carousel. This was a concept using essentially a rotating hook-hopper feeder they call [it], to see whether or not this was a feasible approach to doing that, taking bulk-loaded tubes and orienting them into a queue and then individually…

CARUSO: So looking at the design here, what I get is that, you don’t drop a whole bunch of tubes into a large… Page 109 Rotating Hook Hopper-Feeder

BABSON: Hopper.

CARUSO: …hopper. Is it just purely random that the tube will get picked up?

BABSON: Yes.

CARUSO: Is that what you’re betting on?

BABSON: Totally random.

CARUSO: And so as things turn around, as thing move, it’s churning this bulk…

BABSON: Right, yes.

Page 110 CARUSO: …number. So, eventually, some…one will be oriented correctly in order to be picked up.

BABSON: Right. That’s exactly right.

CARUSO: Okay. So the mechanism constantly rotates. It’s constantly churning things around to pick something up, and then drops it down into a little chute, where it’s perfectly oriented.

BABSON: Yeah.

CARUSO: And then it makes its way into the analyzer.

BABSON: Right.

CARUSO: Okay. So you mostly built that…you built it out of wood because it was cheaper. Actually, I think it’s wood…

BABSON: Well, it’s cardboard [and wood].

CARUSO: …cardboard and some tape. A lot of tape, I noticed to keep things in place. So was this…did this start as an idea that you had in your mind?

BABSON: Yes.

CARUSO: And then it came through, so then you built it. So it wasn’t like you were sitting there playing with things, and you…?

BABSON: No. No. I knew what I wanted to build before I started.

CARUSO: Okay. What about this next device?

Page 111 BABSON: That next device was…we needed to…after we incubated the bead with the sample and the reagent, and so forth, we needed to separate the bead, the liquid from the bead. Then we had to wash the bead. We were washing it with an injector pump, which would dribble, which was bad. So this device was to come up with an injector pump which would incorporate what we called suck-back: after the volume of fluid, the fixed volume of fluid, was delivered, in this case water, it would suck back a little bit.

Injector Pump with Suck-Back

CARUSO: Right. So that way you wouldn’t get the dribble.

BABSON: Well, you wouldn’t…yes, an anti-dribble injector pump.

CARUSO: Okay. This was just, again, to test an idea.

BABSON: Yeah.

Page 112 CARUSO: Okay. What about the next one?

BABSON: Well, that was when this guy bit the dust—[Babson indicating a bead pack with a spiral groove to keep the beads in a line]. That bead pack, which was designed for us by an outside firm, [often didn’t work. Static electricity would build up and prevent the beads from rolling down the spiral groove]. We needed an alternative. So this was a concept that would see whether or not we could bulk load the beads and singlicate them, and deliver them one at a time to the […] incubation ring. That worked very nicely.

Bead Loader with Singlication

CARUSO: So this uses a solenoid essentially to move a lever which opens a hole, which would allow one…

BABSON: Right.

CARUSO: …[bead] to come through.

Page 113 BABSON: One bead. It also…there’s what we called a “disturber” in there 03:22:37, which would reshuffle the beads [and keep them from bridging over the exit hole].

CARUSO: Right. So nothing would get stuck.

BABSON: So that some…the beads are kind of rough, and they would bridge. So you have to keep mixing them up. That’s the same with that loader, re-loader.

CARUSO: Okay. So the last device, if you want to explain…which is using string, and rubber bands as well…

BABSON: Yes. That…

CARUSO: This is an agitator.

BABSON: That’s to [mix] the solid phase, which is on the bead, and the reactants, which is the sample and the reagent, which are in solution. If you didn’t mix the contents, the reaction rate would be dependent upon the diffusion from the liquid phase into the solid bead surface, and that’s very slow. So to speed up the kinetics of the reaction, you need to mix the bead, keep the bead moving and within the assay tube. This device would, basically, knock—bump—the bottom of the tube periodically back and forth. That was incorporated in the IMMULITE pretty much.

CARUSO: So were they…I’m wondering if these models sort of stayed as is once they were incorporated. Like if we looked at the device, would we just see metallic versions of these things, or were they modified, then, somewhat from their original design to complement the machines?

BABSON: Oh, yeah, very much so.

CARUSO: Okay.

BABSON: Yeah.

Page 114 CARUSO: So it’s mainly to capture specific…

BABSON: It’s just…it’s just to demonstrate a concept.

CARUSO: Okay.

HUNTER-LASCOSKIE: So would you be bringing these into the conference room, and demonstrating them for a group? Or…?

BABSON: Sometimes, yes. Yeah.

HUNTER-LASCOSKIE: So I’m guessing they sparked some…

BABSON: When they…

HUNTER-LASCOSKIE: …good discussion, or…?

BABSON: I had a time convincing people that this pump with suck back, for example, would be precise enough. So I collected a lot of data, and it turns out it was more precise than the […] the pump we were using.

HUNTER-LASCOSKIE: Oh, so you’d basically be giving a presentation…

BABSON: Yeah.

HUNTER-LASCOSKIE: …backing these…

BABSON: Right.

HUNTER-LASCOSKIE: …up.

Page 115 BABSON: Yes.

CARUSO: Did you have a wood shop here? Wood shop in the…

BABSON: I had my wood shop at home. Yes.

CARUSO: At home, so this is something you would do at night, after…

BABSON: Yes, right, absolutely.

CARUSO: Okay. Were you using that wood shop for anything else at the time? Or was it just your own personal…?

BABSON: Own personal wood shop.

CARUSO: Okay.

BABSON: Yeah.

CARUSO: Were there other aspects, other models that you developed to come up with new concepts for the…?

BABSON: I…sure there were. Yeah. There’s one in the picture there—[Babson pointing to a framed picture on the wall surrounded by his wooden models]—that, I think, I have it in my bookcase […] in my office.

CARUSO: Okay.

BABSON: But they only…these were the ones that would fit on the wall, comfortably.

Page 116 CARUSO: Okay. So now, this automation, this is happening in the early ‘90s.

BABSON: Yeah.

CARUSO: Was that when it was taking place? Are there other changes going on inside DPC Cirrus at the time? Were you still continuing to expand…?

BABSON: Well, we were growing, sure.

CARUSO: And what was the market like for your device? Was that growing as well? Was it a steady market?

BABSON: Yes. Yes.

CARUSO: And were you…?

BABSON: And there were a number of competitors at the time, too.

CARUSO: Okay, like what other companies?

BABSON: [Dade (Baxter Healthcare) had the STRATUS, PB Diagnostics had the OPUS, Syva had the SR1, Technicon (Miles) had the ImmunoOne, Amersham had the AMERLITE, Pharmacia had the DELFIA, Becton Dickinson had the AFFINITY, Toso Medics had the AIA 1200, Boehringer-Mannheim had the ES 300, Abbott had the IMX, and Ciba Corning had the ACS 180. Of all these products only IMMULITE is still being sold].

CARUSO: Were their devices—I know this is going to be somewhat biased—but were their devices on par with what you were creating? Were there things about those other devices that you…earlier you had mentioned that, I think it was DPC…DPC was…had their own…

BABSON: Well, DPC was working on a 03:27:37 system which…

CARUSO: Had some problems.

Page 117 BABSON: Had a lot of problems. Yes. Yes.

CARUSO: So were your competitors creating devices that had similar characteristics, in terms of the data that it could generate, to yours?

BABSON: Our device was unique in that we used the actual centrifugation to do separations, and washings, and which turns out to be very efficient. Other devices would use magnetic particles, let’s say as a solid phase, and then squirt in water, suck it out again, squirt it in, suck it out, and it didn’t work very well. Not as efficient.

CARUSO: So is it roughly around 1996, the mid to…I’d say the mid ‘90s that your more automated immunoassay analyzer? I’m just looking at when your patents were. There’s a group of them. The two washing systems, the sample dilution system, and dilution well insert, the automated immunoassay analyzer, those seem to be…those patents are being issued somewhere in the mid ‘90s. So I’m wondering if that’s roughly when the more automated version of the IMMULITE system was coming out?

BABSON: Oh, when did we market the IMMULITE 2000? […I believe it was in 1997].

CARUSO: Sure. I was wondering if it was around that general period of time. So it seems like you’ve…so somewhere in the mid 90s, you’ve developed a lot of automated techniques for this system. I know in 1997 you received the New Jersey Inventors Hall of Fame Award.

BABSON: Yeah, Inventor of the Year Award from the New Jersey Inventors Hall of Fame.

CARUSO: Right. Can you tell me a little bit about that award, how it came about? How…?

BABSON: I believe John Underwood nominated me for the award. They had…New Jersey Inventors Hall of Fame had a committee that evaluated these nominations, and they made the selection. We had a ceremony down in Newark, [New Jersey]. I had to wear my monkey suit. It was…they had a number of different awards that they had, annual awards. I was only one of several recipients.

CARUSO: Was it acknowledging your entire career? I mean you’ve done everything, pretty Page 118 much, in New Jersey.

Arthur L. Babson receiving the New Jersey Inventor of the Year Award.

BABSON: Yeah, pretty much. But it was mainly for the IMMULITE system. Yeah. I’m pretty sure.

CARUSO: Okay. So after you came up with the IMMULITE 2000, did…what was the next step for this system? Did you see…were you looking to tweak this system more, or were you trying to think of new ideas to pursue? Were you receiving anything or any sort of guidance from your parent company, DPC at the time, about directions to go?

BABSON: No. DPC—hi, Carroll [Carroll Scribner entered the room]—DPC was totally dependent on us for the direction.

Page 119 CARUSO: Okay.

BABSON: Except for marketing, of course. They were in charge of marketing.

CARUSO: Right.

BABSON: But in terms of the technical aspects of the new systems, they didn’t have any contribution to that at all.

CARUSO: Okay. So what is it that you wanted with these systems? Where did you see them going?

BABSON: The newer systems, the IMMULITE 2000?

CARUSO: The IMMULITE 2000, or what would come after that?

BABSON: Well, what has come after that is 03:32:37 the IMMULITE 2000 XPi, which was just introduced…what a year or two ago? Two years ago, yeah.

CARUSO: So what is it that you saw, or what is it that you wanted to accomplish with the IMMULITE system after you came out with the IMMULITE 2000? What is it that you were trying to address that you needed a new model for? Was it just incorporating outside technologies? Or the general change in technological development that you needed to incorporate into the device?

BABSON: Well, we needed…currently on the IMMULITE 2000, to change samples you’d have to put the instrument into pause. Then it would take a while to re-crank it up again. We wanted that totally automated, so that’s where the XPi came in, where we had total automation of the sample loading.

CARUSO: So it’s now a continuous flow instead of like a batch system.

BABSON: Yes, more or less. Yeah. That’s a good way to put it.

Page 120 CARUSO: Okay. What else, if anything, is going on in terms of modifying these systems? I’m just wondering if…

BABSON: Well, we were working on new systems like the…what we called the…what is now called the VersaCell, which was then called the […] SMS, Sample Management System, which would basically totally automate the sample handling. The operator just loaded, bulk loaded, trays of samples, and the robot would then pick up the sample, put it in the IMMULITE, where it would be pipetted. Then the robot would put it back into the sample tray. So this was a product […] which is essentially our next product.

CARUSO: Okay. Was this something that, again, you were coming up with these ideas about how to push diagnostic, clinical diagnostics, in new directions? I mean, talking…IMMULITE was, “I had an idea one day. I thought people might need this. So it just….” That’s what you worked on. I was wondering if you were having other ideas along those lines about devices that you might want to pursue or that you’re thinking of pursuing at some point?

BABSON: No. No. We were an immunoassay company. We were just trying to improve the quarter-inch bead technology.

CARUSO: Okay. So can you take me a little it through any other changes that were occurring within the company? I know that you…Siemens acquired you in 2006.

BABSON: Right.

CARUSO: So I’m wondering how that sort of came about, and also, if there were other changes going on within the company?

BABSON: You have to ask Siemens that.

CARUSO: Okay.

BABSON: But they decided to get into the in vitro diagnostics business. They weren’t in it at the time. So they just willy-nilly bought up three different companies and put them together.

Page 121 CARUSO: So did that affect you at all in terms of how this company was being run? Or is it just, it was an acquisition for them, and they were happy with what you were doing, and they were leaving you alone?

BABSON: No. They didn’t leave us alone. They threw their weight around, you might say. But it’s been good.

CARUSO: Okay. At what point did you wind up coming over to this facility here? I mean, I guess what time did you build this facility and come over here?

BABSON: Nineteen ninety-one, I think was…

SCRIBNER: No, 2001.

BABSON: Oh, 2001. Yeah, 2001…

SCRIBNER: December.

BABSON: Right.

SCRIBNER: Two-thousand one […].

BABSON: Ten years ago.

CARUSO: So what precipitated the building of this facility 03:37:37, and the move?

BABSON: Well, we ran out of space at the rental facilities in Randolph. We just needed more space. So we bought this property, designed the building to our specifications, and built it and moved in. Page 122 Groundbreaking ceremony for new building in Flanders, New Jersey—

27 September 2000.

CARUSO: And this was still the…

BABSON: We have twenty-eight acres here, so we have room for a lot more expansion.

CARUSO: Lots of expansion. You’re still manufacturing everything on site.

Page 123 BABSON: Everything on site. Yeah.

Flanders building dedication ceremony, 24 May 2002. Foreground (left to right):

Michael Ziering, President of DPC; James D. Watson, Board Member; and

Arthur L. Babson, Chief Scientist.

CARUSO: Okay. Did the character…or how would you describe the character of the company over time? Clearly, I mean, initially, if you were selling only a few devices here and there to a very local group of individuals, I would assume that managing…

BABSON: No. We had worldwide distribution right from the beginning.

CARUSO: Right from the beginning.

BABSON: Well, not right…after the DPC acquisition.

Page 124 CARUSO: Right. I’m talking about thinking back to before the DPC acquisition, when it was just Cirrus.

BABSON: Yeah.

CARUSO: Clearly as you build these devices, you also, in many respects, take responsibility for those devices, right. So out in the field, if something goes wrong, I assume that you have to go…not necessary you specifically, but someone from the company has to go and work with people, maybe you bring people in to understand how to use the device. How did those aspects of the company develop and change over time?

BABSON: Well, they grew by leaps and bounds, you might say, because we had, at the time, at maximum…we had how many people in field service?

SCRIBNER: At maximum?

BABSON: Yeah.

SCRIBNER: Probably fifty or sixty right before we…

BABSON: So we would…and we had customer training here. Of course, this wasn’t at the time of the DPC acquisition. We had Gene Hochmuth, the gentleman that took us to lunch. He was field service. He started it and he built up the group, essentially. But and we did customer training here. We started off small, and built a group. Now we have a lot of people.

CARUSO: Are things still operated roughly the same way now that they were when you were coming up with the name Cirrus? Is it still just people sitting around a desk coming up with ideas? I’m just trying to understand whether the structure of the organization, the way…

BABSON: The structure of the organization since Siemens acquisition has changed dramatically, because we’re totally integrated in several locations.

CARUSO: Right. I’m just wondering if the culture of the ideas, how things are thought up and implemented…in the schoolhouse you worked closely with a lot of individuals. It seems like Page 125 people working together to come up with devices, instrumentation, how to build it, and things like that, does that aspect of things still exist now? Or has that changed?

BABSON: Yeah, I would say it still exists now, except it’s distributed. Some of our new projects, for example, are distributed between Flanders, [New Jersey]; Glasgow, Delaware; [and] Tarrytown, New York.

CARUSO: And how is that sort of managed? Do people from this facility travel to other facilities? Is it just like a movement, a shuffling of people around on a regular basis for meetings, and things like that?

BABSON: Yeah.

CARUSO: Okay. So everyone’s kind of kept in the loop about everything…

BABSON: Right.

CARUSO: …that’s out there.

BABSON: Right.

CARUSO: Okay. All right. Now, some of the materials that you sent 03:42:37 us to prepare for this interview, they weren’t technical documents, right. They weren’t published papers in…published scientific papers. You sent one piece that talked about belief systems, the world being round, the world being flat…

BABSON: Oh, those are my personal essays.

CARUSO: Your personal essays.

BABSON: That’s got nothing to do with the company.

Page 126 CARUSO: I know that has nothing to do with the company. But I’m actually interested in hearing a little bit about what inspires you to write those personal essays, and for what sort of audience are you writing those personal essays?

BABSON: Well, the audience is mostly me.

CARUSO: Okay.

BABSON: I just…I get inspired by…for instance, the one that…”Guns for Everyone,” was inspired by an incident in the schoolhouse, where…not the schoolhouse, our schoolhouse, but where some kids were killing each other.

CARUSO: And you had the one about the litigious society. I’m just curious what motivates you to write those pieces. I actually haven’t met many people that sit and write personal essays that…

BABSON: Really?

CARUSO: …actually reflect on things beyond their career. So I’m curious why it is that you write those things.

BABSON: I don’t know to tell you the truth. I’ve got a whole book of essays, if you’d be interested.

HUNTER-LASCOSKIE: Is that something you’ve done throughout your career, just kind of when you have the time? Or is it only something that’s maybe more recent?

BABSON: Well, and by “more recent,” you mean last decade or so?

HUNTER-LASCOSKIE: Right.

BABSON: Yeah, probably.

Page 127 CARUSO: Okay. Are there any things that…I don’t actually have any more questions myself. What I usually like to do at the end of the interview is try to give the interviewee a chance to talk about something that’s either related to your work, to your research, or anything more broadly, that I haven’t asked about. Sometimes I throw this question out and people start talking to me about science education in the United States.

Sometimes I throw out this question and people get into the fact that, actually, for the past twenty years, they’ve devoted most of their free time to volunteering at the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. So I’m trying to capture as much as I can in this oral history, but there’s a lot of stuff I don’t know about. So I like to give you a chance to bring up some topics that you find interesting that we could possibly discuss. But if you have nothing…

BABSON: Well…

CARUSO: …that’s also fine, as well.

BABSON: One of the things we didn’t mention was that Susan and I—[I mention this] in the memoirs—Susan and I built our own house.

CARUSO: Okay. When was that?

BABSON: In 19…shortly after we were married. That was early 1980s. Took us three years.

CARUSO: Did you literally build it yourselves?

BABSON: Literally built it myself.

CARUSO: So…

HUNTER-LASCOSKIE: Wouldn’t that require some…

BABSON: Every board, and nail…

HUNTER-LASCOSKIE: Did that require a lot of learning on the job, or was that something that you and Susan had to figure out how to do it? Did you have some experience?

Page 128 BABSON: We…well, I’ve always been into building stuff, but—as demonstrated by the models on the wall here—but I always wanted to build a house. We were lying in the hammock one day, and I said, “I’d like to build my own house,” and she was very enthusiastic. She said, “Yeah. Let’s do it.”

CARUSO: So where were you going to…where did you wind up building?

BABSON: Well, right…actually, right next door to where we were living.

CARUSO: Oh, okay, so an easy commute.

BABSON: We bought the six-acre lot. Susan and her prior husband, David, had already bought it. When, after Susan got divorced, and I got divorced, and we got married, we bought it back from David. That’s where we’re living right now. So, we…it was very convenient, because we were living right next door 03:47:37 to where we were building the house.

CARUSO: So you’d go out at four in the morning…

BABSON: Yeah. We would go out about…well, not four in the morning. But every afternoon after work, go home, change our clothes, go over to the building site, and work until dark, and go back and have dinner, and go to bed.

CARUSO: Anything else while you were building, other than building that house?

BABSON: Anything else I was building…?

CARUSO: Anything else you were building, or were there other things you were doing while you were building the house? I’m assuming you still had some free time—just joking…

BABSON: Well, we got interested in Africa, and we spent a lot of time in Africa, mostly on safari, but also involved with the Cheetah Conservation Fund in Namibia. I was on the board of directors of the Cheetah Conservation Fund, an example. We spent a lot of time and resources supporting them.

Page 129 CARUSO: What was the pull for you? I mean what was the…

BABSON: I liked animals.

CARUSO: Liked animals.

BABSON: I love animals. Yeah. If you end up with…reading the…did you look at the pictures?

CARUSO: I was hoping…I was hoping that you would bring up the raccoons without me prompting.

BABSON: Well, I’ve always been interested in animals, always liked animals. We have three cats at home. But…and Susan feeds—I don’t know if you noticed that picture on my desk of the two bears and the cat in the sun room…

CARUSO: I haven’t. I’ll have to take a look. But…

BABSON: Yeah. Take a look at that. Susan feeds all the animals and we raised a couple of sets of raccoons. The first set was like…wandered in one day, and we opened the door, and they walked into the bedroom—our bedroom is on the ground floor. The second set fell out of the nesting tree. We had to nurse them with a bottle, bitch’s milk. But they were a lot of fun.

CARUSO: How much time did you spend in Africa doing…well, how much time did you spend there…

BABSON: Well, we made…I think we’ve probably been there at least a half dozen times, probably more.

CARUSO: What parts?

BABSON: Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, then Namibia.

Page 130 CARUSO: And how long would you…?

BABSON: We’d go for like a month. Yeah.

CARUSO: Okay. Is there a reason cheetahs specifically?

BABSON: Yeah. We always liked cheetahs. Susan got involved with Laurie [L.] Marker who is head of the Cheetah Conservation Fund in Namibia. We’ve been there a number of times.

CARUSO: I noticed, actually, I think it’s the December, maybe the November issue of National Geographic is all about big cats, and conservation.10 So it’s just interesting that…I mean, well, there was something I didn’t necessarily know about you.

BABSON: Yeah.

CARUSO: Are there any other things that you would want to discuss, any other topics that you’re interested in, or you would like to talk about?

BABSON: I don’t think so.

CARUSO: No. The remembrances that you provided, it’s dated December of 1995. So I’m not sure…

BABSON: Yeah. There’s an update in the end there. I don’t know if you’ve gotten to it yet. It’s…

CARUSO: Two-thousand seven addendum.

BABSON: Two-thousand seven, yeah. Page 131 Arthur L. Babson with Chewbaka in Namibia.

CARUSO: I mostly focused on the pictures and didn’t get past those. Okay, all right. The Van Slyke Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Science of Clinical Chemistry in 1998…

BABSON: Yeah.

CARUSO: Didn’t know about that one.

BABSON: Oh, you didn’t know about that one…

Page 132 CARUSO: No.

BABSON: On my wall in my office 03:52:37

CARUSO: But I didn’t see your office before conducting the interview. So what was the Van Slyke Award? Was it…was that the only other award that you received?

BABSON: That was the only other award that I got from the Clinical Chemistry Association.

CARUSO: And that must be your continued work in the…

BABSON: Right.

CARUSO: …field.

BABSON: Right.

CARUSO: Okay.

BABSON: Yeah.

CARUSO: Anything else, any other…?

BABSON: Other, there was the New Jersey Inventors Hall of Fame, Inventor of the Year Award, which is also up on the wall. The one that Carroll showed you, that was the Lifetime Achievement Award from Siemens, which I got just a year ago.

CARUSO: Right. Okay.

BABSON: In Germany. I think it’s the first and only Siemens Lifetime Achievement Award. Page 133 Arthur L. Babson receiving the Siemens Lifetime Achievement Award,

Munich, Germany, 19 January 2010.

CARUSO: Wow.

BABSON: So that was kind of nice.

CARUSO: Yeah. That sounds great. Is there anything else you want to talk about? No.

BABSON: Not really.

CARUSO: Okay. All right, well thank you very much. Page 134 [END OF AUDIO, FILE 2.1]

[END OF INTERVIEW]