Chapter I

Univ. of Michigan, Lawrence Radiation Lab, Caltech, UCLA, UC Berkeley (1939-1952)

Overview
This chapter opens with a few words about my ancestry, early childhood, grade-school, and high-school activities and hobbies. These included teen-aged collecting of rare cave specimens in Kentucky and collecting other geological artifacts in Upper Michigan. James Van Vliet, a graduate of U. of Mich. helped me acquire components for basement laboratories, in which I carried out advanced science projects. I also visited Ann Arbor Saturday mornings to study glass blowing with Gunther Kessler, an instrumentalist for the U. of Mich. Physics Dept.

Enrolling at U. of Mich. upon graduation in 1939, I majored in math and physics and became laboratory assistant to physics Prof. O. S. Duffendack on various research projects, including neutron counters and electron microscopy. For this work, Duffendack nominated me as a fellow of the Amer. Assoc. for the Advancement of Science. I became and remain their youngest elected fellow at age 18. My interests in chemical bonding and the origin of life began during this period.

With World War II looming, I embarked with a fellow student, Paul Young, on a 'last chance' hunting and collecting expedition to the Southwestern United States and Mexico. This trip was full of adventure but somewhat ill-fated! Paul had to return to Michigan, and I gave up collecting plans but continued traveling in Mexico. Subsequently, I drove to California to visit family, and determined eventually to settle there.

Returning to U. of M., I roomed with two friends from Central High in Detroit. Both were soon drafted and one was lost in action. One notable event was my civilian flight training, obtaining a license to fly small planes. Upon graduation, I took a temporary research position developing an AC voltage stabilizer. But desirous of returning to California, I obtained a position as physicist at the UC Berkeley Radiation Laboratory.

Upon returning to Detroit, my sister, Leslie, also wanted to go to California, so we set off together. Arriving without incident, she took a position in San Francisco and I started as an assistant, actually a handyman, at the 'Rad Lab.' Although I tired quickly of being a handyman, experiences there much influenced my subsequent career. With the brashness of youth I complained about my assignments and asked for more challenging work. That, and a scolding from E.O. Lawrence, himself, was the beginning of the end for me there.

After consulting with colleagues, I acquired a position on a Naval war research project at Caltech early in 1944 with Carl Anderson's group. My assignments there yielded every challenge and demand I had sought unsuccessfully at the Rad Lab. My first project was to develop a turn-handle alignment adjustment device for a rocket sight. After some reorganization, I was assigned to W. R. Smythe's group and entrusted with development and field testing of aircraft-fired, spin-stabilized rocketry. My first paper on chemical bonding was published then.

Some hobbyist excitement also awaited me. I had maintained correspondence with Aaron White, my surviving Ann Arbor roommate. Upon being discharged, he joined me in Pasadena. Since Aaron had much time on his hands, I suggested a joint project. We lived not far from the Santa Anita racetrack, and I had some interest in horse racing, compliments of my brother, Dick. So, I proposed making a statistical analysis of horse-race wagering. If there were any bets with positive payoffs, he agreed to go to Santa Anita daily to place bets. The rest is history.

In another Pasadena hobby, I began piano and musical composition studies. My piano teacher was Henrietta Werndorff, soloist at premiers of works of Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg in Vienna in the early 1900s. My composition teacher, Calista Rogers, was a well-known singer, director, and folk-lorist, and assistant conductor for the Bach Society. Through Marietta's introduction, I met and had my first and only composition, a Ballade in D minor, played for us by Eric Zeisl, a well-known composer from Vienna.

At war's end, I joined my parents at the Sutter hotel in San Francisco, and spent several winter and spring months of 1946 there. Each weekday I commuted to UC Berkeley and audited courses. I consulted with Prof. Sumner Cushing Brooks of the Zoology Dept. on my origin of life studies. He invited me to give a Zoology Dept. Seminar. Although reluctant, I made a favorable impression that stood me in good stead upon my return for graduate work.

My paper on the origin of life had appeared in 1945 in Philosophy of Science. The science editor for the Los Angeles Times interviewed me in Jan., 1946 for an article before I left Caltech. To my great surprise, almost 50 years later I learned that his news story, "New Life Creation Theory Based on Earth's Rotation," had appeared on the front page on Feb. 4, 1946,-as the day's lead article and headline.

A second paper on evolution to the living state also was in the works, eventually appearing in 1947 in the American Naturalist. A main thesis of both papers was that "The [24-hr] fluctuation in temperature in itself acts as a 'shuffling factor' which increases the probability that favored molecular associations will occur and that non-favored ones will be eliminated."

Meanwhile my parents settled in Los Angeles. My bother Earl and I joined them, with Dick following upon his discharge. I enrolled as a math major at UCLA, and also obtained a teaching assistantship for '46-'47. For my second and third years, I was awarded University Fellowships. I continued graduate physical science courses together with beginning courses and graduate seminars in biology. During that period, I achieved my 5th and 6th publications. One was a theoretical synthesis concerning chromosomes, foreign proteins, and viruses, in American Naturalist for 1949. Its 44-page-length required publication in consecutive (March-April and May-June) issues, a precedent. The other was a continuation of my chemical bond studies, the 4th and last in that series.

Having completed three years of graduate and undergraduate studies at UCLA in 1949, I was ready to enter a Ph.D. program, and had applied for a Public Health Service fellowship. Being fairly confident of receiving it, I had made no other financial arrangement. However, unbeknownst to me, only one such fellowship could be awarded in any Department, and the Department had recommended someone else. So, there I was, high and dry at the last minute.

In Science I had read about Phoenix Project Pre-doctoral fellowships at the U. of Mich. I hastily assembled transcripts and reprints and submitted them with an informal application. A friend from UCLA, Dr. Howard Bern, was in the Zoology Dept. at UC Berkeley. So I also made a hurried call to him. To my good fortune, he was in charge of hiring teaching assistants and offered me an assistantship on the spot. Though also offered a Phoenix Project fellowship, I opted for Berkeley.

I interviewed with Prof. William Berg, who accepted me into a Ph.D. program in chemical embryology. In one seminar I became interested in the unsolved problem of the non-linearity of the Arrhenius plots for enzyme-catalyzed reactions. I soon found a comparatively simple modification of the usual formulation that described the temperature dependence with greater accuracy and had theoretical implications. A paper on these studies appeared in 1950 in the Journal of General Physiology. Little could I imagine that I would receive a reprint request for this paper 54 years later.

In the undergraduate course in Natural History, I studied deer mice, initiating a lifelong interest in animal behavior. To complete my Ph.D. studies at Berkeley, I obtained a National Cancer Institute Predoctoral Fellowship. The M.A. was conferred in 1951 and the Ph.D. in 1952. My thesis topic was the "Metabolism of Free Amino Acids, Peptides, and Proteins in Early Sea Urchin Development." This involved taking equal samples of embryos at regular intervals. The necessity for using quantitative procedures underlay my subsequent development of the technique of freeze-drying samples directly in small vials. Within 5 years this became state-of-the-art in chemical, drug, and vaccine laboratories throughout the world. My doctoral thesis on these studies appeared in 1953.

I obtained 2-year postdoctoral fellowship support from the National Institutes of Health to continue my studies abroad. In a visit to Washington, D.C., I learned that I topped their national postdoctoral rankings. I continued my studies with Prof. John Runnström at the Wenner-Gren's Institute for Experimental Biology at Stockholm U., Sweden.
End Overview

Early childhood
I first saw the light of day on January 21, 1922, in Providence Hospital, Detroit, Michigan. My father and his parents and siblings were immigrants from Russia, now Poland (village of Bogopol), around 1900. My mother also was born in Detroit, a descendant of immigrant great grandparents who arrived in Detroit in 1860 from Gora-Kalvariya (Polish, Gora Kalwaria) in the Province of Souvolk, Russia. My earliest serious hobby in Durfee Intermediate grade school was building and flying model airplanes. I acquired the hobby by working in a model airplane store owned by Henry Rainey, a genius at building such planes. On some weekends we would motor to near and distant sites, entering contests for several categories (mostly maneuvering) of model planes, occasionally achieving a prize. The most popular category, drawing the largest crowds, was speed, sure to provide spectacular crashes.

Even earlier days were recalled recently, when Ivan Boesky was convicted of insider stock trading. On Sundays, I sometimes walked to the Dexter movie theater (10-cents admission in the 30s), occasionally looking in at Boesky's Delicatessen. It was owned by Ivan's father. We did not have hard-core kids' gangs in our neighborhoods in those days, only cliques, moderately at odds with one another, say the 'Calverts' versus the 'Glynn Courts.'. Our most dangerous weapons were 'zip' guns that shot rubber bands cut from old tire inner-tubes, triggered by spring-loaded clothes pins.

Two of my childhood chums were Bob and Archie McClelland. I vividly recall those times, particularly because their mother Flora, a widow, ran a 'custom' cosmetics business out of her home (Flora McClelland Cosmetics) with a very elite clientele. She produced all her own products at home on Calvert St., in batches of about 5 gallons, in huge rotary and reciprocating mixers with shield-shaped paddles. Packaging and labeling also were carried out on the premises. I can still recall the scent of the cocoa butter ingredient. In recent times, I've tried to locate Bob and Archie, to no avail. But at least I did not find their obituaries, as is too often the case.

Grade-school days
In grade school, I attended a summer camp one year in the early 1930s, where the counselor was Walter P. Nickell, a well-known naturalist, ornithologist, and teacher, based at the Cranbrook Institute of Science in Bloomfield Hills, Mich. He was known, affectionately, as the "Birdman of Cranbrook." He could imitate any birdsong with perfection. Subsequently, during another summer vacation period, Nick, some friends (including now-retired veterinarian, Milton Lipson, a friend to this day) and I mounted a cave-exploring expedition to Kentucky (Fig. 1-1, our spelunking party, with the locals). This was to Nick's prior stamping grounds. Nick and I also took a geological collecting trip to the Keewenaw Peninsula in Upper Michigan one summer, looking for fossils, minerals, arrow heads, and whatever. Our party also had at least two other members one of whom took the surviving picture of Nick and me prospecting (Fig. 1-2). Note that Nick bent his knees when bending down, whereas I didn't. Many years later that precise bad habit cost me a ruptured spinal disc.

I became hooked on cave exploration on that first trip and determined to repeat the experience. The next summer, at age 16, I hitch-hiked to Kentucky and Tennessee on my own (Fig. 1-3, the author in knickers and boots, ready for spelunking), where I explored several other caves. It was on that trip that I reached into a cavity for a young skunk and got thoroughly sprayed. Those locales, however, were no place for a 'northerner' to travel alone. Every stranger was suspected of being a 'revenuer.' But Nick, who formerly taught in the backwoods there, had kindly supplied me with names of acquaintances and introductions, which proved invaluable.

Nick also arranged for me to collect cave minerals for the Cranbrook Institute of Science. Among other things I collected some rare helictites, which remained on exhibit in the Cranbrook Museum for some years. Unlike stalactites and stalagmites, their growth consists of highly irregular formations, sometimes helical in form and often very delicate. They were 'growing' out horizontally from a wall beside an underground stream.

I contacted Cranbrook recently to inquire about them. They were still catalogued as being in their collection but it took Kevin Kelly, the Collections Manager, several months to track them down. He also found that the shipping receipt but it was from Milton Lipson. Apparently I shipped them to Milton, and he forwarded them to Cranbrook. The Polaroid shot in Fig. 1-4 is, to my mind, quite impressive; I haven't seen the likes of it during numerous cave visits elsewhere.

I was in frequent contact with Nick and his family thereafter. Unfortunately, Nick died in 1973 at a comparatively early age. A loan fund established at Central Michigan U. to commemorate him was converted to the Walter P. Nickell Scholarship in 1995. CMU also had awarded Nick a Doctorate of Law degree in 1964.

Having a taste for travel and adventure, one summer I convinced my parents to allow me to hitch-hike to Florida. The only incident I remember from that trip was being given a ride on the way south by the middle-aged owner of the Penguin series of British books. In the hours we rode together, he confided to me the sexual travails of his married life to a much younger woman.

High-school days
From my earliest schooldays, mathematics and the physical sciences were my forte and main lines of interest. These were greatly reinforced in my first year at Detroit's Central High School in 1936, when I was introduced to two scientists by my chemistry teacher, Louis Panush.

One of these was a neighbor, James Van Vliet, living only a few doors away on Calvert. He was a chemist, a graduate of the U. of Michigan. He had worked at Sparks-Worthington, a manufacturer of radios and automobile horns up through about 1935 (e.g., the Spartan Model 506 radio), which by then was out of business. Existing S-W radios now have the reputation for appearance, "being somewhere between a cathedral and a tombstone" -- colorful plastic, wood, and glass table sets, designed either by Walter Darwin Teague or Raymond Loewy.

James came from a fairly well-to-do family and was managing the family properties, which consisted mostly in collecting rents. He helped me acquire laboratory equipment from the defunct S-W factory in Jackson, Michigan, not far from Detroit. During several trips there I obtained, at garage-sale prices, all manner of glassware and chemicals, including several mercury vapor vacuum pumps and uncommon wire and rod stock of electrode elements that were used in vacuum tubes. These were the initial ingredients of my subsequent chemistry (Fig. 1-5) and physics laboratories and machine shop, which I built in the basement of our home at 1999 Calvert.

Through James, I met David Segal, who also lived on Calvert, just a block away. Dave was the Detroit area sales representative for Eberbach Scientific Supply Co., located in Ann Arbor, Mich., not far from the U. of Mich. He motored to Ann Arbor almost every Saturday morning on Eberbach business. Sometimes he brought back material for my basement labs. Once he offered to let me come along, and introduced me to the glassblower and instrumentalist for the U. of Mich. Physics Dept., Gunther Kessler.

From then on, I either hitch-hiked or accompanied Segal to Ann Arbor every Saturday morning, and studied glassblowing and other laboratory techniques with Kessler. I also donated some of the very desirable rods of electrode material for radio tubes that I had acquired at the S-W factory. In the eventuality, I did very little glassblowing, being able to accomplish most needs with vacuum tubing and ground glass connections. Gunther had two sons, Heine and Karl. Both became scientists, Karl with a government agency.

Six activities stand out most from my high-school days and pursuits in my basement shops. One was my first try at Wilson cloud-chamber experiments, wherein the air inside a sealed chamber saturated with water vapor is suddenly expanded, cooling the air. One then seeks to visualize tracks formed by vapor condensation on particles ionized by a passing high-energy particle. C.T.R. Wilson received a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1927 for his work on this device. Another was my grinding of a 6-inch reflector telescope mirror -- never finished, because I went off to the U. of Mich. A third, requiring only an accurate balance, was a study of the wear and tear on U.S. monetary coins, through use. By weighing many coins, segregated by year and denomination, and appropriate calculations and plots, I was able to show, in 1937, very clearly through plotted curves, that the coins had received much greater wear and tear during the depression years, say 1930-1933 than before or after.

In a fourth project, I made up vials of luminous paint, based on zinc sulfide, and advertised them in popular science magazines, for use on toggle switches for lights. I sold a few by mail-order, despite complaints about poor adherence and settling of the luminous component. Another activity of interest, not exactly a project, grew out of my chemistry studies. It was based on the properties of calcium carbide. When this substance is reacted with water, flammable acetylene is generated. On winter nights, with snow on the ground, my brother Dick and I would drop a few pellets of calcium carbide in the snow and light the emitted gas. Passers-by puzzled endlessly over the sight of 'burning snow.'

In a fifth activity, I built a diving helmet from a 5-gallon water bottle by removing its base and closing off the top with a stopper. I don't remember how I removed the base without cracking the bottle but I suppose it was with an encircling string saturated with alcohol and set afire. Oxygen was supplied through a vertical glass tube extending from the stopper at the top. We tested it successfully under careful supervision in the swimming pool at Central High. I don't remember ever using it in the field, that is, at a lake. I have, or had, movies, somewhere, of testing it at the pool.

In the sixth venture, I devised an interesting chemical-formula card game based on similar games played with students from my chemistry class. When I afterwards took a class in printing shop, I got the idea of printing playing cards for the game. One thing led to another and I eventually got permission from the shop teacher to print 24 packs of cards, instructions, and wrappers on paper stock supplied by me, thinking about the possibility of selling them as entertaining study aids. By the time I enrolled in the U. of Mich., all was ready to go. I talked the owner of the busiest book store in Ann Arbor into putting a display in his window and stocking packs of cards, advertising them as study aids. The display continued until all the packs were sold. I was too busy with studies to carry that venture further.

Although I had interesting times in my science and math classes at Central high, the only other thing that stands out is that I was able to make some spectacular chemistry and physics class demonstrations by virtue of possessing appropriate laboratory equipment from my basement stock, and having access to liquid air. In one experiment at the front lecture table of the classroom, I froze an orange and then shattered it to pieces with a hammer.

U. of Chicago, U. of Mich.
For reasons long forgotten, I had set the U. of Chicago as my goal. Admission supposedly was assured, and dormitory quarters were arranged, through correspondence and the mailing of transcripts. Arriving by train, I took up occupancy in the dorm and completed the entrance examinations, only to be informed afterwards that I couldn't be admitted because my transcripts were lost or never had arrived. More than that, my exam scores, though passing, were said to be insufficiently meritorious to warrant waiving the rules. In other words, they didn't feel they would be losing a great prospect. Little did I realize at the time that my two greatest future mentors and supporters, Profs. Paul Alfred Weiss and Everett C. Olson were then influential members of the Chicago biology faculty.

After hurried phone calls to James, we decided that the U. of Mich. would be my best bet, even though it was very late to apply. Being an alumnus, James had some pull with the registrar, and guaranteed him that I never would get a grade lower than a "B." In actuality, I got three Cs, one in Leslie White's beginning anthropology 32 course, but I received both sophomore and senior honors. White's grade was influenced by a (long forgotten) disagreement we had over a course topic (and my treatment of it in the course final).

We kept up a correspondence in later years. His theories on cultural evolution helped revolutionize the way archeology was studied. According to White, all cultures fell along a continuum of complexity based on the state of technological advancement. It was a few years later (1943) that Betty Meggers, the now well-known Smithsonian anthropologist, began to study with White for her master's degree, before going on to Columbia U. for her Ph.D.

It was too late to find a roommate or an outside room in town (Ann Arbor) but I was fortunate to be able to share a dorm room with the floor captain, who was 2 or 3 years my senior. After settling in, in January, 1939, I took the entrance exams, only to find that they were the same ones I had taken only a week earlier at Chicago. Having already pondered over many answers, I had much more time for the others and, not surprisingly, did exceptionally well. That earned me noticeably, but undeservedly, high respect from my counselor, a member of the Geology Dept., Prof. Chester Slausen.

Although Michigan had become my second choice, it was by no means of lesser stature. Both schools ranked in the top 20 in the U.S. Some would put one or the other in the top 10. In fact, I believed the U. of Mich. to have a more distinguished physics lineup than the U. of Chicago, with such faculty as Goudsmit and Uhlenbeck (of electron-spin fame), Firestone, Crane, Randall, Schwinger (only visiting), etc.

For the second semester, I roomed with Louis Cote, who was a classmate from Detroit. He was an accomplished math major who went on to an academic career in math. Although I tracked him down years later, chatted by phone, and sent him one of my geometry treatises, I never heard from him afterwards. Perhaps he still resented my chiding him with an uncomplimentary nickname almost 60 years earlier.

Having had considerable amateur experience in physics, and with a recommendation from Kessler, I was offered a position with O. S. Duffendack, a professor of physics, as his research assistant. At first, I was engaged in some of the early perfection of neutron counters, working in the room above the cyclotron. I also transferred and combined misc. rare gases in large glass bulbs, and used a recording spectrophotometer, including aluminizing its mirror. Eventually I was assigned as a research assistant with the new RCA electron microscope, only the second one in the U.S.A., assisting Robert Picard, who was studying metal surfaces, and Edna Kearney, who was studying rod-shaped bacteria, for their Ph.D. theses.

My path crossed those of both again years later. Picard was Director of Research at Cenco (Central Scientific Company) in Chicago, as related in Chap. 3. That was in connection with my chamber-type laboratory freeze-dryer. Edna studied shape changes in enzymes in interactions with substrate molecules. That was in connection with my studies of biological membrane structure and function (see Chap. 4).

I had subscribed to Science magazine in 1939 and was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) the next year, at the age of 18. Duffendack had nominated me on the basis of my research in his laboratories. This was, and remains, the earliest age ever for election to an AAAS Fellowship. Many years later, someone in his early 20's was feted in Science magazine, but incorrectly, as having had that distinction. On Oct. 26, 1988, I was welcomed "to the ranks of AAAS Fifty-Year Members" and became "exempt from further payment of dues."

I developed some hobbies while at U. of Mich., two of which remained with me for many years. One, which was completed while still there, was to read the entire literary output of Arthur Conan Doyle. Another remains with me to this day, namely, ancient and medieval history, mostly through the Cambridge Series for both periods, but also through the works of the English historian, Sharon Turner.

Another hobby was playing pool and 3-cushion billiards at the Student Union, just around the corner from where I lived with Gustaf and Aaron (see below), which remained with me until about 1999, when sciatica and failing knees (from playing tennis and ping-pong with the younger generation) put an end to them. Although I was only an average billiard player, specializing in "safeties," I did manage to win a couple of weekly elimination 3-cushion tournaments at a pool hall in Santa Monica in the 1970's. My handicap was 2 or 3 points in a game of 12.

It was during this period at U. of Mich. that I became interested in chemical bonding, most particularly, relations between C-C bond multiplicity, energy, and interatomic distance, as well as in the origin of life, about which more, later. Living in the same dorm that first year was another student, Paul Young, whose father, Paul Sr., owned a sporting goods store in Detroit, specializing in fishing gear and world renowned to this day (though long deceased) for fishing tackle and, most particularly, fly bait. With war looming on the horizon, Paul and I decided to make a collecting trip to the Southwestern United States and Mexico while we still had the option.

Mexican Trip
Accordingly, we first applied for appropriate collecting permits from several Southwestern States, and for visas to Mexico. We started out early in 1940 in my Model A Ford convertible (purchased for $50), with Paul's small hunting trailer attached behind (Fig. 1-6). In the American border city of Laredo, Paul made contact with a noted stamp collector, a Mr. Richter. Paul had brought along a valuable assortment of stamps from his extensive collection, as emergency capital for the trip, just in case of unforeseen needs. He made some arrangement with Richter, I believe to sell him the stamps, conditionally, if he contacted him from Mexico to send some cash. I never learned how that arrangement worked out, since Paul returned alone, as a temporary invalid, as related in the following.

The trip was full of adventure! The most memorable incidents began at the border town of Nuevo Laredo. Paul headed off to a bar the very first night and got into a hassle of some sort. The female owner or manager knocked him out by kneeing him in the testicles! When he regained consciousness in a small back room, his cash and travelers' checks were gone. Fortunately, he did not have much of value with him. After that adventure, we lost no time proceeding south toward Mexico City. We decided to head to the coast, north of Tampico, to start collecting. There were no roads where we went, only sufficiently wide horse-trodden earthen trails. Unfortunately, we ran into a solid week of rain. That made collecting, and travel impossible. I remember vividly the noisy parrots, who scarcely ever stopped squawking in the rain. We had to survive with our trailer's stock of food. When the rains let up, Paul succeeded in shooting an armadillo. But as soon as we tried to leave the area we got totally mired in the mud.

The outlook was grim, but we were saved. A band of natives on horseback showed up. With great accommodation they pulled us out of the mud and escorted us to higher ground, where we could continue in safety. Though they broke a rope and exerted great efforts in helping us, they refused to accept cash, ammunition, or other offered items in return for their help. Fortunately we had the armadillo, which they gladly accepted. That encounter left us with the highest regard for Mexican natives. We were soon to be disillusioned, though, by city folk in Tampico.

Upon arrival in Tampico in late afternoon, we parked in the street alongside a city park to see the town and have a square meal. Paul disregarded the advice of the waiter -- not to eat the chili peppers -- and paid the price, in consequence. Upon returning to the park after dinner, we were surprised to see youngsters and teenagers running around in the vicinity of, and away from, our trailer. Sure enough, they had broken into the side window-port (open in Fig. 1-6) and screen and were unloading everything loose on the upper back shelf. Luck was with us again, as they did not have time to get to the real valuables, and guns, which were kept under the floorboards comprising our bed. The most valuable of the many 'loose' items stolen was my typewriter. We contacted the police, but it was evident that any time waiting around for recovery of property would just be time wasted.

In Mexico City we had a Chinese dinner on our first night, and were struck immediately by a most pitiless form of Montezuma's revenge. We tried to 'run it off' (Paul's idea) with little success. Paul, being much of a loner, ventured out alone on the second or third night for fate's offerings. Fate did not disappoint. In fact, that night's activities led to the end our joint adventures in Mexico, and the Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit.

Paul and I had met the leader of a former troop of boy scouts who had started from Chicago, a year or so earlier, and walked down one coast to southern South America, with the intention, also, of walking back up the other coast. As he told the story, and as best I can remember, one or more of the scouts were killed, escaping from unfriendly natives, one or more contracted disease and died, the remainder turned back, electing for quick transportation to the States. The troop leader, the sole 'survivor,' was on his way back, alone, walking to Chicago. I later read of his successful return in a newspaper account. Paul was dazzled by the tale, and wanted to embark on a like adventure. Since I was not of the same mind, we split up in Mexico City.

Paul took some supplies, a rifle, and the travelers' checks in his name, and set off in the direction of Vera Cruz. That left me with the small collapsible-handle rifle (a "Game Getter," which also refers to knives, bows, and arrows). A third rifle we had brought along - Paul's mother's favorite - had been shipped back to Detroit, as its barrel became bent against a telephone pole as it projected from the front seat of the car in Nuevo Laredo (we were transferring the guns between inspection points for registration). Luck was not on Paul's side this time. He became 'spiked' in a knee accidentally by a cactus thorn. The knee became severely infected, in effect disabling him. He somehow managed to get transportation back to Detroit, to the Henry Ford Hospital, where I visited him only a matter of 5 or 6 weeks later.

I spent some additional time in Mexico City parked near the Hotel Regis. There I met and shared a couple of meals with a producer or director from Hollywood, a Mr. Monty G. Mason, who was vacationing there with his wife. He invited me to look him up if the occasion ever offered, but I never heard, nor found a trace, of him in LA, thereafter.

Meanwhile, I proceeded south, alone, toward Acapulco, with the collecting part of the expedition now abandoned. One evening, I pulled off the road to a small cleared area for the night. I was awakened before dawn by the sound of horses. Peering out the window port on the trailer door, I saw about a dozen horsemen. Retaining my high regard for the natives, I opened the door to exit but, perhaps foolishly, brought along my Game-Getter, just in case. They were very cordial and explained that they only wanted a little money for coffee at a place up the hill, which I was only too glad to give them.

One morning, after bagging a Blue-winged Teal at a pond near where I slept, I picked up a young hitchhiker. Along the way we heard shooting and I pulled to the side of the road to have a look. Far below, was a lake, on which people were speed-boating and shooting swimming waterfowl. I can't remember whether I left the Game-Getter in the car or trailer, but when I returned it was nowhere to be seen. Searching, I found it under the trailer where my young passenger had cast it, hoping I would forget and drive off without it. He had already informed me that he would be stopping there. I then drove down to the lake, where I found that the hunters were American tourists.

I continued on to Acapulco, where I spent a few uneventful days seeing the usual sights (including the famed cliff divers), then headed back north to the U.S. In a letter from Paul's mother at postal General Delivery in Laredo, I learned about Paul's accident and his whereabouts. I continued west to California for perhaps a week or so, where I visited my aunt on my mother's side and her family. It was then that I definitely set my sights on someday settling in California,.

Back at Michigan
After motoring back to Detroit and Ann Arbor, and visiting Paul, I had plenty of time to arrange for roommates and quarters. I managed to connect with two other students from Central High in Detroit, Gustaf Gotham and Aaron White. The three of us lived together in a rooming house almost adjacent to the student union, which was handy for meals and various recreational activities, including pool and bowling. A good lunch could be had for 35 cents in those days.

Aaron had been a much admired and talented center on the high school football team, and was highly intellectual. With him and Gustaf as roommates, it was natural for us to enter the weekly football winner-picking contest of a Detroit newspaper. We concentrated on what is now roughly the PacTen. We made hundreds of entries every week, with teams picked according to the odds. But then as now, the west coast college teams did not accommodate the oddsmakers, and we never even came close to having a winner. In another connection, in a fit of rage one day, Aaron bent and tore the back cover of my book, "Sex and Internal Secretions," 1939, by Allen, Doisy, and Danforth. Some few years later at UC Berkeley, the book, being out of print and rare, was gladly purchased from me, torn cover and all, by Prof. Howard Bern, about whom more later.

Both Aaron and Gustaf were drafted in following years, and I eventually roomed alone. Gustaf, unfortunately, was killed in action. I did see him again during the war, though, when I was in Pasadena at Caltech, as he passed through on the way to or from an army base in California; more about both of them later. I was deferred on the basis of being a physics student and research assistant on a war-related project, and of potential future use to the U.S. in war research (see below).

That was only my first deferral of several to come, as every time I changed my address in coming months I was reclassified promptly into 1A, and then deferred again because of my war-related research. That applied until the last occasion, by which time I had an ulcer and was under the care of a physician. Then I became 1F. But I'm getting ahead of the story. Although I had ulcer symptoms for many years afterwards, and usually carried a flask of milk with me, I was never diagnosed with more than a hiatal hernia. When tested for Helicobacter in 2002, and having a gastroscopy, I surprised everyone by being negative in both.

On return to the U. of Mich., I found myself in the integral calculus class of Edwin Beckenbach, whom I mention because I encountered him again a few years later at UCLA as my professor in Functions of a Complex Variable. One notable event in those last few years at the U. of Mich. was my signing up for civilian flight training, as a result of which I obtained my license for flying planes in the Piper Cub category (Fig. 1-7) on 7/5/41.

I have always been susceptible to motion sickness, and on one occasion, in the course of training, I had an irresistible and embarrassing attack. I regurgitated straight ahead onto the back and head of my flight instructor, Mr. John Carlson. Under the circumstances, he showed remarkable restraint. I mention this only because it presages an even more embarrassing incident only a few years later.

Upon graduation from Michigan in June, 1943, I took a temporary war-research position there with Dr. Richard Fowler, a student of Duffendach's, working on the development of a custom-made AC voltage stabilizer for the Ford Motor Co. During that time I wrote to the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley inquiring about possible openings.

Just as we finished the voltage stabilizer, I was offered a position as a physicist in Berkeley at the going rate of about $225/month. Later, I heard that Fowler found a flaw in the stabilizer at the last minute and had to redesign it practically overnight to meet the scheduled delivery date. Returning to Detroit, in preparation for my departure, I learned that Paul's mother had a Nash she wanted to sell, so I decided to drive west in it.

My sister, Leslie, a public school teacher at the time, also wanted to relocate in California so we set off together. Arriving without incident, she took a position in San Francisco and I started as a physicist, actually more of a handyman, at the Radiation Laboratory.

Short Stay at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory
After getting settled at Berkeley in late 1943, the first thing I did one evening was to phone the eminent UC Berkeley zoologist, Richard Goldschmidt, to consult him in connection with my origin of life paper, on which I had been working for several years. He graciously invited me to visit him at his home that same evening. I also dropped in to see Melvin Calvin, future Nobelist in Chemistry in 1961, at the Chemistry Bldg., to consult with him in connection with my chemical-bond paper. Although that was almost 20 years before he elucidated the first autotrophic CO₂-fixation pathway, he was already well enough known that I had heard of him. At that time, his office seemingly was just a corner desk in a large organic chemistry lab. Nothing of significance emerged from either liaison, and I have no specific recollection of events at either, except that both professors were very cordial.

Although I tired quickly of the handyman job, the experience proved to be invaluable and very much influenced my subsequent professional and hobbyist careers. I learned of the potential for electromechanical automation of activities in connection with E. O. Lawrence's cyclotron, converted to a mass spectrograph for the separation of uranium isotopes in the war effort.

In later years, this experience helped me immensely in my subsequent behavior research. In essence, I was able to automatically record the behavior and activities of mammals and birds that, to this day, over 40 years later, has not been achieved by other researchers in the field (Fig. 1-8). Computers make the data reduction easy. But the recording devices for gathering and transducing the data -- interfacing with various remote and contact sensing devices--are not in the customary repertoire of biological scientists.

While employed at the Rad Lab I met a young chemist, George, whose last name will remain unspecified. I met George again several years later at UC Berkeley, as he was pursuing his Ph.D. George's father owned a small chemical company that produced and marketed vitamins and other supplements. One night George received an SOS from San Francisco, where their plant was located. In the midst of processing a large batch of product, it fell into an unmanageable state, whether jelly, solid, or other, I do not remember. It proved to be all in a night's work for George, though, as he claimed to have satisfactorily resolved the problem. I also met a friend of George's named Jean, of whom more later.

I met several astronomers and physicists at the Rad Lab, some of whom also eventually came to UCLA. One of these was Daniel Popper, with whom I later had many contacts. By coincidence, I crossed paths with both of the Oppenheimer brothers at different institutions within a year or so. Frank was a project leader at the Rad Lab. He would stop by at all hours of the evening (I was on the swing shift) to check results. He was notorious for forgetting that his date was waiting in the car, while he stayed for hours. Contact with J. Robert was at Caltech, and strictly casual (see below).

In one mishap at the Rad Lab, a windowed port had its interior cover -- operated with an external knob -- left open. As a result, the window imploded from the heat. The vacuum in the chamber was lost, the run was ruined, and the chamber was heavily contaminated. One of my jobs was to install microswitches which, in an alarm circuit, would warn, automatically, of any future open port.

While at the Rad Lab I sent Pauling a copy of my draft paper on chemical bonding on Oct. 23, 1943. I have no written record of my correspondence with him at that time but an outline of it can be found in the "Linus Pauling, Day-by-Day Special Collections." Pauling replied on Oct. 28, suggesting that I "obtain more experience before undertaking the writing of scientific papers [actually, he advised me to take advanced chemistry courses]." He also suggested that I work on my spelling. The only misspelling I remember was the name of the chemist, "Penney," which I had written as "Penny." I wrote and thanked him shortly thereafter, explaining that my main interests were in biology, and that the chemical bonding paper was comparatively hastily prepared. On Nov. 4, I received another reply from him, with encouragement and advice for my future studies. As fate would have it, only a few months later (see below) I was standing before him in his office and the paper in question was published the same year (1944).

An unappealing job I and others undertook was to map the magnetic field, by climbing into and crawling around the cyclotron chamber when it was 'down.' Although we were not aware of it at the time, some of the tasks at the Rad Lab were potentially lethal. This applied particularly to the servicing of the sources and receivers, which contained the uranium isotopes, and had to be cleaned, emptied, or restocked periodically. One or more of the workers in the servicing unit later died of radiation poisoning.

At any rate, with the brashness of youth, I wrote a letter to someone in the upper echelons complaining of the meniality of my tasks and asking for more challenging assignments. That was the beginning of the end for me at the Rad Lab, but I take full responsibility. Lawrence, himself, called me into his office one day and explained the virtues of modesty. As an exemplar he told me of how he once escorted Robert R. Millikan about the Lab on the occasion of a visit. In spite of being a Nobel Prize winner in physics in 1923 Millikan was most unassuming and the very picture of modesty. Of course, Lawrence was right. In fact, there were, then and future, luminaries in chemistry, physics, and astronomy at the Lab, also doing more or less menial work.

At Caltech with Carl Anderson, Willie Fowler, and W. R. Smythe
After advice from several colleagues from the Los Angeles area, I sought and obtained a position as a Research Staff Member on a highly classified Naval War Research Project at the California Institute of Technology ("Caltech" or "CIT") in 1944, with Carl Anderson's (Nobel Laureate, for discovering the positron in 1932) group. Anderson was in charge of research on all aircraft-fired rocketry.

William Fowler was Executive Investigator on the project. Fowler became a joint Nobelist in physics in 1983 with Subramanyan Chandrasekhar for his studies of nucleosynthesis in stellar interiors. He had worked previously with Fred Hoyle and Geoffrey and Margaret Burbidge. They first definitely established that all of the elements from carbon to uranium could be produced by nuclear processes in stars, starting with the hydrogen and helium produced in the Big Bang). C. C. Lauritsen (Fowler's mentor) was overall scientific head, with the project often referred to as the "Lauritsen's project." My position and work there yielded every challenge and demand that I hoped for but were, primarily of necessity, lacking at the Rad Lab in Berkeley.

Little did I realize at the time that I was joining a major center of very important work on tactile missiles, together with two of the main groups in modern solid propellant development. For one, there were Caltech's sites at Eaton Canyon, where extruded double-based propellants were produced (toward which Nobel's patented Ballistite -- nitrocellulose plasticized by nitroglycerine -- was a first step).

For another, there was the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory (GALCIT), which had contracted with the Army Air Corps., in 1940, to produce rocket-assisted takeoff systems for aircraft. At GALCIT, cast composite propellant was invented, and the Aerojet Engineering Corporation (later Aerojet General) was created (by von Karman et al. in 1942). I was soon to be steeped in related ventures. [During the war, GALCIT proposed a long-term, rocket-research program, to be called the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. This was later acquired by NASA (in 1959) but still managed by Caltech.]

Caltech was engaged in missile research on: (1) the development and tactile use of both fin-stabilized rockets, conventionally and retrofired from aircraft, and conventionally fired from the ground and landing craft; and (2) spin stabilized rockets fired from the ground and aircraft. The fin-stabilized rockets were used originally in retrofiring antisubmarine warfare, and as barrage rockets fired from landing craft (mainly PT boats), probably their biggest payoff. Although, in the domain of rocket missiles, the army was represented at Caltech by a Lt. Clark (later known to me as a UCLA facilities engineer), the army never employed Caltech's rockets extensively, whereas at war's end the Navy was spending about $200 million a month on them, representing an extremely successful Caltech contribution to the war effort (for refs. to this and some of the information below, see the Caltech Archives in Physics).

Also at Caltech, although I had no direct contact with him then, was Wolfgang K. H. Panofsky. He had carried out his Ph.D. research under Jesse W. DuMond, obtaining his degree in 1942. During the war, he and DuMond developed a "firing error indicator," a shock wave sensor capable of accurately detecting and measuring the shock waves produced by supersonic bullets, and determining the distance by which a bullet missed its target. This proved to be so successful that Robert Oppenheimer asked Panofsky to join Los Alamos to measure shock waves from nuclear explosions to gauge their intensity. Years later, when Panofsky headed SLAC (the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center), I offered to donate supplies of metal stock from UCLA that I had acquired as excess property from the (Lawrence) Rad Lab (see Chap. 7). My quantities, however, though considerable, were insufficient to be of help.

At first I was quartered at a desk in the W.K. Kellogg Radiation Laboratory (constructed from Lauritsen's architectural plans and built with funds solicited by Millikan from the American corn flakes king) but soon I had my own office overlooking Caltech's central courtyard. My first project was to develop a turn-handle aiming alignment device for a rocket sight, using a new sighting technique developed by the astronomer, Horace W. Babcock (eventual director of Caltech observatories, following in his father's footsteps). Fortunately, I did not have to develop this from scratch, but was able to locate a firm that was producing a mechanism for a different purpose that could be adapted with but few modifications.

Horace actually went into the field, himself, in the Pacific, on live flight tests against Japanese targets (Willie Fowler also spent three months in the South Pacific during 1944 as a civilian with simulated military rank). I never did learn, specifically, how well my turn-handle device stood up under the stress of aircraft vibrations in the field. It was full of machine bolts and nuts, and, of course, a lock washer for each nut.

Only two years later, in 1946, Horace discovered stellar magnetic fields (Zeeman splitting and spectral polarization), and after that, in 1953, conceived of adaptive optics, that fabulous perfection of telescopic techniques, whereby the blurring produced by the earth's atmosphere is almost completely eliminated. This is achieved by flexing the surfaces of thin mirrors hundreds of times per second, precisely canceling the overhead turbulence. With this technique, a diffuse field can be transformed into a field of sharply delimited stars, arguably as good as viewed from space. The technique requires the near presence of a bright star or planet, or a laser-generated 'artificial' star, high in the atmosphere, to gauge the rippling of the air.

Adaptive optics is now in use routinely at the world's largest telescopes, such as at the Keck's twin 10-meter scopes in Hawaii, the Very Large array of four 8.2-meter telescopes in Chile, and a Swedish solar telescope on the Canary Islands. Horace also was involved in the discovery of the origin of cosmic rays in 1949, and the strongest magnetic field ever found, in 1960. I tried unsuccessfully to contact him recently (Dec., 2002). He lives in Santa Barbara, but has no listed phone or E-mail address.

After some reorganization, I was transferred to W.R. Smythe's group, being put in charge of field testing and analysis in a fledgling program to develop aircraft-fired, spin-stabilized rocketry. Speed of development was of the essence, so we first tried existing rockets with fins removed, in simple jury-rigged vertical mounts outside of the aircraft. Results with these led to shortening of their length by 50% to increase stability of vertically-fired rounds, which meant that custom manufacturing became necessary.

In the next step, purely as a developmental convenience, we decreased the O.D. to roughly 2-1/4 inches and incorporated spin stabilization of the trajectory. At this time, parallel programs were carried out, testing both the small spin-stabilized rockets, fired vertically from aircraft, with spin imparted by angled nozzles, and 3-1/2-inch O.D. ones fired from a ground launcher that imparted variable degrees of spin before launching. This launcher was built under contract with the Harvey Aluminum Corp., with the project supervised by Mike Ambroff, with whom I also was in postwar contact.

In the interests of space, isolation, and secrecy, all initial testing was at a facility at Goldstone Dry Lake, CA, which we customarily accessed by bus, sometimes bringing assembled rockets with us. The small vertically-fired rockets were mounted in simple tubes on the aircraft. We adopted the expedience of fastening them in the tubes with simple wire loops. These were released as the wire became melted by the nozzle jets when ignition occurred. This was found to have the disadvantage, until we achieved the appropriate gauge of wire loops, that sometimes the wire loops parted prematurely under flight conditions, leaving rockets with live propellant on ground approaches to, and on, the firing range. In this connection, all rocket heads were either standard live ones taken from conventional ammo, or non-explosive.

At the peak, four hundred machine shops in Southern California were kept busy manufacturing the metal parts for Caltech rockets. These were assembled and the solid explosive propellant processed in Eaton Canyon, in the Arroyo Seco, not far from Pasadena. Eventually, these facilities were insufficient and most of the work was transferred to the Naval Ordinance Testing Station (NOTS) at China Lake, CA (see below).

After several months, I was allowed to hire an assistant (Bruce Overton) to carry out some of the field testing. But not after several adventures of my own in the field. To make a long story short, however, the war ended before our spin-stabilized rockets could make the firing line.

Smythe, incidentally, was a living legend for his tough exams in classical electricity and magnetism, in which even the brightest might falter. Two of my friends in Anderson's group were Robert B. Leighton and Charles Wilts. Leighton was working on new rocket launchers for Navy aircraft and an air-to-ground missile to attack German V-1 sites. He later became Chair of Physics, Math, and Astronomy at Caltech, was author of a text, Principles of Modern Physics (1959), and wrote the final draft of the Feynman Lectures in Physics. Charles Wilts, also a subsequent faculty member and Executive Officer in Electrical Engineering at Caltech, was the one who developed the retro-firing rocket procedures for antisubmarine warfare. In later years at Caltech, a Charles Wilts Doctoral Thesis Prize for outstanding independent research in electrical engineering leading to a Ph.D. was established in his honor.

Leighton not only spent weekends building his own home in the nearby mountains, he was an expert machinist and built much of his own equipment. In later years on visits to Pasadena, he was as likely to be found at a lathe or miller in the machine shop as in his office. He had a great, dry sense of humor. Later, as a faculty member at UCLA, on one occasion, I instigated an invitation to him to lecture to the Physics Department on his solar studies, in which field, as well as several others, he was a pioneer (infrared sources, cool stars, dust clouds, the Martian atmosphere). At one point in the lecture he asked whether the presented material was clear. On receiving no immediate reply, he followed with, "is anybody awake?"

He headed the team that took and interpreted the Mariner photographs and helped develop its TV system. I happened to visit one day when the Mariner photographs were on his desk. Commenting on the cratered, bleakness of Mars, he said something to the effect that, It didn't resemble the moon or a desert on earth, rather, "Mars looks like Mars."

Even as I write (2003), Leighton's name is in the news. In his Martian atmosphere research, he and Bruce Murray proposed (Science 1966;153:136) that it was controlled by vapor equilibrium with a large polar reservoir of solid carbon dioxide. Just recently, Byrne and Ingersoll (Science 2003;299:1051-1053) argued that the polar reservoir is too small to buffer the more massive atmosphere. [Our knowledge of Martian conditions has changed drastically in recent years. New observations by rovers and orbiters indicate that liquid water not only existed on Mars, it once covered large parts of the planet's surface, perhaps for more than a billion years (Sci. Amer. 2006;295(6):62-69).]. It now appears (Science, 6 April, 2007) that enough water is locked up in the Martian polar caps to produce a global water layer about 11 m thick.

Earlier (1961), Murray and others had proposed (J. Geophys. Res. 66:3033-3045) that water-ice existed at the lunar poles. As I write, this remains unconfirmed. [The polar lunar orbiter, Clementine, detected reflected radio waves characteristic of an icy surface at the moon's south pole while the Lunar Prospector detected large amounts of hydrogen at the dark regions of both poles. The presence of ice remains inferential (Sci. Amer. 2003;289(6):86-93)].

Both Leighton and Wilts eventually were pulled from rocket research to perfect the simultaneous implosion mechanism (detonating the outer casing of castings of explosives) for use in the first version of the atomic bomb. The morass of wires emanating from jack-boards that accomplished this reminds me of my real-time computer for programming and data reduction in my behavior studies (see Fig. 1-9), though my computer was of much greater complexity. [I once found a thoroughly-dehydrated, electrocuted feral mouse deep in that mass of wires. It had accidentally simultaneously touched a grounded and 'hot' jack, and might have been there undetected for many months. JLK] However, the mechanism Wilts and Leighton worked on was not the one used at the doomed port of Hiroshima.

In "Little Boy," at Hiroshima, a subcritical mass of chain-reacting uranium was fired into another by a relatively simple gun-like mechanism, causing the U235 in the combined mass to go supercritical and explode. An even more complex mechanism, using Plutonium, was employed at Nagasaki a few days later. When I tried to reach both Leighton and Wilts not long ago, to convey my regards and refresh my memory, I learned that Leighton had died in 1997 of an unspecified neurological illness, and Wilts, in 1991 (the same year as Carl Anderson), of a massive heart attack while hiking in the mountains.

It was at Caltech that I first decided to submit a paper on chemical bonding to a technical journal. In order to do that I needed permission, first from the Principal Administrative Investigator of our project, Dean Ernest C. Watson. He sent me to get permission from Linus Pauling. I had corresponded with Pauling earlier from the U. of Mich. with regard to this paper, at which time he advised me to take several advanced courses in chemistry. At any rate, he then gave his OK, provided I also got the go ahead from Verne Schumaker and Jurg Waser, two of his Ph.D. students or postdocs. With their help I reduced the paper's length to about a printed page and submitted it to the J. Chem. Physics. It was accepted (1944;12:246) and second, third, and fourth papers followed, one in the J. Amer. Chem. Soc., the other two in the J. Chem. Physics, in the period 1944-1949. Several papers or abstracts by other workers followed up on this work. One that I have on hand at the moment is an abstract titled, "A Modification of Kavanau's Relation," by R. T. Lagemann, in Proc. Amer. Physical Soc. (1945;67:308).

As noted earlier, our spin-stabilized rockets were tested at Goldstone Dry Lake, having become famous since, as the location of tracking and guidance antennas (including a pair of 85-ft parabolic dishes) for NASA satellites. However, being severely cramped for space, additional facilities were needed. On one occasion, Fowler, Anderson, Wilts, Leighton, and I (and others) made scouting trips to Inyokern County desert areas to find a site for these facilities. After a very extensive search, a region known as "China Lake," larger than the state of Rhode Island, was selected, acquired by the Navy, and converted to such facilities, including what eventually was named Armitage Field.

Lt. Armitage was one of our leading test pilots. Our paths crossed on several occasions at testing sites, and we became fairly well acquainted. At one point an enormous new multi-thousand-pound, fin-stabilized rocket was being developed, named Tiny Tim. Unfortunately, Armitage was assigned to one of the early launch-testing flights, on which occasion Tiny Tim exploded prematurely, while still below the aircraft. Armitage was lost, but his memory remains with us in Armitage Field. In quite a coincidence (there is only one clan with the "Kavanau" spelling), another of our test pilots, Lt. McCollum, once asked me if I was related to Barney Kavanau (a first cousin), for whom he worked in 1943 at Vultee Aircraft Corp. in Nashville, Tennessee, soon to merge with Consolidated Aircraft Corp. to form Convair

Kavanaus in Scientific and Technical Fields, and the Arts
While on the subject, few family members or their descendants entered scientific and technical fields, or medicine, seemingly all on the Kavanau side. The first noteworthy member was Jack Kavanau, Barney's father (my uncle), who obtained his B.S. degree from CCNY in 1914. Thereafter he was employed as a draftsman and civil engineer by the New York State Commission of Highways and the Erie Railroad, including a restoration project on the Brooklyn Bridge. An old artist's rendering of the bridge remains in the possession of Jack's granddaughter, Karen. Another uncle in New York, Willie Kavanau, had a grandson, Lew Goldklang, who has flourished in industry, in computer science and mathematical endeavors.

Barney (born Charles Barney) was much into aircraft design and construction. Over the years he was associated with Vultee and Consolidated Aircraft Corps.(together they formed Convair in 1943), Hughes Tool, and several specialty firms, including Statham Industries, American Jet (Turbine Aircraft Corp.), and Volpar Turboliner/Gulfstream. When General Manager at Statham, Barney donated several pressure transducers to UCLA for use in my research and in class instruction. My three children, Kristina, Warren, and Christopher also entered technical fields, Kristina in bioinstrumentation, Warren in computer programming, and Chris, in molecular imaging. A second cousin, Dr. Margaret Kavanau is a practicing psychologist in NYC.

When President Kennedy took office he appointed Robert S. McNamara, of Ford Motor Co. as Secretary of Defense. McNamara, who may have been the first senior executive of an American auto company to be at all concerned with fuel economy and safety, brought along his assistant, my first cousin, Dr. Lawrence Kavanau, whom President Kennedy appointed Director of the Office of Defense. Lawrence and Nicholas Golovin co-chaired the NASA/DOD Large Launch Vehicle Planning Group (1961-1963). That Group was the first to support Dr. John Houbolt's concept of a lunar orbital rendezvous (LOR) for the Apollo Missions Program. This concept had repeatedly been rejected by previous governmental planning groups and agencies, and not only for 'inability to rescue from lunar orbit.' Lawrence argued successfully that the Saturn C-4 spacecraft was capable of LOR and that this was the only way to beat the Russians to the moon. LOR was not adopted officially, however, until after von Braun, previously backing an 'earth orbital rendezvous,' endorsed it in the spring of 1962.

Lawrence subsequently made design, technical, and policy recommendations for that Program. He also was involved in development of the Titan IV and Saturn S-II rockets, the Gemini and Apollo spacecrafts, and the Space Shuttle. It is said that Lawrence's firm assurances to President Kennedy that "We can do it. We can go to the moon and come back," inspired Kennedy's speech of May 25, 1961, "we will put a man on the moon." Lawrence co-founded Ford Aerospace Corp. and SYS Technologies, Inc., and held a number of research and executive positions in the aerospace industry.

Lawrence was 5 years my junior. In his student days, seemingly by coincidence, he followed my path from the U. of Mich. to Caltech to UC Berkeley, where he also obtained the Ph.D., and subsequently also settling in southern California. His daughter, Laura, is a well-known writer of mystery novels. Another second cousin, Ted Kavanau, was founding Senior Producer of CNN, who designed and supervised the editorial system for the world's first 24-hr TV news organization. He also was founding President and ran CNN Headline News. Ted originated movie film reviews with Stuart Klein in 1967 on the New York Channel 5 Ten O'Clock News. He won several Emmys as top journalist and other professional honors. Ted is credited, in error, with originating the saying and editorial policy of, "If it bleeds, it leads." Most recently he co-authored the book, "Get Fit in Bed" with Genie Tartell, DC, RN, Cardiac Critical Care nurse at The University Hospital for the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

Resuming at Caltech
Returning to my experiences during the war years, at times when we did not go to test sites by bus, we 'rented' cars from the carpool. On one occasion I drove alone to the Naval Air Station at San Diego. From there I caught a flight to the test site. After the test, I returned to the Station, where I customarily had dinner in the enormous mess hall before driving back to Pasadena. During dinner I ran into Sylvan Rubin, another member of Anderson's group. I don't remember the details, but Sylvan would have had to stay there overnight to get aircraft transportation to somewhere else, before he could return to Pasadena. He didn't want to wait, but couldn't legally accompany me because he had no base pass. In the end, I smuggled him out in the car trunk. I don't know what the consequence for either of us would have been had he been detected, but it couldn't have been serious.

I lost track of Sylvan after the war. [I recently learned that he had been with the Ford Aerospace and Communications Corporation in Los Altos, CA, and had published on 'dynamic string functions' in 1984 [J. Pascal 3(6)]. In 2004, from Los Altos, he wrote a Letter to the Editor, "Wavy Gravy," to Amer. Sci. 2004;92:492. But I was unable to obtain a phone number for him in Los Altos.] It was on another occasion, driving back from San Diego, that I heard of President Roosevelt's death on the car radio.

On another occasion, I was returning to China Lake from a test, as a passenger in the back compartment of the test plane (an F-something) piloted by the test pilot. It was an exceedingly rough trip and the urge to regurgitate became irresistible. I was wearing one of those explorer-type stiff helmets, which I used as a vomit container, so as not to foul the compartment. As we circled the field for a landing, I got the bright idea of dumping its contents out the side hatch to avoid embarrassment, as we taxied in after landing. I thought, most foolishly, as it turned out, that the air flowing rapidly past the hatch would carry away the vomit. Unfortunately, the hatch opened at the front, not the rear. To my chagrin, the opposite happened, as I carried out my plan. No sooner did I open the hatch, than the contents of the hat were blown all over the compartment, including onto me. I never lived that down and never learned if, when, or how the compartment was cleaned, thereafter. I assume it had to be steamed. Maybe this event played a role in the 'higher ups' agreeing to my hiring a field assistant.

Some excitement of a different nature also awaited me in Pasadena. I had been in correspondence with my high school and college buddy, Aaron White, who was in the army, and about to be discharged (remember him as having torn the cover of one of my books in Ann Arbor). I was living in a rented upstairs room in the home of a widow, Mrs. Harmon, whose son Stetson was an officer in a local bank branch. As the room already had twin beds, and Aaron was essentially broke, I obtained Mrs. Harmon's permission to invite him to share the room.

Aaron arrived in due course and took up residence. Not being ready to seek employment immediately (eventually he became a computer designer at Litton), he had much time on his hands. We were living not far (by bus) from the Santa Anita racetrack, which was much in the news at that time. I had some interest in horse racing, compliments of one of my younger brothers, Dick, who was not an infrequent visitor to the races at the Detroit Fairgrounds. In fact, whenever he had a 'sure thing' long shot, and was short of cash, he hitch-hiked to Ann Arbor, just to borrow ten or twenty dollars to bet on it.

Aaron was not the only person from my past to visit in Pasadena. Gustaf Gotham from my U. of Mich. days also came by for a short visit, as mentioned earlier. On that particular day, Gustaf came with me to the Caltech barber shop where many of the faculty got their haircuts. While I was being tended to, J. Robert Oppenheimer also came by and took a seat to await his turn. He could have been on campus in connection with development of the simultaneous implosion mechanism for the atomic bomb (see above). At any rate, I mentioned to Gustaf that he was the J. Robert Oppenheimer, by way of introduction. After the war in late 1945 J. Robert returned to Caltech, where I audited some of his lectures. I also ran into Tom Lovering, another U. of M. buddy, son of T. S. Lovering of the U.S. Geological Survey, late one evening in downtown Pasadena. He was with a group of conscientious objectors undergoing sleep deprivation studies by the government. Lastly, my younger brother, Earl, also visited for a week or so in the summer of 1944.

Analyzing the odds on horse-race wagering
I proposed to Aaron that I would make a detailed statistical analysis of horse-race wagering. If it turned out that there were any bets with a statistically positive payoff, which I expected might eventuate, he agreed to be the money man, going to Santa Anita daily to make the bets. So I wrote away for the monthly horse racing manuals (books of daily outcome charts) from the last 5 or so years, and made the detailed analysis. To carry this out rigorously, one needed the insight to classify the races according to: (1) the number of entries; (2) the odds on the favorite; and (3) the odds on the second-favorite. As expected, the type of race -- handicap, claimer, maiden, distance -- was entirely superfluous. The results depended, not on the type of horse or race, but on human nature.

Some gamblers swear by their systems of betting, whatever the medium. I previously had carried out a rigorous general analysis of various proposed systems in which the amount of money bet depended on the outcome of one or more preceding bets, in the extreme doubling up after each loss, etc. In the course of the analysis, however, I came to an impasse, where it was necessary to sum a certain series or prove a certain 'theorem' (although the result is intuitive). At that point, I visited Prof. Morgan Ward of the Caltech Math Dept. He had the precise reference I needed -- to a paper by a Scandinavian mathematician. However, All details of this calculation were lost when my parents moved their domicile while I was at Rockefeller, and my papers, stored in a basement locker, 'disappeared.' At any rate, the result of my analysis was just as expected, namely, that in the long run no practical system of betting is superior to any other system. For example, if the odds are even, one will break even. In the case of horse races, in the long run, assuming either random betting or truly representative odds, one will lose whatever the track 'take' amounts to. Thus, if the track takes is 10%, one will lose 10%, of the total money bet.

My statistical analysis turned out to be favorable. I soon found that limited amounts of money could be made, not off the horses' performances, however, but off the public's performances. The reason is, that the average person can't resist making bets on some horses that potentially provide the largest payoffs. First, they tend to bet to win, as opposed to place (finish second) or show (finish third), and, second, they tend to overbet on longshots. As a result of these propensities of the public, despite the track assessing a 10 to 15% 'take' off the top of the total money bet, a few categories of bets were potentially profitable. These were primarily show bets.

There actually were some 'few and far between' profitable bets on horses to win. These were mostly in any category of race where the favorite was 'odds-on' (4 to 5 and less), and all other horses in the race were comparative longshots. Place and show payoffs also were superior in these races. The accompanying graphs (Fig. 1-10) give the cumulative profit or loss for all win, place, and show bets on horses at odds between even money (1/1) and 1.9 to 1 (9.5/5) to win in 13 categories of races, where the categories are based on the number of horses (entries) in the race, and the odds on the second favorite (e.g., an 8-horse race, with odds of 3/1 on the second favorite). Also given are curves for the best and worst of the 13 show bets. For example, one of the best show bets might have been for odds of 6/5 on the favorite, and 4/1 on the second favorite, in an 8-horse race, while one of the worst might have been for the same odds on the favorite, but with the odds on the second favorite being as low as 8/5.

As can be seen, all of the 13 best show bets were profitable on a cumulative basis. On the contrary, for the 13 worst show bets all were losers except those at even money, which barely made a profit. Absence of uniformly monotonic (continuously rising or falling) trends in the graphs likely is because the odds categories represent relatively few bets, even over a period of several years. In summary, money could be made, but only infrequently (and for a sufficiently large investment). Perhaps one race every third day would fall in a favorable category.

In actuality, the temptation to make at least one bet every day (as opposed to, say, every third day) was too great to resist. We made borderline bets on many occasions, and we did little better than break even. In one big loss, the longshot, PariBrazen, won and the odds-on favorite, Thumbs-Up, was 'out of the money.' A quite unexpected result emerged from this analysis, that reminded me of my coin-weighing days in high school.

I routinely worked up the payoffs at individual tracks with different percentage takes, usually between 10 and 15%. The calculated average place and show payoff figures were sufficiently precise that one could pick out the tracks that were skimming money from the payoff pools. At them, the payoffs would be close to 5 or 10 cents less, depending upon the breakage, than at other non-cheating tracks in the same percentage-take category. Not leaning toward crusading, that was one good reason not to publicize my findings.

On a later occasion, while I was at UCLA (1960s), my uncle Leonard, on my mother's side, visited in LA for several months. He was single, and a gambler at heart, so we decided to put my table of calculated favorable bets to another use. But it was a struggle to keep Leonard from betting borderline bets. Had he stuck to the limited number of favorable races, we would have obtained very good returns. As it was, even with some transgressions, a modest return was achieved (maybe about 1%).

The "Kelly Criterion"
The following is of interest in connection with the above studies of betting on horse races. Just 12 years later, John L. Kelly of Bell Labs. published "A new interpretation of the information rate, in the Bell Syst. Tech. J. (1956;35:917-926). It treats asset allocation problems in terms of idealized models. These lead to scientific betting systems that actually could beat the Vegas casinos at blackjack and give superior results on Wall Street investments. For purposes of illustration readily understandable to the man in the street he chose horse-race betting, formulated somewhat as follows:

Suppose that I go to the track with a bankroll of X dollars. Also, suppose that for each horse I know the actual probability that it will win the next race. Suppose further that the betting odds are at least slightly inconsistent with this information. Finally, suppose that each race is merely one of a very long sequence of betting opportunities.

Kelly then found criteria for deciding how much he should bet on each horse in each race for a favorable outcome. He further observed that for similar idealized assumptions, the same formulation could be (and have been) applied to similar investments on Wall Street and gambling at blackjack. Expressed mathematically, it is a useful quantitative guideline for investing known as the "Kelly Criterion." Of course, this criterion has no bearing on my findings for betting on horse races. Disregarding its being an idealization, one could never know "actual probabilities" on horse race results in advance.

But one could rephrase the circumstances to known odds on betting on colors of balls drawn from urns. While Kelly could only have had an intuitive sense of the influences of human nature on the odds (as did I, initially), being "slightly inconsistent" with the "actual probability," this supposition is well-suited to horse race betting because the actual odds usually would be too low on longshots (public overbetting) and too high on favorites (public underbetting). But on the other hand, in actual circumstances, the track 'take' of roughly 10-15% usually would cancel being able to take advantage of such disparities

With regard to blackjack gambling at casinos. One need not depend on "idealized models." Knowing the face values of cards already played, one can, in real time, compute the probabilities of obtaining a card below or above a certain value for both oneself and the dealer, and decide on the basis of them whether to hold or draw. In fact, applying card-counting schemes devised by Kelly, Ed Thorp was so successful at blackjack that casinos had to ban him and change their rules for shuffling cards (W. Poundstone, American Scientist 2005;93:556-558).

Musical efforts and acquaintances
During my last 14 or 15 months in Pasadena, with the war winding down, I decided to try another experiment on myself. The matter to be investigated was, to what extent could I (without any prior piano experience, whatsoever) learn to play a difficult piano piece in, say, 6 months, without the benefit of the usual exercises and rigorous training? To get an answer to that question, I obtained the music to Beethoven's Waldstein sonata, obtained a beginner's book for piano, to learn how to read notes, rented a studio, and went to work.

I patterned my play after the fabulous Walter Gieseking, whose recording I possessed. I also had heard him (and Rachmaninoff) play in Ann Arbor at the Rackham Auditorium at the U. of Mich. But there was no danger of being mistaken for him. I had proceeded for some weeks, when a voice teacher in the next studio, Caroline Allingham, who could hear me through the walls, told me about her good friend, the Pasadena soprano, conductor, and folk-lorist, Calista Rogers (Fig. 1-11).

Calista was very highly regarded and prominent among the musical elite in Pasadena, Her father was the famous music publisher of New York and London, coming from a long line of musicians and musical people. Informal musical gatherings, a regular thing in her parents' home, brought her into contact with many leading musicians, and gave her an intimate knowledge of the various types of musical literature. She studied both violin and piano but gave both up when the qualities of her voice developed. She received much of her musical training at the Institute of Musical Art in New York. One of her teachers was Sir George Henschel, the famous singer and conductor.

Calista came to Pasadena in the 1920s. For the next 25 years she sang recitals, participated in concerts and numerous performances at social gatherings, toured, and directed choral groups, including the chorus and orchestra in a performance of the Bach contata, "Thou Guide of Israel." When I met her she was Assistant Conductor for the Pasadena Bach Society, and teaching various aspects of musical theory and vocal art. She interested me in learning the ABC's of music composition, and also introduced me to a piano teacher, Marietta Werndorff, formerly of Vienna and Council Bluffs, Iowa. Again, to make a long story short, deviating somewhat from my initial objective, I took maybe 15 or 20 lessons from Calista and Marietta before the war ended, although during that time I was still mostly on my own.

Calista taught at her home, but I continued renting the studio for piano playing under Marietta's instruction. In the months that I kept up my studies and practicing, I learned to play parts of the sonata's first movement well enough to fool my parents into thinking I was an accomplished player, at least of that piece, when they visited Pasadena in 1945. In fact, I can recall my father, who was very hard to please, praising me only once in my entire life, and it was then. My parents were on their way from Detroit to a stopover in San Francisco, on their way to Los Angeles where my mother's sister and her family lived. I followed and joined them in San Francisco some months later.

My studies with Calista also bore fruit. Having bought books on composition and harmony (since passed on to my son, Warren), I set to work on a composition of my own, a "Ballade in D minor," a somewhat solemn dirge with a catchy melody. It remains pretty much the only tangible evidence of my efforts along those lines (Fig. 1-12). I entered it into a musical composition contest of the UCLA Music Department about 10 years later, but won no prize.

It was my association with Marietta that had the most interesting overtones. She was well acquainted with Arnold Schoenberg, the famous Viennese composer, who subsequently joined the Faculty at UCLA. A building, Schoenberg Hall is named for him. She had participated as a piano soloist in the first performances of some of his works in Vienna in the very early 1900s. Later, I found that she was also known as Frau Dr. (musicology) Etta Jonas-Werndorff, the wife of Karl Werndorff. In a letter to her in the teen years of the 20th century, Schoenberg addressed her as "Liebe, liebe, liebe Frau Doktor! Wess klagen Sie." He wrote her again as recently as Jan. 27, 1941. He also wrote Karl as recently as Dec. 22, 1939. Schoenberg's grandson , the attorney Randol Schoenberg, was in the news recently (Jan., 2006) for having won a suit against the Austrian government to recover five very valuable Gustav Klimt paintings stolen by the Nazis, for their rightful owners.

Another well-known Austrian composer, Alban (Maria Johannes) Berg, was a student of Schoenberg's, and Marietta also was a soloist in introducing some of his works. For example, there was the famous premier in Vienna on April 24, 1911, when she performed Berg's piano sonata, Op. 1. On another occasion she performed his Mombert-Lieder, Op. 2. On January 14, 1910, in the Vienna Ehrbar-Hall, Marietta performed Schoenberg's Op. 11, Three Piano Pieces. Then there was a Pro Musicis Concert in Vienna in 1911, when violinist Fritz Brunner and Marietta performed another composition of Schoenberg's.

But there's more! Schoenberg also found time to do portraits and studies. Of two portraits he painted of Marietta, one is lost, though it survives in a reproduction. The other (Fig. 1-13), and also one of her husband, Karl, are at the Arnold Schoenberg Center, Vienna. Karl's professional bent is lost to us, but it had to be sufficiently noteworthy for Schoenberg to paint a portrait of him. This matter was resolved when I read Stuckenschmidt's book, Schoenberg, His Life, World and Work, in which one finds,

Among the performers [on Nov. 7, 1907] was Marietta Jonasz, who shortly afterwards married the orthopaedic surgeon Dr. Werndorff; she was an excellent young pianist, whom Schoenberg thanked warmly for her performance.....

Marietta was sufficiently taken with my Ballade that she wanted her friend from Vienna, the noted composer, Eric Zeisl, to hear it. Zeisl (and wife Gertrud) had fled Vienna in 1938 at age 33, before his musical reputation was firmly established. He settled in West Hollywood in about 1940, where he scored music for MGM films. Soon he returned to classical composition and taught evening classes at Los Angeles City College.

Zeisl's work, including piano and cello concertos, four ballets, numerous choral and chamber works, and an unfinished opera, was praised by such as Korngold, Milhaud, Stravinsky, and Castelnuevo-Tedesco. His daughter, a retired professor at Pomona College, had married Schoenberg's son, Ronald. Zeisl died of a heart attack in 1959 shortly after teaching his evening composition theory class.

In a recital in Schoenberg Hall, Miss Marylynn Hall sang three of Zeisl's songs in his memory on Nov. 22, 1959. On the next day, a Memorial Concert was presented for him in the Wilshire-Ebell Theater. David Forrester conducted the world premier of Zeisl's Cello Concerto, with George Nelkrug as soloist. Only in 2005 was his rediscovered piano concerto in C, in three movements (completed in 1952), given its world premier in an Episcopal church in Saratoga by Jason Klein and the Saratoga symphony. The Eric Zeisl Archive is located at UCLA.

Marietta and I visited Zeisl one weekend evening in 1945. I remember a small house high on a hill, and a dimly lit living room. After introductions and some discussion, he graciously played my Ballade, much to our liking. Of course, that was no big deal one way or the other for a master musician. Otherwise, nothing notable transpired.

Some years later, while on the faculty at UCLA, I practiced a piano piece a little more to my abilities, namely easy parts of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata. I don't know where I got the nerve to do it but, at an affair on one occasion at my home, I tried to play the opening to the Waldstein Sonata for a group of fellow faculty members and their wives. Not unexpectedly, I broke down in the middle of it and had to begin again from the beginning. Despite that, I learned (many years later) that I had made a favorable impression. About 15 years ago, I assembled on tape a composite of the Moonlight's first movement, from my best individual renditions. Through a misunderstanding this was recorded over and lost. I haven't returned to a project like that since. The individual renditions still may be in my collection of tapes, somewhere.

Among other indulgences in Pasadena, I was allowed to audit some of Caroline Allingham's voice lessons. Also, thinking I must or might have singing aspirations, Caroline asked me to audition for her, quickly ending that speculation. I might have done much better with a selection with which I was familiar, such as a passage from Mahler's "Das Lied von der Erde, but my interest was too little, and my performance too pitiful, to even suggest it.

I also audited some of Imry Deak's cello lessons (his brother Stephen, a well-known soloist and orchestral cellist, also taught the cello). I remember having to skip a lesson from Calista when she took over for Master Conductor, Dr. Richard Lehrt, for the 1944 performance of Handel's Messiah, which was repeated in Pasadena every Christmas Season. Several years later, in 1953, Lehrt had the distinction of leading a one-hundred piece symphony, including players from every major orchestra around the U.S. and Europe. He conducted the Messiah again as recently as Dec., 1956.

This Pasadena musical episode involved a rather unlikely coincidence. You will recall that while at Berkeley at the Radiation Lab, in 1943, I made the slight acquaintance of a student, or employee named Jean. Unbeknownst to me, in 1945, she was married and separated from the chemist, George, also a friend of mine from those days. He later became a very successful chemist at an Ivy League university, she a physician. Anyway, through all the time I was taking lessons from Calista, Jean was living in Calista's rented upstairs unit, and could hear us talking and piano playing, She was hiding out, though, with a baby on the way. I didn't find out about it, and have a chance to visit with her again, until I was almost ready to leave for San Francisco in Jan., 1946. I crossed paths with George again in Berkeley, in the early 1950s, when both of us were working on our Ph.D. theses. There, he married again, to a fellow student named Betsy.

War's end, another temporary residence and first stint at Berkeley
At war's end, Aaron and I moved to another private home in Pasadena. Soon thereafter, Aaron moved to West Los Angeles to attend graduate school at UCLA's Dept. of Mathematics. We eventually were classmates there for 3 years before he moved down south to Del Mar to take a position designing computers at the forerunner of Litton Industries. My next Pasadena roommate was a botanist, Bill Jacobs, from back east, who was researching in Bonner's lab at Caltech. At that time there transpired a most unusual event.

Bonner's group went to the mountains to ski one weekend in the winter of 45-46. Bill was off skiing alone somewhere and became lost. When he didn't return to camp that evening, a search was initiated and continued for several days, without success. Bill's parents came out from back east, also, and continued searching after the others had to return to Pasadena. Having no success either, they came to see me and collect Bill's belongings. They took most of them back east with them, and asked me to dispose of the remainder. I can't remember exactly what was left or what I did with it.

About 10 days after Bill initially became lost, and everyone had given up hope, he was found, not much the worse for wear. He had holed up in an emergency bivouac, far off the main trails and, being a botanist, subsisted on lichens. He was still recuperating in the hospital when I departed our quarters for San Francisco in January, so I never saw him again. He eventually joined the botany faculty at Princeton U.

The Origin of Life - 1945-1947, 1960, 2004-2007
At about this time I was reclassified into 1A. However, by then I was under the care of the Caltech physician for an ulcer, seemingly acquired during betting on horse races. With a letter from him attesting to my condition, I was reclassified yet again. But this time it was into 1F. At war's end, with only my youngest brother, Earl, still in Detroit, my parents moved to the Sutter hotel in San Francisco. My sister, Leslie Caro, who had married in the meantime, was living in San Francisco. Earl and I joined my parents at the hotel and spent several winter-spring months of 1946 there. Each week day I commuted to Berkeley, where I audited various science and mathematics courses.

At this time, I consulted with Prof. Sumner Cushing Brooks, a physicochemical biologist in the Zoology Dept. at Berkeley on matters pertaining to my origin of life studies. Apparently he was much impressed, because he invited me to give a Departmental seminar. I was horrified at the thought. I couldn't imagine getting up in front of Goldschmidt and other Departmental luminaries, and daring to present a talk on The Origin of Life. So, I hastily declined. After agonizing for several days, however, I changed my mind and gave the seminar, after all. I was pretty much in a daze throughout, and about all I remember is that I exceeded the allotted time, and that Goldschmidt was one of those who left before I finished. Fortunately, I made a favorable impression that stood me in good stead when I returned three years later for work on my doctorate. I never saw Brooks again, though, for he died in 1948.

At this time my paper, "A theory on causal factors in the origin of life," was out in Philosophy of Science (July, 1945;12:190-193). This paper falls in the "Metabolism First" (MF) category of theories on the origin of life. Quoting from its concluding paragraph:

If these considerations hold, then it is reasonable to expect such phenomena to take place on other planets where the conditions are similar. By laboratory experiments with simple living forms exposed to conditions of an oscillating afference of radiant energy (or perhaps merely oscillating temperature) the determination of the importance of these considerations seems feasible. It should also be possible to investigate the effects upon suitable material aggregates.

The Miller-Urey experiments (leading to a theory also in the MF category) did not follow for 8 years. However, they used electrical discharges as a source of energy, rather than radiation of solar color-temperature and intensity, relatively unimpeded by atmospheric absorption.

I don't remember how he got wind of the Philosophy of Science paper, but the science editor for the Los Angeles Times, William S. Barton, interviewed me in Jan., 1946, for a newspaper article on the origin of life. Previously, Barton had been promoted from, Science Reporter for the LA Times to Science Editor for Newsweek in New York City and, finally, back to LA as science editor for the Times. To my great surprise, his feature article appeared on the front page on Monday, Feb. 4, as the lead article of the day, at the upper right (Fig. 1-14). I was unaware of this until 2005 when I looked up the article, previously believing it had appeared in Section B. Below, I reproduce its title and subtitle, and excerpt from the body of the text. Some of Barton's quotes, however, are fanciful deviations from anything I said.

New life creation theory based on earth's rotation
Periodic changes in temperature believed factor

....A revolutionary theory on the origin of life has been reported to scientific journals by J. Lee Kavanau, young California Institute of Technology biophysicist, it was disclosed yesterday....The newest idea propounded by Kavanau is that the rotation of the earth was an all-important factor in 'breathing life' into the world....The theory might be said to contain this overly simplified recipe for creating life.

Take sunlight and elements, always including carbon, to form molecules; next, keep these molecules closely associated with each other; finally, expose the material to the chief life-producing stimulant - periodic temperature changes resulting from the earth's rotation, or from night and day.

Sun necessary
...."We can assume," the scientists explains, "that when life first appeared, the earth's temperature was less than that of boiling water and that day and night temperature changes were of the same order as now.

"Such changes could stimulate the required reactions only in something like carbon, atoms of which, being neutral, or 'on the fence' electrically, are apt to react to small increases or decreases in energy. Salt, on the other hand, is so stable that it reacts only when temperatures are too high for life."

Start on small scale
What chance is there that any living thing as large, even, as a mouse, could have been created without centuries of gradual evolution from microscopic cells? Very little chance, the new life origin theory indicates; for, since energies available for life-producing reactions are small, and the number of molecules which could be held together at the outset are most limited, the first living things must have been the size of bacteria or smaller.

The evolution of minute and simple organisms into large and highly complex plants and animals, according to Kavanau, resulted from the reactions of the primordial forms to a whole variety of environmental stimuli.

For example, while the spinning of the earth on its axis may have sparked life into existence, the revolution of the earth about the sun (producing the seasons), the altitude about which a spark of life was developed, and countless other factors decided whether a 'life egg' would become a flea or an elephant.

I received a letter, Jan. 2, 1946, concerning the same paper, from Arthur E. Ruark, Kenan Prof. and Chair of the Dept. of Physics and Astronomy at U. of North Carolina, to whom I had sent a reprint. He was on leave as consultant to the Naval Research Laboratory at Anacostia, and future author, in 1959, of the McKinney Report on Progress toward Fusion-Power. He wrote as follows.

I appreciate the reprint of your paper on Origin of Life. I consider that it links together many diverse lines of thought. It is reasonable to expect that in the course of time you will find that others have considered some of your ideas. When a man has done a careful job of synthesis and has arrived at a bold general working hypothesis, he is often appalled on considering the amount of work necessary to substantiate the consequences of his assumption. It seems to me you stand in somewhat the same position as Klein when he wrote the Erlanger program. After 53 years the consequences of that single paper still serve as a current stimulus to research.

Please keep me on your mailing list for material of this kind.

A second MF category paper, "Some physico-chemical aspects of life and evolution to the living state," was in the works, eventually appearing in the American Naturalist (1947;81:161-184). A main thesis of both of these papers was that "The [24-hour] fluctuation in temperature in itself acts as a 'shuffling factor' which increases the probability that favored associations will occur and that non-favored associations will be eliminated." For orientation, the book on the same subject, "The Origin of Life," by the Russian pioneer, Aleksandr Oparin, appeared in 1924, and the British scientist, J.B.S. Haldane's essay, in 1929. Thus, my proposals were only the third to fall into the "Metabolism First" (MF) category. But it was the first to feature and suggest a role of intermittent or cyclic temperature changes or energy afference. A translation of Oparin's classic, had appeared in 1938. Another printing of that work with an Introduction by S. Morgulis of the U. of Nebraska appeared in 1953. In the introduction, there appears:

There is no scientific basis, says Kavanau, that life may not be originating continuously upon the earth. The fact that we have no evidence of such de novo origin is of no particular significance, for if there is such origin we must anticipate that it would be in units far too small to be treated in the manner in which we are accustomed to dealing with organisms....It is likely, however, that the changes in the conditions at the earth's surface, since the most favorable period for the origin of life, have been so great that present-day de novo origin, if it occurs, is highly infrequent.

This is the only time I have been quoted without a reference, presumably on the assumption that the name was well enough known that one was unnecessary. I wonder what Morgulis would have thought had he known that I was just a graduate student in math at UCLA at the time of publication, and only 23 years old at the time I wrote it. Several people asked me in following years (I recall only Herman Kabe from Prof. Fritiof Sj›strand's lab) whether I was the Kavanau to whom he was referring. As noted earlier, there is only one family named Kavanau that spells its name that way.

In 1960, in a letter to the editor, "On the Origin of Life," in Science (1960;131:1682), I spoke out against the view, falling in the "Replicator Molecule First" (RMF) category, that the origin of life is to be identified with the origin of enzymes or DNA (eventually most workers suggested RNA). I favored the view that relatively simple, bounded, molecular aggregates increased in size until becoming partitioned into two because of instability. I used the analogy of corporations, not originating with their boards of directors, but with simple beginnings by founders operating out of their garages.

Though I had emphasized only one aspect of the importance of the earth's rotation to the origin of life, in the broader picture I had put my finger on an absolutely essential condition for life on the earth. No researcher, to my knowledge, has delved further into this question. In The Scientist (2003;17:28,28), in an article by Jack Lucentini, however, there is a statement attributed to J. L. Bada of Scripps Inst. of Oceanography, "Bada also has explored the possibilities....and that repeated freeze-thaw cycles on the planet might have stimulated organic compound synthesis," which skirts the topic.

Consider today's informed, more or less popular, view on such matters as summarized by Dr. Oliver Sacks in Natural History (2002; 111(9):38-40).

Life as we know it is not imaginable without proteins, and proteins are built from peptides, and ultimately from amino acids. It is easy to imagine that amino acids were abundant in the early earth, either formed as a result of lightning discharges or brought to the planet by comets and meteors. The real problem is to get from amino acids and other simple compounds to peptides, nucleotides, proteins, and so on. It is unlikely that such delicate chemical syntheses would occur in "some warm little pond," as Darwin imagined, or on the surface of a primordial sea. Instead, they would probably require unusual conditions of heat and concentration, as well as the presence of special catalysts and energy-rich compounds to make them proceed. The biochemist Christian De Duve of Rockefeller University suggests that complex organic sulfur compounds played a crucial role in providing chemical energy, and that these compounds may have formed spontaneously early in earth's history, perhaps in the hot, acidic sulfurous depths of the seafloor vents (where, it is increasingly believed, life probably originated). De Duve imagines this chemical world as the precursor of an "RNA world," believed by many to represent the first form of self-replicating life [RMF category]. He thinks that the movement from one to the other was both inevitable and fast.

But without the earth rotating, all the above considerations would be moot. It can be suggested that there would be no atmospheric circulation, no trade wind, no storm, no lightning, no gaseous oxygen, no deep sea vent, in fact, no sea at all. Nor would the earth necessarily be spherical (the moon, of course, assumed its spherical shape before its rotation became locked in phase with the earth). Rather, if water were even retained, it might be somewhat prolate, with all the water collected and frozen on the dark side, and with the existence and influences of tectonic events very much uncertain, with mantle dynamics known to be influenced by the earth's spin.

Though I called to attention the possible importance of the earth's rotation for the origin and existence of life in 1945, this matter still does not figure in the speculations, thoughts, and calculations of today's astronomers and geophysicists. They simply take it as a given, not only that candidate planets will rotate, but that they would do so with favorable periods. Thus, to them, the matter of influences of rotation require no consideration. This is exemplified by the recent review in Science (2007;318:210-213), "New worlds On the Horizon: Earth-Sized Planets Close to Other Stars." Not once in the review do the words "rotate" or "rotational" occur. The only indication that the authors assumed rotation or even recognized its possible significance follows from their statement:

In such cases the day-night temperature difference on the planet can be measured, indicating the presence or absence of an atmosphere to redistribute heat, and it may be possible to extract a low-resolution spectrum and search for absorption by gases such as.....

Similarly, in their excellent article, "The Color of Plants on Other Worlds," in Scientific American (2008; April:48-55), which is a detailed consideration of photosynthetic possibilities, N. Y. Kiang et al. make no mention of planetary rotation about various types of parent stars (except for, "on an orbiting earth-like world," and "a range of orbits.....that allows for liquid water"). On the other hand, in "Habitability of Planets Around Red Dwarf Stars," in Origins of Life and Evolution of the Biosphere (1999;29:405-424), M. J. Heath et al.'s Abstract runs as follows:

Recent models indicate that relatively moderate climates could exist on Earth-sized planets in synchronous rotation [due to intense tidal torque] around red dwarf stars [such dM stars comprise ~70% of solar neighborhood stars]. Investigation of the global water cycle, availability of photosynthetically active radiation in red dwarf sunlight, and the biological implications of stellar flares, which can be frequent for red dwarfs, suggests that higher plant habitability of red dwarf planets may be possible.

Heath et al. conclude with:

.....since such a large percentage of stars are dM stars, there are grounds for cautious optimism that the number of potential forest-habitable planets in our Galaxy is larger than may have been considered previously.

In November, 2003, I attended the weekly Wednesday evening dinner and seminar of Bill Schopf's Center for the Study of Evolution and the Origin of Life. The speaker that evening was Dave Deamer, Prof. Emeritus of Chemistry and Biochemistry at UC Santa Cruz, with his topic being, "Origin and self-assembly of complex molecular systems in the prebiotic environment." As I stood in line at the 'cafeteria table,' Bill's wife, Jane Shen-Miller, came walking toward me with our speaker, Dave. I was flabbergasted to learn that he had inquired after me, and wanted to meet me.

In a subsequent e-mail, Dave wrote:

I absolutely agree that "shuffling" of organics in fluctuating environments (wet-dry cycles, light-dark, high temp-low temp) is the best place to look for the kinds of natural experiments that must have preceded the origin of life....I will look for your American Naturalist paper and see if it can be brought back into circulation as a primary reference to these sorts of conditions.

The latter remark was in response to my having written to him that "Few people still alive know that these papers exist." Almost exactly two years later I called Dave's attention to the LA Times front page article. He replied:

Thanks for sending the LA Times article. I read it with real interest, and you might be amused that we are using cyclic temperature changes to drive polymerization in lipid-monomer systems. If it works, you will be the first to hear of it [nothing yet--JLK].

An article, "Transitions from Nonliving to Living Matter" [MF category] (Science 2004;303:963-965), by S. Rasmussen, L. Chen, D. Deamer, D. C, Krakauer, N. H. Packard, P. F. Stafler, and M. A. Bedau, advanced some realistic views on the matter. I extract a few excerpts-all quotes:

....a localized molecular assembly should be considered alive if it continually regenerates itself, replicates itself, and is capable of evolving....the simplest way to achieve these characteristics is to house informational polymers (such as DNA and RNA) in a metabolic system that chemically regulates and regenerates cellular components within a physical container (such as a lipid vesicle)....Andy Pohorille....used simulations to argue [favored by me--JLK] that nongenomic early organisms could undergo early evolution before the origin of organisms with genes....Takashi Ikegamic....Presented simulations of a simple and abstract model of metabolic chemistry that demonstrates the spontaneous formation and reproduction of cell-like structures.

By 2007, Metabolism First theories of the origin of life were in full resurgence, championed by such researchers as Dave Deamer and Robert Shapiro (of NYU). Shapiro's article in Scientific American (2007;296(6):46-53) is titled, A Simpler Origin of Life. It leads off with, "The sudden appearance of a large self-copying molecule such as RNA was exceedingly improbable. Energy-driven networks of small molecules afford better odds as the initiators of life." Proponents of RMF theories continue to be in the news. Recently appearing in Nature was:

It is well established that the evolution of life passed through an early stage in which RNA played central roles in both inheritance and catalysis¹ -- roles that are currently played by DNA and protein enzymes, respectively. But where did the RNA come from? Experiments reported by Powner et al (Nature, page 239, 14 May 2009) provide fresh insight into the chemical processes that might have led to the emergence of information-coding nucleic acids on early Earth.

Graduate studies at UCLA
Meanwhile my parents found a home in Los Angeles, not far from UCLA. Brother Earl and I joined them there, with brother Dick following, also, upon his discharge. With the 2-bedroom house crowded, I built myself a bedroom in one side of the garage, and a darkroom for Earl in the other side.

I enrolled as a mathematics major at UCLA, as mathematics was my best subject, from the point of view of an all-A record. I also applied successfully for a teaching assistantship to support myself. I was interviewed by the mathematics chair, a geometer, Paul Daus. Though I did not admit it, he divined that I probably was majoring in mathematics, only to be eligible for the position as a TA. I taught only that one year of '46-'47. My assignment was a college algebra course and a recitation section in calculus. For my second and third years, I was awarded a University Fellowship in Mathematics, and subsequently in Physical-Biological Sciences ($900/annum).

For my studies, I continued graduate courses in chemistry and physics, together with beginning biology courses, and graduate Seminars in Experimental Embryology with Abe Schechtman, with whom I was hopeful of obtaining a Ph.D., Advanced General Physiology, with Frederick Crescitelli, and Cellular Physiology, with Theodore Jahn -- all now deceased, like so many others.

These courses were uneventful, except for those in various areas of chemistry, almost all of which were of note for one reason or another. Let's start with biochemistry under Max Dunn. In the second semester laboratory course, my cumulative final grade was so much higher than the next highest, that Dunn wanted to give only one A in the whole class. Fortunately, the instructor talked him out of it, and he disregarded my grade, as far as the grade curve was concerned, and awarded several other A grades.

At that time, I met Bruce Merrifield, a student of Dunn's, who in 1949 accepted a position in D. W. Wooley's laboratory at The Rockefeller Institute in New York City. I also spent two postdoctoral years there in 1955-1957 (see Chap. 2). On a subsequent visit in the early 1960s, after I was already at UCLA, I was able to give Bruce some assistance with his automated solid-phase peptide, protein and nucleic acid synthesizer, which was burning out electromechanical relay points right and left. The problem was that his Tenor multi-point rotary switch, which I also was using in my behavior studies to simulate constant color-temperature twilights, was not equipped with the proper spark suppressors.

For his invention of the synthesizer in the period 1959-1963, Bruce received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1984. In his obit in Nature in June, 2006, it was said that,

Merrifield's ingenious concept led directly to the development of efficient methods for preparing synthetic nucleic acids -- essential for modern molecular biology and biotechnology. The solid-phase principle is also at the heart of combinatorial chemistry, which enables the simultaneous preparation of thousands of compounds, and which has changed the fabric of medicinal chemistry and drug discovery since the early 1990s.

During my postdoctoral tenure at Rockefeller, Nils Arthur Jernberg (head of the Rockefeller Instrument Shop) and I developed (among other things) an anharmonic laboratory shaker, for component mechanisms of which we shared two patents (see Chap. 2). Bruce Merrifield also sought Nils' help in developing an automated prototype of his synthesizer (in his home basement; now in the Smithsonian Institution). Ironically, the reviewers of Bruce's earlier paper on bradykinin synthesis had asked him to delete his "regrettable" reference to the possibility that his synthesizer (which for ribonuclease involved 369 reactions and 11,391 steps) could be automated [My own conflicts with reviewers of submitted papers are detailed in coming Chaps.].

My class in organic chemistry was unusual only in that the instructor was Edwin Macmillan, a student of the Mayers' (Joseph and Maria Goeppert) at the U. of Chicago. I went through the whole course thinking he was an organic chemist. To my surprise he taught the statistical mechanics course I later enrolled in. We were using the Mayers' book, Statistical Mechanics. At the first meeting Macmillan asked us to be on the lookout for any errors, so they could be corrected for the next printing of the text. To his surprise, as he felt he had gone through it with a fine-toothed comb, I eventually found at least 6 errors in equations, that a chemist might easily overlook.

The unusual event in this course happened one day when Macmillan came into class and announced, "I'm tired of giving all the lectures, will one of you volunteer to give today's assignment?" Of course, all the other students looked at each other in shock and bewilderment at such an unprecedented request. But it was my practice to go over each assignment in detail beforehand -- looking for errors too -- so I didn't hesitate to accept the invitation. I even asked for more time to finish during the next session. By coincidence, one of the errors in the book occurred in the material I covered.

However, with the good went the not-so-good. I also took a course on the chemical bond from Prof. Clifford Garner. By this time my paper on carbon-carbon bonds had long since appeared (1944) in the J. Chem. Physics, so it was anticipated that I would do well in the course. And I made more than a few useful contributions during class. However, the final was of the open book variety. Although this was very familiar to the engineering students in the class, constituting the majority, it was quite foreign to my experiences. To make a long story short, I think I did no better than a "C" on the final. But Garner took pity on me. By allowing extra credit for my contributions during regular class sessions, he gave me an A.

Unfortunately, many of my coursework notes and other papers were lost from storage when my family moved to Park La Brea in 1956, while I was at Rockefeller. I have only those from Ted Bullock's course in Invertebrate Zoology, and Magnus Hestenes' course in Calculus of Variations. Experiments and projects for Bullock included: Synecological succession on glass slides immersed in the ocean (a volitional project for the semester); Humidity response of Armadillium (a pill bug); Properties of the Anthozoan (a coelenterate) nerve net; The movements of marked littorines and limpets; Righting behavior in Patiria minita (a starfish); The effect of low oxygen tensions on kicking in barnacles; and Osmotic regulation in Pachygrapsus crassipes (a crab). This was a rigorous course!

Hestenes' course final covered Applications of the calculus of variations to Riemannian geometry and mechanics: I. Geodesics, Example 1, To find the shortest distance between two points (x₁,y₁) and (x₂,y₂) in the Euclidean x,y plane, Example 2, Find the geodesics on the surface of a sphere of radius r, II. The Principle of Least Action, Lagrange's Equations, Trajectories and Geodesics, Example 1, Natural trajectories as geodesics; III. Principal Curvatures of a Surface. Also a rigorous course. I also took a course in Tensor Analysis from Ivan Sokolnikoff. Three of us from his class corrected the notes for the book he was just completing on the same subject. The other two students were Julius Brandstatter and Harold Luxenberg. I was in touch with Julius in later years.

Publications as a graduate student at UCLA
It was during this period at UCLA that I achieved my 5th and 6th publications. One was a theoretical synthesis, "On correlation of the phenomena associated with chromosomes, foreign proteins, and viruses," in American Naturalist (1949; 83:95-138). The 44-page-length of this paper required that it be published in consecutive (March-April and May-June) issues, a precedent. The other was a continuation of my chemical bond studies, "Comparison of relations between covalent bond order, energy, and interatomic distance for carbon-carbon bonds," in the J. Chem. Physics (1949;17:738-739), the 4th and last in the series. The latter paper compared results given by my relations for interatomic distance, energy, and order, with those of two other investigators. Predictions for benzene and graphite bond orders were compared with quantum mechanical calculations, while those for energies were compared with experimental values.

From the Introduction to the American Naturalist paper:

Discoveries of the last decade are casting a new light on the seemingly heterogeneous phenomena associated chromosomes, foreign proteins, and viruses. Being intrinsically linked to proteins it is to be anticipated that these phenomena will ultimately be explicated upon the basis of common factors. It has thus seemed desirable to examine them in the light of new information and to attempt to correlate them upon the basis of factors which appear to be basic.

From the Conclusions of the same paper:

Phenomena associated with chromosomes, foreign proteins, and viruses are discussed. The chief factor that appears to determine the course of these protein-associated phenomena are: the action of long- and short-range specific attractive forces, the saturation of these forces through particle association, Coulomb repulsion, the Brownian velocity of the particles, the pH of the protoplasmic medium, the isoelectric points of the particles concerned, and the availability of energy (presumably from nucleic acid metabolism) and building blocks from ancillary processes.

Here, I was mistaken about a role of long-range forces. In reality, short-range forces plus the endless contacts brought about by Brownian motion are sufficient.

In response to this paper I received a letter, dated Jan. 12, 1951, from C. W. Bennett, Principal Pathologist for the U. S. Dept. of Agriculture, as follows.

I am very much interested in the theory advanced in you recent article in the American Naturalist with respect to the immunization of plants against related strains of plant viruses. You probably have read Giddings' recent publication in which he reports failing to find that any of his strains of curly-top immunized against any other strain of the virus in sugar beet. We have reason to believe that our curly-top is a complex of a large number of related virus strains....Since reading your article it has occurred to me that perhaps curly-top virus is so closely bound to normal plant proteins in the diseased plant that there are no primary aggregates available to adsorb and thus inactivate a second strain thus permitting free multiplication of the second strain introduced. I would be very much interested to know whether you would consider this hypothesis as a tenable one in the light of your experience with animal and plant virus.

Feb. 27, 1951:
Thank you very much for your letter of Feb. 8 with suggestions and discussion of the possible factors involved in interactions between strains of the curly-top virus.
Unfortunately, our methods of measuring the concentrations of different strains of curly-top virus in the plant are rather inexact. However we do have methods that provide evidence of giving information regarding relative virus concentrations when the differences are large....
Whether we can go much further with adsorptive tests with strains of the curly-top virus remains to be determined....We are hoping to obtain further evidence on some of these points in some further attempts to purify the virus.

In response to the same paper, I also received a letter, dated Jan, 5, 1951, from G. B. Sanford, Pathologist-in-Charge of the Dept. of Agriculture, Dominion Laboratory of Plant Pathology, U. of Alberta, Canada, as follows.

I have just read with a great deal of interest your article, "On correlation of the phenomena associated with chromosomes, foreign proteins and viruses. III. Virus-associated phenomena." American Naturalist 83: 113-138, 1949; and I thought that possibly you might suggest the procedure we might take in our research on the leaf-roll disease of potatoes in connection with the formation of necrosis of the phloem elements in potato tubers. Certain varieties are immune, while others are more or less susceptible, but apparently they can all carry the virus....

What I wish to ask you is if you think we are justified in endeavoring to explain this phloem necrosis as being of emblematic origin, or whether some other explanation might be more logical. I realize that this is a question in another field, but I though perhaps you might be good enough to make a suggestion.

Yet additional correspondence in connection with this paper includes:

I would greatly value a copy of your paper, "On Correlation of the...." when separates become available. Also, if you have the time and inclination, I wonder if you would enlighten me as to your reasons for discarding in toto my conclusions regarding the evidence for long range forces from studies such as Hinton's. Since you refer to my paper, I assume you have given some thought to its arguments and evidence, Lastly, just what would convince you to invalidation of the sort of evidence Hinton presents (which you make much of), if the sort I discussed is unacceptable to you?

Hoping that I may have the pleasure of your reply, and that you will place my name on your mailing list, I am Sincerely yours, Kenneth W. Cooper, Princeton U., Dept. of Biology, March 19, 1950.

Unfortunately I have no record of my reply to this letter. It should be mentioned, however, that both Hinton and I were mistaken in believing in the existence of a long-range specific attractive force. Cooper is now an emeritus professor at UC Riverside.

A noted very recent news item was: Scientists are reporting evidence that intact, double-stranded DNA has the "amazing ability to recognize similarities in other DNA strands from a distance. And then like friends with similar interests, the bits of genetic material hangout or congregate together. The recognition -- of similar sequences in DNA's chemical subunits -- occurs in a way once regarded as impossible

In January, 2008, a paper by Baldwin et al. appeared in the J. Physical Chem. B (112:1060-1064) with the title, "DNA Double Helices Recognize Mutual Sequence Homology in a Protein Free Environment," In 1922, Muller (Am. Nat. 56:32-50) had suggested that a specific attractive force between hormologous chromosomes brings about their pairing during meiosis. The existences of such a force, possibly operating at distances up to 200Å had been assumed in the present paper, but subsequently discounted, as noted above. The "Baldwin et al." force is of interest in this connection, though it operates, at most, over distances of a few tens of Å. According to its authors:

.....We now find that sequence recognition occurs between intact DNA duplexes.....occurs between double helices separated by water in the absence of proteins.....We thus report experimental evidence and discuss possible mechanisms for the recognition of homologous DNAs from a distance.....fragments with identical sequences were approximately 2 times more likely to be found near each other than the fragments with different sequences.....Amazingly, the forces responsible for the sequence recognition can reach across more than 1 nm of water separating the surfaces of nearest neighbor DNAs in the spherulites.....We hypothesize that the origin of this recognition may be as follows. In-register alignment of phosphate strands with grooves in opposing DNA minimizes unfavorable electrostatic interactions between the negatively charged phosphates and maximized favorable interactions of phosphates with bound counterions..... DNAs with identical sequences will have the same structure and will stay in register over any juxtaposition length. Nonhomologous DNAs will have uncorrelated sequence-dependent variations in the local pitch that will disrupt the register over large justaposition length.....The sequence recognition energy, calculated from the corresponding theory.....is ~1 kT under the conditions utilized.....Presently, we cannot exclude other mechanisms for the observed segregation.

On to UC Berkeley
Having complete three years of graduate and undergraduate studies at UCLA in 1949, I was ready to enter a Ph.D. program with Abe Schechtman, and had applied for a Public Health Service fellowship for the next year. I was confident of obtaining this fellowship, so had made no other financial arrangement. However, unbeknownst to me, only one fellowship could be awarded in any given Department, and the selection was based on the Department's number one recommendation. The Department, however, had recommended someone else, a student named Lucy B., but no one told me about it. Had someone, I could have applied for a TA position. So, there I was again, high and dry at the last minute, like at the U. of Chicago back in 1939.

I had read about some Phoenix Project Pre-doctoral fellowships at the U. of Mich. in the journal Science, so I quickly assembled some transcripts and reprints of my papers and airmailed them with an informal application to Ann Arbor. At UCLA, I had met Howard Bern, who obtained his Ph.D., and was offered a position at UC Berkeley. So I also made a hurried call to him. To my good fortune, he was in charge of hiring teaching assistantships for the coming year in the Zoology Department, and offered me a teaching assistantship on the spot.

Dean Ralph Sawyer of the School of Graduate Studies also offered me a fellowship on behalf of the Phoenix Project Planning Committee ($1,500/annum) for the academic year 1949-1950, but I opted for Berkeley. On arriving there, I interviewed with Prof. William Berg, who accepted me into a Ph.D. program in chemical embryology.

At the time of my arrival at Berkeley, the Chairman of the Zoology Department was Harold Kirby, a protozoologist, who unfortunately died at age 52, during my stay. Lynn Margulis later (The Scientist 2003;17(13):11) wrote the following of him and L. R. Cleveland of Harvard.

Both....were acknowledged to be brilliant scientists....Cleveland and Kirby were so far ahead of their time that nobody has integrated their work into common knowledge. Their science is dismissed as humanities, [as if] it's not science anymore, it's too old....If it weren't for these two men, we couldn't make this model for the origin of nucleated cells."

At Berkeley, I made the acquaintance of many fellow graduate students, with some of whom I kept in close touch in later years. I shared a large double office with a brilliant chap, Dr. Ellsworth C. Dougherty, one of the very first to obtain both an M.D. and a Ph.D. He was an expert on roundworms and would have achieved great prominence in later years, when these creatures became a favorite object for studies in cell fates and molecular biology. Together with several coworkers Dougherty isolated the soil nematode, Caenorhabditis elegans in the late 1940s and devised sterile laboratory culture conditions in defined media. Ellsworth was responsible for raising many of Osche's subgenera to the genus level, thereby establishing the name Caenorhabditis elegans. He supplied Sydney Brenner, a future Nobelist in Physiology or Medicine in 2002 with a culture of strain C. of elegans. His "passion" was to establish Caenorhabditis as a model metazoan organism to compete with microbiological systems.

Ellsworth was married to a Chinese lady who owned and ran a dress shop in downtown Berkeley or Oakland. I encountered him again, and for the last time, about 10 years later at some Society meeting in the U.S. Unfortunately, and for precise reasons unknown to me, he committed suicide in December, 1965. I can guess that one of the causes had to do with his failure to gain the recognition he deserved at Berkeley where, at the time I was there (1949-1952), he failed to achieve a professorship. I would guess that most of his problems were of his own making, because of a caustic personality.

As a teaching assistant I was assigned to courses taught by Morgan Harris (Growth) and Richard Eakin (Embryology). The latter subsequently became famous for his impersonations of great scientists in his classroom lectures. At that time, I knew little of his field of research, which was on the evolution of eyes. [In later years (1994-2005) my studies of the origin and evolution of sleep crossed with his studies on eyes.] I took the usual broad range of courses in mammalogy, natural history, physiology, genetics, etc., that are part of the major. Graduate seminars included Experimental Morphogenesis with Eakin and Berg, Invertebrate Zoology with R. I. Smith, and Advanced Genetics with Curt Stern.

Enzyme kinetics paper
In the seminar with Eakin, enzymes were one of the topics. I became interested in the unsolved problem of the non-linearity of the Arrhenius plots of the logarithm, kr, against the reciprocal of the absolute temperature, T.

I found that a simple modification of the usual theoretical kinetic formulation described the temperature dependence of a wide variety of biochemical processes with greater accuracy than previously achieved. The results supported the contention that in the lower temperature range of enzyme activity a thermodynamic equilibrium exists between catalytically active and inactive forms of enzymes. I suggested that, at low temperatures, intramolecular hydrogen bridges converted catalytically active enzyme into inactive forms, which was the last word on the subject at that time, and remains substantially valid. These studies eventually were published as, "Enzyme Kinetics and the Rate of Biological Processes," in the J. Gen. Physiology (1950;34:193-209). Although these results were not earth shattering, they did receive some notice in following years, of which I noted the following.

From The Kinetic Basis of Molecular Biology, by Johnson, Eyring, and Polossar, 1954:

Kavanau (1950) has worked out an empirical formulation which fits the increase in apparent activation energy of biological processes at low temperatures. Although its theoretical significance is not fully clear, the suggestion that the mechanism involves changes in molecular configuration which affect the catalytic properties of the enzyme is plausible. Furthermore, it is reasonable to believe that the activation energy is higher at low temperatures, and that this circumstance is partially responsible for the change in µ value encountered in various biological reactions.

From Reversible Inactivation of Enzymes at Low Temperatures, by Maier, Tappel, and Volman, J. Amer. Chem. Soc., 1955 (77:1278):

The widespread occurrence of non-linearity of Arrhenius plots for enzyme-catalyzed reactions suggests a behavior pattern inherent in enzymes. Kavanau has proposed just such a behavior pattern. The enzyme is considered as existing in an active and inactive form which are in reversible equilibrium with each other. The model Kavanau suggests is an inactive form which is not sufficiently unfolded, perhaps because of the formation of intra-molecular hydrogen bonds. This is the reverse of the effect postulated for irreversible high-temperature denaturation, the unfolding and breaking of hydrogen bonds. Kavanau presents evidence to show that the behavior of a number of enzyme systems is in accord with this interpretation....the examples of Kavanau are limited to hydrolytic enzyme reactions. Evidence in support of the suggestions of Kavanau based on data for an oxidizing enzyme as well as for a hydrolytic enzyme in the temperature range 20° to -30° using aqueous mixtures are presented herein.

From The Enzymes, Edited by Boyer, Lardy, and Myrback, 1959:

Thermodynamics and mechanism of enzymic catalysis: Kavanau, Hultin, and Maier et al. have suggested that the protein folds more tightly at lower temperatures to lose activity. This analysis is consistent with what is known of conformation changes, but more experimental verification from studies of physical properties is necessary. Only fumarase has been investigated in this way....Thus there is indication in this case and perhaps in the others of interesting changes in conformation which alter but do not eliminate catalytic activity.

A reprint request 54 years later
In what may be a record for a scientific paper, I received a reprint request for the enzyme kinetics paper 54 years later, on February 24, 2004 from I. S. Meilanov, of Dahadaeva, 5/25 - 15, Russia. A search in Biosis revealed 15 multi-authored and single-authored publications by I. S. Meilanov going back to 1970, all in related areas, with 3 examples as follows.

"Thermal compensation for enzymic activity in homoiothermal animals". [Article] Biofizika. 45(2), March-April 2000, 228-231, "Effect of repeated cold stress on free radicals metabolism enzymes activity and total antioxidant reserves in rat brain during hypothermia" [Meeting] Journal of Neurochemistry, 78(Supplement 1),. September, 2001, 156, and "Temperature dependence of kinetic characteristics of acetylcholinesterase of synaptic membranes from rat brain cortex" [Meeting] Journal of Neurochemistry, 78 (Supplement 1), September, 2001, 155.

Berkeley (continued)
In the undergraduate course in Natural History at Berkeley I undertook a project for the course involving the study of the behavior of deer mice, Peromyscus maniculatus, a species of white-footed mice. This initiated a lifelong interest in animal behavior that continued thereafter almost until this day. During this period, I either had pets or experimental subjects for behavioral studies. I retained few notes from my Berkeley class work. Included, however, is another class project from the Natural History course titled, Cliff Swallows on the Berkeley Campus, graded "B," and my laboratory sketch book, including bird bills, the coyote skull, bird feet, topography of the bird, feather tracts, and the primary feather, also graded "B."

In those days, two foreign languages were required for the Ph.D. in Zoology. Mine were German (administered by Curt Stern) and French (administered by Richard Goldschmidt). My Doctoral Committee consisted of William Berg, Chairman, Richard M. Eakin, and David M. Greenberg. The Examination Committee also include Norman R. Pace and a 5th member, whom I can't recall.

To complete my Ph.D. studies at Berkeley, I applied successfully for National Cancer Institute Predoctorate Fellowship ($167/month) for my last year. In that year, I also was awarded a Charles Atwood Kofoid Eugenics fellowship ($1,400/annum), which I was obliged to decline. My studies were comparatively uneventful, with the degrees of M.A. conferred in 1951 and Ph.D. in 1952. One of my proposals for a thesis topic was nuclear transplantation, achieved a few years later with great fanfare by Briggs and King in England. Eakin, however, and I feel quite rightly so, discouraged me from attempting it. In later years, whenever I was in contact with him, he took the opportunity to apologize for diverting me from that promising pathway. Nevertheless, I felt we made the right decision. I recently (03/2004) came across one of Eakin's notes (dated 11/9/95), as follows.

How nice to hear from you! Thank you for the reprint on sleep and memory. I struggled to comprehend, but my old brain is nearing rigor mortis. I am now 85.

You have always been original and creative in thinking and experimenting. I still remember with shame my discouraging you to try nuclear transplantation, believing it too difficult technically. And then came Briggs and King's study! I learned a valuable lesson--never discourage a new idea or experiment.

The thesis topic I chose was the "Metabolism of Free Amino Acids, Peptides, and Proteins in Early Sea Urchin Development." This involved collecting the sea urchins, fertilizing the eggs, raising the embryos, and taking equal samples at regular intervals. [The necessity for using quantitative procedures with the latter equal samples underlay my development of freeze-drying in vials, soon to be a standard procedure in chemical, drug, and vaccine laboratories throughout the world (see Chap. 3, The VirTis Affair). The samples were then denatured and extracted, and the extracts assayed microbiologically for their free, amino acid content. A paper on this topic with the above title appeared the following year in the J. Exper. Zool. (1953;122:285-337).

My immediate goal was to continue the same studies in a postdoctoral program abroad, which I projected would require at least two years. All my fellow graduate students urged me to stay in America and obtain a position. They argued that if I went abroad I would lose out on the choicest openings and find nothing desirable on returning. [Years later, reading "Physics and Feynman's Diagrams" by Davis Kaiser (American Scientist 2005;93(2):156-165), I learned that this mindset also existed among physics postdocs, among which only a small minority pursued postdoctoral training, usually in Europe, before the war.] On my part, I couldn't wait to get abroad for exposure to other cultures and languages.

For support I applied for fellowships to the National Institutes of Health, again, to the National Science Foundation (their inaugural year), to The National Research Council, and for a Lilly Postdoctoral Fellowship. I was awarded fellowships outright by the first two agencies, and was Alternate Number One in the field of Biology for the National Research Council ($3,300 plus $500 for foreign travel), and Alternates Number Two for the Lilly ($3,300 plus $500 for foreign travel plus $500 to the Institute), each of which awarded only a single fellowship. That meant I was 2nd and 3rd in the entire U.S., among all biology applicants for the latter fellowships for the year 1953.

As those higher ranking than me for both of the latter fellowships apparently accepted more appealing offers, I eventually had my choice of four fellowships. I declined the NSF fellowship without hesitation, as it was less desirable than the others. Inasmuch as I needed at least two years, and time then was of the essence, I had no choice but to go to Washington, D.C. immediately, in response, to interview for the invitations. At the National Institutes of Health, I was informed by Dr. Ronald Scantlebury, chief of the Research Fellowships Branch, that my postdoctoral ranking in the entire U.S. was number one, and that a 2nd year would, indeed, be possible. At the interviews for the other two fellowships, I was informed that a second year would not be allowed. Accordingly, I accepted the NIH fellowship and declined the others, making some unknown 2nd and 3rd alternates very happy.

I had made arrangements to carry out my postdoctoral studies with Prof. John Runnström at the Wenner-Gren Institute for Experimental Biology at Stockholm University, Sweden. I opted for surface travel on the ocean liner, Stockholm, departing from New York City in December, 1952. On the way to New York, I made a visit of several days to the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, for reasons that I have forgotten. It seemed that everywhere I went in those days presaged a return at a later date, as the reader may have noticed. The only thing of scientific interest that I remember from that visit was that George Gamow, of Big Bang (although the name BB owes to Hoyle) fame, was in residence, and I occasionally passed him in the hallways, where he reeked of tobacco smoke.