Oral History Interview with Philip Westerman by Matthew Crawford

October 26, 2023
Location of Interview: Matthew Crawford’s Office at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio

Liquid Crystal Oral History Project
Department of History
Kent State University

Transcript produced by Sharp Copy Transcription

NOTE TO USERS: Sharp Copy Transcription, an independent transcription service, produced the original version of this transcript from the digital audio files of this oral history interview. In this case, the interviewee, upon review of the original transcript, revised and enhanced some of their responses to the interviewer's questions. 

DR. MATTHEW CRAWFORD: My name is Matthew Crawford. I'm a Historian of Science and Associate Professor in the Department of History at Kent State University. Today is Thursday, October 26th, 2023. I am interviewing Dr. Philip Westerman. We are conducting this interview in my office in the Department of History at Kent State. Dr. Westerman, thank you for agreeing to speak with me.

DR. PHILIP WESTERMAN: You're welcome.

CRAWFORD: Can you tell us your title and institutional affiliation, or last professional title and institutional affiliation?

WESTERMAN: Professor Emeritus of Biochemistry and Molecular Pathology at the Northeastern Ohio Medical University, which used to be called Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine.

CRAWFORD: Great. How do your identify yourself as a scientist? What field or discipline do you see yourself primarily affiliated with?

WESTERMAN: My primary scientific organization that I belong to is the Biophysical Society, and I would call myself a biophysical chemist.

CRAWFORD: What does that mean, to call yourself a biophysical chemist? How does that distinguish what you are doing from other types of chemistry?

WESTERMAN: Chemistry, for me, involves synthesis. I had that skill, so I was able to make lipid molecules, biological lipid molecules. Then I used a physical technique, nuclear magnetic resonance, to study the behavior of those molecules.

CRAWFORD: I see. The synthesis component [involves] making the lipids, and then this NMR[1] technique is thephysical technique, as you said.

WESTERMAN: Right, yes.

CRAWFORD: I’m sure we'll have an opportunity to talk more about those things, but before we get into that, I just wanted to get a little bit into your background. I was wondering if you could tell us what year you were born, where you grew up, and maybe a little bit about what your childhood was like.

WESTERMAN: I was born in Brisbane, Australia, in 1945, but grew up in the city of Sydney. I attended a selective high school in Sydney, and then I got a scholarship to the University of Sydney. I did a bachelor of science degree, graduating with first-class honors, in the field of chemistry, and then proceeded to the PhD degree at the University of Sydney. I received the PhD in 1970.

CRAWFORD: Growing up in Sydney and attending the selective high school, were you interested in science as a child? How did your interest in science develop?

WESTERMAN: I think my interest developed because of a chemistry teacher in high school. Even though I did three different foreign languages in high school and did well in English as well, the chemistry teacher was the one that really ignited my interest in science. So, when I went for my undergraduate degree at the University of Sydney, I almost did medicine, but in the end decided to do a science degree, a B.Sc. degree.

CRAWFORD: You mentioned studying three foreign languages and doing well in English. Is that to say you were maybe considering going into the humanities before you had this chemistry [teacher]?

WESTERMAN: Yeah, I liked the humanities as much as the sciences at that stage, but I would say it was the teacher that tipped the balance.

CRAWFORD: Really!

WESTERMAN: Yeah.

CRAWFORD: What was it about this teacher?

WESTERMAN: He was very enthusiastic. He had a lot of demonstrations—you know, passing samples round. In fact, his class, I think we had eight students, which was a record for the high school, who received first-class honors in the subject of chemistry. So he was an outstanding teacher as well.

CRAWFORD: Do you remember his name?

WESTERMAN: Andersson. But it was interesting—he was in amateur theatre, and very good at it! He knew how to make a presentation and do it enthusiastically.

CRAWFORD: I could see how a theatre background might play a role in that! [laughs] You mentioned that you attended a selective high school in Sydney. Was this something that you had to apply for?

WESTERMAN: No, it was a public school and I’d say academically one of the best high schools in the city, judged by results. We did what was called a leaving certificate, at the end of five years, and in a statewide exam, and you actually had your position in the state, and I was in the top 200 in the state, amongst, say, 30,000 who did the exam.

CRAWFORD: Wow. Was your family supportive of your interest in science?

WESTERMAN: No, they weren’t. My parents were very religious, and they were afraid that by going into the sciences, I would lose their faith, or my faith. Which I have done anyway! [laughs]

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

WESTERMAN: They wanted me to go to a technical school. Because you were divided—academically oriented, or technically oriented—in the system that existed then. It no longer exists, but we're talking, 60 years ago.

CRAWFORD: A technical school would have been to learn a trade or something like that?

WESTERMAN: Yeah. [High school] ended at three years, not five years, and typically people went into a trade after that.

CRAWFORD: I believe you said it was first-class honors that you received in chemistry as well as several other students?

WESTERMAN: [I received honors in] mathematics, as well.

CRAWFORD: That’s not something we have in the American education system. I wonder if you could say a little bit about what that signifies, or what it means?

WESTERMAN: You took an extra exam, but you also attended additional classes as well. I’d say advanced placement here might be an equivalent.

CRAWFORD: It’s an additional assessment of your skills and knowledge.

WESTERMAN: And additional material, so that when I went to university, the freshman chemistry course, I had done in high school.

CRAWFORD: I see. You didn’t have to take that class?

WESTERMAN: Well, I did. I took it. We were required, but [laughs]—

CRAWFORD: [laughs] You finished high school and started at the University of Sydney probably in the early 1960s?

WESTERMAN: 1962.

CRAWFORD: Why did you decide to go to the University of Sydney? Were you considering any other schools?

WESTERMAN: It was considered the best university in Sydney at that time. There are four universities now, but it was considered—it’s the oldest university in Australia. It was established in the 1840s.

CRAWFORD: You were a chemistry major from the start?

WESTERMAN: No. We had to do physics, mathematics—applied and pure—biology. But still it was fairly narrow. I didn’t do any humanities at that stage.

CRAWFORD: Really!

WESTERMAN: No. We specialized early. That was the system. I don’t really approve of it right now, but then, there was no alternative!

CRAWFORD: How was it determined what your specialization would be? Was it something that you chose, or was it based on your test results or something?

WESTERMAN: Test results, and also I think the influence of friends that were doing the same subjects.

CRAWFORD: Was that the case for you?

WESTERMAN: Yes, I think so.

CRAWFORD: You mentioned a number of students from this chemistry class that you took in high school. I think you said eight of them got first-class honors.

WESTERMAN: Right.

CRAWFORD: Did some of those students from your high school also attend the University of Sydney and go into chemistry?

WESTERMAN: Most. Virtually everybody from my high school went to university. That was unusual. That’s why it was a selective school, I think. But a number of them went into medicine, and a number went into biology.

CRAWFORD: You mentioned earlier that you were actually considering medicine as opposed to chemistry.

WESTERMAN: I actually made the switch for one week! [laughs] But I had the option of getting back into science, so I went back into science.

CRAWFORD: What precipitated—why did you—?

WESTERMAN: I think there were familial interests. My mother’s cousin went into medicine, and he didn’t do well. Throughout his life, he had psychological problems. She had some idea that I was similar in personality to him, and so—so I think that was a factor. She didn’t really express opposition, but it was still a factor.

CRAWFORD: But you ultimately decided to stick with chemistry?

WESTERMAN: Chemistry. The subject appealed to me. It was very logical.

CRAWFORD: Also it sounded like from what you were saying earlier that when you started university, they gave you a broad slate of science classes.

WESTERMAN: Yes.

CRAWFORD: Was the thinking there to expose you to all these different sciences and then eventually you would decide, “Oh, physics is my thing,” or biology, or something like that?

WESTERMAN: Yes.

CRAWFORD: What do you remember or what stands out to you from your time as an undergraduate in science at the University of Sydney? Was there a particular experience or class?

WESTERMAN: Dissection classes in biology. Dissecting a worm, dissecting a dogfish, dissecting several other animals. I can’t remember what they were. But that really made a strong impression.

CRAWFORD: Why was that?

WESTERMAN: I had never been exposed to cutting open an animal. You had to learn on an earthworm! [laughs]

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

WESTERMAN: I liked the experimental side, too. I liked doing the—in organic chemistry, I liked making compounds.

CRAWFORD: What was it that you liked about that?

WESTERMAN: It was hands-on. But also the combination of theory with practice. That was very critical to me, I think. This is why later on in life, when I got interested in nuclear magnetic resonance, which was my PhD thesis, I saw the link between theory and experimental observations very clearly. The theory was very strong—quantum mechanics—and it was beautiful. I thought there was just a great beauty to it. And I found that very appealing, finding that the world was logical, and could be understood with this mathematical theory called quantum mechanics.

CRAWFORD: When you say it’s beautiful, is that what the beauty is? The logic and order?

WESTERMAN: The logic, yes, and the fact that there’s something tangible there. You take this white powder, and you put it in a tube, and you put it in this instrument, and you get a lot of absorption lines, and you can explain the position of those absorption lines exactly, with the theory. Then I thought, well, this science really makes sense. It explains a little part of the world. I didn’t know how little part that was, at the time! [laughs]

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

WESTERMAN: Because I had been brought up in a fundamentalist environment, where knowledge was revealed knowledge. I’m an empiricist now, I think. I don’t believe in revelation. I am sorry if I’m offending any views that you may hold!

CRAWFORD: No, no. [laughs] Are you willing to talk about that a little bit more? Growing up in a fundamentalist household and being taught that revealed knowledge is, I don’t know, the highest form of knowledge, how did you become an empiricist, then? In other words, why didn’t you just stick with the family tradition [laughs], so to speak?

WESTERMAN: Well, it’s comfortable, and it has been very difficult to break away from it, because of opposition. I’m in a family where—actually, my wife has a religious faith, which has been good, because I tend to be very tolerant, I believe. Occasionally not [laughs]—but, you know, we're all intolerant sometimes.

CRAWFORD: Sure. [laughs] Partly what I’m wondering about is, again, growing up in a household like that, what drew you to empirical—?

WESTERMAN: Well, the fact that I saw science worked. I’m also a materialist, I’d say, philosophically, and I believe that virtually everything in principle can be explained in physicochemical terms, ultimately, even if it’s not understood right now. Like dark matter; people don’t know what that is. [laughs]

CRAWFORD: Right, right. But we might, someday! [laughs]

WESTERMAN: Yes, that’s right. We may, sometime.

CRAWFORD: Not to get too philosophical here, but there are some big questions that have come up over the history of science about the relationship between faith and science, and there are certainty plenty of examples of scientists that find ways to make it work.

WESTERMAN: Right, yes.

CRAWFORD: In your sense, do you really see them as mutually exclusive, just in your own experience?

WESTERMAN: I think a little bit of faith helps. I’ve been influenced greatly by an article by E.M. Forster. You know who that is?

CRAWFORD: Yes.

WESTERMAN: He wrote an essay called, “What I Believe.” Are you familiar with the essay?

CRAWFORD: I’ve heard of it. I haven't read it.

WESTERMAN: I’d say that’s almost a statement of my beliefs.

CRAWFORD: Could you—?

WESTERMAN: I don’t believe in belief. He starts the essay off, “I do not believe in belief.” But he says, you've got to be able to get along in this world, and so you've got to have faith in something. And he said he has faith in people, until proven otherwise. So you start off initially in a personal relationship by having faith in that, and then the subsequent behavior determines whether you maintain that faith or not in that person. And people are basically good. I mean, that was what he was saying. But it’s interesting, the essay was written in 1939, just before we went through the experience of World War II. There’s a lot of people, particularly those who are Jewish, who would say, “No, I don’t have faith in people.” No matter how cultured or educated they are.

CRAWFORD: That’s a very interesting way to start an essay, but an interesting conceptualization of what faith is or what you're having faith in.

WESTERMAN: Right, yeah.

CRAWFORD: You mentioned that you graduated from the University of Sydney with a degree in chemistry in 1966. You continue on at the University of Sydney into a graduate program.

WESTERMAN: Right.

CRAWFORD: When did you decide you were going to go on to do an advanced degree in chemistry? Was that ever a question or—?

WESTERMAN: Well, I got a scholarship.

CRAWFORD: [laughs] That always helps.

WESTERMAN: A nice scholarship. Not only free tuition, but I got a stipend as well. I think there was government policy at the time that they wanted to increase the number of scientists in the country. They wanted to take a technological leap—so, it wasn’t a difficult decision.

CRAWFORD: Right, because there was the incentive of the scholarship, and—

WESTERMAN: Right. And we were not well-off. My father was a traveling salesman. Of course he never understood what I did.

CRAWFORD: So getting that scholarship was vital.

WESTERMAN: I could actually live at home. I commuted.

CRAWFORD: Oh, nice.

WESTERMAN: Well, good and bad. Right? [laughs]

CRAWFORD: It financially cuts down on the costs.

WESTERMAN: Yes, but you've got to put up with your parents. [laughs]

CRAWFORD: Right, yes. [laughs] Yes, of course. You mentioned that the Australian government was essentially investing in science and technology in the form of producing more folks in those fields. In your recollection or your understanding, what was the status of Australia as a scientific nation at that time?

WESTERMAN: It was very high. It was part of the British system, which is interesting. If anybody wanted to advance academically in Britain, there was a list of universities—not published, but I knew about this. At the top were Oxford and Cambridge, and then they included all the colonial universities in that list. So a lot of our professors were English people that were sent out to the colonies. Their attitude was, well, if I make it out here, I’ll get back to one of the good universities in England, in Britain. Of my professors, three of them—in physical chemistry, inorganic chemistry, and in organic chemistry—they were all English. Some of them liked Australia so much and didn’t want to go back to England. Or, they didn’t make it, in terms of status, so they didn’t earn a place back at Oxford or Cambridge. So, it was part of the colonial system, and they were just coming out of that. Now it’s completely out of it now. Completely. A lot of professors now are from all over the world.

CRAWFORD: What was that like for you, as a student, starting out graduate school, looking at a career in science, that kind of colonial dynamic? Did that influence the interactions with your professors at all?

WESTERMAN: I was always shy—not shy; that’s not the right word—but I was always—the professor was up there. It was a little bit of the European/English attitude, which doesn't seem to exist here. Well, to a lesser degree.

CRAWFORD: You mean to say that the relationship was professional and more like the professor was a little more distant from you?

WESTERMAN: Yeah. You made an appointment to see him. That may be the case here too, I guess, but—we didn’t have office hours or things like that, no.

CRAWFORD: Did you have a sense that, as someone from Australia, that maybe you could end up at Oxford one day?

WESTERMAN: Yeah, there were examples of Australians that had made it. Perhaps the most famous inorganic chemist at the time was an Australian. Also one of the chemists that I worked with later in Canberra, he had a reaction named after him. He was very famous. But that gets into another topic of a research fellowship that I did back in Australia. We have a university in Canberra, the capital, which is a showcase university. It’s called the Australian National University. The policy when they established the school was to bring back Australians that had made it, in either the United States or Europe, and bring them back as chairs of the various departments. That’s what happened. It was a device actually used to bring Australian postdocs back, too, for research fellowships. A deliberate government policy. I won one of those awards, which was like an NTT.[2] You got a three-year term, and you got subsidized housing, you got travel. Back from Cleveland, I was paid for—all my—anything I wanted to move back. It was very, very good, but it was only for three years. This was a way of saying, “We’ve invested this amount of money in these people. We want them to contribute to Australian society and not contribute to North America or to European society.”

CRAWFORD: That makes sense. [laughs]

WESTERMAN: Right, yeah, I got one of those, but I only stayed half the time, because I saw the writing on the wall.

CRAWFORD: What do you mean by that?

WESTERMAN: I came back. I saw that a lot of the people weren’t getting jobs in science. Because the universities at that stage, which had undergone a large expansion, were full. No more positions. Yet they were bringing back all these people that had been in very prestigious labs, at very prestigious universities, bringing them all back, and then they ended up in public service or something else and had to abandon science. I didn’t want to abandon science.

CRAWFORD: Australian National University, was that fairly new at the time, or had that been around for a while?

WESTERMAN: It’s fairly new. There was a small university in Canberra. The university had a chemistry department, but the Australian National University did no teaching. It was completely a research organization. It was a showplace. Actually some very well-known academics have come out of the place. There’s some Nobel laureates and things like that. In fact my neighbor in Canberra ended up with a Nobel Prize in medicine.

CRAWFORD: Really? Wow!

WESTERMAN: Yeah. He was a Swiss guy. He babysat my daughter. I tell the story at weddings and various functions, that she is one of the few people that can claim she was babysat by a Nobel laureate. [laughs]

CRAWFORD: Right! [laughs]

WESTERMAN: And it’s true! [laughs]

CRAWFORD: Yeah, right! That’s right! [laughs] It sounds like this Australian National University was probably part of this government initiative to invest in the sciences.

WESTERMAN: Yeah, I think so, to push Australia ahead technologically. It’s a country of 25 million people now.
CRAWFORD: I want to just ask one more question on this line, and then maybe get back to talking about your graduate experience. Science is often thought of as an international, collaborative effort, and being part of networks of scientists and collaborators.

WESTERMAN: Right.

CRAWFORD: Australia is of course geographically quite far from many places. Did that ever feel like an obstacle to fully participating in the international scientific community?

WESTERMAN: Of course the internet didn’t exist then, but there were jet planes flying from Australia. An Australian has written a book called The Tyranny of Distance.

CRAWFORD: Oh, yeah? [laughs]

WESTERMAN: It’s about that topic.

CRAWFORD: Huh, interesting.

WESTERMAN: I can’t remember the author’s name. But it has always been—of course the British thought this was a perfect place to send their criminal element, in the 1700s, because it was like going to the Moon. [laughs]

CRAWFORD: [laughs] From the British perspective, yes! [laughs] Of course I can imagine being at the University of Sydney, which it sounds like was one of the universities on the list, the unofficial list, did that mean you were getting scholars coming from abroad and stuff like that?

WESTERMAN: Oh, all the time. People would come out and do sabbaticals—Americans, and people from North America. Every second person you speak to in this society says, “Oh, that’s on my bucket list,” or “I’ve always wanted to go to Australia.” So academics would say, “This would be a wonderful place to do a sabbatical year.” So, we were exposed to a lot—to North Americans, and British, and European scientists.

CRAWFORD: Great. Going back to your experience as a graduate student at the University of Sydney, I wonder if you could speak a little bit more about your time there. Did you have any significant mentors, what attracted you in terms of research for your dissertation, those sorts of things.

WESTERMAN: I was left on my own, to a large extent, which was good and bad. I was not mentored very well, I thought, by my advisor. But, he gave me a project, which I did in my honors year, and then I expanded that. I virtually created the compounds to make. I decided. I branched out into several other areas. So in the middle, it was rather difficult, because when suddenly you realize you've done a little bit of work, but is this enough for a PhD degree? My PhD thesis was, “Chemical and NMR Studies in the Acenaphthene Series.”

CRAWFORD: Could you say a little bit more about what is an NMR study of this series? What were you actually doing for that research?

WESTERMAN: Do you really want to hear it? [laughs]

CRAWFORD: Yeah!

WESTERMAN: The dependence of vicinal J coupling—proton-proton coupling—on the negativity of the substituent [in a CH2-CHX group].

CRAWFORD: Okay!

WESTERMAN: That doesn't mean a thing!

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

WESTERMAN: [laughs] Essentially, some of the absorption lines in the NMR spectrum are split by what’s called spin-spin coupling. Vicinal is a chemical [term] that [describes a] fragment of a molecule. Essentially, CH2-CHX next to each other on carbons. The spin-spin coupling between these three protons depend on the negativity of the substituent—if it’s a chlorine, a fluorine, a bromine, a cyano group, a methyl group, various chemical substituents. I did that for one series of rigid compounds. There had to be no flexibility in the molecule. Then I branched out into other series. That was my creative contribution—to choose other rigid systems and synthesize all of them. I then moved into another proton-proton coupling, but this was long-range, over more than one carbon-carbon bond. That was my initiative too, and I synthesized, again, probably 50, 60 different compounds, where I could measure that, and I was able, using the spectrometer, to do those measurements. Why this is useful is that understanding what determines spin-spin coupling [constants] is used by organic chemists in structural determinations of unknown compounds. You get an unknown compound and you want to know its chemical structure, then you've got to use a lot of NMR data, nuclear magnetic resonance data. I was completely confined, at that stage, to the proton nucleus, hydrogen. But later in my career, I—well, I’ll talk about that at the appropriate stage.

CRAWFORD: It sounds like, if I’m understanding, part of the significance of this work is—I don’t know if this would be correct, but providing the data or the characterization of these kinds of interactions, so that, as you said, organic chemists who are working with unknown compounds would be able to use that information as a way to characterize the things that they're looking at.

WESTERMAN: Right, yes. The use of empirical parameters to apply to unknown problems.

CRAWFORD: Right. When you say that you synthesized these compounds, were these new compounds that you were making?

WESTERMAN: Many of them.

CRAWFORD: That sounds like a contribution in and of itself.

WESTERMAN: That’s a novelty. Yes, yes. There’s a standard way for a chemist to claim the synthesis of a compound. You send [a sample] in for elemental analysis.

CRAWFORD: Send it in to where?

WESTERMAN: There’s a central body. I can’t remember right now—it’s 60 years ago—but you would send a certain number of milligrams to [laboratory] and they would determine the percentage of carbon, the percentage of hydrogen, the percentage of oxygen, nitrogen, etc. Given the formula, you could calculate what it should be. The experimentally determined value had to agree with the [theoretical value].

CRAWFORD: Working with NMR at this time, in the late 1960s, early 1970s, in the context of chemistry, was that new for that time?

WESTERMAN: Relatively. In a lot of techniques, the physicists use it first and then the chemists come along. NMR was discovered by a Dutchman, and also by a group at Stanford, I think. There were two groups, one European and one American. A lot of people won Nobel Prizes and [various awards]. But the physicists deserted it. They said, “We'll let the chemists fill in the details. We're moving on to other things.” [laughs]

CRAWFORD: [laughs] It sounds like it became a fairly central tool and technique for chemists to use.

WESTERMAN: Oh, yeah. You can’t do it without it. We’ve got an instrument here in the Chemistry Department that’s very expensive. It has a superconducting magnet. [laughs]

CRAWFORD: Right. [laughs]

WESTERMAN: We didn’t have those superconducting [magnets], then. They didn’t know about superconductivity in the sixties.

CRAWFORD: How common was it to find the technology to do NMR at a university? Was the University of Sydney—?

WESTERMAN: We had three instruments, but the students weren’t—until the end of my career, I wasn’t allowed on the instrument. We had technicians—

CRAWFORD: Really? Wow.

WESTERMAN: —to run these instruments. The reason was—I mean, Australia was using foreign exchange money to buy these things. They were manufactured in Germany. One of the major manufacturers was a company called Bruker, in Germany, and the other major manufacturer was called Varian. You might have heard of Varian. They're in Palo Alto. They were the two manufacturers. We had Varian instruments to start with, and then we got a Bruker. The government would—this was a big investment in the universities. They’re much more common now.

CRAWFORD: That’s part of the reason why they had people whose job it was to—

WESTERMAN: To run them.

CRAWFORD: —to run the device. You've said that later in your career, you were able to operate the NMR device yourself?

WESTERMAN: Right, yeah.

CRAWFORD: Does it take a kind of special expertise? I’m just asking because I think for a lot of people, they think about technology nowadays, and you know, you push a button and—[laughs]

WESTERMAN: Right, yeah. The software was pretty primitive then, that operated these things. The water had to be ultrapure because you didn’t want iron particles getting into a magnet and mess up the cooling system. They were iron-core magnets, they were called. They were cooled by water. And heavy as anything. Ugh! They were usually in the basement of a building. You didn’t want vibration either, so—

CRAWFORD: Right, so in addition to having the machine itself, you had to have certain—the right kind of location for it, access to ultrapure water—

WESTERMAN: And a trained technician. At least. It’s interesting, when I came on my first postdoctoral fellowship to Case Western in Cleveland, I started operating the machines immediately.

CRAWFORD: In Cleveland?

WESTERMAN: In Cleveland, yeah. In our group, we had four machines, four NMRs, and I actually became the expert in running these things. So, there was a different attitude, here. Maybe it’s just a wealthier country; [individual scientists]could get grants to buy one here. In Australia, it was extra special.

CRAWFORD: Yeah, I can see that. Again, just to continue on this line for a little bit, given that you mentioned you became the expert in running the NMR machine, for someone who hasn’t used an NMR machine, I wonder if you could just walk us through that process. What does operating an NMR machine look like?

WESTERMAN: You're talking about now, or—? [laughs]

CRAWFORD: Let’s say back then, in 1971, or when you moved to start at Case.

WESTERMAN: You've got a strong magnetic field, [into which you place the sample and then you irradiate the sample with] radio frequency. Because in the radio frequency range of the electromagnetic spectrum, energy transitions occur between nuclear spin states. So it’s very, very small amounts of energy. I mean, radio frequency is almost nothing. We're being bombarded by it all the time. That’s why the instruments have to be insulated, too. Same with MRIs now. They build a cage around the MRIs to avoid interference from outside radio stations! [laughs]

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

WESTERMAN: It was a little bit of an art, you know? You’d play around with the RF generator, the radio frequency generator, the frequency of it, and shift it round until—and you watched an oscilloscope. You saw a Lissajous pattern. I don’t know if you know what that is?

CRAWFORD: I don’t know what that is!

WESTERMAN: You see these interfering ovals. Then when you're on frequency, you know when you're on frequency. It sends out a beep, too, so you can do it by ear. So, you're tuning a radio frequency. It’s like turning a radio dial, I guess, essentially. Today, it’s much easier now to use these machines. You've essentially got to learn how to put the sample in the magnet.

CRAWFORD: And that’s it!

WESTERMAN: And you've got to learn the software, the commands. That’s the most difficult part. Then the processing of the data also requires a bit of instruction.

CRAWFORD: But nowadays the machines tune themselves, basically?

WESTERMAN: Yeah. Well, I think over here in the Chemistry Department, the students get instruction—the graduate students, once they’ve gone through that instruction then they're authorized to use the machine.

CRAWFORD: Wow. What kind of output does the machine give you?

WESTERMAN: Energy transitions between allowed spin states of the nuclei. It’s a property of the nucleus.

CRAWFORD: What does that data look like? Is it a graph, or—?

WESTERMAN: Lines.

CRAWFORD: Absorption lines, like you said earlier?

WESTERMAN: Absorption lines, yeah. You show it as absorption lines. Positive lines. They all have a lot of fine structure to them, the various transitions. For instance, a cholesterol molecule which has 27 carbons, you can see 27 carbons, 27 lines. It’s quite amazing. Some of them are very close together, but—it’s just a very, very powerful technique.

CRAWFORD: Just from visually looking at the absorption lines, you can almost immediately tell something about the structure?

WESTERMAN: Right. And I’ve had years and years of interpreting this, so I’ve had graduate students in the Chemistry Department come to me and say, “What does this mean?”

CRAWFORD: Like you said, there’s an art to it, so there’s also an art to reading these outputs and knowing what they're telling you.

WESTERMAN: There’s books and books now, and there’s large tables of empirical data. It has become a lot easier. But thanks to all of the work that we did in the 1960s and 1970s. Probably a large number of groups around the world were building up empirical tables, of chemical shifts and coupling constants, things like that.

CRAWFORD: These serve as kind of like an index that you would use?

WESTERMAN: Yeah, yeah.

CRAWFORD: You get your output, and then you look at these tables, and sort of—?

WESTERMAN: Yeah. When I did my postdoc at Caltech, we were working on another nucleus. Not protons, but we were working on nitrogen-15. Nitrogen-15 is a natural abundance isotope, but a rare isotope. We had one of the few spectrometers that could do natural abundance nitrogen-15 NMR, at Caltech. At that stage, I was able to develop a whole ‘nother set of empirical data that people use now. Is it a secondary amide? Is it an amino acid? Is it—? Any one of these compounds that may have a nitrogen in it.

CRAWFORD: The NMR machine that worked with N-15, that was actually different in some way than the other ones you had worked with?

WESTERMAN: It had sample tubes like this.

CRAWFORD: Okay, so you're indicating with your hand—

WESTERMAN: And it was superconducting. Oh, yeah, it was very, very large tubes, and you had to have big samples. That was 50 years ago. In 1975, I was at Caltech. The machines now are just unbelievable.

CRAWFORD: What do you mean by unbelievable? Just in terms of versatility?

WESTERMAN: There’s two-dimensional NMR now, all sorts of pulse sequences. It was just simply continuous wave radiation when I was doing NMR, but now they do pulses of energy. And they have sequences. This is where the quantum mechanics really melds with the observations. This is the beauty of the technique, really.

CRAWFORD: Conceptually I get continuous radiation versus pulse sequence, but what is the advantage of using a pulse sequence? What is the difference? Are there different applications?

WESTERMAN: Oh, you can’t do two-dimensional NMR with continuous wave. You get NMR spectra now in two dimensions, and you can know from that, interpretation of that spectrum, which carbon is connected to which carbon.

CRAWFORD: Wow! [laughs]

WESTERMAN: With cholesterol, the early techniques, just 27 lines, but if you do a pulse sequence, a 2D pulse sequence, you know which are adjoining carbons. It’s so much more powerful.

CRAWFORD: When did two-dimensional NMR roughly—?

WESTERMAN: [The development] has been continuous [through the 80s and 90s]. Different people have contributed, and different people have won Nobel Prizes. During my career, MRI developed. I was at some of the early Gordon Conferences—

CRAWFORD: Really!

WESTERMAN: You know the Gordon Conferences?

CRAWFORD: Of course.

WESTERMAN: —where Lauterbur, who won the Nobel Prize for doing the first image—he was at that conference. That developed during my career. A lot of people who were in NMR more or less decided to go into imaging. In fact, one of my graduate students—Bill and I supervised a few graduate students. One of them ended up in the MRI business.

CRAWFORD: Which graduate student was that?

WESTERMAN: Larry Strenk. He came from Baldwin Wallace. He did a physics degree [there]. Bill and I co-advised him [for the Ph.D degree]. Because I had an adjunct appointment in the Physics Department here as well.

CRAWFORD: You're talking about Bill Doane?

WESTERMAN: Yeah.

CRAWFORD: That’s what I figured. Just—for the recording. [laughs] Did you ever consider either going into imaging or working on ways of developing the NMR technology?

WESTERMAN: I did, but not seriously. See, I was at a medical school, so it made sense. But I was doing another branch of NMR, which was called wide-lined or solid state NMR. That technique and that nucleus, which was the deuterium nucleus, was ideal for studying liquid crystals. This is really the collaboration with Bill Doane. He was doing deuterium NMR so I found a natural fit here. One of the reasons I came to Kent State was I knew that they had a special effort in liquid crystals at the time. At the time, I was offered a job in industry as well, with more money, but I decided I wanted an academic career. I wanted the freedom of an academic career.

CRAWFORD: I know you came to NEOUCOM,[3] as it was known at the time, I think in nineteen-seventy—six?

WESTERMAN: Six.

CRAWFORD: Your formal affiliation with the Liquid Crystal Institute was a few years after that. In the intervening time from when you finished your PhD in 1971 to coming to NEOUCOM in 1976, you had this postdoctoral fellowship at Case Western as well as research fellowships at Australian National and Caltech?

WESTERMAN: Yeah.

CRAWFORD: I’m curious, in particular, the jump to Case Western for the postdoc, how did that come about?

WESTERMAN: In Australia, if you wanted an academic position, you had to get a postdoctoral fellowship experience. I’d say an equal number of students went to the United Kingdom as went to North America. So, at the end of my PhD, I applied for five postdoctoral fellowships. I think I got three of them. I chose Case Western—actually I [preferred personally] to go to the British Isles. Every Australian has a love-hate relationship with England. It's the mother country. So, Australia is kind of a hybrid between North America and Britain. I came to Case Western, and I had the three most exciting years of my life here! Unbelievable. Absolutely unbelievable.

CRAWFORD: What made those three years so exciting?

WESTERMAN: The group I was in, and the friends I made. And a particular man who owned Hough Bakeries.

CRAWFORD: Who owned what?

WESTERMAN: Hough Bakeries, which was an institution in Cleveland. H-O-U-G-H. There’s a Hough area in Cleveland, which is really run-down now, but that’s where their factory was. He ran a catering company, the number one catering company in Cleveland. He was ultra-kind to us, and introduced us to the Cleveland establishment, really, because—

CRAWFORD: What was his name?

WESTERMAN: Pile. Robby Pile. He knew everybody in Cleveland. We were here two weeks—I mean, this is just personal information—but he said to us, “I cater the New York Metropolitan Opera.” They’d come to Cleveland—in those years, they used to come every year—and they performed several operas. He said, “I’d like to take you and your wife.” I said, “I don’t have any clothes.” He said—well, he got me a tux. Then he got a mink coat—I guess it was politically okay to wear them then—for Jan, and he took us to the dinner before the opera.

CRAWFORD: Wow.

WESTERMAN: Aida was that night. And he introduced to this guy who was worth 100 million, this guy who was worth 300 million, this guy who was—and we thought this was America.

CRAWFORD: Yeah! [laughs]

WESTERMAN: It was really through a church. At that stage, I still attended church.

CRAWFORD: Oh, is that how you met?

WESTERMAN: That’s how we met him, yeah. I didn’t know that Hough Bakeries were all over Cleveland, all over everywhere. They’ve closed down now. They're out of business. But he introduced us to some people, and we got into the babysitting business through that, and we then acted as parents for these children of wealthy parents who went to the Caribbean or to Europe for the summer. So, we lived in all these mansions all over the place.

CRAWFORD: [laughs] Wow!

WESTERMAN: Then I got into a carriage house. A guy who was a professor of voice at the Cleveland Institute of Music, he sang Beethoven’s 9th Symphony at Blossom. He was a Chinese guy. He had these parties at his house, and I got to meet the music establishment of Cleveland. I would be paid to be bartender at these parties. So I just had an incredible three years. We didn’t have a children. So, we got a car, and we went—we actually physically were in 47 states—

CRAWFORD: Oh my gosh.

WESTERMAN: —in three years.

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

WESTERMAN: Because I was going to scientific meetings as well, all during this. And I got 18 publications out of this.

CRAWFORD: Oh, my! In three years!

WESTERMAN: Yeah, well, I worked like crazy. We just lived like—it was crazy, like three years of crazy stuff. Had a colleague who was married in Atlanta; we went to his wedding for the weekend.

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

WESTERMAN: Drove our car down there!

CRAWFORD: You drove down [laughs] to Atlanta?

WESTERMAN: Yeah. I mean, it was just—I think now I could write a book about that three years. And maybe I got too Pollyanna-ish an opinion of America.

CRAWFORD: Why do you say that?

WESTERMAN: Well, I saw the wealthy side, and I didn’t see—

CRAWFORD: Right.

WESTERMAN: —the other side. Well, we did. [Occasionally,] we drove through suburbs of Cleveland, on Harvard Avenue and things like that, so I guess I did see the bad side. At that time, it was only three years after ’68, which was—was a terrible year. I remember watching the Watergate on television—

CRAWFORD: The hearings, on television.

WESTERMAN: The hearings, that’s right. So when I went back to Australia, with a research fellowship, I got reverse culture shock. It’s interesting. I don’t know if you are aware of that or you've experienced it yourself?

CRAWFORD: I haven't experienced it myself. Maybe a little bit. What was it like for you? How did that manifest itself?

WESTERMAN: I’m going back to a place that’s not as alive as where I’ve come from, and I see Australia from a different point of view now because I’ve been living outside of it for three years. Plus, I’ve got a child, a daughter. And that changed my life.

CRAWFORD: Australia—you said it was not alive. What do you mean by that? Or not as much alive, I guess?

WESTERMAN: I don’t know if you're aware of what’s called the tea break, in England, and Australia? At 10:00, you go to the tea room and you chat with your colleagues, and what is supposed to be a 10-minute break turns into a 30-minute break. So, you go back, and then lunch—you know, two hours over lunch. And then, 4:00, afternoon tea. I was extremely critical of that, but I fell into it because everybody was doing it. Actually there are advantages to that, because I don’t know if you read Watson and Crick’s The Double Helix, he talks about the advantage of the tea break. Because there was cross-fertilization. He actually—this is off the record, I guess [laughs]—but he realized by talking to an organic chemist that he had the wrong structure, the wrong tautomeric structure, for one of the nucleotide bases, in the structure determination of DNA. He learned that at the tea room! He would never have had a conversation with this guy. And because of that, he went immediately back to the lab, changed his structure, and then [normally] fell into place. It was like—one of those moments.

CRAWFORD: But you said at the time you were kind of critical of it?

WESTERMAN: I was very critical of it, yeah.

CRAWFORD: Because it seemed to take away from the work? Or what was the nature of that?

WESTERMAN: Yeah. Also I was setting out on a project of my own now. Not the advisor; it was my own. That’s difficult, to start out as a scientist. Plus, the instrument I was promised didn’t turn up. They said, “We're getting an NMR,” and it didn’t turn up. So I had to find something to do. In the end, I had a productive 20 months. I got four papers out of that. And I worked hard. But it wasn’t the beginning, I think, of a major research thrust.

CRAWFORD: I’m curious about, again this time at Case Western. You talked a lot about your personal experiences, but it sounds like professionally it was quite productive as well.

WESTERMAN: It was amazing! Absolutely.

CRAWFORD: How did you get 18 publications? [laughs]

WESTERMAN: I used to work through the night. There was competition for the NMR machines, so I would get 36 hours. I’d spend the week preparing samples for those 36 hours, and then—we didn’t have automatic changers like they have changers now that change the samples. So my poor wife had to put up with me getting up at 2:00 in the morning or 4:00 in the morning and driving from Cleveland Heights into Case Western, and changing samples, and processing data. I worked extremely hard. But I lived extremely hard, too. And when you're 25 and 26 and 27, you can do that.

CRAWFORD: Yeah. [laughs] Were you doing the same kind of work—?

WESTERMAN: I was doing NMR. I was more or less hired as the expert NMR guy, but we were looking at unstable intermediates in organic reactions, called carbonium ions. George Olah was the name of the—he was a Hungarian émigré from the 1956 Revolution, in Budapest. This was the early 1970s. Well, in 1994, he won the Nobel Prize for chemistry.

WESTERMAN: This was who you were working with at Case?

CRAWFORD: Yeah.

WESTERMAN: 1994, 20 years later. I like to think that some of the work I did contributed to that.

CRAWFORD: What did he win that prize for?

WESTERMAN: For chemistry. Just all his work in showing the stability and isolating these unstable intermediates in chemical reactions.

CRAWFORD: Wow.

WESTERMAN: It was a big group, and it was very international. We had our token American. [laughs]

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

WESTERMAN: We had Japanese, Chinese, English, German, Swiss, you name it. This is another thing that I really find exciting about science. I love travel, and I love the international aspect.

CRAWFORD: You say you love travel. Is there anything else about the international element of science that interests or excites you?

WESTERMAN: Well, I’ve always wanted to travel. During my career I have been to many international conferences all over the world. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to be an academic, so I could fulfill that desire to see other cultures and get to know people that had a different background than me.

CRAWFORD: It must have been quite nice to be at this postdoc and working with all these people from—

WESTERMAN: Oh, yeah, and we made some very good friends. And they're still friends, to this day.

CRAWFORD: I’m curious, too, aside from the lack of a tea break—and you talked about being able to use the NMR machines and there were four of them and things like that—were there any other differences in maybe I guess you would call it the culture of science, in the United States, versus Australia? Anything else that stood out to you?

WESTERMAN: There was more money here. I think going back to Canberra was partly realizing that I had a child and I had—that makes a huge change in your life, and that was part of the reverse culture shock. I had all this freedom in Cleveland. No children.

CRAWFORD: You talked about the experience of reverse culture shock going back for the research fellowship at Australian National University. Then you move to California?

WESTERMAN: That was an awfully hard decision to make, because my wife wanted to stay in Australia, and she actually acceded to my desire to pursue my career. She’s a remarkable person. She has always found new jobs and new outlets in the places that I’ve decided where we're going to live, essentially. I more or less said, “I just want to go back for a few years and then see if I can get an academic job in Australia.” I broke that promise, really, because we ended up staying 50 years. Or 47 or whatever years.

CRAWFORD: Did you ever try to go back to Australia?

WESTERMAN: Yeah, I applied for a few jobs, didn’t get them. I’ve been fortunate, though, because I’ve earned a good enough salary at the medical school to go back every year. I have made over 40 trips to Australia in the course of 50 years. I’ve been twice this year.

CRAWFORD: Wow. [laughs] That’s amazing.

WESTERMAN: Yeah, so we have maintained our strong family links, both my wife and myself.

CRAWFORD: That’s great.

WESTERMAN: But yeah, my wife, in Cleveland, got a job as a chignon maker, the hairstylists, blending these pieces. She was trained. She was a school teacher, actually, and when she got here, she couldn't teach, so she got this job at Higbee’s making these hair pieces, was trained for that. Couldn't believe that she was only given one week’s vacation a year. She said, “I want to go to England. My husband and I have planned this trip to England.” Because we had always wanted to go to England. “You say I’ve only got one week vacation. I want to go for three weeks.” “No.” “Well, I quit.” She quit. And when she got back, she started the job again.

CRAWFORD: [laughs] Wow.

WESTERMAN: Because they hadn’t hired anybody or trained anybody! After that, she quit again, I think, because she wanted to take a long vacation. She got a job with an insurance company called Progressive, down on 36th Street and Euclid in Cleveland, and Lewis was the boss. Do you know about Progressive at all? This guy, Lewis? He has built the law school at Case Western, a very fancy law school. A multimillionaire. Progressive is now on 271. If you go up 271, you'll see Progressive Insurance Company. She was in that company as an underwriter, trained as an underwriter. So she did that, as well. It’s amazing. She’s very adaptable.

CRAWFORD: When did you meet your wife? Were you in college?

WESTERMAN: Yeah. It was 1960s, I think, I met her.

CRAWFORD: Was she a student at the University of Sydney also?

WESTERMAN: She went to teachers college. But it was through the church again.

CRAWFORD: Which church was this? Which denomination?

WESTERMAN: [laughs] That’s a story!

CRAWFORD: Oh, boy! [laughs] I’m happy to hear it, if you want to talk about it.

WESTERMAN: All right, yeah! I don’t know if you've heard of a group called the Plymouth Brethren?

CRAWFORD: No, I haven't.

WESTERMAN: It’s an offshoot of the Anglican Church. It was started by a guy in Ireland in the 1830s who was an Anglican priest, but he decided that he believed in the individual priesthood of individuals and that you didn’t need a bishop or a pastor or anything like that. So he broke off from the Anglican Church. In the 1840s, this became a huge movement. But like a lot of the religious sects that form—or groups; I shouldn't use the word sects, but maybe it was—they fragment. So much depends on personality and interpretation. If you believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible, then there’s hundreds of ways of interpreting it. That’s what I grew up in. And I grew up in a very happy environment, very wonderful group of young people. Socially, it was a wonderful experience. So, that’s it!

CRAWFORD: So, you met through the church. Was that the same—? Because you mentioned—

WESTERMAN: Same as Robby Pile.

CRAWFORD: —meeting Robby Pile, yeah.

WESTERMAN: That’s the connection. That’s how I met him. Because they have a worldwide network—very large in New Zealand, very large in Switzerland, and in the British Isles. And a lot in Canada, an awful lot in Canada, primarily because Canada is full of Irish and Scottish and English immigrants. But they're fundamentalist. No, evangelical is probably a better word. They don’t believe in snakes. [laughs]

CRAWFORD: Okay, got it. [laughs] So, you come to Caltech in 1975, and you're there for a year. Are you working on your own research at Caltech?

WESTERMAN: Yeah, well, it was my project, but the confine was, it was nitrogen-15 NMR. It was a new nucleus for me. I did proton for my undergraduate, I did carbon-13 at Cleveland—nucleus—which was developing, then. I did carbon-13 in Canberra. Then I did nitrogen-15. So I was moving from nucleus to nucleus.

CRAWFORD: Was that difficult, or—

WESTERMAN: No!

CRAWFORD: —exciting?

WESTERMAN: It’s the same principles, but a different radio frequency. MRI is really proton NMR. You’re looking at water, in the body. That’s all it is. Have you had an image taken, yourself?

CRAWFORD: No.

WESTERMAN: You haven't injured a limb?

CRAWFORD: No, not yet! [laughs]

WESTERMAN: [laughs]

CRAWFORD: At least not in a way that would require that kind of imaging!

WESTERMAN: It’s very good with the head, too, with the brain, picking up tumors. But it’s proton NMR.

CRAWFORD: What was it like being at Caltech? That’s of course a very famous place in the world of science.

WESTERMAN: Absolutely fantastic place. Absolutely fantastic. I mean, every week there’s some famous scientist giving a seminar. That’s the danger; you spend your whole time going to seminars. [laughs]

CRAWFORD: [laughs] Was that a danger for you?

WESTERMAN: No, no, I worked hard there, too. I got four publications out of that, I think. Four or five, I can’t remember. I knew that if I had Caltech on the letterhead, I’d get a job application. I was very anxious; I had a child at that stage. It was just—the weather—Pasadena is a lovely place. I was a little bit like Henry Kissinger that year. I had about 10 job applications, and virtually all of them on the East Coast. I was only there 10 months, 11 months, and had to go on all those job interviews, so Jan was always driving me to the airport, from Pasadena down to LAX.

CRAWFORD: Was it only like a one-year fellowship when you—?

WESTERMAN: No, I was offered another year, but I was anxious to get a job. I was really anxious. Because I had five years of postdoctoral fellowship. In the sciences, it’s terrible now; people do postdocs forever. Because schools are relying on NTTs and people have these multiple teaching assignments in different schools in one’s area. I don’t know if it’s like that in history?

CRAWFORD: Yeah, with NTTs and part-time faculty. Postdocs aren’t as much part of the professional life cycle. They exist, but it’s not the same—my sense from talking to scientists is it’s virtually a requirement that you have at least one postdoc if not two or three, if you want to go into academia in a full-time position.

WESTERMAN: Right.

CRAWFORD: It’s not as much a requirement in history, but we do have the same kinds of issues with how teaching is being portioned to full-time, part-time, tenure-track, and NTT. So yeah, I certainly understand. [laughs]

WESTERMAN: Yeah, it’s unfortunate. I think it’s cheap labor, really. Now I see it as cheap labor. Could you take a break?

CRAWFORD: You read my mind. I was just going to suggest that maybe we take a break here. It kind of makes sense, since we can come back and talk about—

WESTERMAN: I might get a coffee, actually.

CRAWFORD: Yeah, sure.

[break in audio]

CRAWFORD: After taking a short break for coffee, before we took the break we had just finished up talking a little bit about your time at Caltech, and now want to move into when you took the position at NEOUCOM in 1976 where you became an assistant professor of molecular pathology and biology. I’m just wondering if you could talk a little bit about how you came to that position. And were there other offers that you were considering? I think you said maybe you had an industry job—so why did you decide to come to NEOUCOM instead of pursuing something else?

WESTERMAN: I was interested in returning to the Cleveland area because we had good friends from our days at Case. While at Caltech, I think I mentioned, I had a large number of interviews at different companies, industrial as well as academic jobs. I ended up with two offers. One was with Diamond Shamrock, in Painesville. The person who wanted to hire me there was particularly interested in nitrogen-15 NMR. He had realized that I had worked at Caltech on that nucleus. At that stage, Diamond Shamrock was interested in entering the drug business. Pharmaceutical industry, really. The other offer I received was from an individual who was the chair—or the program director, he was called, actually, at the time—of a biochemistry department—or program was the right word, not department—that was being established in a new medical school in the state of Ohio. This was a consortium arrangement between Kent State, Akron U, and Youngstown. There were no buildings at this stage. On my interview, I was taken out to the grounds, which was a former corn field, Mr. Jones’s farm, in Rootstown, Ohio, and there was one steel girder sticking out of the ground at that stage.

CRAWFORD: Wow. [laughs]

WESTERMAN: But this seemed attractive, this position, because it was an academic position. The individual who hired me—or interviewed me, and ultimately I was hired—was an American Hungarian who had escaped in 1956 from Hungary, again at the time of the Revolution. He knew of George Olah, my advisor at Case Western. They were both Hungarians. He didn’t know him personally, but he knew of his reputation. So, he called him up, and George Olah said I was out there on the West Coast looking for a job. So I got this phone call at Caltech one day from this man that had a very thick Hungarian accent. He was an MD from the University of Szeged, in Hungary, and he said, “I’m interested in characterizing a liver enzyme system”—called the cytochrome P450 enzyme system—“and I’m hiring four people.” Or three, I think at the time. One was a classical enzymologist that can do the enzymology. The other one was a molecular biologist who could do the DNA/RNA work. And one was a physical chemist who could use nuclear magnetic resonance to characterize this enzyme system. Now, this enzyme system is very important. It is involved in the metabolism of all the xenobiotics. That’s a term meaning a foreign chemical to the body. But not only drug metabolism, it’s also involved in the biosynthesis of many biological molecules, including cholesterol, the biosynthesis of cholesterol. So it’s really—it’s not well characterized. He thought, if I take this multisystem approach, I can put together a joint grant for the NIH.[4] So, I was hired with the task of writing a huge grant proposal, a group project, on cytochrome P450, and my contribution was to do the physical characterization of this enzyme system. Ferenc Hutterer—H-U-T-T-E-R-E-R, I think. He had been working as a clinical chemist at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. So, I went for the interview, and I gave a talk to a group of people who I thought did not understand a word I said.

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

WESTERMAN: Except for Fred Walz, who was a Chemistry Department professor, and another chemist in the Chemistry Department, Bruce Roe. The president and the founder of the medical school, Dr. Olson, I had a very positive interview with him because he had spent time in Sydney during World War II and liked Australia very much, and more or less had a favorable inclination, I think, towards Australians. So, I went back to Caltech, just wondering—I had several applications in at that time. I was invited back for a second visit a couple months later, so I went back, and then I was made an offer. Then that involved buying an instrument, an NMR. We had startup money from the state to buy this equipment. It was a lot of money. I then spent the next few months going to various NMR companies. Bruker had an office in Billerica, near Boston. Varian had an office in San Francisco. JEOL had an office—that was a Japanese company—they had an office in New Jersey. I visited each of those companies and evaluated their instruments. I then went to a school for people that want to use NMR to study biological systems. That was at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. That was a one-week school. Because my background was mainly chemical, not biological, so I needed to get up to speed, in biology. We eventually decided on an instrument. I came to Rootstown, but the medical school at that stage was just under construction, so we set up a lab at the University of Akron, in the polymer institute, for a year. We had an office in Kent, Martinel Drive, in those days. To this day, I still remember giving a presentation to all of the members of the Liquid Crystal Institute, who came over to Martinel Avenue. This included Alfred Saupe—

CRAWFORD: Wow.

WESTERMAN: At that stage, I had no idea of his fame.

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

WESTERMAN: And, Adriaan de Vries. Spielberg was there. And [Edward] Gelerinter, I’m sure. There were a whole bunch of people that I had never met. A young man, after the presentation, came up to me and said his name was Bill Doane. He said, “There’s a possibility we could collaborate.”

CRAWFORD: Wow. Okay.

WESTERMAN: He was very friendly, very outgoing, very encouraging. He probably realized at that stage I didn’t know much about liquid crystals.

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

WESTERMAN: To this day I’m still embarrassed about talking about liquid crystals in front of this group of people! But, you know, everybody has got to learn. People learn their jobs, on the job. So [laughs]—

CRAWFORD: This would have been when you first arrived?

WESTERMAN: 1976, while the NMR was being installed at the University of Akron. We had purchased the NMR. Another part of my job was to learn biochemistry. I had done biochemistry as an undergraduate course at the University of Sydney, but it was just an introductory biochemistry course. I was really a physical organic chemist, being hired for a job that I wasn’t qualified for! [laughs]

CRAWFORD: Did you have any reservations about that?

WESTERMAN: I had some reservations, but everybody had reservations. Because this school was an experiment! At that stage, everything was uncertain. There were undergraduates who had committed themselves to the program, which was a six-year program, and they were already at Kent State, Youngstown, and Akron, in the program. The building wasn’t there. The curriculum wasn’t established. But thank goodness—Stanley Olson was an amazing individual. He was a mover and a shaker, really. He organized the building of that facility. He organized the first few years. Amazing individual. I had a great deal of respect for him. I then went through probably a year of hell, because I couldn't do much experimentation because the lab was being built and established down at the University of Akron. But I had to write a curriculum. We spent hours, the four of us—Hutterer; the other two guys, the enzymologist and the molecular biologist; and myself—writing a biochemistry textbook, almost. This thing went on for hundreds of pages, and we spent hours and hours arguing over titles, and everything. It was just a really terrible, terrible year. That year, my wife’s father died.

CRAWFORD: Oh.

WESTERMAN: So it was very tough on Jan. We were living in a rented place. Somehow we survived that year. You know, uncertain future. I had turned down the other job at Diamond Shamrock, but twice they approached me in the next couple years and wanted me to move from the medical school. I was tempted to go up there, to Diamond Shamrock. The funny thing is, Diamond Shamrock no longer exists. They split and the chemical division separated from the oil division, which moved to Texas. So, it was good that I didn’t. It was good that I stuck with the medical school. Meanwhile, we were writing this joint grant proposal, and that was a mammoth task because Ferenc Hutterer’s English skills were very poor. Very, very poor. I was able to make a major contribution there because I had written a lot of papers in English over the years. I had written a lot of George Olah’s papers, because again, his English wasn’t as good as mine. So, I contributed a lot, and I learned a lot of biochemistry. The interesting thing was, this course was not a biochemistry course; it was a molecular pathology course. I came up with the key idea behind the course, and that was, let’s study a cell type or an organ system and use it as a model. We used the red blood cell. We found that it had the best characterized protein in the human body, hemoglobin, and it had a model membrane, which was what I was going to do research in. The red blood cell membrane was very well characterized. The molecular biology was pretty well understood, and the molecular pathology of the thalassemias and the hemoglobinopathies was well understood, so we could develop case histories on the thalassemias and on the hemoglobinopathies. So, we wrote case histories. We wrote chapters on the red blood cell. Ultimately, during my career, I joined the hematology sub-council, for clinicians, and was giving a lecture called “The Magnificent Red Blood Cell.” To me, this was so exciting, to learn all this medicine and this biology. I mean, to me it was just—my friends say I have an insatiable curiosity, and to me—this is not really how science works, because people are usually very narrowly focused. If I was more concerned with my career I should have been more and more focused on my research. But I started devoting a lot of time to learning the molecular pathology and the biochemistry. Then when the first class came in, I was asked to give a lecture on DNA. By that stage, I knew all the details of the structure in DNA. I’m still embarrassed about the lecture I gave at the beginning, because I was really just learning how to give presentations. But things worked out, and by the second year of my tenure—with the new incoming class, the charter class—the second year, the year after them, they voted me as teacher of the year!

CRAWFORD: Yes, I saw that!

WESTERMAN: Hutterer, at that stage, had fell afoul of the administration and they were trying to get rid of him. He was another element of uncertainty in my life, because if they got rid of him, then the whole department would have gone, probably. Fortunately, they didn’t. I don’t know the story, really. The dean wanted to get rid of him, but he didn’t. The fact that I had won a teaching award—and then the fact that on the shelf copy of the national boards, the class did the best in biochemistry, and above the national average.

CRAWFORD: Wow.

WESTERMAN: The administration said, “What’s the secret? What are you doing that’s right? You're teaching a subject that’s unpopular, and yet the students”—one of the teaching faculty is the teacher of the year, and then the shelf copy of the national boards, you had these outstanding results! That really saved—it saved the school. No, it saved the chairman. But at that stage, in 1981, there was a real budget crisis, incredible budget crisis, and one of the presidents at the university wanted to close the medical school. That was Michael Schwartz. The Youngstown president did not. Youngstown has always felt like the poor cousin of the three universities. So, it was all left to Guzzetta, who was the president of the University of Akron. He had the deciding vote. That’s how close it came to shutting this medical school.

CRAWFORD: Wow.

WESTERMAN: He decided he wanted the medical school, so he went with us, and we struggled through that budget crisis, which was—affected the whole state. There was an economic downturn, I think, at that time. So, the school survived. I started teaching most of the red blood cell, and Alan, my colleague from New Zealand, he was teaching the molecular biology of the red blood cell, and how the genes were translated into the protein hemoglobin, and how the hemoglobin was processed. We both ran the case histories. Ferenc was helpful there, greatly helpful, because he knew the medicine. He knew the clinical chemistry, so he was able to introduce this clinical flavor. But he was a terrible lecturer, absolutely terrible. Now I can express these opinions now, because the man has departed. But I shouldn't speak poorly of the dead, I guess! But— [laughs]

CRAWFORD: Well, you know, I mean [laughs]—everybody has their talents, and—

WESTERMAN: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think Ferenc was a very good strategic thinker, to actually have the concept that you can’t teach a traditional biochemistry course.

CRAWFORD: That’s what I was curious about. You're coming from, as you said, a non-biological, non-medical chemistry background. You've worked in chemistry departments. I was curious to ask you about, in designing this curriculum, what concessions, I guess you could say, would you have to make to the fact that it’s medical school students and a medical school? Was this decision to focus on the red blood cell and do these case histories sort of the main concession you made?

WESTERMAN: I think the red blood cell was my contribution, because we did the liver cell, or hepatocyte, in the second semester, the second quarter. We were on quarters at that stage, not semesters. Then the third quarter, we did all the other cell types, other organ systems—muscle, fat, adipose tissue, and so on. We did endocrinology as well, the biochemistry of that. I’d say the blend of having a molecular biologist, a chemist, an enzymologist, and a clinician—the interplay of those really was a good blend and together could put together a good course. And the course was popular in the early years. And successful. In terms of standardized testing.

CRAWFORD: Just thinking about the curriculum in medical schools in general, education in these kind of like—I don’t want to say fundamental science, but in terms of biochemistry and molecular biology, that was already established as an integral part of medical education at the time?

WESTERMAN: Well, no, I’d say the term molecular pathology—people didn’t understand that term.

CRAWFORD: Really!

WESTERMAN: “What is molecular pathology?” Because at that stage, there were very few diseases that were characterized at the molecular level. I think sickle cell anemia was the first. Linus Pauling had a major influence in that regard because he identified what sickle cell anemia was. It was a mutation at a single site in the DNA, really, that resulted in sickle cell. But it was a very important disease, and a very common disease. Then we went into all of the hemoglobinopathies. Now, there’s 700 or 800 different hemoglobinopathies. They serve as a model, really, for all the monogenic diseases, the diseases caused by a mutation at a single site, single locus. But now, the interesting diseases are the multigenic ones that results from the interplay and the expression of a multiple number of genes, like diabetes and so on. But at that stage, the standard text was a book about that thick, and by the time I left teaching, it was five volumes, each one that thick. Now, the printed edition no longer exists. It’s all online. It’s called Stanbury. It’s the standard textbook, The Metabolic Basis of Inherited Diseases. Literally thousands and thousands of metabolic diseases are understood now. Now, whether you can cure them is another thing, but at least you could define what the nature of the pathology was. Molecular pathology now is a well-established discipline.

CRAWFORD: Right, but in the late 1970s, it was—

WESTERMAN: It was not.

CRAWFORD: It was new.

WESTERMAN: It was not. It was new.

CRAWFORD: Had you heard about it before?

WESTERMAN: No! No, It was new. But again, my insatiable curiosity just—led me to over-read. To read too much!

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

WESTERMAN: On subjects that weren’t my discipline! They say in academia you get into trouble if you spread yourself too widely. And I think that’s unfortunate, really.

CRAWFORD: I want to just go back a little bit. I’m still a little unclear on—because it sounds like this was very rewarding work, in spite of that year that was very difficult, to do, and obviously it seems to resonate with your insatiable curiosity. But I’m just thinking, you have a young child, you're going to a place where like literally the buildings for the campus are not built. It’s kind of this new venture, and so there’s so many uncertainties in that. And your other option is to work for an established company. I’m still a little unclear on why—it sounds like it was a real gamble! Was there something that attracted you to academia, or you didn’t want to go into industry?

WESTERMAN: I didn’t really want to go into industry, deep down. I wanted academia, because I believed it gave me the freedom. More freedom to learn. Also, on the basis of my politics. I tend to be to the left, and liberal in my politics. I have always been that way. So I’m not really attracted to corporate America. I shouldn't say corporate America, but corporations, and the mentality of corporations. So that was part of it. I was willing to take the risk. I always had a safety valve that if things—see, I took a risk when I left halfway through my three-year tenure at the Australian National University. That was a real—that could have been a disaster, because I had one child at that stage. And my wife was just so amazing. Tolerant.

CRAWFORD: This choice paled in comparison to that one, maybe? [laughs]

WESTERMAN: And anyway, I was going back to Australia in five years! [laughs] But we didn’t.

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

WESTERMAN: Does that answer the question? [laughs]

CRAWFORD: Yeah.

WESTERMAN: The funny thing is, I don’t think I’m a risk-taker. I don’t think so. I’m very cautious. But there, there were two major risks in my life—first of all coming to California, and then coming here. But I had faith in my abilities. That’s being a little too self-confident, I guess, but—I don’t know.

CRAWFORD: You obviously were doing well, in high school and then in college, and going to the University of Sydney, and—I think for good reason!

WESTERMAN: Things have worked out. I’ve had a wonderful life.

CRAWFORD: You mentioned giving this talk to the liquid crystal group in 1976.

WESTERMAN: Yeah.

CRAWFORD: Were you aware of the Liquid Crystal Institute before you came?

WESTERMAN: Yes, I was, because my advisor at Caltech was John Roberts. He was a very well-known chemist. He had written a textbook that was a standard called Roberts and Caserio, a standard organic text which I’d used, at various stages during my undergraduate years, so I knew of Jack Roberts. He ended up provost of Caltech. Wonderful man. Absolutely wonderful. When I told him I was moving there, he says, “Oh, Glenn Brown.” He knew of Glenn Brown. And he knew of a review article that Glenn Brown had written for Chemical and Engineering News. In fact, that’s what made Glenn Brown’s name known in the world of science. I don’t know how much of that was original contributions on the part of Glenn. I think he had spoken to Glenn Brown. I don’t know if he knew him well. But that was the connection. He said, “Oh, that’s a good position for you.” I don’t think he thought that I was material for Ivy League schools. I don’t know. That’s a value judgment; I don’t know. But I didn’t get any offers from Ivy League schools, top-tier schools, but he thought Kent State was a really good place for me to apply. But I actually published four papers for him that year, so I did well in 10 months! And he was a friend. I talked with him, I kept in contact with him for years. Anyway, be that as it may. So I knew what the liquid crystals were. The funny thing was, in my undergraduate years, I had seen the name “A. Saupe” on papers. I didn’t know he was at the Institute, but I knew of “A. Saupe.” Incidentally, [his] grandson is in the program here!

CRAWFORD: That’s what I’ve heard, yes! [laughs]

WESTERMAN: [Axel], his name is, so he’s also A. Saupe. You've talked to Tony Jákli, have you?

CRAWFORD: Yes.

WESTERMAN: Oh, you have. Okay, yeah. I’m good friends with Tony.

CRAWFORD: Did you ever meet Glenn Brown?

WESTERMAN: Oh, yeah! I knew him well. I knew his widow well, too. Yeah. I knew the house he lived in, and they modified so he could live when he got—I think he had Parkinson’s and dementia at the end. Died a terrible death, I think. I was at the stage where he had trouble talking. He’d slur his words and he was hard to understand. But in the interviewing process, I was interviewed by Glenn Brown.

CRAWFORD: Oh, wow, okay. Yeah, I know from looking through his papers and reading some of the things he wrote that he was very interested in the medical and biological applications or implications of liquid crystals.

WESTERMAN: Yeah.

CRAWFORD: So I imagine someone like yourself that was associated with the medical school and doing this NMR work would have been of interest to him for sure.

WESTERMAN: Yeah, think they were very interested in hiring somebody at the medical school that could collaborate with someone at Kent State. Because the idea of the consortium was big at that time. The medical school is a lot more independent these days.

CRAWFORD: I wonder if you could just talk a little bit more, in the wake of that meeting Glenn Brown or interviewing with him, and then this talk in 1976, how did your relationship with the Liquid Crystal Institute develop over time, or individuals there?

WESTERMAN: It was sort of Bill Doane. He came out to the medical school a couple of times. We had long talks. We talked about membranes, lipid bilayers. I was beginning to read a lot of the literature. I had actually gone up to Canada at the NRC[5], in Ottawa, and gone to a school, up there. There was a guy called Ian Smith there, who was a big guy in deuterium NMR. I was learning about deuterium NMR at that time. This was a new nucleus. I was excited. We had done proton, carbon-13, nitrogen-15; now I was doing deuterium. I had never heard about the quadrupole interaction.

CRAWFORD: What is that?

WESTERMAN: [It’s the interaction between the quadrupole moment of the deuterium nucleus and the electric field of a deuterium-carbon bond. It affects the nuclear spin states of the deuterium nucleus and the size of that interaction is dependent on the orientation of the Carbon-deuteron bond]. [The quadruple interaction is] not important in solutions, because the molecular motion of the molecules in solution averages it to zero, but it’s important in liquid crystals and [in the] solid state, because molecular motions are on a different timescale. So, the CH bond remains fixed in space for long enough for it to [alter] the Zeeman interactions between the magnetic field and the spin, of the nucleus. So, there’s a minor perturbation of the Zeeman spin states in the quadrupole interaction. It’s got to be in systems that have restricted molecular motion. And liquid crystals are such. So it’s a nucleus that’s very useful for liquid crystals, and solid states. Polymers as well. But it’s not much use for the organic chemists. Again, this was a learning process, because there was a lot of quantum mechanics involved. I continually tried to teach myself quantum mechanics, all the time, because I didn’t have a degree in physics, and I think I had had a poor preparation in quantum mechanics as a graduate student. But to me, this is all the more exciting, because here I’m learning about quantum mechanics, and I’m learning about diseases, so I’m covering the whole spectrum.

CRAWFORD: Part of, if I understood correctly, what’s driving this collaborations with the LCI[6]—obviously you and Bill Doane share—you're both working in NMR.

WESTERMAN: Right, yes.

CRAWFORD: But you also have mentioned a couple of times that your research interests were shifting to lipid bilayers and things like that.

WESTERMAN: Right, yes.

CRAWFORD: I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about that turn in your research.

WESTERMAN: If I was doing deuterium NMR, I had to get deuteriums into the [lipid] molecules. Here was where my synthetic background came into play. I could make molecules with the hydrogens replaced by deuterons. So then I got into the chemistry of phospholipids. Phospholipids self-assemble spontaneously in water to form lipid bilayers. Bill then said, “Why don’t you co-advise this student of mine?” Maria Vaz. She was Portuguese, and her husband was also a graduate student at the time. They were both Bill’s, but Bill essentially lent me Maria, as a student, so I co-advised her. He also had an NMR that had the best temperature control system of any NMR that I had come across. It was a liquid flow, not an air flow system, so it was very accurate. Physicists are interested in what is called phase transitions, and lipid bilayers undergo phase transitions, from what’s called a gel to a liquid crystal phase, or really a smectic to nematic phase transition. So then I started synthesizing in my lab. I set up a synthesis lab at the medical school and I started synthesizing phospholipids. Dimyristoylphosphatidylcholine, or lecithin—I made it with the methyl groups on the nitrogen, CD3 groups, deuterium-labeled. We made up model membranes—they're called model membranes—that had some of the properties of biological membranes. But I was also interested in the interaction of cholesterol with the phospholipids, because the red blood cell membrane and most biological membranes have cholesterol as a major component. The question is, what is the role of cholesterol? That was the question we were asking. We were going to make up membranes without cholesterol, we were going to make up membranes with cholesterol. Then we decided protein-lipid interactions are very interesting, because all biological membranes have proteins in them that transport ions, transport a lot of things—water, hormones, a lot of molecules that are transported across the lipid bilayer. How do they get across? A protein is usually involved. So I picked on a peptide called gramicidin, which is a favorite for biophysicists because it has been made with everything labeled. Deuteriums on it, and [nitrogen]-15s. X-ray crystallography has been done on it. Every physical technique has been used to characterize it. So I was studying three systems—phospholipids, phospholipid-cholesterol mixtures, and gramicidin A-phospholipid mixtures. We started off that, and we were interested in studying the phase transition so we would measure the quadrupole splittings. Maria did a lot of the measurements but I was also hands-on. I would get down there onto the NMR and both of us would do measurements. We ended up—we got a paper into PNAS—Proceedings of the National Academy— and we got into PNAS because I knew Harden McConnell. Harden McConnell was a member of the National Academy, and he had moved from Caltech to Stanford, and he was a bigshot. At one of the scientific meetings, I introduced myself and we had a discussion, and I asked him if he would sponsor one of my papers. And, he did. And that was good. That was good. Bill and I decided to write a grant. We decided to write an individual grant because our joint project on cytochrome P450 had not been funded. The big project had not been funded that we had spent so much time and effort on, but which had been a huge learning experience.

CRAWFORD: Was Bill Doane involved in the cytochrome—?

WESTERMAN: No, he wasn’t involved in that. That was separate.

CRAWFORD: That was the NEOUCOM project.

WESTERMAN: Yeah. So we wrote a project on protein-lipid interactions. That was the title. And the people at that stage—there was virtually nobody in the United States at that time doing deuterium NMR on lipid bilayers. There was a Canadian guy, and there was a guy in Switzerland doing it. They had written the major reviews, those two guys. And I had trained with the guy in Canada, at NRC in Ottawa.

CRAWFORD: Oh, really?

WESTERMAN: Well, just for a week. I had gone up there to spend a week in his lab and learn how to manipulate these lipids and how to prepare the samples. I had picked that up there in Canada. So, [Bill and I] got funded. We got funded by the NIH. That helped my career an enormous amount. I was the PI,[7] but Bill was the co-PI, and he was perfectly happy with that. And I think it helped Bill’s career. It might have, because at that stage, he was not the director of the Liquid Crystal Institute—he was applying to be—and he could put on his CV that he had worked with someone at the med school. I’m not taking credit for that; I’m just saying it helped both of us.

CRAWFORD: Right, it was mutually beneficial.

WESTERMAN: Yeah, and I had a wonderful relationship with Bill. He is such an agreeable sort of guy. I know him really well. We have had disagreements, and we've had arguments, but sometimes when you have arguments with people, it helps clear the air, and you actually become closer friends. So I’d say I’m a very good friend of Bill’s. And he has just helped me enormously, because we co-advised three students. At the end, I was writing the papers and and Bill [would say], “Oh, don’t put my name on this,” but in the end I did—I put his name on the paper—because I feel a tremendous amount of gratitude towards him. Meanwhile I got to know everybody in the Institute over the years. Good friends with Adriaan de Vries, and his daughter was one of my medical students.

CRAWFORD: Wow.

WESTERMAN: I hooded her at commencement. Have you met Adriaan? Oh, he’s deceased now.

CRAWFORD: Yeah.

WESTERMAN: You probably haven't met him.

CRAWFORD: No, I didn’t.

WESTERMAN: I became good friends with Alfred. In fact, the two of us were invited to Calabria, and we taught a course in Calabria together. I established this link with Italy, then, and I’ve made a dozen trips to Calabria. That was, again, partly through Bill, because Giuseppe Chidichimo came and did a sabbatical with Bill, and I got to know him, “Pino” as we called him. Has he talked about that?

CRAWFORD: Yeah, because that was the work that led to the—

WESTERMAN: To the displays. I established a separate collaboration with Chidichimo, and I had two of his students, actually, in my lab, come over and do work. I’ve loved my Italian experience. I’ve just loved it.

CRAWFORD: I saw on your resume that you've been a visiting scientist at Calabria a number of times over the years.

WESTERMAN: Yeah, and we exchanged houses.

CRAWFORD: Oh, really!

WESTERMAN: With friends, yeah, so we spent a summer there, or spent three months living there. I did three years of Italian here at Kent State! [laughs]

CRAWFORD: [laughs] Nice!

WESTERMAN: See, science is so rewarding, really. It can be so rewarding. It’s just, in terms of life experiences, it’s—yeah.

CRAWFORD: I know you have obviously had a long-term relationship with the LCI and many of its members. Did you continue to collaborate on research projects, or once this phospholipid bilayer project was over did you shift to other things, or did you work on other projects?

WESTERMAN: Yeah, I did. I started working on anesthesia, anesthetics. I thought I would take these lipid bilayers, modeled lipid bilayers, and add various concentrations of anesthetics. I was mainly working with general anesthetics. Because there’s a huge division between local anesthesia and general anesthesia. At that stage, there were two competing theories. One was that the general anesthetic modified the lipid properties of the bilayer. The other theory was, no, the general anesthetic interacted with a specific protein. So, there were these two huge schools of thought. I was with the lipid side, of course. I actually think the other people are right now. I was in the world of anesthesia for a number of years. I collaborated with people in anesthesia from England and the U.S. and went to several conferences. I didn’t publish many papers in that area. But we did—we studied chloroform interacting. ether, benzyl alcohol, other general anesthetics. I became interested in that field, and that was another huge learning experience. And then after that, I started characterizing systems that mimicked the composition of the stomach after one has ingested a fat diet, a triglyceride diet. Alfred Saupe published a paper in 1965, in his early years here at the Institute, with people from the Cleveland Clinic. He identified lipid phases in the stomach of mice—I think it was mice—and he used the optical properties [of liquid crystalline phases]. Because these are birefringent, these properties, so they interact with plain polarized light in a particular way, because they're partially ordered. He just left it at that; it was a single paper. But then I read that paper, and I decided, well, there’s more work to be done in this. So I made up mixtures of phospholipids, triglycerides, diglycerides, and cholesterol, mimicking the composition of what happens when someone eats triglycerides. The pancreas and the enzymes in the saliva glands are really important in the breakdown of the triglycerides, and they form a lot of monoglycerides and diglycerides. So I started synthesizing, then, deuterium-labeled monoglycerides, triglycerides, cholesterol, phospholipids, and mixing them up, and drawing a phase diagram. A phase diagram really—I don’t know if you've seen this, triangular shapes—where you vary the composition of each of the major components. This axis is the percentage of phospholipid, this axis is along the percentage of triglycerides, and this one is the percentage of cholesterol. Or you can draw any number of these—they're still linear plots, but they're triangles. Different points on this diagram represent different compositions. What’s interesting is that there are points where it’s all micelles. I don’t know if you know what micelles are, but they're not a lipid bilayer, they're actually—soaps form micelles when mixed with water. Micelles typically are surrounded by water, and they have water on the inside. But they're very small. They don’t have a bilayer structure. So, when you wash a dish, actually, you're mixing a detergent with a fat—triglyceride—and that forms micelles, and then water will wash that off the plate. That’s the action of a detergent, so it’s all connected with detergents, and colloid formation, and stuff like that. It’s really interesting. There’s regions in the phase diagram where there’s colloids and micelles, there’s regions where there’s lipid bilayers, and there’s regions where there’s micelles and lipid bilayers. There’s regions where there’s everything— solid material and liquid crystal and micelles. The whole diagram is really fascinating, and it’s fascinating because there are points where cholesterol starts to precipitate out. This led to study on modeled bile systems. The bile is made in the liver, and it’s a mixture of cholesterol, phospholipids, and bile acids. The bile acids are modified cholesterols. They are cholesterols that have been made into a detergent. So you've got a detergent mixed with cholesterol mixed with triglycerides and everything else. What happens is when somebody has gallstones, it’s actually cholesterol that is precipitated out. One major type of gallstones are crystals of cholesterol in the gallbladder. So, understanding the phase diagram of model bile acids is really fascinating. So I started working on the phase diagram of model bile salts and—modeled bile. This was connected with liver metabolism, which was going back to the cytochrome P450, because the cytochrome P450 is involved in converting cholesterol into the detergent bile cells.

CRAWFORD: Wow.

WESTERMAN: It was really interesting, I thought, so we got into another area of medicine. I didn’t publish as many papers in that field as I would have liked to, but I did publish some papers, and I got a single-author paper into the Journal of Lipid Research. Later on in my career I then moved to the fluorine nucleus. I started making compounds with fluorines in them now. I made several cholesterols where hydrogen was replaced with fluorine. Then I got into two collaborations, both of which resulted in publications. One was Harvard Children’s Hospital. Is that where you were? Or Brigham—?

CRAWFORD: No, it was just the Harvard medical campus on Longwood Ave.

WESTERMAN: Oh, okay, because they have several clinical hospitals in the area. I worked with Martin Carey, who was a bigshot in that field. We used the fluorinated cholesterols—we did surface bilayer studies. This is another area where you actually deposit lipids onto a water surface and you study surface tension. We have Elizabeth Mann over here. Do you know her?

CRAWFORD: I know of her.

WESTERMAN: Yeah, she works on that area. So I made fluorinated cholesterol and several other fluorinated compounds, and we used those. I got a nice paper published there. Then I worked with a group in Sweden, University of Umeå, and we did phase separations of phospholipids. When you mix sphingomyelin, which is an important phospholipid—sphingomyelin is found in a lot of biological membranes—and mix that with a phospholipid and you put in cholesterol—and this colleague of mine, Göran Lindblom, a Swedish physical chemist, really good chemist, he was doing NMR but a different type of NMR. He was measuring rates of lateral diffusion in a lipid bilayer. What this is, you measure how fast the lipid molecules are diffusing laterally within the bilayer. What happens at certain lipid compositions is that you've got a lipid bilayer, it’s at a fixed temperature, and you change the composition, and [some islands of lipids] precipitate out [the lipid bilayer]. The rest is a nematic phase. He did some very nice work using proton NMR, fluorine NMR, and deuterium NMR together, combined, to measure rates of lateral diffusion. We published a couple papers in the Biophysical Journal on that.

CRAWFORD: Wow.

WESTERMAN: That was a real hot field at the time. Actually, it’s interesting—the biologists [use the jargon “island formation”] and the physical chemists say, “We've known about phase separations for years.” [laughs]

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

WESTERMAN: We just call it a different term.

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

WESTERMAN: That’s essentially where my research went in the end. I wish I could have gone further, but I ended up, at the end, really having trouble getting funding from NIH. I sent proposals in with Peter Palffy, I sent one in with Oleg Lavrentovich, but in the end, nothing got funded, and I was getting frustrated. I ended up with local money from the American Heart Association, so that was good. That was good, and that kept my work going for a number of years. But in the end, I decided—I had enough. Of getting rejected.

CRAWFORD: Any idea why the NIH wasn’t—was it just that the—?

WESTERMAN: The competition was a lot more severe, then.

CRAWFORD: This was in the late 1990s, early 2000s?

WESTERMAN: Yeah, the 1990s and the early 2000s. By that stage, a lot of people were doing deuterium NMR. We had started out early in the field when there were only a couple of competitors, and now there was a whole bunch of people. And people were getting NMRs the could do all this stuff. I relied on Bill’s machine. Yeah, because my [own] machine [at NEOUCOM], I ended up selling.

CRAWFORD: Oh, really?

WESTERMAN: Yeah, I sold it to a friend of Paul Ukleja, who was one of Bill’s early students. Have you heard the name?

CRAWFORD: Yes.

WESTERMAN: Paul Ukleja. He was a good saxophone player.

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

WESTERMAN: He went to the University of Massachusetts and needed a magnet, so I sold him my magnet. Then I relied entirely on Bill. Bill, by this stage, was thoroughly into the display industry. He didn’t want to collaborate anymore. That was fine.

CRAWFORD: But you were still able to use the NMR?

WESTERMAN: Yeah. And, I had trouble getting graduate students, because I wasn’t a physicist. I had an adjunct appointment in Physics for a long time, and then an adjunct appointment in Chemistry for a long time, but I was in the School of Biomedical Science, which was my avenue for graduate students, and most of those were not interested in physical characterization of systems. In some ways, I felt all of these people are going into molecular biology; I feel like a fish out of water, out there at the medical school. So towards the end of my career, because I had picked up so much medical knowledge, I became the course director, and I was the course director for 15 years.

CRAWFORD: What does that mean, to become the course director?

WESTERMAN: I designed the curriculum, scheduling the people to give the lectures, deciding on which case histories were presented. I had a lot more to do with clinicians. Again, I was very excited about learning the biochemistry of [various diseases]! You know? Because we’d have these case histories where we’d give the biochemistry of [the disease], but we’d have the clinician come in and bring a patient with [that condition], in front of the class, and we present the patient to the class. Again, I was just learning! So, there was this desire just to learn more stuff. Gradually, I became less and less competitive, I think, on the national stage in the field of deuterium NMR. But that was all right with me. I mean, by that stage, I had achieved my professorship, and then when I decided I’d like to do something else, I was then awarded emeritus status. I was satisfied with that. Then John West offered me a job, a soft money job, in organic chemistry, so for two years I made chiral dopants for the display company, Kent Displays. I was working with a guy from Kodak, Rochester, whose lab had been closed. He was [an excellent] organic chemist. He and I made all of these chiral dopants and we’d send them over for testing to see about their helical twisting power. You have heard that term, too?

CRAWFORD: Yeah.

WESTERMAN: You've heard all of the jargon, probably.

CRAWFORD: A lot of the jargon, yes! [laughs]

WESTERMAN: None of that could be published, because it was all proprietary. But it was going back to my roots. I got back in the lab, and I had a student work for me. It was fun. I was doing synthesis again! It was a complete circle.

CRAWFORD: That was two years after you took emeritus status in 2005?

WESTERMAN: [No], it was 2009, I think? See, I gave up my tenure in 2005, got emeritus status, and then ran as course director on a half-time salary for four years, I think, and then got the offer from John West to do synthesis, so I did that.

CRAWFORD: That makes sense. It’s just about noon.

WESTERMAN: Oh, is it? Oh, it is!

CRAWFORD: If I could take just a couple more minutes, I just wanted to ask you some broader questions. Obviously you had a very long career that spanned several decades. Just having talked about all these different phases of your career and different projects you've worked on, looking back, what would you say were some of your most significant achievements or accomplishments in that time?

WESTERMAN: Some of them were as a postdoc, working with George Olah. We prepared some ions that hadn’t been prepared, so that was very novel. Also I established a biosynthetic pathway for a secondary metabolite, a fungal metabolite, at the Australian National University. That was with Arthur Birch, and he was the guy that really gave me the research fellowship. He’s a famous organic chemist, of the Birch reduction. Every organic chemist knows about the Birch reduction. So I worked with a very famous man, really, in Australian chemical history. He was professor at Manchester before he was offered the position at the Australian National University. I’ve worked with famous people! Yeah, but I’m not famous! [laughs] But that’s okay! I’m happy. I’m satisfied and happy with my life. So, that was one. And then doing the phase diagram of intestinal phospholipids, I think. I didn’t mention, I had a colleague in the Chemistry Department—Prosser, his name was—and he was here for a number of years, and he left. He went back to Canada. But I did some work on that, using fluorinated compounds again. We got a PNAS paper out of that and a few other papers. I’m proud about that work. But he was the primary person there. I’d say, to be quite honest, if I had focused more, if I had been more focused, I think I would have done better, career-wise. I’m happy, but I think—I don’t like the trend of just more and more narrowing of one’s research interests, becoming more and more of a specialist. I think that’s sad, really. Because I talk to a lot of colleagues—and see, I’ve had the advantage of being exposed to physicists, chemists, biologists, and physicians, and it has been such an amazing education, I think. To me, I’d say, why would someone be so narrow? I find a lot of my colleagues—the chemists, they really know their chemistry but they don’t know anything else. Similarly, a lot of the physicians don’t know anything about the [basic science]. In some respects, in terms of a life education, I feel I’ve had the best. And, I’m not boasting.

CRAWFORD: I understand that.

WESTERMAN: I mean, I’m being completely honest with you. You have the ability to draw out—

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

WESTERMAN: —personal details. You have an amazing ability. [laughs]

CRAWFORD: [laughs] Thank you. But I think it’s interesting, too—I think the flip side of what you're saying about your own experience and the ways in which it was rewarding to you, having these kind of interdisciplinary interactions and being able to work across specializations—I think the flip side of that is a comment I don’t know that you're making explicitly about—it sounds like what you're saying is the discipline of science as a career is in some ways structured to encourage or reward people in certain ways such that they become hyperspecialized.

WESTERMAN: Yes, yes.

CRAWFORD: It’s not that you're saying that that’s necessarily bad, but there are some drawbacks to that system, perhaps.

WESTERMAN: Yes, yes, yes.

CRAWFORD: Is that something that you would like to see change in the future?

WESTERMAN: It’s hard to change it, because the funding agencies—it’s the NIH and NSF[8] that are really determining this.

CRAWFORD: Right, and driving this kind of situation.

WESTERMAN: And driving this narrow education. But also you don’t want these generalists, too, because what is society doing, just giving me a general education and paying for it?

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

WESTERMAN: You know? I see that argument, too. You want advances in the field, in the frontier areas. You've got to have those advances, and so you've got to have these specialists. It’s kind of sad; I read the biography of Huxley—

CRAWFORD: T.H. Huxley.

WESTERMAN: —and I see that he was a generalist. In those days, you could afford to be. You can’t, today.

CRAWFORD: It was a lot cheaper to do science in the 19th century, in some ways. [laughs]

WESTERMAN: You virtually had to be—I think of the early organic chemists like Emil Fischer and others, these German chemists—the graduate students paid to work for them. You know? And they were all individually wealthy. So, science is just different these days.

CRAWFORD: I wonder also—I’m curious about your thoughts on this, just as somebody talking to you—I think it also has to do with the fact that you're at a medical school. You're teaching medical students, who are, depending on what kind of medicine they're going into or whatever, there is a kind of generality to it, right? Because you have to know many different things about the body and disease and things like that in order to be effective. Obviously physicians specialize as well, but the human body is such a complex interface of different systems and different ways of understanding it—at the molecular level, at the organic system level, and so forth—I mean, I don’t need to tell you this!—so I take your point about generalists, but it sounds like—and again correct me if I’m wrong—I think there’s something about what you were giving back in terms of teaching and education and so forth.

WESTERMAN: Yeah. I’ve had a very satisfying career in that regard, because I’ve had doctors write to me and give me an instance when they remembered a case history. I remember one particular case, he remembered this rare disease that we had, and he had a patient with it, and as a result, he was able to save that patient’s life, with a liver transplant. And I—to me, that’s so satisfying, to hear that. There were several instances [when] that happened. I like lecturing, too. And I got the teaching award seven times, from the medical school, so—

CRAWFORD: Yes, I saw on your CV! [laughs]

WESTERMAN: I mean, teaching an unpopular subject. But, I don’t know.

CRAWFORD: Teaching is an art and a skill as well.

WESTERMAN: Yeah. I listened to so many bad sermons as a kid that I decided I was not going to give another bad sermon in my life! [laughs]

CRAWFORD: [laughs] I think that that’s maybe a good place to end this! I think that’s a really nice sentiment. I just want to thank you, Dr. Westerman, for your time, and for sharing your story with me and with this project. I really appreciate it.

WESTERMAN: Oh, yeah. Well, I’ve enjoyed it. I’ve enjoyed it. And I didn’t know how we’d fill three hours!

CRAWFORD: Yeah. [laughs] Thank you very much.

WESTERMAN: Yeah, yeah. I really appreciate it.

[End]

________________
[1] Nuclear magnetic resonance
[2] Non-tenure track
[3] Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine
[4] National Institutes of Health
[5] National Research Council
[6] Liquid Crystal Institute
[7] Principal Investigator
[8] National Science Foundation