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Interview with Samuel Epstein
Full text linkAn interview in three sessions, December 1985 and January 1986, with Samuel Epstein, William E. Leonhard Professor of Geochemistry in the Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences. Dr. Epstein received his BS (1941) and MS (1942) degrees from the University of Manitoba and his PhD (1944, with Carl Winkler) from McGill University. He became a research fellow at Caltech in 1952 and two years later joined the faculty as an associate professor. He received the Leonhard chair in 1984, retired in 1990, and died on September 17, 2001.
In this interview, he discusses growing up in Poland between the two World Wars and immigration to Winnipeg in 1927. Recalls his first interest in science and influence of Alan Newton Campbell at University of Manitoba; graduate work at McGill; meeting European scientists during war work on Canadian Atomic Energy Project. Moves to McMaster University to work with Henry G. Thode on isotopes, using mass spectrometry; thence to the University of Chicago, 1947, to work with Harold Urey on paleotemperatures and Heinz Lowenstam on marine shells.
He discusses the advent of geochemistry at Caltech in the early 1950s, with the hiring of Harrison Brown, Clair Patterson, Charles McKinney, Gerald Wasserburg, and himself from the University of Chicago. He describes his isotopic work and the evolution of the geology division, especially under Robert Sharp (1952-1968). Comments on Linus Pauling case and Pauling’s departure from Caltech. The interview concludes with comments on current state of Caltech and reminiscences of his career and colleagues
Interview with Jenijoy La Belle
Full text linkInterview in eight sessions, February 2008-April 2009, with Jenijoy La Belle, professor of English, Caltech.
La Belle talks about her childhood, education, and family influences growing up in Olympia, Washington, and her early love of literature and poetry. She recalls her undergraduate years at the University of Washington (B.A. 1965), including studying with poet Theodore Roethke, who became the subject of her doctoral thesis (Ph.D. 1968) at UC San Diego. She describes her early years (1969-1975) as Caltech's first female professor, her Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) colleagues, including division chair H. Smith and J. K. Clark, her friendship with physicist R. P. Feynman, her initial impressions of Caltech students, and her research on poet/artist William Blake. She discusses HSS's shift in emphasis toward the social sciences in the 1970s, the impact on the division, and the appointment of economic historian R. Huttenback as division chair in 1972.
In 1975, La Belle's landmark Caltech tenure case begins when Huttenback overrules the English department's recommendation that she be granted tenure. She relates chronology and conduct of the case, detailing the involvement of HSS and other faculty, Caltech provost R. Christy, trustee L. Wasserman, numerous campus committees, and outside referees. She describes events leading to her decision to file an official complaint with the EEOC, the agency's investigation and subsequent citing of Caltech for gender discrimination in faculty hiring, Caltech's reaction, and her satisfactory resolution of the case with Caltech in 1977. (Verbatim excerpts of relevant letters, articles, memos, and other documents are included in this section.) She outlines Huttenback's subsequent career as chancellor of UC Santa Barbara and his Santa Barbara trial and conviction for embezzling university funds in 1988, and reflects on its significance for her own case.
She discusses her literary research into Blake, 17th-century poetry, and Shakespeare's plays, and the importance of the Huntington Library (San Marino, California) humanities collections in her work. She comments on her involvement with Caltech faculty committees, and her role as chair of Caltech's convocations committee (1986-1989). Interview concludes with her perspectives on teaching Shakespeare to four decades of Caltech students, team-teaching/staging the Bard in tandem with Caltech theater arts director Shirley Marneus, and a brief assessment of Caltech's presidents
Interview with David Baltimore
Full text linkInterview in three sessions, October-November 2009, with David Baltimore, Robert Andrews Millikan Professor of Biology and president emeritus of Caltech (1997-2006).
He recalls his childhood and early education in Great Neck, NY, his aptitude for science, and a summer at the Jackson Laboratory in Maine (1955), which confirmed his vocation. He discusses interest in molecular biology at Swarthmore (B.A. 1960); 1959 summer at Cold Spring Harbor with G. Streisinger; meeting S. Luria and C. Levinthal; graduate work at MIT and Rockefeller (PhD 1964); 1961 summer at Albert Einstein College of Medicine; postdoc at MIT with J. Darnell and Einstein with J. Hurwitz. Recalls his discovery of polio polymerase and demonstration that RNA chains initiate with a triphosphate.
In 1965 he is invited to join Salk Institute by R. Dulbecco; returns to MIT as associate professor in 1968. Recalls his 1970 discovery of reverse transcriptase and copublication with H. Temin; 1975 Asilomar conference on recombinant DNA; 1975 Nobel Prize with Temin and Dulbecco; founding of Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research; National Academy of Sciences committee on national strategy for AIDS. Comments briefly on investigation of T. Imanishi-Kari for fraud and his return to MIT from Rockefeller University in 1994.
He discusses vetting process for Caltech presidency, his 1998 inauguration, and highlights of his presidency, including purchase of St. Luke's Medical Center, $1.4 billion capital campaign, and building Broad Center for the Biological Sciences. Comments on Caltech architecture, including Cahill Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics; receiving National Medal of Science in 2000; L. Van Parijs dismissal from MIT and prior work in Baltimore's lab; and the prospects for human enhancement and understanding of consciousness
Interview with Frank B. Estabrook
Full text linkAn interview on February 28, 2007, with Frank B. Estabrook, Distinguished Visiting Scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Dr. Estabrook received his MS (1947) and his PhD (1950) in spectroscopy at Caltech. He joined JPL in 1960, becoming senior resarch scientist there from 1979 to 2006 and Distinguished Visiting Scientist in 2006. In this interview, he discusses his youthful fascination with general relativity and his later research, with H. D. Wahlquist, J. W. Armstrong, and B. Bertotti, on the development of proposals to detect gravity waves by means of the Doppler tracking of spacecraft. He discusses the involvement of Caltech theoretical physics professor K. S. Thorne in these efforts, and the inclusion of gravity-wave experiments in the Galileo, Mars Observer, Ulysses, and Cassini missions
Interview with Carolyn Ash
Full text linkAn interview in two sessions, in November and December 2003, by Shirley K. Cohen with Carolyn Ash, Director, Student-Faculty Programs Office.
Born in Chicago and raised in Ohio, Carolyn Ash began working at Caltech in 1977 with Professor David Elliot, then secretary of the faculty, and other faculty officers. In this interview she recounts her early involvement beginning in 1979 in the new SURF [Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowships] Program and the evolution of that program over time; its origins in an idea of Professor Fred Shair (chemical engineering); participation of other faculty Hal Zirin (astronomy), William Schaeffer (chemistry), Bernard Minster (geology); initial financial support by trustee Lew Wasserman, eventual endowment by Caltech Associate Samuel Krown; NSF [National Science Foundation] contributes funding. Gradual administrative recognition and involvement; establishment of SURF board of directors and faculty administrative committee. Inclusion of women students and students outside Caltech, initially from JPL, 1985. Departure of Fred Shair 1989, and Ash appointed director by vice-provost David Goodstein.
Circumstances of first National Conference on Undergraduate Research [NCUR] (University of North Carolina, Asheville, 1987); conference hosted by Caltech in 1991; Southern California regional conferences follow. Establishment of weekly career counseling sessions: research seminars, round-table discussions. Statistics on Caltech undergraduate student participation: upwards of 50 percent involved. Continuing recognition of SURF under President Tom Everhart. Startup by Professor David Van Essen of MURF [Minority Undergraduate Research Fellowships] program, 1991, in biology and chemistry; TIDE begins mid-nineties [Teaching and Interdisciplinary Education] with support from Professor Nate Lewis and President David Baltimore. Renaming of office Student-Faculty Programs. Additional programs funded by Beckman Foundation and Rea and Lela Axline (Axline SURF Program); NASA-developed program USRP [Undergraduate Student Research Program] modeled on SURF. SURF as model for other institutions; SURF firmly embedded in Caltech culture
Interview with Michael Werner
Full text linkInterview on July 25, 2008, with infrared astronomer Michael Werner, project scientist for the Spitzer Space Telescope. Dr. Werner received his BS from Haverford in 1963 and his PhD from Cornell in 1969 under M. Harwit. As a postdoc with C. H. Townes at UC Berkeley 1969-1972, he performed early infrared studies of the cosmic microwave background with P. L. Richards and J. Mather. Taught physics at Caltech 1972-1979 and worked on the Kuiper Airborne Observatory. Began working on SIRTF [Shuttle Infrared Telescope Facility] in 1977, first at NASA's Ames Research Center and after 1990 at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Dr. Werner discusses the history of infrared astronomy and the evolution of SIRTF into the Spitzer Space Telescope. He remarks on its discoveries since its August 2003 launch, including the bar at the center of our galaxy, the characteristics of extrasolar planetary atmospheres, and the discovery of numerous large galaxies in the early universe. Recalls his appointment as George Darwin lecturer at the Royal Astronomical Society. Comments on upcoming observatory launches by NASA and the European Space Agency
Interview with Valentine L. Telegdi
Full text linkValentine Louis Telegdi was born in Budapest in 1922 and grew up in Bulgaria. He took his Master of Science degree in chemical engineering at Lausanne University in 1946 and received his PhD in 1950 from the ETH (Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule), the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. Victor Weisskopf and Gregor Wentzel were instrumental in his appointment as an instructor at the University of Chicago in 1951, where he worked with Murray Gell-Mann. In 1954, after Enrico Fermi's death, Telegdi became the head of Fermi's Nuclear Emulsion Group there. In 1956, he went to the Institute for Advanced Study for three months. Later that year, back in Chicago, he and Jerome I. Friedman found parity violation in muon decay, in parallel with the work of Chien-Shiung Wu at Columbia and her collaborators at the National Bureau of Standards, and that of Richard L. Garwin, Leon M. Lederman, and Marcel Weinrich at Columbia. In 1959-1960, on leave from Chicago, Telegdi worked with Garwin at CERN on the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon. In 1966, again on leave from Chicago, he had a visiting lectureship at Harvard. In 1968, Telegdi was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and in 1972 he became the Enrico Fermi Distinguished Service Professor of Physics at Chicago. He left the university four years later--discouraged at what he called the "decay" of the Enrico Fermi Institute since Fermi's death and the increasingly cumbersome grants process--and returned to Switzerland, where he headed a group at the ETH doing atomic physics; he also took up a joint appointment at CERN, heading a particle physics group. In 1981, he began coming regularly as a visiting professor to Caltech, where he worked with (among others) Gell-Mann, Richard Feynman, and Felix Boehm. In 1991 he was awarded (along with Maurice Goldhaber) the Wolf Prize for his work on the weak interactions and in 1995 the American Physics Society's Julius Lilienfeld Prize. In 2003, he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Society. He died in Pasadena, California, on April 8, 2006, at the age of eighty-four
Interview with Heinz E. Ellersieck
Full text linkA February 25, 2004, interview with Heinz E. Ellersieck, associate professor of history, emeritus, in the Division of Humanities and Social Sciences.
Dr. Ellersieck received his undergraduate and graduate education at UCLA (AB 1942, MA 1948, PhD 1955). His father was German violinmaker Hellmuth Ellersieck, who emigrated to Denmark before the outbreak of World War I, where he met and married Dr. Ellersieck's mother. In 1914, to avoid extradition to Germany to serve in the Kaiser's army, he and his wife moved to Norway, where their children were born. In 1926 the family emigrated to Los Angeles.
Dr. Ellersieck attended Alta Loma Elementary School and Los Angeles High School. After his graduation from UCLA in 1942, he joined the army, spending almost a year in the infantry in Fort Meade, Md., before joining the ASTP [Army Specialized Training Program] and studying Russian at Cornell. He attended intelligence school at Fort Meade and in 1945 was sent to England, to the air force intelligence branch. He was discharged in the summer of 1946 and returned to UCLA, where he studied Russian history with Waldemar Westergaard and Raymond H. Fisher.
After receiving his MA, Dr. Ellersieck spent fourteen months in European archives gathering material for his dissertation on the 17th century czars Alexei Mikhailovich and Feodor Alexeevich. In 1950, he was recruited as an instructor in Caltech's Humanities Division by Professor Rodman W. Paul and the division's new chairman, Hallett Smith, and he discusses their efforts to turn it from a teaching division into a division emphasizing research and scholarship, on a par with the institute's science divisions.
He also recalls joining, soon after his arrival, Caltech's Project Vista, which the air force had asked the institute to undertake in preparation for a possible Soviet invasion of Western Europe. (Ellersieck was recruited because of his military and intelligence experience and his knowledge of Russian history and language.) He comments on the report that resulted and the air force's unhappiness with its recommendations against the use of tactical atomic weapons. He comments on his further studies of the Soviet Union during the years of the cold war. His retirement in 1988 coincided with the end of that war.
He also discusses his continuing interest in Pasadena civic affairs, especially his involvement with Pasadena preservationists and with police community relations
Interview with Andrew P. Ingersoll
Full text linkInterview in two sessions conducted by Sara Lippincott in 2004 with Andrew P. Ingersoll, Earle C. Anthony Professor of Planetary Science at the California Institute of Technology. Discusses parents' social activism in the 1930s. His youth and education at Amherst College (B.A. physics, 1960) and Harvard University (M.A. physics, 1961; PhD 1966); his early interest in atmospheres, oceans and meteorology; working with A. Arons and H. Stommel at Woods Hole on ocean acoustics. Recruited to Caltech in 1966 in planetary science; early atmospheric studies of Venus, Jupiter (Great Red Spot) and Mars; collaborates with G. Munch and G. Neugebauer. Involvement with NASA's Pioneer 11 and Voyager imaging team at JPL; results of Voyager's "Grand Tour" of Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune; his theories on winds and turbulence in outer space. The Shoemaker-Levy comet, Hubble Space Telescope observations, and Jupiter's effect on protecting the Earth from comets. Works with the Soviet Venera space program on Venus' atmosphere; visit to the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Galileo and photographing Jupiter's atmosphere; Europa lander to study its subterranean ocean. Discusses recent evidence of water on Mars, terraforming Mars, and colonizing planets. Concludes with administrative work at Caltech: Executive officer for planetary sciences (1987-1994); G. Wasserburg as division head (1987-1988); Caltech committees; Caltech's core curriculum and the need for greater emphasis on research time. Teaching atmospheric dynamics; discussion of global warming; research in oceanography and the precession of the equinoxes
Interview with Hugh P. Taylor
Full text linkAn interview in eight sessions in the summer of 2002 with Hugh P. Taylor, Robert P. Sharp Professor of Geology, emeritus, in the Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences. In this wide-ranging interview, Dr. Taylor recalls his upbringing in Arizona and New Mexico, where his father was an agent for the Santa Fe Railroad; his move to Southern California; and his undergraduate education at Caltech. After receiving his BS at Caltech in geochemistry in 1954 (he was one of the first two geochemistry majors to graduate from the institute), and a master's degree at Harvard, he returned to Caltech for his PhD, working on oxygen-isotope ratios with geochemist Samuel Epstein. He recalls their refinement of the separation technique and his application of Oxygen-18/Oxygen-16 ratios to the study of magmatic intrusions, especially Iceland's Skaergaard intrusion--studies that led to a new understanding of hydrothermal convection and the effects of meteoric groundwater (essentially, rainwater) on basaltic intrusions.
He recalls Caltech's move into geochemistry in the early 1950s under the chairmanship of Robert P. Sharp, the advent of plate tectonics in the mid-1960s, the lunar program at Caltech, and his friendship with astronaut/geologist Harrison "Jack" Schmitt. Further recollections include the accomplishments of Gerald J. Wasserburg's laboratory in analyzing the lunar material; Wasserburg's feud with colleague Leon T. Silver; Silver's reluctance to publish; Taylor's collaboration with Silver on isotopic analysis of the Peninsula Ranges Batholith; Taylor's collecting trip to the Skaergaard intrusion; his work with Robert Coleman of the United States Geological Survey on the Red Sea Rift Zone; his work with Bruno Turi on igneous rocks in Italy; and the discoveries made by several of his outstanding graduate students and postdocs.
The latter part of the interview amounts to a history of Caltech geology, as he describes the evolution of the division from a classical, field-oriented geology department to a first-rank division incorporating geophysics, geochemistry, and planetary sciences. Along the way, Taylor gives his assessment of the various strengths and weaknesses of the division's chairmen: Robert P. Sharp, Clarence Allen, Eugene Shoemaker, Barclay Kamb, Peter Wyllie, Gerald Wasserburg, Peter M. Goldreich, David J. Stevenson, and Edward M. Stolper