Oral History Interview with Mary Neubert by Matthew Crawford

September 30, 2022
October 14, 2022

Liquid Crystal Oral History Project
Department of History
Kent State University

Transcript produced by Sharp Copy Transcription


MATTHEW CRAWFORD: My name is Matthew Crawford. I'm a Historian of Science in the Department of History at Kent State University. I am interviewing Dr. Mary E. Neubert, former Synthesis Chemist and Senior Research Fellow at the Liquid Crystal Institute at Kent State University. Today’s date is September 30th, 2022. We are conducting this interview at Dr. Neubert’s home in Hudson, Ohio. Dr. Neubert, thank you for agreeing to sit for this interview. I wanted to start off with a few questions about your early life. I wonder if you could tell us when you were born and where you grew up and what your early childhood was like.

MARY NEUBERT: I was born in Jeannette, Pennsylvania, in 1939, April 28th. Jeannette is not a big town, but it’s not a small town either.

CRAWFORD: Did you have a large family or a small family?

NEUBERT: I'm one of five children. It’s a mixed family because my father's first wife died, and he had two children. Then he married my mother and had three of us. I'm the last one. I don’t remember much of [my] early childhood.

CRAWFORD: Were you interested in science as a child?

NEUBERT: No. I was probably more interested in art than science. But sometime around maybe sixth or seventh grade, something like that, I had an experience with a neighbor friend. She had a chemistry set that had belonged to her brother who had died. We played with that, and that seemed to stimulate an interest in science. There was nobody in my family or anything like that. My father had quit school in sixth grade to help support his family. He had obtained training in die-making through a correspondence course, which I find very amazing. My mother had been a schoolteacher in grades one through six. Both came from families without fathers, difficult times.

CRAWFORD: Did your family—your parents or your siblings—encourage your interest in science?

NEUBERT: No. I can say that pretty much I had very little encouragement. Generally my family was based on the principles of families at that time, that the father was the breadwinner and the mother took care of the family. It was generally well-known, although it was never said to me, that a woman was supposed to work for a few years after graduation and then get married and raise a family and no longer work. I can’t say they were against a woman working, but that generally was the most acceptable by everybody in the family.

I did not feel discrimination at all. It was never discussed. It was never something that I understood or anything like that. My father was a disciplinarian, but he seemed to be able to solve problems by working hard, and he made his own concrete blocks for his shop, and you know, solved problems. That's the only major thing I remember about him, is that he was able to solve problems. My older brother and sister were of course a good bit older than me, so they were more like aunts and uncles than brother and sister. I'm sure there was a lot of controversy when I wanted to go to become a chemist, but most of it was not passed on to me.

CRAWFORD: Did you know when you graduated high school that you wanted to go into chemistry?

NEUBERT: By the time I was in high school, I knew I wanted to become a chemist. That would require a college degree, of course. I was naïve in thinking, well, the money would come from somewhere. I did not take the college prep course because they did not offer a course in science, although you had courses in like Latin. But I took everything else required of a college prep course, so I had the background to go to college. My sister, who is only a year older than me, she went the normal route, did secretary and so forth. But here’s me that's stuck in the course [laughs] and how was I going to ever do it?

I guess I was very overly optimistic in the beginning. I applied to the University of Pittsburgh and had this idea I would go there. I got accepted, but then there was the question of where the money was coming from. The University of Pittsburgh had a program for women that you could pay for your room and board by living with a family in Pittsburgh and helping take care of the kids, so I signed up for that, and did that for two years.

Once I got into Chemistry and taking chemistry courses, I got involved in the Chemistry Department and professors and I started getting part-time jobs washing [glassware] in the chemistry research lab. I took other jobs, too, any job that became available that I could apply for. So I earned some money. Still not enough to pay totally, but my mother helped me out, and somehow—and I don’t know how I ever did it, semester to semester—I never knew from one semester to another whether I would have the money to pay the tuition. And there were no credit cards. I did not want to borrow money and have my mother to have to back up a loan.

Lo and behold, somehow I managed to do it. There was at least one professor who tried to help get scholarships. I was not an “A” student. Despite what people often think—that if you're a scientist, you're some kind of brain—I was not an “A” student, and I could not get a scholarship. But in my final year, the Dean of Women’s office gave me a federal loan. Not a big loan, but that helped. So somehow I got enough money scraped together every semester to pay for my tuition and started applying for jobs when I graduated. I belonged to the American Chemical Society, the student group, and I subscribed to Chemical & Engineering News, and they had ads for jobs. I did not get much help from the University, but there was a job opening in Syracuse, New York, at Bristol Labs, the drug company. I had worked as an undergraduate on a grant for undergraduates on a research project, so I already knew some basic techniques for doing research. I had to give a seminar and write reports and stuff like that.

CRAWFORD: I know you had this National Science Foundation Undergraduate Fellowship. Was that the Fellowship?

NEUBERT: That was it. It was pretty much I hung around the Chemistry Department and the professors provided some help along this line. It was not something I applied for. It was they got the money and they decided to give it to me and a couple other students that were involved. So, I really think this was a real help, because then when I went on an interview with Bristol Labs, I could tell them what I had done. I had been prepared for presentation, and I knew my structures and things like that. I feel these kinds of positions for undergraduates, interns or whatever, as long as they are supervised properly, they're really a big help.

CRAWFORD: That work would have been with Dr. Robert Levine?

NEUBERT: Levine.

CRAWFORD: And Dr. Marwan Kamal? Was that another professor that you worked with at that time?

NEUBERT: [He was] a postdoc. [I worked for him.]

CRAWFORD: I got those names from your dissertation.

NEUBERT: Yeah, and I don’t remember whether there was a publication or not. There’s at least one publication from Bristol Labs that my name is on.

CRAWFORD: Do you remember, were you helping them with a particular research project or just doing sort of—?

NEUBERT: I was helping him with his research project. It was on pyridine compounds. Later on, I ended up then writing book chapters for pyridine. I had some experience with that at Bristol Labs, too. Once I graduated I felt obligated to help my mother, to return some of the money that she had helped me, so I worked at Bristol Labs until she died, and then that's when I applied to graduate school.

CRAWFORD: I do have some questions about your time at Bristol Labs, but majoring in chemistry as a woman in the late 1950s and early ‘60s, were there other women chemistry majors in your program? What was that experience like?

NEUBERT: I had a very close relationship with [Geri].1 We're still friends. Pre-med, in chemistry. She had a part-time job in the Chemistry Department. We became very close friends. I don’t know of any others. There were very few women in the labs. But I did not grow up hearing about discrimination, and I never recognized the discrimination that happened. One case—a chemistry professor had student assistants for demonstrations—nobody told me this; I did not know this—that these were available. I did not get it. And yet, everybody in that class, in the chemistry class, knew I was the one most interested in chemistry. I mean, I was really deeply into it. Had my own lab. My brother helped me build my own lab. I'd walk to the public library and get books in chemistry.

CRAWFORD: What was it that attracted you to chemistry?

NEUBERT: I don’t know. I just liked to see what would happen when the chemicals—at one point, my family bought me a chemistry set. Sears Roebuck, of course. It turns out that ACS did a survey once and found out that it was common for chemists to have had experience with a chemistry set. Now, this chemistry set was not any great experiments. They were simply making compounds and stuff like that. But I had a big setup in the basement. I went through the whole lab book and everything. Yeah, so as far as working in the lab, by the time I go to a job, I have much more experience than most students. But getting into further work, I loved running reactions and trying to make a compound. That's all I can say about why was I so excited about it.

CRAWFORD: It sounds like it just clicked.

NEUBERT: There was discouragement, attempts tried to—I had a neighbor woman that I really liked, and she asked me what I was going to do after graduation. I says, well, I wanted to go to graduate school. And the answer was, “You'll never go to graduate school.” Now, I can point this out, but if you're going to let somebody like that discourage you, forget it. Did not discourage me. I still went to school. I think it was about three years that I was at Bristol. They were very pleased with what I did. I worked on penicillins.

CRAWFORD: Really!

NEUBERT: Designing, synthesizing new penicillins. They are not easy to work with because they're not real stable. I had a good teacher. I worked on an apprenticeship sort of thing. I had by then gotten good recommendations. I started applying to graduate school. I still didn’t have any feeling for discrimination, until one of the schools I applied to was MIT. I didn’t really want to go to MIT, but one of my senior coworkers got his degree there, and he was convinced that it wasn’t what you knew but who you knew. So obviously I knew somebody. But I didn’t get in, and I was actually told it was because I was a woman. Because they had had bad experience with female graduate students ending up quitting because they got pregnant. I considered this—well, it’s discrimination to a certain point, but I can understand, because there's investment and money here, in assistantships and stuff like that, and I think it’s as much a responsibility of the woman involved. But on the other hand, no one would tell you this today. Anyway, it didn’t discourage me, and I went to Rochester.

CRAWFORD: I want to make sure I'm understanding. After finishing your undergraduate degree at Pittsburgh, you searched for and got this job at Bristol Laboratories. The primary goal in getting that job was to help pay back your mom for the financial assistance she gave you for your undergraduate education. But your plan coming out of undergraduate was to go to graduate school?

NEUBERT: I would have gone directly to graduate school. Yeah, there was a job I had as an undergraduate in addition to dishwashing. I worked in the Graduate School of Public Health. They had a grant on studying the waters in the rivers in Pittsburgh for radioactive materials. I had taken a course in nuclear chemistry. When I had enough credits in everything required, I took more chemistry courses, so this was another thing, and a different experience. They convinced me to apply to graduate school there. They wanted to accept me and everything. But by then I had the job offer there at Bristol Labs, and I really felt I'd prefer organic synthesis.

CRAWFORD: Your time at Bristol Labs, that takes you from the world of academic science now into the world of industrial science. Was there a significant difference in the two settings, or did it seem fairly continuous in terms of the type of work you were doing?

NEUBERT: I don’t think there's a big difference between the actual work in the chemistry and stuff like that. The big difference is in where your priorities are. I feel it’s an advantage to be exposed to both, but it’s not always possible. The working world needs to come out with a product that they can make, so decisions are based on, “What do you think is going to be the material?” In the academic world, it’s more trying to prove a theory or an idea of some sort, develop a new synthesis method, procedures, or whatever. I really feel both are needed, but you get all kinds of problems, especially in academics, about wanting to just make new things and not contribute to the advancement of chemistry; let’s put it that way.

I think a person exposed to both sides can then work in either side and contribute significantly. Now, a lot of my papers, my own publications, are just studying the effect of structure on liquid crystal properties. There's controversy in why I am not making a new material that the physicists want in their studies or something like that. So there's this conflict. Yet at the same time, if they come up with a compound they want to study that's not commercially available, they need me to make it, and then they want me to do routine synthesis and stuff.

I trained undergraduate students, too. They worked for me. I think they were able to do better after they graduated. Usually, my students got a job. I was surprised when one of my students in his senior year was always reading advanced organic chemistry books, and he was obviously interested in chemistry. He was working for me. I asked him what he was going to do after graduation, and he told me, “Oh, I guess I'll get a job.” I told him, “You should be going to graduate school.” That's all I said. And he started applying to graduate school. He couldn't get into Rochester because he was applying too late. He went to Case Western Reserve and got his degree there. He didn’t have to do a teaching assistantship because of the experience in my group. He took care of one of the NMR instruments. He got his degree and ended up getting a postdoc at Harvard.

CRAWFORD: Wow, wow.

NEUBERT: So now this is when the student does better than the [laughs] teacher. He has worked his way up through various drug companies. He’s out at Pfizer now.

CRAWFORD: Do you mind telling us his name, if you recall it?

NEUBERT: His name is [Jirousek]. Mike, I think. Names become difficult.

CRAWFORD: Sure. But Mike [Jirousek] is what—?

NEUBERT: I think I would have to get the spelling for you, for you to know this last name.

CRAWFORD: We can check on that, for sure. I know you said that you think experience in industry and academia is useful to chemists, or maybe scientists in general. It sounds like you're saying that your experience both in industry and academia was helpful to your own students as well. Is that correct?

NEUBERT: Yes. I think a lot of times, the professors don’t have an industrial background. There are a few who have, and they're usually tougher on their students, because they know what is needed. But yeah, the thing is, you're probably going to get a job in the industrial world unless you want to go into teaching. Teaching is a tough thing, from trying to get tenure and stuff like that, and there are a limited number of jobs available. So instead of thinking, well, if you go into industry you're escaping the research. And that's not true, of course. That's not totally true. There's a lot of research going on in industry.

CRAWFORD: In your experience, either from this time that we're talking about when you were working at Bristol, or going into your PhD, was that generally the sensibility in the academic scientific community, that if you were going into industry you were sort of escaping from research, as you said?

NEUBERT: It depends on what the student wants to do. I liked making compounds and I became very skilled at it, so I was very valuable in that sense. But I was not real good at the theory and new ideas and stuff like that. Also, there is the teaching component to academia, and some of the professors really enjoy teaching. There is a problem that once they get tenure, some of them ease off and they don’t do as much. I think this is a problem of getting older in general, that your interest is going to change. I know mine did. Your interest is going to change, and you may or may not—some people—like Dr. Brown was totally interested in and excited about liquid crystals all the way.

CRAWFORD: This is Dr. Glenn Brown, the founder of the Liquid Crystal Institute.

NEUBERT: Yes. He’s the one that got everybody interested in liquid crystals. We’d go to a meeting, and I would see him talking to everybody at that meeting, trying to find out what they were doing, and then inviting many of them to come and give seminars. That interest and excitement and everything, and push to get people interested, I attribute that as a major thing.

CRAWFORD: Sure. So, you worked at Bristol Labs for a couple of years and then went on to pursue a PhD in Chemistry at the University of Rochester. I'm just curious why you decided to go to the University of Rochester.

NEUBERT: Well, the person I worked for at Bristol Labs got his degree from the University of Rochester, so he wrote a letter of recommendation and recommended this school. I applied to a couple other schools. I got into one very well-known graduate school, but without an assistantship, and I needed an assistantship. I had other friends at Bristol Labs that had gone to Rochester. They took me for a visit, and I liked it, so I didn’t pursue anything else after that—got that accepted.

CRAWFORD: What was it that you liked about the program?

NEUBERT: The University of Rochester?

CRAWFORD: Yeah.

NEUBERT: Well, I would look at the organic synthesis stuff, and Marshall Gates, of course, did the first synthesized morphine that proved the structure of morphine. So I knew there was at least one good organic synthesis chemist, and probably more applied than many would be. He worked with drug companies on designing, and we worked on trying to make new morphine compounds that would not have the side effect[s]. So, yeah, I'm not sure that I thought any more about it than that.

CRAWFORD: Were you aware of Dr. Gates’ work before applying? Did you specifically apply to work with him, or were you more just applying to the program?

NEUBERT: The visit, I talked to one of the professors—there was another professor, Autry, that was not applied, and I talked to him, too. I guess I was probably more affected by having worked at Bristol and thinking I wanted to go along in something more like that. Now, when I got the PhD, I went back to Bristol. I struggled through graduate school. People, here again, think you're a brain, and you don’t have any problems. I almost failed out. I keep telling people that I almost failed out as an undergraduate and almost failed out as a graduate student.

But I was able to recover and pass the written exams [in graduate school], so then it was a matter of finishing the research. Of course I had an advantage when it came to finishing research and trying to get a job, but there weren’t many job offers. It was a time that not many people were hiring. But [Dr. Cheney] at Bristol Labs wanted me back, so I got an offer from them, so I went back to Bristol Labs. It turned out they had a new research administrator, and I did not really want to work on penicillin, and they wanted me to work on penicillin, and so things just did not work out. So, I lost that job, and checked in to the unemployment office, which didn’t help any.

But went back to Chemical & Engineering News [laughs], and found a postdoc at Washington University School of Medicine. What the professor needed—this was biochemistry—he needed pure samples of [fatty acids]. Generally you have a mixture of chain length, and he needed the pure samples for monolayer studies. He was looking at the role of lipids in blood clotting. So we had to start with 50 pounds of frozen egg yolks [because there are fatty acids in egg yolks]. The professor had a relationship with a slaughterhouse, because his students were working on the proteins in the blood, so we got this big batch of—and it all had to be chromatographed. Well, I can tell you most organic synthesis would turn and run if you had them to do something like that—

CRAWFORD: And why is that?

NEUBERT: —but it didn’t bother me.

CRAWFORD: Why would organic synthesis—?

NEUBERT: Well, I was used to working on a larger scale. By this time, and even more so today, students in the universities don’t work on a large scale, pretty much. They convince them to work on a small scale to save chemicals and environmental recycling stuff. There's no reason why they should be afraid of working on a large scale, but they are. I had them in my group. I'd ask them, “Well, what scale do you want to work on?”; “Five grams.” I says, “Double it.” And that's not a lot. Oh, they thought that was terrible! They did not want to work on that scale. There are some differences, but there's no reason why you can’t adopt it. But they have something against them. I don’t know what it is.

CRAWFORD: Was that something that you learned from your experience working at Bristol and in industry, working on a large scale?

NEUBERT: Yeah, overall. I'd say back when I went into organic chemistry, you maybe did your reactions on a ten-gram scale or something like that. I don’t remember exactly what it was, but it was a much larger scale than what they want them to work on. They want them to work on, say, maybe one gram. Then whatever product you get, if you get 100%, it’s still going to be impure, and it needs to be purified, and you need enough to do that.

On top of that, in liquid crystals, you need enough materials that the physicists could use the material. When we sent materials to the people all over the world who were talking to our people and exchanging information—“Well, how about using this material?”—and they could get it from us. Particularly important was Doane’s research. He needed deuterated materials, which is even harder to do on a large scale. And we did it. Our materials, we worked as hard as we could to get them as pure as we could, using the techniques available at the time. Now, you have many minor impurities like chain length and stuff like that, but we sent materials to—the Ukrainian medal was because they got one of our deuterated materials.

Now, a physicist, despite any attempt to do so, a physicist is not going to go in the lab and make it. Organic synthesis is a messy, smelly whatever. I tried to minimize it by hoods and stuff, but it’s not the most pleasant thing to do. If you want to keep your hands clean all the time, you don’t want to do organic synthesis. So the physicists were glad to have us make their material.

CRAWFORD: This was at the Liquid Crystal Institute, when you were working there?

NEUBERT: Yeah. This was something new at the beginning. This was when I was hired. They had gotten an NSF grant and they wanted to study these new materials that had been discovered, but they couldn't get the materials they wanted. There were a few that were commercially available; they weren’t the materials they wanted to study. They didn’t have the phases they needed. In that grant, they asked for money—I was not there, so I could not tell them—but [Derry] Fishel was [the] organic chemist [for the group], and he probably wrote the synthesis part. They asked for a person to be hired to, in his case, make deuterated materials.

CRAWFORD: That was for the postdoc that you got in 1972?

NEUBERT: That was my position.

CRAWFORD: Your position, okay. What are deuterated liquid crystals?

NEUBERT: If you have water, for example, you know it’s H20. Well, there's also D20, deuterated water. It’s simply having a higher weight of material in the atomic structure. But it does mean you have to go back to the very beginning of the synthesis, because you have to start with deuterated material. Now, you can make it yourself, which is not easy, or there are deuterated materials you can buy, but they're very expensive. You need extra money, then, to do this sort of thing, and you're generally going to work on a smaller scale.

Now, the deuterium substitutes the hydrogen in say, Bill Doane’s work, in his NMR work. NMR looks at all the hydrogens in the molecule. We could select a certain—depending on the chemistry—of where we could put that deuterium. If he wanted to look at the deuteriums in that area, he could use our material. That's what we were able to do for him. It’s no small thing, to convince these people who are getting a pot of this money to spend money on things like this, when most physicists never had a course in organic chemistry and they don’t know what it’s for. I even had one of the chemists think we could just throw the compound in a deuterated solvent or [chemical] and get the deuteriums where [we wanted them]. Well, you can’t do it. The chemistry doesn't allow you to do it. You have to know chemistry to know what you can and can’t do.

But we were able to do it. We were able to put deuterium in. Usually it was on a carbon close to where the chain is attached, in the chain, with the first or second carbon in the chain. There were reactions we could use to do that. Bill Doane did his research on this. He would not have been able to do it without it. So that's where I come in. By this time, I've had some experience [with this synthesis but not with deuterated materials]. It turns out I believe Dr. [Gates] recommended me as the best synthesis chemist he had seen in a while. That's what was needed: somebody who could not only make it but make enough that they could use, and that it would be pure. There was an attempt at one point to go to China—Dr. Doane talked to the Chinese—“Oh, we could make it for you too.” But how pure is it going to be?

CRAWFORD: The process of synthesizing liquid crystals, was it known at the time? Did you have to develop any new techniques for synthesizing liquid crystals?

NEUBERT: We used mostly methods already [known]. Maybe not with the liquid crystals, but with chemistry, organic chemists. Reduction is one way to get your deuterium in. I spent some of my time in the first year trying to do exchanges, like we mentioned, with acid and stuff. I found it just wasn’t selective enough. At the same time, off across the ocean, the British were also working on similar sorts of things, with putting deuterium in the liquid crystals, so they had some chemists that worked on it, too. We actually used some of their methods to make the materials we needed to make.

CRAWFORD: Were they making these deuterated liquid crystals to study their structure? Is that what the deuterium is there for?

NEUBERT: Yeah. They were there to study the structure of the liquid crystal phase. I always have to add this lecture—liquid crystals are not crystals. Kent State gives me an award that's cut out of a solid crystal-like plastic. It’s not even an actual crystal. They are phased in between the liquid and the solid. These are different phases, so there's different interest [by] different people, depending on whatever phase they're looking at. The ideal thing is to have the liquid crystal phase at room temperature, and that rarely ever happens, so you make mixtures or something like that. In the meantime, while I'm working, the British have come out with this cyanobiphenyl compound that is more likely to be used in displays than what we were working on.

CRAWFORD: That compound that the British came up with, what was the name of it?

NEUBERT: It was George Gray’s work. That's the company he’s associated with, where they buy the materials. I haven't kept up to date on any of that so I don’t know what’s available today.

CRAWFORD: When you came to the Liquid Crystal Institute, was that the first time you had heard about and worked with liquid crystals?

NEUBERT: Yes. Actually, once, [at] University of Rochester, Dr. Brown must have gone and given a lecture there, because I remember hearing a lecture on liquid crystals. But it didn’t stimulate me at all. It didn’t do anything at the time. It’s something I remember from after working at the Liquid Crystal Institute. I had people at Bristol Labs [after] I went to work with liquid crystals say, “We think we made a material that probably has a liquid crystal phase, and we didn’t know what it was.” Organic chemists test the purity of their material by a sharp melting point. They didn’t have a sharp melting point. Said, “Send me the sample.” Lo and behold, it has a liquid crystal phase. It was a whole new thing! So how do you get people to do the thing that allows them to discover something like this? It’s usually not always so well-planned as we ask them to do it. There's something that Bill did, discovered a mixture that he discovered by accident. That pops up, and you see it. But if they're not doing anything, they're not going to find anything.

CRAWFORD: Is that one of the properties of a compound that has a liquid crystal phase, that it doesn't have a distinctive single melting point?

NEUBERT: Yeah. Now, if it’s at room temperature, of course it’s like a cloudy liquid, more likely. And then, the interesting thing is, I can put this under a microscope, and it can look similar to a liquid crystal—I mean, to a crystal. If it’s in the smectic phase, for instance, it has a very well-defined pattern and stuff. You can identify it in different liquid crystals. They're very beautiful. If it’s a nematic phase, which is what they use in displays, it has threads running through it and a totally different structure. I don’t know, maybe it takes a chemist to know phase transitions, but the physicists barely caught it.

CRAWFORD: I want to talk about some of your work with microscopic studies and your work at the Liquid Crystal Institute. I just have one quick question going back to the earlier trajectory of your career. You did your PhD at Rochester and then went back to Bristol Labs. When you went to start working on your PhD, were you planning on going back into industry, or were you thinking about staying in academia?

NEUBERT: I did not want to go back to Bristol Labs. It’s the only job offer I had. I even asked if I could work on one of the other types of drugs. No, I had been trained as the penicillin person. But I had worked on morphine compounds [as well].

CRAWFORD: Were you ever considering becoming an academic, like a professor?

NEUBERT: No. They offered me the job.

CRAWFORD: Oh, yeah?

NEUBERT: After I had returned to—I was at the Liquid Crystal Institute, and they were trying to start an academic program for liquid crystals [in 1996], and they wanted me to be the chemist part. The thing is, what they really wanted was somebody to talk about the chemical properties and stuff of the liquid crystal. On top of that, I had been working for the Institute for quite a while, so I was kind of aware of how the academic system worked. Of course, the problem was, with my position, it was not a permanent position. It could easily be wiped out at any time. They said I was too valuable for them to do that, but it always could have happened.

I never wanted to go into teaching because I never liked getting up, giving a lecture to a classroom of students. I liked teaching individuals—I still do—because each person is different and requires a different approach. That's what we did in my group. One girl, for instance, wasn’t doing good in chemistry, but she loved running reactions on a large scale, so I said, “Give her all the large-scale reactions nobody else wants to do.” Things like that. Then recognizing the student that should be going on to graduate school.

The other thing is—and I'm sure you're aware of this—as a professor, you get involved in all these meetings and discussions and decisions that you're spending your time on. Research takes time. It takes a lot of time. What I often see happening is a professor starts out as a young professor and has the energy and everything to put in the extra time and everything. Then as he works towards a full professor, he does less and less. Because I think we don’t deal with reality very well. You want somebody to do everything, and some people, there are some few people who can do it, but most people can’t do it and do everything well. The important thing to me is that you do something well, whether it’s teaching—you know, they neglect the students. When I was a student at Pitt, the professors all had the chemistry classes at 8:00 in the morning so they could go and do research in the afternoon. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with those professors, but deal with the reality of it, instead of trying to make it something it isn’t.

CRAWFORD: I do understand what you're saying, the different roles that professors have to play.

NEUBERT: What I got at times was I spent too much time on my own research. But then if I didn’t do that, I didn’t have enough publications or something. Well, they wanted me to publish things before I felt they were ready. That's another problem at a university. Then what I see happening is people breaking up their research into several papers instead of doing what I did, which was waiting until I got all of the data for all of the materials, and you had that. Is that what we want? If you really want quality work, it’s going to take more time, whether it’s quality work for the student or for the researcher.

CRAWFORD: Would it be fair to say that some of the decisions that you made in terms of the different jobs that you took or the different positions that you took, or like you're saying, you decided not to take the offer to become a faculty member, did you do that because research was your real priority and that was your real focus?

NEUBERT: No, it was more I didn’t want to teach.

CRAWFORD: Oh, okay. [laughs]

NEUBERT: By that time in my life, I'm getting older, and so working in the lab is more difficult. I'm no longer working in the lab and stuff. I'm tired of writing research proposals and stuff like that. So, it was time to come up for writing a new proposal to NSF in the group, coming up with new ideas. Liquid crystals, a lot of compounds had been made by this time. The chemistry is changing. The chemistry has changed. Things are more difficult and stuff like that. I probably had reached a point like so many people where I didn’t have the energy to start something new, or wanted to work in a different area, something totally different.

CRAWFORD: This would have been later in your career, like the late 1990s, around then, or—?

NEUBERT: I retired in 2002. That's 30 years I was at the Institute. That had been my goal for a while by then. I felt I put enough into it at that point. Things like the microscope textures, I really enjoyed.

CRAWFORD: I wonder if we could talk a little bit more about your work identifying liquid crystal phases by their microscopic textures. What got you doing that type of work?

NEUBERT: Because when I made a material, if I wanted to know whether it had a liquid crystal phase, I had to do microscope work. There's a couple ways. DSC shows you the thermal changes, so you can see that. Then the melting point, same thing.

CRAWFORD: What does DSC stand for?

NEUBERT: Differential scanning calorimetry.

CRAWFORD: Thank you. Differential scanning calorimetry, okay. Got it.

NEUBERT: Dave Johnson got into this area of studying in that way. But there's nothing visual. This is all heat absorption. It’s that sort of thing. Which is important. There's x-ray crystallography, of course, but especially in the early days, you were not going to do x-ray crystallography before computers became available. Computers made analysis of x-ray diagrams much easier. There was a person doing that in the group. I'm not talking about structure of the phase; I'm talking about identification of the phase according to what has already been done in the literature. The Germans did a lot of work on this. So some of the compounds that had been made, there had been some compounds made that their phases had been reported.

I come into the area; I don’t know anything about it. Dr. Saupe, who is the one that probably has used the microscope the most, was pretty quick in his instruction, so it became obvious to me I needed a collection of compounds to use as standards for these phases that were reported, so if I see something new, I have something to compare it with that was already known. It requires a pretty good microscope, and a heating stage. Virtually what it means is doing the same thing as a scanning calorimetry does, but using the microscope to look at what you're seeing on the material itself.

The thing about liquid crystals is they have some of the properties of crystals, which is the anisotropy. Light goes in two different directions and you see crystals, the beautiful crystals you've seen. Well, you can do that with the smectic phases of liquid crystals, and you see not crystal structures but things similar to that, and it changes with each type. If you go to the nematic phase, it flows, and you see a different texture. So you put the sample on the heating stage, and melt it, and then heat it up, and see where your changes are, and then cool it down and see where you are again. Because sometimes it will show up on cooling but not on heating. So it’s very simple. How do you learn how to do this? You just look at things and you spend a lot of time on taking pictures and stuff like that. I had a ball! Because I had studied photography. I had been interested at one time in photography. So I often took pictures for the artwork and stuff.

CRAWFORD: Would people come to you, other researchers at the LCI for example, and say, “We have this new material, it seems like it has a liquid crystal phase, could you take a look at it for us?”

NEUBERT: Yes. A lot of them, they could identify the simplest things, but then they usually had question about it. It took me quite a while to reach the point that people knew that I could do the more complicated stuff. Because here I'm making all these new compounds in my research, and I'm remaking the things people want done, and who’s going to look at them under the microscope? Me. It’s just adding on, piling up the information, until you get very good at it. You have to know how to do it and to make sure you're right.

[Once] I had the problem that a group in France had talked about a phase they wanted to say what it was. I took a look at it and I says, “No, it’s not that. It’s [a] benzoic acid [texture].” We know that because DeVries had used that in his x-ray studies. And we know what the phase is. But this was a famous person in France; no one wanted to believe it. I had the problem of trying to disagree with somebody and getting them upset. It has happened a couple of times. What I ended up doing in one case, I tried to get it corrected in the literature by talking to the editor [at the Journal of the American Chemical Society], and the author got all upset, accused me, and wouldn't trust me. So I took it and wrote an article, a short note in one of the journals. Because to me, the important thing was to get the right data. It’s not—the data is correct; the interpretation is wrong.

CRAWFORD: These errors that you found in the literature, these were errors where the researchers were misidentifying the phase of the liquid crystal or misidentifying the material?

NEUBERT: In the one case, he was a chemist and he was making new materials, and he just did not have enough experience. Sometimes these phases are very short, so they'll overlap, and if you don’t catch them, you see something different. This one chemist, he had worked on something similar to what I was interested in, and I went to his work, and I knew what he said the transition temperatures were couldn't be right. In that case, I did not argue with it. I had already been burned. So I wrote my own paper that has the correct data. But yeah, see the pressure of doesn't want somebody—especially a woman. Now, in the old age, I'm beginning to see how many things happened that had some sort of problem with women.

CRAWFORD: You've mentioned a number of times now your own research and what you were doing making new compounds, and your research in chemical synthesis and so forth. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about, what do you think were some of your most significant research achievements or accomplishments in your own research with liquid crystals?

NEUBERT: Well, see, the thing you would consider the most achievement in the research is like discovering a new phase or something like that. I don’t feel that my research did anything like that. I'm a firm believer in getting information, and that information, if the information is good and done well and stuff like that, then it’s available for somebody else who has different ideas.

The problem is—and I think more so today—of rushing to get published, and not making sure that things are right. I feel that the contribution we made to the whole group, and the liquid crystal scientists, I don’t know, can’t be specific about how this information helped. I think though having that at the Liquid Crystal Institute where everybody was invited to come and discuss, they could talk to me or anybody else, and that all stimulates you.

How this all ended up then being in the displays—all these industrial people were coming to the Liquid Crystal Institute. Dr. Brown was organizing the meetings and stuff like that. This somehow got into people’s heads and figured out they maybe needed different science to solve the application or something like that. But if the information isn’t there, you can’t do anything, except collect new information.

CRAWFORD: It sounds like you're saying in your view, the significance or the most significant achievement of your research was providing this information about liquid crystals and their phases?

NEUBERT: Well, right. Also I think our providing the materials that people could use. I'm not the person with the greatest support for great discoveries, because I feel that great discoveries are based on the collection of a number of smaller discoveries that were considered not very important. I in my own synthesis used things that were developed by the Germans during the Second World War, their procedures, and what they were able to do with what they didn’t have to work with. That made it possible for me to do something else. This is what science is all about. It’s not getting that final thing. That's the product people think. Getting the final knowledge, making it available, so that it’s there for other people to use.

CRAWFORD: You have mentioned a couple of times feeling like some researchers were rushing to get their results published, or maybe they're breaking up a larger project into smaller units for the purposes of publication. Would you say that that's something that changed over the course of your career? Like there was more pressure on researchers to do this kind of publishing and more publishing? Or has it always been like that?

NEUBERT: I haven't really thought about it that much or studied it and stuff like that. I would say that it’s probably more. Here’s the thing: You need somebody in these positions who is going to be productive in some way. The question is, in what way do they need to be productive? To me, there should be nothing wrong with somebody who loves teaching to only do teaching. But, I've had professors tell me that they think the person who does research is a better teacher. I don’t know. That is something to look at. Is it true that some professors will be better if they do research?

But I had a professor at Rochester in stereochemistry, he was very good. Everybody liked him. The students all liked him. He was very good. He was an excellent teacher and stuff like that. He got his degree at Harvard. He did not get tenure. Now, why wasn’t he given tenure? He did not write up his research and get it published. He did not have enough published. Why didn’t he publish? And Fishel2 was kind of like this, too. Because he never felt he had it complete enough. So, what is going on here? So he loses his job as a professor! Last I heard of him, and I don’t know what finally happened, he wasn’t doing anything like that. He wasn’t teaching or anything. We lose a perfectly good professor because he hasn’t done enough research.

Now maybe he wasn’t able to make the kind of decisions you need to make to get to those publications. Maybe he was too careful or something; I don’t know. But I know I've had that problem with my own work, and I will say, “Well, there's a cutoff point. We've done as much as we could. It’s up to somebody else to take it over.” But he was not able to do that. To him, it was terrible to not have the data complete.

CRAWFORD: Do you feel like your position at the Liquid Crystal Institute as a Senior Research Fellow you were given the time to really collect all the data that you wanted before publishing?

NEUBERT: I did it. [laughs]

CRAWFORD: Okay, so you took the time.

NEUBERT: I can’t say I was given the time.

CRAWFORD: [laughs] Yeah, okay.

NEUBERT: But there were times I would say, “We would like to do another series, but let’s publish this.” That's the sort of thing I'm talking about. But I did not serve as a professor. I'm not on the committee meetings and stuff like this. I don’t know what all goes on. That's just what I feel from the outside.

CRAWFORD: I'm just thinking about the time. We've been talking for about an hour and 15 minutes. Would you like to take a break for today, and we could resume at another time?

NEUBERT: Yeah, because dinner will be coming up in an hour or so.

CRAWFORD: Okay, so why don’t we stop for today, and we can resume?

NEUBERT: You don’t have enough? [laughs]

CRAWFORD: Oh, I can always have more, so—let me just—

[End Part 1]

[Begin Part 2]

CRAWFORD: My name is Matthew Crawford, and I'm a Historian of Science in the Department of History at Kent State University. I'm interviewing Dr. Mary E. Neubert, former Synthesis Chemist and former Senior Research Fellow at the Liquid Crystal Institute at Kent State University. Today is October 14th, 2022, and this is our second interview session. We are conducting this interview at Dr. Neubert’s home in Hudson, Ohio. Thank you again, Dr. Neubert, for agreeing to participate in this interview. We wanted to start off with some additional reflections you had on your early interest in science and some of your early experiences in science that may or may not have influenced you. I wonder if you could say a little bit about those.

NEUBERT: Yes. I became interested in chemistry through the experience with a chemistry set that a friend, a neighbor of mine had gotten from her older brother. For some reason, I got very interested in chemistry in the basis of that and spent time going to the library, learning. The public library, I had to walk to it, but they had books on experiments and various science things. I set up my own laboratory and eventually I was given a chemistry set for Christmas and did all the experiments—very simple, basic experiments—and continued to work in the lab.

CRAWFORD: What age were you, roughly?

NEUBERT: I don’t know what age I became interested in the sciences; probably around sixth or seventh grade. But never wrote anything down. It’s hard to remember. Before that, we had science in school by then, but did not show any interest until that happened.

CRAWFORD: You mentioned something about starting or joining a local science club when you were a kid?

NEUBERT: We had—and I'm trying to remember the name—Little Einstein [Science Club], or something like that [which I started]. Well, we actually had some meetings. We didn’t do a heck of a lot; we just got together and talked. One time, in my high school era, my brother bought me a telescope. We would go out in a vacant lot at night and use the telescope. I don’t know if any of these kids ended up in science. I haven't followed through what they did in life. I think there was one who worked for a company. There were times when we went to the Buhl Planetarium, which was about an hour’s drive from where we lived.

CRAWFORD: Where was that located?

NEUBERT: Pittsburgh.

CRAWFORD: What was the name of the Planetarium?

NEUBERT: Buhl Planetarium.

CRAWFORD: This science club, was it something that the kids organized, or it was through school, or part of a national program of sorts? No?

NEUBERT: It was just totally a get-together.

CRAWFORD: Neat.

NEUBERT: It had no organization or records or anything like that. I'm not even sure what all we did. [laughs]

CRAWFORD: You were also mentioning that you at some point early on read the biography of Marie Curie. I wonder if you could tell us about that.

NEUBERT: The woman who discovered radium?

CRAWFORD: Yeah.

NEUBERT: I can’t recall her name right now.

CRAWFORD: Marie Curie?

NEUBERT: Yeah. Where do we find things that change our path or set our path? Was it this book, or was it the chemistry set? I don’t know; maybe it was several things. But that had a very definite impression on me. The realization that I could be working with something new and not realize that it would be dangerous in that way. Chemicals are dangerous in many ways. But that was really relatively new at the time. We did not practice waste disposal methods and things like that when I first got into chemistry. That came along later, this new danger to using chemicals.

CRAWFORD: What about other safety practices when you first started in chemistry? How did the safety practices change over your career?

NEUBERT: One of the things I fought for was ventilation. When I first started working [at the LCI[, the hood systems were not adequate, especially when we had to work on a large scale. It was not typical for people, chemists at that time, to use a hood always in running a reaction. They would use it if they knew it was a hazardous chemical like chlorine or something like that, that would cause a problem, but they did not use it just to avoid, say, things like we probably heard in the news about benzene. Chromatography where you do a column and they have a benzene. We didn’t worry about that, solvents and things like that. I was fighting when I started at Kent in the building that was not designed to do chemistry, but had been modified. To me, the hood system was not adequate, and I fought and tried to get something done about that. That eventually led to a new building. That would be the middle building. That would be the first addition, between the two science buildings. To get bigger hoods, more adequate hoods and stuff.

CRAWFORD: Were you able to have input in the design of the labs in that building?

NEUBERT: It was much better. There's always a concern about fire hazard and getting out and things like that. We actually were consulted about the design of the labs. I would say that some of this stuff was influenced by the fact that I had worked in industry and we had been taught or used better equipment in industry than the university had.

CRAWFORD: Why do you think that was?

NEUBERT: It’s a cost thing, and how serious you were about it. The thing is, the lab where we started was an office building that Dr. Brown had convinced the dean that we should have this center, and that was not something that was typical, that the university spent money on something like this. So he was given this building which of course was not designed properly for labs. A laboratory building has to be designed from the beginning. He modified and did the best he could with what he had to work with. There wasn’t a concern that you have now about breathing chemicals that you worked with, like recrystallizations and things like that. For the amount or size of reaction we had to work on to make enough material for the physicists, we needed bigger hoods, too. Storage of chemicals; there was inadequate storage of chemicals. There was no rule about smoking in the building, and I ran into problems in trying to enforce “Don’t smoke, because we're working with all these flammable chemicals, and the ventilation isn’t the greatest that it should be.” Gradually, things improved, and we added more people and got a new facility. That is something that is probably unusual in a lot of universities. If Dr. Brown had not done it, it wouldn't have happened. He was very interested in liquid crystals. They were new, and they were interesting.

CRAWFORD: As I understand liquid crystals or the work on liquid crystals, part of it is the work of physicists—the research, I'm talking about—and part of it is the work of chemists. The building that the LCI moved into after the Lincoln Building was actually built in between the Physics and Chemistry buildings.

NEUBERT: Yes.

CRAWFORD: A representation of the connection between those two disciplines.

NEUBERT: Well, it was professors from the two departments that started it. Yeah. It was more convenient to have everybody closer together. The hope was to have more cooperation, too. Actually when we got the new building, it seemed to go in the opposite direction. When we got the second building, the one that they have now, things were more separated again. If you're a professor and you have all these different duties and work to get done and so forth, you don’t want to spend your tine walking back and forth to—I mean, you sure have this problem. That's why a professor in the History Department doesn't know chemists, because I'm way down at the other end.

CRAWFORD: That's right. How did the faculty from the two departments get along? Did the physicists and the chemists get along well? I'm wondering if some of these issues with not having proper lab space for chemists, was that a reflection of resources being given more to the physicists, or was it just—?

NEUBERT: Well, you have competition. This is one of the things that I see as different from industry. I would say in industry, you're always encouraged to cooperate and interact, because you work together to develop a product or something. But in a university, everybody is competing to get their tenure or recognition, and build their resume and stuff like that. It’s just not set up to have a lot of interaction.

Where you find the interaction is where there's a subject that is of interest but requires more than what the individual expertise. My thesis professor was Marshall Gates at Rochester, work on morphine compounds. He interacted with industrial people because they tested his drugs and things, and also had interaction about what to design, what was needed in the chemistry of morphine compounds. You don’t have that pretty much in a regular department. It happened here because Dr. Brown was driving it, and to get grant money, we needed to do something. Always, what do you submit for a proposal for a grant? These things, they were totally new, so you need more knowledge, and that's what pure research comes from.

There was this controversy between Dr. Brown and some of the other [scientists] about, should it become more applied or should it be more academic? You had these two arguments going on, too. How much support do you put into the applied, when basically chemistry departments in the past had been academic research, and you don’t do it to make money or design a product. The fact is, we really need both. If students are going to go out and get a job in industry—so often in the academic one, they don’t know much about what’s going on in industry. They eventually adapt and maybe end up doing very well, but they don’t know what’s going on and so forth. Our students are not learning that part, unless there is a professor who worked in industry at some time. Sometimes, there is.

To me, I'm caught in the middle. I tend to like to do the pure research, but also I recognize the need—there's nothing wrong with doing applied research, either. For instance, in my papers, couldn’t get into the American Chemical Society journal, because it was simply making new compounds and not considered new enough, but easily accepted to a liquid crystal journal.

CRAWFORD: Are you saying that the Journal of the American Chemical Society put more emphasis on pure research and academic research and less on applied?

NEUBERT: That was my experience. I don’t know whether that has changed now, as there seems to be more interest in applied. Of course, applied can go too far the wrong way, too. It is always a balance. Nature is full of balances. It’s always a balance.

CRAWFORD: Do you think in your time at the LCI that the Institute struck the right balance between academic and applied, or were there times when things were out of balance?

NEUBERT: I think it was just a personal thing, that some professors—the Chemistry Department didn’t seem to appreciate it—the Liquid Crystal Institute brought in more money than the whole rest of the university. I don’t know what all went on in the departments. I didn’t sit in on the faculty meetings and stuff. But the professors are struggling to be known. They get their work supported financially and stuff like that. Then they're seeing this group come in with what seemed like a huge sum of money. That huge sum of money was divided among three universities, and all the people on it. I did not feel I had that much more money. I just had a steady supply of money. I had lots of requests, and always had plenty of work to do.

CRAWFORD: I want to ask you two specific questions related to this. In 1983, Dr. J. William Doane, or Bill Doane, takes over as the director.

NEUBERT: Yes.

CRAWFORD: From looking at the historical records of the Liquid Crystal Institute, as well as articles about the Institute, it seems pretty clear—and also from talking to Dr. Doane—that he really tried to shift the thrust of the Institute to focusing more on displays, more on applied work, or applications of liquid crystals, much more so, it sounds like, than Dr. Brown .Would you say that's an accurate description of Dr. Doane’s—?

NEUBERT: Yes, but realize that the [senior] staff, we had a committee that included [senior] staff that voted on various things, and this was voted on [by] the [senior] staff. We were asked to vote on who should be the next director, and Bill Doane was one of the applicants. Saupe was another. Saupe would be the academic person. I don’t remember who else was there. Doane was chosen [not only for his interest in the applications of liquid crystals but also his success in getting grant funding.]

Part of this was financial. How are you going to get the money? It was obvious that this—we had interactions with industry, with Hughes Research Labs, for example. They were interested in that. There were other companies and stuff like that. So, where are you going to get the money to support your research? Are you going to totally depend on NSF? Or are you going to find other applications? Industry contributes to other chemistry departments where they have interests. And yeah, they control what you're going to work on, to some degree, but at least you're able to do research. [laughs] So I'm in the middle. [laughs] Because I'm providing the materials for people who need to use them in research, yet I'm doing research and structural activity properties to try to determine what materials will be of interest.

I was at one point able to take graduate students as an adjunct professor. I had one student who got his [master’s] degree. So I had no trouble with a student doing research and getting a degree. It was pretty much the Chemistry Department who decided whether he got the degree or not. Seeing the need for more interest in application, it was obvious to me when one of the students from the Chemistry Department that was working for one of the professors actually came to work for him, and it was about his second or third year, [that he] came and wanted to work for me. Because the main reason was he thought he could get a job after he had gotten [his PhD] —my people got jobs. So that sets up a conflict, too. I told him it would be easier just to finish and not to create conflict in the Chemistry Department. But he decided; I didn’t tell him to come and work for me. But I had one student work for me, and he got a master’s degree.

CRAWFORD: Would you characterize a relationship between academic science and industry as generally advantageous to universities and academic research?

NEUBERT: I personally do. If it’s done right.

CRAWFORD: What does that relationship look like when it is done right? What does that mean to you?

NEUBERT: Well, you take like the drug industry; it’s very much dependent on synthesis of new materials. It has changed a lot since synthesis is done differently than it had been when I was there. But there's that. There's materials science. Materials need to be developed. There's medical things. I worked in a medical school in Saint Louis, and there was a need there for chemists that had some relationship to biochemistry or something like that. I had taken biochemistry courses. I worked on a biochem problem. They needed pure lipids on a large scale, and I could do that. The person did his monolayer studies and stuff like that. I think it also provides better interaction between the professors and the students, and what they want to do. They want to get a job. I think it also shows how chemistry is used in industry. But I don’t want to get rid of academic research, because research that leads to something good, it starts out to be nobody was interested in it. Maybe they stumbled on this. Like the Harvard professor said, “If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn't be research.” Basically. I probably haven't quoted that right, but—

CRAWFORD: To a certain extent, that sounds like the history of liquid crystals, right? They were discovered in the late 19th century, but not much is done with them for another 50 years or so.

NEUBERT: Yeah. And look what it led to. When I started there, which was about five or six years after the center was formed, what industry was interested in was a flat-panel TV. There were lots of people who didn’t think it could be ever done, practically, financially. And look what it has done! They had very difficult problems. People could have said, and probably did, “You're not going to be able to do that.” And somehow, they found a way to do it.

CRAWFORD: Yeah. Along these lines of thinking about the relationship between academic research and industry, you've already referenced the ALCOM grant that the Liquid Crystal Institute got in 1990, which was this cooperative grant or enterprise, collaborative research center I guess it technically was, between Kent State, Akron, and Case Western University, but also with the specific goal of interacting with industry. You're right; it brought a tremendous amount of money into the Liquid Crystal Institute.

NEUBERT: I can tell you; it was not easy.

CRAWFORD: Why is that?

NEUBERT: Well, they have conflict in industry, interests, and the scientists involved, and how things are administered. It’s people. Interactions, there were problems. We had a problem that people had to travel. Like Case Western Reserve scientists would come down and visit me. That wasn’t so bad; it was easy parking and stuff like that. But then if I went up there, it was a nightmare trying to find a place to park, and took away a lot of time, of work time. You had that. You had different ideas on how to do things and what should be studied and how it should be studied. There's no way, when you're dealing with people, especially at this level, that like to think their ideas are the greatest—there's nothing wrong with that, but somehow interacting with people who differ with you or things you don’t understand, it’s not easy. The question I have is, who is the best person to do this? In many ways, Bill Doane was [good at it].

CRAWFORD: It sounds like what you're saying is, there was interest in collaboration but also some real challenges to it as well.

NEUBERT: Yes. I think that you have a challenge every time you get a group of people together. It doesn't matter what you're talking about. You have a challenge of getting people to interact together. Somehow, you have to understand where they're coming from, and that's not always easy, and find a way to convince the person to come the way you want to do it, if you're in charge. And that's not easy. It’s a people thing. And scientists are never [trained in] people skills. As I sat through and listened to many, many presentations and talks of papers, I came to the conclusion we could have used some coursework in presentations. Somehow we learned how to write scientific [papers]—we were never taught how to write our manuscripts [other than in an English composition course].

CRAWFORD: Which is a little ironic, I guess maybe would be the word, because publishing papers and giving presentations is a huge part of being a scientist.

NEUBERT: Yeah! And initially, when I went into it, it was passive voice. Now, when I left, they were doing all kinds of things. We were taught to write in passive voice. One of the conflicts I ran into in submitting papers was how much NMR data should be in the paper. I felt it should all be there. Then some people didn’t feel it should be. So you have that sort of thing. But I think the worst thing is, they were not taught—even though we're going to be directing other people and be in charge of other people, we're not taught how to deal with other people, interact with other people with different age levels, different skills, different thoughts, and different ideas. There's other areas in life where you—like business, you're taught how to deal with the customer. The professors pick things up as they go along and gain experience, but we get nothing at the beginning! In graduate school, you're told you have to do a couple lectures; that's it. That's all! If you have a good advisor, maybe that person will help you along.

CRAWFORD: Why do you think those skills are so overlooked as part of science education?

NEUBERT: I don’t know. I don’t know whether it’s some idea of you already know how to do it, but I think it’s a lack of knowledge about what it takes, and how it should be done. One of the big problems is—and I was fortunate to have Dr. Fishel on this, because he helped me on this—scientists, the person who is giving a paper, and it’s not just in science but other areas, has so much data; trying to condense it into a reasonable, short thing that people can follow is a lot of work, and time-consuming, and that doesn't get done. I have sat through enough PhD [presentations] to say that a lot of PhDs don’t know how to do it. Even though they don’t see anything wrong with it. But if you have to take a couple years of research and condense it down to 15 minutes, [which many conferences require], that's not easy to do.

CRAWFORD: I wonder if I could ask, just because someone listening to this interview may not be familiar necessarily with the type of research that you did, why did your research generate so much data? What was the data that came out of the type of research that you did?

NEUBERT: The data for me was—well, in the early days of liquid crystals, they made homologous series [trying to find where the liquid crystal phases are]. Because where you see the liquid crystal phase changes during—is affected by chain length. This makes sense, because you need a relatively rigid but not totally rigid rodlike structure to get parallel packing. That's the early type of liquid crystal. To get this, it’s most likely to have an area that is largest in the mid chain length. If you get the chain too long, the molecule becomes too flexible. If you get it too short, it becomes too rigid, and it just crystallizes. In the early days, this was what we were doing. We did a lot of this, looking at homologous series, and trying to find where the liquid crystals… So you take one structure. Oh, well you've got to have—the anils,3 for instance, have a lot of liquid crystal phase. Why not do esters? Well, esters didn’t have all those phases. They had fewer phases. But maybe there's a phase that you would be interested in. This same thing is true in drug relationships. If you are trying to design a new drug, you're looking at what happens when you add another substituent that changes it or whatever. Do you get a better drug? It seems simple to the academic people, but it’s what ends up finding the materials that will have the properties that you need.

CRAWFORD: The data that you're generating is kind of—if I may try to explain what I'm hearing—you're making adjustments to these molecules, making changes to them, and seeing how those adjustments affect the properties or produce different kinds of properties?

NEUBERT: Yeah. You see, you can go a lot farther than the chain length. You can go to, do you change the ring system? Or do you change the shape of the molecule? They found when they make a disc out of it, then they get some similar type of properties. Now, what if you put it in a polymer, what’s going to happen? What if you make it so that the body likes it, and what are you going to get there? So there's an infinite number of things you can do in organic chemistry.

CRAWFORD: It sounds like all of these changes and so forth are potentially useful in developing a profile of a certain kind of chemical or a certain compound?

NEUBERT: Actually the most active materials came out of the English group. Well, we had the thioesters, which [were] of interest for [the types of phases, for a while]. But there were two interests here. There were the academic interests, and what could Dave Johnson do with the material, what was he interested in; and what was Doane interested in; and what was I interested in, in just finding the phases. So, designing the materials depended on what you were interested in finding. There's still a lot of academic stuff here. You need to know your chemistry. They've done nice work with polymers and stuff like that. Essentially, what the Liquid Crystal Institute did was, one of the things that it did, was provide a source of knowledge of what materials might be of interest [as well as providing materials]. My esters weren’t very good, but the esters had been used in mixtures, so you never know if somebody else may come along and find some way of using what data you produced.

CRAWFORD: Was it common for a chemist working on liquid crystals to specialize in a particular type of compound? Like you said you worked on esters, and you mentioned this English group that was working on a different set?

NEUBERT: They were working on the cyanobiphenyls. Our work was initially with thioesters. Well, way back further were the anils. The anils were what—azo compounds to—had been seen by others that started the whole liquid crystal stuff. It was discovered by accident, by—the Germans were looking at one of these series and saw this. Essentially what you have in liquid crystal materials is you don’t have sharp melting points, or what was thought to be a sharp melting point. You have a range of change in structure and fluidity. If you look at it under the microscope, you find there is a melting point, a sharp melting point, but it goes through a liquid crystal phase instead of an isotropic liquid phase. That can change again and again. That's really—I had worked in the drug industry, and one of my former colleagues there wrote to me while I was at the Liquid Crystal Institute. I had given a lecture to them about liquid crystals. He came back and says, “I think I have a material that may have a liquid crystal phase, because it doesn't have a sharp melting point.” I said, “Send it to me.” He did. It [did have] a liquid crystal phase. So this is science. You discover something new, and what do you do with it, and what can you do with it. We didn’t discover it initially, but what Dr. Brown did was, reviewing the literature, he saw something interesting.

CRAWFORD: We were talking about the relationship between industry and the Liquid Crystal Institute. Did industry ever come to the Institute and say, “We want you to look into these compounds?”

NEUBERT: They came to me, and sometimes [they gave me] money to make compounds. In one case, I made some. I didn’t think it was a good idea, but [they] insisted, and they turned out not to be stable. They had the phases but they weren’t stable. Yeah, it’s not easy. It’s the same problem you have with drugs, is you find something that may be good, but it has too bad a side effect or something like that, or it doesn't have the right things. You can put all this time in, in finding this, but not have—here is the balance, finding the balance of everything. Nature is full of balance.

CRAWFORD: When industry came to you and asked you to, say, investigate the potential liquid crystal phases of a certain set of compounds, did you do that alongside your own research that you were doing?

NEUBERT: Yeah. That was separate. Now, you can’t always do that, because the structures are not what you can do it with. I had a group come in and ask me to study the decomposition of the anils, because they do tend to degrade over time. I turned them down, because I did not feel I had the equipment to do properly the research—the HPLC, and I did not have that equipment. I did not have the experience and knowledge. And it wasn’t something I really wanted to do.

CRAWFORD: [laughs] I wonder if I could ask a more general question. Thinking about your career in liquid crystal research and just sort of in general, what would you see as the key developments in either chemical synthesis or liquid crystal research over your professional career, when you were active at the Institute, say from—?

NEUBERT: Just in general?

CRAWFORD: Just in general, yeah. Is there anything that stands out to you as particularly significant in that time period?

NEUBERT: I don’t know if I can really comment on that, and I haven't kept up with science developments. I think the liquid crystal discovery has been a major thing in computers. When I started out in chemistry and I was in the Chemistry Department at Pitt, they had a person doing x-ray crystallography studies, and had the equipment and everything. He wanted to hire a student to count the dots in the x-ray pattern for him. This is how they used to do it before computers. I was not interested in doing that. I don’t know how his research went, but I do know that eventually computers made it much easier to analyze x-ray data. That covers a huge area, and a very important field would be the medical field—the 3D structure of the proteins and that. In graduate school, we went over some of the important discoveries in organic chemistry and the mechanisms of reactions, which were far better understood when I left than it had been before. I don’t know what all had been done in chemistry after that.

CRAWFORD: Obviously computers have had a huge impact on all of our lives professionally and personally. I'm curious, specifically with relation to your research and the processing of data, was the advent of computers important to your work?

NEUBERT: No. As I say, I took all these courses in math, and people think of scientists as so good in math; the only math I used in my research was addition, subtraction, [multiplication and division]. I didn’t even need a slide rule anymore. I had to calculate the molecular weights and moles and things like that. If I had gone into theory in organic chemistry, then I would need more. But one thing, with all the push to [inaudible] during that time, understanding and so forth, there's something about skill, and the skill in making materials, and getting them pure, and stuff like that. The skill in any research area, becoming familiar with it, is really great, and it’s not often around. Or the idea of doing things right so that the data holds up and the data is accurate. These abilities to do this is very useful, particularly I think in industry.

CRAWFORD: It occurs to me—a number of times, you've talked about how—I think you said something in our first session along the lines of everybody thinks that a scientist is a genius, and you said of yourself, “I'm not really a genius. I just worked hard.” In an essay that you wrote for the 50th anniversary of the Liquid Crystal Institute, you said this, and I'm quoting you in this essay: “I guess one of the things I saw was so much emphasis on the honors student, the best student, and spending time with them and getting them to do things. And yet I took average students and brought them along and got them good jobs. I helped them to develop the confidence, work ethic, and skill they needed to do a good job. So it’s not just ‘A’ students that can accomplish things; it’s also the average student.” End quote. Again, this was from an essay that you wrote in 2015 on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Liquid Crystal Institute. What I want to ask you about is this idea of skill. Do you think science is a learned set of skills? How important is skill to being a scientist?

NEUBERT: I run into the same thing in art. You have talent, is what they call it. You have talent. I feel each of us is born with a certain [abilities]. In nature’s design, there's a whole range of things, from say, creative to logical, is the one that I ran into. Creative and then logical. Is it only the ones at the creative end that get to create and do great work? Is it only the logical ones that get to do science? Then there was the artist, he came out and says, “Well, if you're more creative, then you're going to be more artistic.” My feeling is that, whether it’s art or whether it’s science, in my experience it involves solving problems. Solving problems is probably the most important thing. And we don’t teach the kids to solve problems a lot of times. Solving problems means that you're using both your creative side and the logical side of your brain. I said, “I don’t have any trouble going from the creative side to the logical side. It depends on what the sub-problem is.” Some problems take a more creative approach, like painting, and some problems a more logical approach, like chemistry.

Now, then the other question is, what is the difference between art and science? To me, the only difference I see in my experience is that art requires an emotional factor, whereas in the sciences, you're told, “Take the emotion out, and use reason.” Now, I run into people, lots of people here, who still insist that what you see, the paintings on the wall, is because I'm so talented. No one gives me credit for the many, many years I spent painting, the classes I've taken, the workshops I've taken, the money I have spent, to reach that point in my painting. I don’t consider it the pinnacle, you know? And neither did Rembrandt consider it. My fear is that by saying, “You can do this because you have talent,” it means I can’t do it because I don’t have talent, and no one tries.

One of the problems I have seen happens is [an unwillingness] to do things over and over and over again. Perseverance. The teachers used to comment on my report cards that I had perseverance. That is one thing; if I make a mistake in the painting, I'll try to fix it, over and over. That's why I work in acrylics, because I can fix. Over and over again. I see a lot of people try a painting, throw it in the [waste] basket because they are unhappy with something. But no one is willing to admit that's why they can’t paint a picture like that. [I really believe that anyone who wants to paint well, will find a way to create. In today’s art world, there are many styles to choose from.]

CRAWFORD: I wonder if your propensity to perseverance also maybe explains your skill at chemistry. Because it sounds like from what you're telling me, the work that you did in chemical synthesis was an iterative process. Working with the same things over and over again.

NEUBERT: For instance, another thing is, I have people tell me, well, a school teacher told them their painting was terrible, and they ridiculed them, and stuff like that. Well, I ran into the same problem. I had a teacher in high school ridicule me because I had took the test tubes out of the basket in the lab and took them home for my own lab. Yeah. And made fun of me because I was a scientist or whatever. I had a neighbor friend tell me, when she asked me after I got my bachelor’s degree, “What are you going to do now?” I says, “I would like to go to graduate school.” She says, “You'll never go to graduate school.” I had my professor, at Pittsburgh, tell me when I was applying to graduate schools that he felt I was applying to too-hard schools to get into. I got into Rochester, and I got into another school. I didn’t get an assistantship for another school, but another good school. I didn’t get in to MIT, because I was a woman. So, if you're going to give up because somebody else thinks your idea is not going to get you anywhere, you're not going to go anywhere! I don’t know why I continued; it just made sense to me.

CRAWFORD: On this anecdote that you mentioned at the end about not getting into MIT because you're a woman, and you've mentioned in this interview, or in the previous interview session, some cases throughout your life where the fact that you were a woman, you were being discouraged from pursuing science. Again, in this essay that you wrote in 2015, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Liquid Crystal Institute, you wrote, quote, “When I first went to the International Liquid Crystal meetings, there were only a couple of other women present.” I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what it was like being one of the few women working in liquid crystal science. Did the presence of women in the field change during your career? Did the experience of being a woman working in science change?

NEUBERT: It did, to some extent, in that when I went to international meetings, there were more women. But I would say at the beginning, there were more women in Europe than there were in the United States. [We seem to be making progress when a woman engineer is head of the Webb telescope.]

CRAWFORD: Interesting.

NEUBERT: At least at the meetings I attended. Now, understand that liquid crystals is an applied area, so that may affect it, too. I don’t know.

CRAWFORD: Why do you say that?

NEUBERT: Well, women may be going into chemistry, and usually not so much the PhD level, to take a job.

CRAWFORD: Do you think that women had actually a greater presence in the field of liquid crystals than they might in other chemical fields? Is that what you are suggesting?

NEUBERT: Say that again?

CRAWFORD: Are you suggesting that women were more of a presence in areas like liquid crystals than other fields of chemistry?

NEUBERT: No. I think that just varies too much to state that. Depends.

CRAWFORD: I know art has been a theme and an interest throughout your life. You were just talking about—you spent many years studying painting. Could you tell us about—? Because your reflections on the relationship between science and art are based in your career as a scientist but also your long career, I guess we could say, as an artist as well. And so I wonder if you could tell us more about your experience as an artist, your background as an artist.

NEUBERT: Actually, I always was interested in art. I'd get good grades or something in art. When I was in high school, I was in the artists’ club. I was in the science club, too. But I couldn't see me making a living at [art]. I knew I would have to do that, because in my family, if you got your high school diploma, you were expected to go out and get a job. If you stayed at home, you were expected to help with the rent or something like that. I told my art teacher that I was not going to go into art and she was disappointed. But I was frustrated at that point in the art because we were still using poster paints, and I wanted to get into oils and [be more serious about what artists were doing]. I became interested in science, in chemistry, so that filled my life for quite a while. Then I got my PhD and I decided I wanted to do some more art. Then I signed up for the Famous Artists correspondence because I didn’t want to sit in a classroom anymore. Eventually got the certificate on landscape painting.

CRAWFORD: What was the Famous Artists Correspondence [Course]l? How did it work?

NEUBERT: Well, it was very well-known at the time. It was advertised in magazines and so forth. A group of well-known artists, illustrators, I think, were head of it. They’d provide textbooks and a class schedule according to what you were interested in. You did your painting at a certain size so it could be mailed and sent it in, and they would critique it. And they were very good! I had to move a couple times, so instead of three years, it was four years, that I got.

I came to Kent, and I had realized at this point I needed to have a teacher I had access to, because I couldn't see the artists correcting things or doing it differently. I read the [newspapers], and here’s—how do you find out information? There were no computers in those days. You take what there is: a newspaper. Jack Richard advertised in the newspaper. Classes. So I went to Jack Richard’s studio, and studied with him for probably at least about ten years. And then along, I got into the Akron Society of Artists and found out about Ohio Watercolor Society and joined it, and got in with the teachers at the [Cuyahoga Valley] Art Center, and learned watercolors. Jack Richard could teach you any area, but he was mostly oils and pastels and that. And collage; I got into collage and stuff, got interested in that, and studied with Jean Deemer for a while. The Ohio Watercolor Society has workshops every year, or did at that time and stuff. So then I had more workshops or private sort of things. [I also took basketry and wood carving.]

By then, I'm doing okay on my own. But here again, my art is not the kind of art that is going to win prizes. It depends on how important you feel a more realistic type of art is. Of course a lot of the thinking today is more abstract and way out. I'm not interested in politics and making a big, major statement. [I spent a lot of time outdoors, sketching and studying flowers in nature.] I'm interested in showing you the beauty of these flowers which I have been out looking at, and that beauty comes from the shapes and colors. That's all. All’s I want is, if you look at my painting and you feel good about it, you like it and its colors, or it excites you or something, then I've accomplished what I'm interested in. I'm first interested in painting what it does to me. I'm not interested in becoming a professional artist or anything like that. I paint because I have to.

CRAWFORD: Why do you say that?

NEUBERT: Well, when I paint, I feel better. I enjoy it, and I feel better. But it’s solving problems, see? It’s the chemistry again; solving problems. They're not that different. I have trouble explaining that to people. They're not that different! But expressing emotion is more difficult to learn when you've been a scientist. Or maybe it’s the other way around; I don’t know.

CRAWFORD: Pursuing art alongside your career as a scientist, did that provide you with yet another form of balance?

NEUBERT: Yes. And the balance idea, speaking of balance, is something that I've come up with more recently. Because if you look in the microscope at liquid crystals, here again you see a balance. Balance in structures. Look at the body; you see balance. Balance in structure. Balance in colors. Look at nature; you see a balance. You see sometimes extremes, but they're usually considered bad or off the track or something like that. They're usually not appealing. But some artists paint that. They want to show you how angry they are or whatever, or how terrible the world is. And that's okay. But it’s not what I want to do. Yeah.

And in art, there's something called—there's composition. One of the things that I often will end up criticizing in seeing a show —where’s the composition? What do you want the person to get from this? And are you providing the tools for them to get to this? If you want them to feel happy, what are you supplying? How is your eye traveling through picture? Here again it’s balance. If you want a subject to come forward, you have to—if you want it to go back, you—and it’s design. And it’s not [laughs] that different than the synthesis.

CRAWFORD: Are most of your paintings images of nature and that sort of thing? Is that generally the theme of your painting?

NEUBERT: You're trailing off there. Can you say that again?

CRAWFORD: Oh, sorry. I was asking about what you tend to depict in your paintings. It sounded like your paintings tend to be more abstract, but you're depicting things from nature, and that sort of things?

NEUBERT: The paintings are influenced by nature; there's no doubt about that. I've gotten more abstract. My paintings of flowers are not totally realistic. You may see the flower was realistic, but look how the stems are. Allium stems are like that, but you don’t see that many combinations too often. They're lined up perfectly and stuff like that.

CRAWFORD: Just for the audio, we're right now looking at a—

NEUBERT: Alliums in the—

CRAWFORD: Right, a painting that’s on the wall here.

NEUBERT: And then you look at—several of the paintings have the design of the photos, of the flowers, in a spiral. If you see that one farther over. That long one?

CRAWFORD: Oh, yeah.

NEUBERT: See, and if you look at the orchid on this wall over here, on the corner there, see, that's the design, to bring your eye, to control your eye. So here again, it’s solving a problem. I think perhaps in—and this is too simple—but I think solving problems is one thing we don’t do a good job at. And perseverance can accomplish so much. I worked with students, both the very smart ones, and the B, C, average one. We taught one person, say, how to study chemistry, and their grades went up. We took the time to talk to people. A graduate student ended up—the one student went to graduate school because somebody talked to him! We worry about, “What can we do to improve our education system and everything?” And we seem to come up with all kinds of complicated things, or designing a program or this or that. For heaven’s sake; take five minutes to talk to the kid! And ask them what they want to do.

CRAWFORD: I just noticed since we were looking at these paintings, you have a hat here that's like a baseball cap, and it says, “Liquid Crystal Institute, Mary’s Kids” and then underneath “Kent State University.” I wonder if you could say something about this hat.

NEUBERT: Well, when we opened the new building, they had all these programs and stuff. We had fought to get a better facility for the synthesis group and got it, and nothing was said about it. All the emphasis was on the graduate students and their research and stuff like this. Here, these students are helping and learning to do a job, and I just wanted to give my students credit. So we had a celebration of our own. And the students designed the hat.

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

NEUBERT: That was their idea.

CRAWFORD: It looks like the “I” in “kids” is like a test tube or something.

NEUBERT: [laughs] Oh, I never noticed that.

CRAWFORD: Yeah. I don’t know.

NEUBERT: It may be.

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

NEUBERT: But these were students of varying abilities. One ended up driving a bus! She was not graduate student material; I did not try to push her that way. But she was good to do things in the lab. Well, she ended up getting married and ended up driving the school bus. So she never went to graduate school, she never made a big splash or anything like that, did any major accomplishment or anything, but she had the experience with us that she got a job, and she was able to raise her family.

I am not against trying to convince people to get an education and stuff like that. And this question has come up: should everybody be required to go to college? There's people out there, you find a skill for them, an area that they're really good at; don’t insist that they become college-educated. I had an experience once with a cousin of mine, a cousin who grew up in a family of nine kids and couldn't go to college or anything, but he became an insurance salesman. He asked me, when he saw me, and I hadn’t seen him for a while, “What did you learn in college?” And you know this is a trick question. I says, “I learned how much I don’t know.” How can anybody walk into the library at Kent State, any floor, and say they know everything? At least understand, all that knowledge you have is just a small, teensy bit of what is available out there. How many students are graduating and get their degree understand that?

CRAWFORD: It’s a good question. Well, I want to be mindful of our time, and I think we've covered quite a bit of ground.

NEUBERT: Did we cover everything?

CRAWFORD: I don’t know if we got to everything, but I think we've covered quite a bit. I did want to ask a quick question, because we're still living with the experience of the COVID pandemic, although of course it’s not as intense as it was a year ago.

NEUBERT: No, but it’s just popping up again here.

CRAWFORD: Right, yeah. I'm actually wearing a KN95 mask in this interview. I wonder if you could just say a little bit about what the experience of living through the pandemic was like for you.

NEUBERT: We were totally isolated. We couldn't leave our room.

CRAWFORD: Yeah. Because we're here in an assisted living facility, right?

NEUBERT: Well, yeah, but there's attachment to nursing.

CRAWFORD: So, you couldn't leave your room? How long did that last?

NEUBERT: I don’t remember. It was a month or so. And then when we were finally—we couldn't go to the dining room or anything.

CRAWFORD: Wow.

NEUBERT: The meals were brought to us. The first thing they did is allow us to go to the dining room. We were assigned seats, and they were spaced apart and everything. So no, it was not pleasant, the isolation. We couldn't visit. You couldn't have your family in or anything.

CRAWFORD: How did you keep in touch with people during that time? Phone calls, things like that?

NEUBERT: Say that again.

CRAWFORD: How did you keep in touch with family and friends during that time of isolation?

NEUBERT: [laughs]

CRAWFORD: So you're reaching for your iPad. [laughs]

NEUBERT: Understand that I did not know anything about this until my nephew brings me this.

CRAWFORD: [laughs] So you got an iPad during the pandemic, basically?

NEUBERT: I don’t remember now exactly when I got it. I think I had it then. He has now bought me a tablet which I haven't started using yet. Yeah, I'm surrounded by people with computers [- a long way from the slide rule to the computer.]

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

NEUBERT: I've never been a—I used the computer at Kent. We all had computers in the office. I used to print my pictures on the computer. I went that far. But then when I moved, I got rid of that and did not get another computer, got this instead. But the world is the people growing up have computers in their toys.

CRAWFORD: Yes they do.

NEUBERT: So it’s a different life. Is it a better life? I don’t know.

CRAWFORD: [laughs] That's a good question.

NEUBERT: Computers are great for storing data and finding data. But there's an awful lot of data out there, an awful lot of things that you can access. So, I don’t know. It’s probably in the next generation.

CRAWFORD: Right. I just want to thank you again, Dr. Neubert, for sharing your story and sharing this time for this interview. I really appreciate it.

NEUBERT: Well, I hope I didn’t bore you.

CRAWFORD: No, you didn’t. Not at all. [laughs]

[End]

Oral History Interview with Mary Neubert by Matthew Crawford

December 9, 2022

Location of Interview: Mary Neubert’s home in Hudson, Ohio

Liquid Crystal Oral History Project
Department of History
Kent State University

Transcript produced by Sharp Copy Transcription

DR. MATTHEW CRAWFORD: My name is Matthew Crawford. I'm a Historian of Science at Kent State University. I’m talking with Mary Neubert at her home in Hudson. Today’s date is December 9th, 2022. Can you tell me about this picture of your office? What are all these binders here?

DR. MARY NEUBERT: The binders are copies of papers on liquid crystals found in the literature. Now, when I started working there, I was always taught to do a literature background before I started on a research project. So, when I went there, that’s the first thing I did, was learn about liquid crystals. So, I did a library search with Chem Abstracts of all the papers on the synthesis of liquid crystals, and I completed the search within a week.

CRAWFORD: Oh, wow.

NEUBERT: This kind of shows you how much the literature has grown.

CRAWFORD: [laughs] Yeah. You probably couldn't find all the literature in a week nowadays.

NEUBERT: No, I had to narrow it down. I had to narrow it down to not everything on liquid crystals, since this was liquid crystals but only on certain types of molecules. Like I did cover the ferroelectrics and the polymers and all this. And it just got too—so bad. When I left, I couldn't keep up to it anymore. And, the computers came in for searching Chem Abstracts rather than do it manually, and I couldn't convince the Chemistry Department that they should have this computer system.

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

NEUBERT: We signed up for it ourselves, but I didn’t have anybody to do the searches, so, I still would go to the library and search the most current literature, on structures, the types of structures I was interested in. This is something that seemed to decrease over the years. I don’t know what it’s like now. But Bill Doane and I both heard young scientists come in the area talk about “new liquid crystals”—which were known way back in the beginning.

CRAWFORD: [laughs] Right, right, yeah.

NEUBERT: So, they weren’t doing that search—

CRAWFORD: The literature search.

NEUBERT: —even though they had computers available to help.

CRAWFORD: Right, right. Yeah, when I interviewed John West, he talked about going to the library and looking at Chemical Abstracts and kind of scanning through the abstracts and stuff of different articles, physical copies.

NEUBERT: Yeah. And that’s what I did initially. Then it just got to be too much.

CRAWFORD: Right. What are all these little green, smaller green boxes down on these lower shelves?

NEUBERT: That’s—I filed liquid crystal articles that—

CRAWFORD: Oh! Okay.

NEUBERT: Dr. Brown—initially he had a service that would send him a list every week, I think it was. And so, we had that for liquid crystal papers. Then I added to it.

CRAWFORD: Wow.

NEUBERT: It’s amazing how expanded the whole thing became.

CRAWFORD: Yeah. It just seems like the number of people working on it grew.

NEUBERT: Well, you know why. Because once we got our grant, then everybody else says, “Well, that’s what I need to do my research on.” What Bill Doane would do, he’d talk to the people at [the National Science Foundation]. It would be NSF he talked to. They would tell him what kind of things they were looking for. I don’t think a lot of people do this, but this is what he did, and he designed the research and everything around a proposal that was in those areas.

CRAWFORD: Oh, so he would talk to the people at the NSF and get a sense of—

NEUBERT: Yeah.

CRAWFORD: —what kind of research—

NEUBERT: And this was part of his success.

CRAWFORD: It sounds like those interactions with the program officers at—

NEUBERT: Yeah.

CRAWFORD: —organizations like the NSF were really important to doing well.

NEUBERT: And a number of us served on NSF teams to go through proposals that people submitted. I was, a couple times.

CRAWFORD: This is great. Thank you so much for showing me this stuff.

NEUBERT: Anyways, I’ve got a lot of pictures here.​​ What is this? This may be—there’s a whole bunch of them. Oh, here it is. Gordon Research Conference.

CRAWFORD: Ah, yes. Yeah, I’ve read about those.

NEUBERT: They started then adding liquid crystals, and then we started going to that meeting.

CRAWFORD: Did you go to that regularly? Was that annual?

NEUBERT: I didn’t go all the time, just what interested me. They always took photographs and that’s what these are.

CRAWFORD: Oh, I see. ​​Okay. And, how did your transcript—? You said you had some questions, or comments.

NEUBERT: Well, yeah, a lot of questions, and I got stuck, in a way.

CRAWFORD: Okay.

​​​NEUBERT: Just a second; I’ll explain.

CRAWFORD: Sure.

NEUBERT: I started reading it like it was a manuscript that needed to be revised, and—

CRAWFORD: Oh, yeah, sorry.

NEUBERT: —organized, and—

CRAWFORD: Yeah. [laughs]

NEUBERT: I was pretty sure you didn’t want that, so I just made a whole bunch of comments along the way.

CRAWFORD: Okay.

NEUBERT: Let me see if I—

CRAWFORD: All right, could you just start over again, and I’ll record it on this, just to have it? So you said your mother—?

NEUBERT: My mother grew up without a father. He died before she was born. There were several girls in the family. I’m not quite sure how many; at least three, probably four. My mother had a state teacher’s license. She went to two years of college and got the state teacher’s license. She had two years of high school, no high school diploma. No college diploma. But then my father came along and needed somebody to take care of his children. He had two at the time, and he and my mother got married, and that ended her career. [My father] designed his own shop and building, at home. He was a tool and die maker—some extra work, on the side. He did not spend a lot of time with us as kids. There were times, very special times, that he did, but he often worked in his shop and did not spend a lot of time.

And page four, there were some questions about the postdoc I worked with, [Dr. Marwan] Kamal. You've got the name right, but he was a postdoc, and the project I worked on was his research project. Essentially it was—I don’t know how much we should add here—it was a synthesis project in which he was making more variations of this particular structure. So it was along the same lines of the type of synthesis work I would end up doing.

CRAWFORD: Do you remember what kind of structure he was working on, like what kind of—?

NEUBERT: There’s a publication on that.

CRAWFORD: Okay.

NEUBERT: Okay. [You asked] about women in chemistry, in the program. There were not a lot of women in chemistry at the time [i.e. in the late 1950s and 1960s], in the labs. But in my organic chemistry course, there was a woman; her name was Geri Sowinski.

CRAWFORD: Geri Sowinski?

NEUBERT: We became very good friends. She was a pre-med chemistry student. She ended up graduating third in our class at Pitt, and she now is a pathologist at Harvard.

CRAWFORD: Oh!

NEUBERT: At Harvard’s hospital, medical system. She has been there many years. She was able to get a scholarship, but she had to work to pay for room and board, or wherever she lived. So, that’s one of the reasons why she had a job in the organic chemistry lab.

CRAWFORD: Ah, I see.

NEUBERT: So, we became very good friends. We're still very good friends​​.

CRAWFORD: Do you know how to spell her name, Geri Sowinski?

NEUBERT: It’s a Polish name. S-O-W-I-N-S-K-I. She did get married and she’s now Pinkus, P-I-N-K-U-S, at Harvard, medical center.

CRAWFORD: Is Geri short for Geraldine?

NEUBERT: Yes. I point this out because here’s two of us, without all the benefits, but somehow managed to struggle and solve the problem and get through, and make a major contribution. I really think that’s one of the major important things here. At least I feel that way. Oh, I did give examples, then, after that, about—so I had several comments about this discrimination thing. I was not aware of discrimination. Because I grew up in a family where my mother was a devout Lutheran. Her philosophy was to treat everyone with respect. This was the Christian way. Thinking back, I grew up in a white neighborhood, but we never talked about that. But I did have a friend in high school. The high school was in the center of town. We lived farther out. So, students came from different schools to the high school. And there I met a Black girl, who lived in my area but farther away. And we got to be good friends, so, it didn’t interfere with us being friends.

But then there was a—okay, there was this—in our chemistry class in high school, everybody knew that I was interested in chemistry and was really deeply involved in it. I can’t say I was the smartest student, but—I was not aware of the fact that the teacher had to choose students in the years to do the exhibit at Buhl Planetarium, where they had a contest. You could submit a project, a demonstration of something in the science area. Jeannette always sent a couple students to that, and they worked in the student shop and put this stuff together. I did not know that at the time. I did not know he made the choice. I was not contacted or asked to be part of it. And here’s the problem: I was not allowed to take shop. I probably would have taken it. I learned shop from my brother, who often taught me how to use tools. But the reason why I wasn’t considered as one of the people to work on this project was I never had shop.

CRAWFORD: Really.

NEUBERT: I didn’t know tools. Stuff like that. Which was a mistake, because nobody asked me. I did not realize that that was discrimination. I thought I was not chosen because I was not good enough.

CRAWFORD: Right, right. But you probably weren’t taking shop because I can’t imagine—

NEUBERT: No.

CRAWFORD: Did they let any girls take shop?

NEUBERT: No.

CRAWFORD: Right. And so—

NEUBERT: Mechanical drawing is another thing. I could have used mechanical drawing. And what did I get? I got home ec. And I already knew how to cook. I mean, because I learned that in my family. I mean, not that I cook any great meal or anything, but—so then I go on—what about Bristol Labs, and was there women chemists? Yes. There were women in the labs, in both the chemistry and the biochemistry labs, and they had bachelor’s degree or a master’s degree. I don’t remember any of them having a PhD. I was very happy at Bristol Labs. It was a good experience for me. I made a lot of good friends. I enjoyed working there. I worked for John Goodby.

CRAWFORD: John Goodby?

NEUBERT: Yeah. On penicillins. And I enjoyed working for him. But during the time I worked there, at some point my mother died, and I felt obligated to—had felt obligated to help her, so that’s why I was working instead of going to graduate school. But when she died, that was no longer the case.

Okay, I’m now on page six. Under Crawford, it says “It sounds like it just clicked”—trying to understand how I got so interested [in chemistry]. Yeah, but I’m telling you, this was true of chemistry, but it’s also true of art. So, when I get interested in something, it’s all the way. Okay, you never mentioned that not only do I learn painting, but I learned wood carving and basket weaving, and enjoyed them.​​ So.

Okay, now page seven, I’m talking about my experience working on penicillins, and that I felt it was a good experience, because I worked directly—I call it an apprenticeship sort of thing, because I worked directly with a PhD chemist, and learned technique. So, when it came time to—my mother was no longer living—I decided I wanted to go back to graduate school. The question is why I went in Rochester. I got my first lesson in discrimination when I tried to—I applied to MIT and I was refused, because I was a woman. I was actually told this; nobody would do that today. But I did apply to Rochester, because a number of the people in the department, including the person I worked for, had gotten their degrees there. They took me on a visit, and I think I discuss that further here. I was accepted to another well-known school but without an assistantship. So, I liked what I saw when I went on a visit, but I did not check into other schools. I’m not that type of person.

CRAWFORD: It sounds like you’re saying in part it was you knew people who had gone to Rochester—

NEUBERT: Yeah.

CRAWFORD: —but also, they offered you an assistantship.

NEUBERT: Yeah. So, I applied there. They wanted me to apply. They wrote letters of recommendation for me, and I applied and got accepted. I discuss further on that I talked to some of the professors there, and what they were doing. There was Marshall Gates, working on morphine compounds, so I knew there was at least one synthesis chemist that I would be interested in.

Yeah, but at the bottom of page seven, we talk about—I also had done a part-time job in the graduate school of public health, and they were studying the radioactivity of the water in the rivers in Pittsburgh. I had taken a course in nuclear chemistry because I took extra courses when I needed credit, a fill-in credit. And they wanted me to apply there. I applied there and got in. [laughs] Which amazed me. And they wanted me to go there, but, by then I had applied at Bristol Lab and got in, and preferred that. So, I don’t have anything more to add to that.

Oh, I give an example here that might make things a little clearer, about research, applied research and academic research. Marshall Gates was the first one to synthesize the morphine compound. It was a very complicated compound, and he achieved the synthesis. That’s the type of project that I would classify as academic. However, when I went to work for Marshall Gates, he was doing modifications of morphine compounds. That modification then is considered more applied.

CRAWFORD: Why do you or why is it considered—the modifications of a molecule, why is that considered more applied?

NEUBERT: You should ask the academic people [laughs] that question.

CRAWFORD: Okay! [laughs]

NEUBERT: It depends on what you do. If you take the molecule and you’re using the same types of reactions and stuff like that, that’s applied. But if you're designing new synthesis methods for it, and things like that, then that’s more academic. And as you can imagine, there’s a lot of place in between. See, I suppose if you want to write a paper to get into JACS, you want to do the synthesis of something new for some reason or other, or you want to develop a new way of doing a reaction, or something like that. Or finding something that’s liquid crystal—they didn’t know this at the time, but that would be academic. But then making multiple compounds, variations of the same compound, is questionable whether that’s academic or not.

I think the academic, too—your academic position is really—professors are a combination of both research and teaching. To me, teaching involves a tremendous amount of time. And research involves a tremendous amount of time. And research involves a lot of continually concentrating on it. You see in the Chemistry Department, the professors have their chemistry lab that they can go in and do some work. But I found that very difficult when I got more experienced, and I ended up having people work for me, and no longer did the work myself. It’s just too hard when you're running reactions to keep track of that, and then be interrupted by students, or by faculty, or go to a meeting or something like that. I think we're very unrealistic in thinking this is possible. There’s a few people that probably can manage to do it, but generally they sacrifice one or the other. I would say as much as Dr. Brown did on liquid crystals and spread the word and wrote review articles and that, that his research probably suffered because of that. You simply can’t do it all. So, I don’t know how it is in the History Department, but—

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

NEUBERT: —I just feel that we expect too much. And we pay everybody less than they get paid elsewhere.

CRAWFORD: [laughs] Yeah.

NEUBERT: And I think teaching really needs a dedication, something you really enjoy doing, and not that you're teaching so you can do research. I know there’s professors who disagree with me. This kind of academics thing—you're going to discover something really new that has not been known before, that’s totally different. And I think you're reaching a point where there’s fewer of these things that are going to show up. [laughs] It’s harder to come up with ideas. One of the complaints I have is that professors don’t talk to the students that are the majors in their field. Including me. They didn’t talk to me. Of course, maybe because I was a woman. [At the University of Pittsburgh], there was a freshman chemistry teacher who did. And he told me once—about whether I should go to graduate school, he says, “You’ll have to go to find out. You won’t be happy until you find out.” So when one of my students would come to me, and do they go into art or do they go in chemistry, I’d say, “Well, if you want to go in art, you’d better find something else to pay the bills.”

CRAWFORD: Yeah. Did your students know that you were an artist as well?

NEUBERT: Yeah. I had paintings in my office.

CRAWFORD: Oh, of course.

NEUBERT: It’s interesting how it popped back into my life, then, after I got out of graduate school. All of a sudden I wanted to get back into painting.

CRAWFORD: Do you have a sense of why that was?

NEUBERT: I had more time.

CRAWFORD: Right.

NEUBERT: I don’t know. But there’s one thing, when it comes to like retirement: I cannot do chemistry in the lab, and that’s what I like to do. I like to run reactions and stuff like that. Art, I can do anywhere. I think in a way I had reached a point of getting the satisfaction out of chemistry. Chemistry was changing. Synthesis was changing. There was a lot of chromatography and stuff like that. And I felt that I wasn’t as well-qualified for that. I didn’t have the background experience like I did in synthesis.

CRAWFORD: You’re saying around the time that you retired in 2002, chemistry was changing?

NEUBERT: Yeah, chemistry was—organic chemistry was changing, and synthesis. They were essentially in the drug companies—the students would come back and complain about, instead of running the reaction, they would put the reagents on a column, a chromatography column, and the reaction would happen on the column. Then the column would separate the product, and you’d get enough material to test. Well, in the old days, you had to make each one of those variations. Now, you can just throw one on the column. To them, it wasn’t as much fun. But it’s a whole learning new, more—and you have to have the equipment to do it, and stuff like that. I don’t feel that threat with art. I can do art, whatever I want to do. But then I’m not trying to make a living at it, either, and I’m not trying to make a name or anything. I think you came to the realization of what we're trying to do. When changing the molecule to try to change the product, the properties. And like I say, this is something that is done in the drug industry. And when I worked at the medical school, the Biochemistry Department—not all organic chemists take biochemistry. I took it several times. But they need certain materials, certain quality materials, they need good materials, and there’s nobody to make it! Because the biochemists, they don’t want to do it. The biochemists work with water solution. The organic synthesis chemist works with organic solutions. It’s a different way of doing it.

CRAWFORD: You're saying, when you were working at the medical school, because you had experience both in organic chemistry and biochemistry, you were able to kind of—

NEUBERT: I had enough knowledge of biochemistry to—and biochemistry involves organic chemistry, and so I had the organic chemistry knowledge, but I also had the experience of working [with biological materials]. So, when they want certain material, it has been made before, it has been done before. See, this is what I’m saying in the applied realm. It has done before. We need somebody to get it really pure, and stuff like this. So we had to go in and make a big batch of it. And here again, it’s the big batch thing. Well, just think—if the Institute hadn’t had me there, who would have made the deuterated material? That hadn’t already been made. Who would have made it? And who would have made enough to go not to just Doane’s group but to other people? That’s what I emphasized somewhere later. We need to emphasize we made materials not just for our group, but that material would go to other scientists, too. And that’s what the Ukrainian medal was for. Not that I made something totally different, but I made this material that they needed. They didn’t have anybody to make it. So this is one of my gripes with NSF. You need background to do research, especially in interdisciplinary areas. I saw this when I worked at the medical school, that there’s got to be some really interesting projects that need to be done that are of interest to biochemists or doctors, for example. If you get sick or something, it’s all chemical. The body is a chemistry factory, and you need a chemist with not just a BS degree but with lots of experience and knowledge and stuff like that, and knows both the areas, both fields. There was one student there that had a medical degree but needed a PhD to do the chemistry. To me, that’s where the most interesting stuff is. And you're lacking it, because you've got this idea that you can’t use this scientist who’s just doing routine work. What scientist with this PhD wants to come in the department and just do the routine work, and then have them say, “Well, it’s not good enough for a promotion because it’s routine stuff”?

CRAWFORD: You said you have a gripe with the NSF. Are you saying you didn’t feel like the NSF supported routine work enough, that they were focusing too much on—?

NEUBERT: Well, they focus on the really academic. I saw with NSF, with the Liquid Crystal Institute, we were able to convince them to—I think there was more pressure for them to interact with industry. Industry interacts with academic in various places, but do you hear about them very often? And, is it as effective as it could be, if they had a proper interaction?

Okay, this is where—on how I determined—go back to the subject—where I’m going to graduate school. I did not know about Gates’ work before applying. But yeah, friends at Bristol got their degree at Rochester, and they took me for a visit to the Chemistry Department, and I talked to the organic chemist professors. There were several of them doing synthesis. Gates, obviously, was doing more applied work, but I knew that at least there was one sort of synthesis chemist that I would want to work with.

CRAWFORD: Was Bristol Labs in Rochester, or close to the University of Rochester?

NEUBERT: It’s in Syracuse.

CRAWFORD: Oh, Syracuse. Right, okay.

NEUBERT: It’s part of the whole Bristol Myers—they moved a lot of it to the East Coast. Connecticut, I think it was. Okay, and I don’t know how much we want to stay here. I talk about that I had struggles with graduate school, mostly in the course work. I had been out of school for three years and didn’t have some of the courses. I was not an A student. I almost failed out as an undergraduate student, in my first year, first semester, and almost failed out as a graduate student, had to take courses over. So here’s a—but I was able to recover in both cases and pass the written exams. In undergraduate school, it was a math professor. I was struggling through algebra, and he—and this is for you, as a professor—we ran into each other in the hallway, and he said he’d be willing to help. Just come to his office and he’d be willing to help. He was a graduate student, teaching assistant. That broke the ice, and I started going to see him. Because I was kind of shy and everything, and I was taught that the elderly—they're absolute like gods, almost.

CRAWFORD: Yeah, you don’t bother them, right?

NEUBERT: Yeah. And actually, we started—I started going fairly frequently and getting help on the problems. One of the things, I think, that I had a problem is, I have to see every step very carefully, one by one, and sometimes the professors go too fast or something like that. But I’m just saying, he just talked to me. He didn’t spend a lot of time with me initially; he just talked to me. And it made a big difference. Look at the difference it made. And when I talked to Mike [Jirousek]—look at the difference that made, in just—so as a professor, at least for the majors—you can’t talk to everybody—at least the majors, you should be trying to help.

CRAWFORD: Yeah. And I think you're making a point about the power of personal interactions, personal connection.

NEUBERT: Yes. And I know there are students that end up being passed—what I notice is that the professors don’t mind students who put the effort into it and come and ask questions. What is bothering them is some of the students who don’t do any work and then they come and expect you to solve their problems, and they get turned off on helping. Yeah. I just was amazed that no one had talked to Mike [Jirousek]. And if they're a major, why isn’t the professors talking to the student? “What do you want to do?”; Where are you going to go?”; “What kind of work do you want to do?”; “Is there some kind of project you can work on?”; “Here’s somebody you can work with,” or something. I’m a real fan for some sort of additional work, interns or whatever you want to call it. But you have to spend the time to make it work.

And I’ll tell you a little story. We had a big ALCOM1 meeting, and people, different researchers were talking about their work and stuff. I had of course to talk about the synthesis and stuff. But before me, there was one of the physicists from another school who got up and said something about not being able to get enough material. And so, I had heard this. I hadn’t talked yet. I talked the next day. So I went to the lab, and I got a bottle of—a bottle about this big with that much liquid crystal material in it, 50 grams of liquid crystal material. I took it to the meeting, and I says—it was a thioester. I says, “This is how much we can make.” And it was—it actually took a lot of work and experience to develop the methods to make that much material. Because when I first got the work to do, it had already been made, on a small scale, but those methods would not work on a large scale. And so, I had to find a way to make it work. So, is that research, or is it—?

CRAWFORD: Application. I’m curious, what was the reaction when you came back with that 50 grams of that liquid crystal material?

NEUBERT: Well, it shut him up! [laughs]

CRAWFORD: [laughs] I bet it did​.​

[End]

Oral History Interview with Mary Neubert by Matthew Crawford

December 14, 2022

Location of Interview: Mary Neubert’s Home
Hudson, Ohio

Liquid Crystal Oral History Project
Department of History
Kent State University

Transcript produced by Sharp Copy Transcription

DR. MATTHEW CRAWFORD: My name is Matthew Crawford. I'm a Historian of Science at Kent State University. Today I am speaking with Dr. Mary Neubert at her home in Hudson, Ohio. Today’s date is December 14th, 2022.

DR. MARY NEUBERT: This is what I wanted to explain, because I think I could have explained it easier, and I’m not sure what to do about it. Because I think one of the new things that we discovered in liquid crystals—and of course the people are studying it for how they can make displays and stuff like that—but kind of overlooked is the fact that we've changed the whole concept of melting point.

CRAWFORD: Can you explain that further?

NEUBERT: Up to this point, we felt that every crystal material had a melting point, and if it was pure, it would be a sharp melting point. That would be crystal to isotropic liquid. I believe people had seen crystal, or crystal changes, but they hadn’t seen liquid crystal change. What we're seeing in the discovery of the liquid crystal phase is a difference in phase transition. What we now see can be a different type of melting, where crystals go to the liquid crystal phases—it can be one, or two, or three—and then finally at the end it goes to the isotropic liquid. So I would call the melting point now crystal to liquid crystal phase, and liquid crystal phase to isotropic liquid, is the—now it’s the clearing point. So I’m not even sure that could be the—because the melting is the whole transition to isotropic.

CRAWFORD: So even though there’s these two—

NEUBERT: There’s changes within that crystal to isotropic. And, we didn’t know that before. So this was an important new piece of information that came out of the research. As I understand it, anyways. So, okay, I have a comment; I don’t know if we want to put it in anywhere or not. Research requires steady, continuous thought, or concentration. And the problem is when you have a professor that’s involved in the teaching and the academic area, often if they try to do research in the lab, that’s given to often interrupted. And this just doesn't work very well for research. Sometimes things sit longer than they should, and then you just don’t have—you know, I’m sure you have this with your job. When you get involved in this, you're thinking about this a lot, often, on and off, and stuff like that. When your major thing is teaching, you're thinking about that, and other problems you might have, and so forth. And then you want to add another major thing to that, that’s going to require concentration. And even if you have graduate students or postdocs who work for you, you have to keep track of that research. And that’s why I think it’s difficult for professors. Because it happened to me. Eventually, I had people working for me, and eventually I couldn't—I ended up not doing reactions. Because I was always being interrupted for something. And it just is not the right thing for at least doing synthesis research, and I think a lot of research.

CRAWFORD: Why would you say it’s not right for synthesis research in particular? Are you saying for that kind of research you really need to be hands-on doing the research yourself?

NEUBERT: There’s a lot—in organic synthesis, yes, there’s a lot of hands-on and there’s a lot of skill involved. And that’s why I said you can’t take somebody new. There’s things they can do. Maybe have them recrystallize, or something like that, or do a distillation or something. But what they don’t have is what you're seeing in my background, is the experience in working in the lab on totally different projects, different compounds, different reasons. And that experience, it turns out, ended up being useful in the liquid crystal area where I needed to make more material, and so on and so forth. That’s what I’m trying to say.

CRAWFORD: So, there’s a kind of skill to being a chemist, an organic chemist, a synthesis chemist, that comes in part from experience.

NEUBERT: Right. And skill. Like for instance, microscope work, that’s another thing. I did that solely by spending many hours on the microscope. There is no special technique or any—well, there were certain ways of doing it and stuff like that. But it’s just—over and over and over and over again. And I never got really bored with it.

CRAWFORD: So is it a kind of pattern recognition when you're doing microscope work?

NEUBERT: Say that again?

CRAWFORD: Is it like pattern recognition, just looking through the microscope, learning what you're seeing?

NEUBERT: Learning the pattern, and how it goes through the transition. One of the things that you need to do is align it a certain way. And you learn it—if you want to see the beautiful patterns that you're thinking of, when you put the material on the slide [in ]certain way, and that gets the molecules to line up and you get a beautiful texture. A lot of people in liquid crystals don’t know that. If you want to look at a different alignment of that particular thing, then while it’s in that phase, then move the cover slip and the alignment changes. It’s not a scientifically controlled thing, but it gives the results that you need. Now, what’s the difference between the phases you see, liquid crystal to liquid crystal , and what are the differences in the different types of liquid crystals, and all that, and what are their properties and everything. And what are you seeing—we're seeing also crystal-to-crystal change. And why am I saying this is a liquid crystal phase rather than the crystal-crystal change? And so if you've seen this many times, it’s an accumulation of everything in the brain to tell you—now, do I ever [see] something I don’t know what? I can’t say one or another? Yes. Impurities, for instance, is something that affects what you see. So that’s another thing. And if somebody gives me a sample I have no idea how pure it is.

CRAWFORD: And if you were someone who didn’t have a lot of experience, you might not recognize the impurities as impurities.

NEUBERT: And this is what happened in the paper that was published in JACS, and the person did not have enough experience. The problem is, is sometimes the liquid crystal phase only lasts a very short time. If your rate is too fast, heating rate or cooling rate is too fast, then you'll see a continuous mixture, and you won’t separate out the different phases. That’s one of the problems that you run into. So, I mean, this is just typical of everything that requires skill. If you’re deciding to make something, and how do you do it, and that. This is what I think we—it just seems to me we have trouble appreciating it. And, okay, you're a professor; there’s a certain amount of skill in teaching. And a lot of it, you learn by trial and error. Do they ever tell you how to teach? Did you ever take a course in how to teach?

CRAWFORD: No.

NEUBERT: No. Which often amazed me. We're supposed to teach, and we’re never taught how to teach. So we pick it up based on our experience. And there’s so much is like that. And why is that less important than somebody teaching us in the classroom, or reading a book or something? There are many ways to learn. But the fact is it comes down to—the learning is all done by the individual. It all comes down—you can go and listen to the professor give a lecture and stuff like that, but if you don’t sit down and spend the time on it, going over it and truly understanding it, you won’t get it. And that’s what students often don’t understand. So, yeah, this is a skill. And we seem to appreciate the skill of somebody that is making a wood carving or something like that. We seem to understand the skill there. Or sometimes in painting, or anything that you make. But we don’t seem to appreciate the skill, the tremendous skill, that is needed in the sciences. So I’ll just add—if we made new compounds, we had to do transition temperatures, and we did them both by microscope and by DSC. If we got a material from somebody else gave us to look at, we did transition temperatures, by the microscope mostly. If anybody had any questions on all this, they came to me, and I had the experience of looking at it. So that [turned out to be a lot]. And that’s how I got this knowledge.

CRAWFORD: This is probably a very basic question, but how important is or are transition temperatures to identifying a compound?

NEUBERT: How important is it to identifying a compound?

CRAWFORD: Yeah, or understanding a compound.

NEUBERT: Well, when you have a new compound, you don’t know what they are, so then you have to collect that data. And it’s totally new, so you can’t get it anywhere else. But if somebody comes back and wants to remake it, make another batch of it or remake it, then that melting point is an absolute value. That’s data. It’s just like the data the medical field gives you—your blood pressure, your breathing rate. What is it of human beings? It’s a certain number. So this is the - what is the periodic table?, which—it’s what nature has established. I run into this with color in the art. Why are the colors the way they are? That’s the way nature provides it. We don’t know that. And so nature provides this material with these properties, and all the scientist is doing is discovering the properties. In most cases, we're not inventing anything; we're just discovering how nature works. Now, one of the purposes of my research was to establish these physical properties so we could hopefully find new and interesting materials, or provide data for other people. So, the one thing I’ve added—we made many compounds in our series, and we also made other materials people requested. And we had a huge number of materials available and data available. If somebody, say a physicist, said, “I want a material that has a smectic-C phase”—or something like this—"and I want in a temperature range”—duh duh duh—we could go through our computer file and see if we had anything to match it, and we could provide that material in many cases—in all cases at least a small amount of material; in some cases we could provide quite a bit. And so like our thioesters that we made for Dave Johnson, they went to other researchers, because we had made so much for him.

CRAWFORD: So you're saying part of your synthesis work was producing these new compounds.

NEUBERT: Yeah.

CRAWFORD: When you produced those compounds, you would get the characteristics of the compounds, like transition temperatures and things like that.

NEUBERT: Yeah, we were looking at the structure-property relationships. But these materials were then also available for anybody to use. I don’t know what has happened to all this, whether it’s still there. I had a whole system for it. But nobody talked to me about it, so—

CRAWFORD: When you—

NEUBERT: When I left.

CRAWFORD: When you retired? But in part, so—somebody from industry or another academic lab could come to you or the LCI and say, “We're looking for a compound that has liquid crystal properties and a melting point of”—I don’t know, 86 degrees or something like that—and then you would have—

NEUBERT: Or sometimes they’d even ask us to synthesize something.

CRAWFORD: Oh, I see.

NEUBERT: But if they came and say, “I need a discotic,” I’d say, “No, we don’t have any of that.” If they came and asked and wanted a polymer, I’d say, “See somebody else for that.” L.C. Chien. See—L.C. Chien. I would at least know where they could get possibly get it. I had the thing in—I may have told you this—France had made a compound, a new compound, and a professor at Harvard wanted to study it. He came to me, and I says, “Why don’t you go to the French? They already have it.” Well, he didn’t trust—he says, “I trust your work more.” So—

CRAWFORD: Interesting.

NEUBERT: —that is not something you can talk about a lot, but—it surprised me. So, anyways, I think that’s—

CRAWFORD: Yeah.

NEUBERT: Oh, I wanted to add—when we talked, I told you that I myself used the old German literature from the pre World War days, for general organic chemical methods to use to make the intermediates to the liquid crystals. And these people had no idea that we had used their work to make our materials. They did contribute general chemistry knowledge. And no one can actually predict how that knowledge is going to be used. All this data in my paper, maybe no one will use it. Maybe someone will find it useful. We're always trying to say, what’s going to be the next big thing? That data is also useful for making mixtures, if they want to lower the melting point. I did notice—now, at the beginning, when I started in liquid crystals, I had been taught to do a search for any ideas I had to do for research, through Chem Abstracts or whatever. To read the literature first. When I started there at the Liquid Crystal Institute, I knew very little about liquid crystals, so I went to Chem Abstracts and looked up the synthesis of liquid crystals. I did a search and it took me about a week. That’s not possible today. There are so many publications it’s not possible. So, now the problem is—so, when I went and did my papers and published it—and I—[pause]—I noticed when—what I did is I continued to read the liquid crystal new papers, but I had to limit it to certain types of compounds. I did not do it for all the chiral materials or the polymers and that. That’s a whole separate file. I only did it for the more basic ones like [phenyl benzoates]. And what I discovered—because I kept copies of all these papers, and that was the notebooks you saw in my office—was that I began to see the same author using the same beginning essentially in their paper, and reporting a few results, and then coming back and doing it for a later paper, where in my opinion it could have been all put together in one paper. And it’s obvious what they're doing; they're trying to get more publication. And yeah, decisions like in the Chemistry Department, does the professor get tenure or not—and one of the things was it said the papers needed to be in JACS or some other well-known—I couldn't get into JACS because it was too applied, but I could get into any liquid crystal journal without any—so—and then there’s certain feeling in the department that the liquid crystal journals aren’t as high class, you know, or scientific or whatever. I don’t know how you’d best—but anyways, if you had your publications in it, instead of JACS, you might not get your tenure. Which—does not make sense to me. Which is probably another reason why I never went [into being a teaching professor].

CRAWFORD: What is it that doesn't make sense to you? The privileging of publications in JACS?

NEUBERT: Of which publications you're in. What should be decided is the quality of the paper itself. Not whether it’s in JACS or [Molecular Crystals and Liquid Crystal], but the quality of papers. And then the other journal is liquid crystals, and you could have good quality papers in these journals, too. And one of the problems is, is you need somebody to proofread these manuscripts, and I would often get them to do. And, a lot of times they came from foreign people who have language problems and stuff. But everybody’s in a rush to collect data and do something simple. So, what should your standards be in considering it a good, acceptable publication? If they just put new data in, that’s worth something, but—you know, that’s a problem I ran into.

CRAWFORD: Just so I have it for the recording, JACS is the Journal of the American Chemical Society?

NEUBERT: Yeah. And so, you asked if this is something recent. It is, in my experience, but I can’t say it was true of all the—it’s just what I experienced. Talking about the danger of working with chemicals—want to say here is, with the radium, it was a radioactivity that caused problems.1 That it would be radioactivity in that way. So, essentially radioactivity got both Marie Curie and her daughter—killed both of them. So in working with chemicals, and how dangerous are they. If they're new materials, how dangerous are they? If we were doing a reaction in those days that involved an acid chloride or something really dangerous, a dangerous reagent or something, we would certainly run our reaction in the hood. But we did not find it a problem working outside the hood if we're doing a recrystallization from benzene, or chromatography where we're exposed to the vapors of the solvents. And that changed over the years. Another thing that changed and I haven't mentioned here is when we’d wash—clean our equipment, we’d sometimes use acetone to get rid of the organic stuff or something like that. We did not have a waste disposal service; things were poured down the drain—

CRAWFORD: Wow.

NEUBERT: —if they were water soluble. Sometimes it was an alcohol or something. And it became—when they started recycling waste solvent, then we started not doing—we stopped doing that sort of thing. We had a way of getting rid of it, a different way of getting rid of it. The storage of chemicals is another problem. As tight as a bottle cap may be, it may leak through the lid or something. So, storage of chemicals—usually it should be in a specially ventilated building, which we—or [a full-length hood] or something like that. And we did not have that. And we were using large quantities. The other thing that got me in trouble was trying to keep people from smoking in the building. Because I don’t know if you've ever been in that little original liquid crystal building; it’s not a very big building, and the ventilation wasn’t the greatest. So, we fought to try to get that changed. Fire hazard is another thing. In each revision of the building, I was consulted about the design, at the beginning stages, and at some point I would have to look at it again. But I was never—caught the final stage. And not being able to read the diagrams. The problem I had is where I thought there was an empty space, they would put a shower or something like that.

CRAWFORD: I see. Yeah.

NEUBERT: One of the problems we had in the first building, between the two buildings—I needed shelves in the middle benches, because we always have a lot of bottles of solvent, of chemicals. I needed shelves in there. Well, they gave me shelves, but they put the lighting fixtures right above the shelf. [laughs]

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

NEUBERT: And we actually found—believe it—I don’t know how many architects were on this thing, but there were several. And yet—and they were supposed to inspect everything, and everything, and we turned on the water, and there’s no—connection to the drain.

CRAWFORD: Oh! Geez!

NEUBERT: And we used to use water as a vacuum pump. But of course the [laughs]—then the other problem is, is they come up and say, “Check this design and give it back to us, in two days.” [laughs] I had another comment about the research. New things in science are often discovered while looking for something else. And, about women in science—I just had the comment—we seemed to be making progress when the woman engineer was head of the Webb Telescope bproject.

CRAWFORD: The Webb Telescope project, you said?

NEUBERT: Pardon me?

CRAWFORD: The Webb Telescope project?

NEUBERT: Yeah. I’m sure they probably had other women on that. There had to be a lot of people on that.

CRAWFORD: Okay! Well, we made it. [laughs]

NEUBERT: Yeah, I’m exhausted! [laughs]

CRAWFORD: Yeah. I can imagine.

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