AN INTERVIEW WITH LAURENCE R. DRAPER

Interviewer: Jewell Willhite

Oral History Project

Endacott Society

University of Kansas

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LAURENCE R. DRAPER

B.A., Biology, Middlebury College, 1952

Ph.D., Immunology, University of Chicago, 1956

Service at the University of Kansas

First employed at the University of Kansas, 1968

Professor of Microbiology

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AN INTERVIEW WITH LAURENCE R. DRAPER

Interviewer: Jewell Willhite

Q: I am speaking with Laurence Draper, who retired in 2008 as professor of microbiology at

the University of Kansas. We are in Lawrence, Kansas, on May 8, 2009. Where were

you born and in what year?

A: I was born in 1930 in New York City, actually a suburb, if one could to call it that, one of

the boroughs of New York City called Queens. I lived there through my college years in

a town called Flushing.

Q: What were your parents’ names?

A: My mother was Margaret A. Draper and my father was Alfred A. Draper.

Q: What was their educational background?

A: My mother had a degree in music or piano from the University of Cincinnati or from the

Conservatory of Piano in Cincinnati. My father earned a doctorate, a Ph.D., in

bacteriology, at the University of Cincinnati.

Q: What was your father’s occupation?

A: He was a clinical bacteriologist. He had a clinical laboratory in Manhattan, which New

Yorkers call “the city”. Back in those days—this was in the 20’s and 30’s and on until

the 60’s— clinical laboratories were not always associated with hospitals as many are

now. A local cadre of physicians would send their patients to him for testing, --- blood

tests, swabs, all those kinds of bacteriological tests, urine analyses, or he would go to the

patient’s house to collect the blood, etc.

Q: Did you have brothers and sisters?

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A: I have one sister, who is six years younger than I, who still lives on Long Island. She is

an interior designer and has recently retired herself.

Q: You said you grew up in the same place where you were born.

A: Yes, on Long Island in the borough of Queens, Flushing.

Q: Where did you go to elementary school?

A: I went to two, actually. In the lower levels, perhaps up to the third grade or thereabouts, I

went to public school, P.S. 120, which was in Flushing. Then my parents moved to a

different part of the town and I went to a different grade school, P.S. 32, which was in an

area known as Bayside, which is a part of Flushing. That’s where I did my elementary

and secondary education.

Q: Were you involved in groups such as Boy Scouts or things like that?

A: Not at that time. It was just local friends, etc. It wasn’t any particular activity except for

the local church, which we went to at that time, the Presbyterian Church. I was

associated with the choir in my younger days. I’ve always been interested in music. In

grade school itself—we’re talking now in the late 30’s—those kinds of activities hadn’t

really started then. I had some hobbies -- model airplanes and that sort of thing in those

early years.

Q: You probably remember the years of World War II.

A: Yes, I grew up during it. I was nine years old when the war started and it continued,

obviously, up until 1945. So I was a preteen and a teenager during the war. The war was

close to us in New York City with the fear of invasion and that sort of thing.

Q: So they thought that planes at that time could attack New York City?

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A: People weren’t as much concerned about planes as they were about spies landing by

submarine. Of course it just the pervasive sense of emergency. My father had a white

helmet for the Civil Defense Corps. We had blackouts and we had to cover our windows.

There were no planes in those days that could have reached us from Europe anyway.

Q: We even had those in the Midwest, believe it or not.

A: It was quite a thing to go out with my father patrolling the streets at midnight. I don’t

know what we were expected to see. But that’s the way it was.

Q: Did you collect newspapers and scrap metal? Some people did that.

A: The local newspaper, one of the New York papers, the Herald Tribune at that time, on a

daily basis, particularly after D Day, the invasion of Europe in 1944, they would show

little maps, which they changed daily as the Allies moved inland. I selected these maps

every day into a sort of scrapbook. If you flipped them, you could see the movement of

the forces in France, etc. That’s one thing I collected. During the war, during grade

school as a matter of fact, one of the things that we did in our shop class, where we did

woodworking, was to make small scale models of various military aircraft, which were

painted black and were used by the Civil Defense Corps or by the Army as ways of

training spotters in identifying different aircraft, especially German. That was our job.

We’d get these little wood blanks that were partially scaled and we’d whittle them to

shape, add wings, tail, etc. So that was our shop experience then.

Q: Do you remember when the war ended?

A: Oh, yes. In 1945 I was obviously in high school at that time. And I remember the actual

start of the war for the United States with Japan as well as the Axis. I remember waking

up and turning on my bedside radio and hearing that Pearl Harbor had been attacked.

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Q: There must have been a huge celebration in New York when the war ended.

A: Yes, but that was mainly in the city, meaning Manhattan, one of the five boroughs

comprising New York City.

Q: Oh, I see.

A: Many think of New York as Manhattan, Broadway, Times Square, and so forth. We

were in the outlying reaches, practically 20 miles from Manhattan.

Q: Where did you go to junior high and high school?

A: There was no junior high. The elementary schools in New York at that time were eight

grades. Then one moved into a four-year secondary school or high school. I went to a

school called Bayside High School, where I eventually graduated.

Q: Were you involved in extracurricular activities?

A: In a sense. I was in a chorus in high school. I was not very athletic, as you can probably

tell, but I did get involved in the music program. The school had no football or baseball

team. It was a new school and they hadn’t gotten around to developing sports teams.

The school was very strong in art. I remember my interest in art was satisfied there to a

great degree. I had a teacher whose name I cannot remember. I do remember is that he

had two fingers missing on one of his hands. But he was a marvelous artist. He taught

something that later affected my collegiate tenure. He taught us what he called line

drawing. That’s the kind of drawing in which you have an object or something in front of

you that you were to draw. The instruction was that, with a pencil, you were to draw the

object without removing the pencil from the paper. No sketching, no repeated strokes. It

forced us to observe the object exactly and translate onto a piece of paper exactly what

we were seeing in an essentially continuous movement, being very careful not to remove

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the pencil from the paper, except to go to a different part of the drawing. That technique

came in very handy later on in college, which I can get to when we talk about college.

Q: Did you have influential teachers?

A: In the high school level I don’t remember any particular teacher, other than this art

teacher I mentioned. But he was a good fellow. Because of that art class I became

involved with the annual yearbook, the art that went into a yearbook, that sort of thing.

Much of my time was in music and art in high school.

Q: Did you have jobs in the summer?

A: Yes. In the New York City school system, graduation from either elementary school or

high school could end on the half year. When I was in elementary school they skipped

me ahead one half year, which I regret, because I missed the second half of the second

grade when students learned subtraction. I still can’t subtract very well. So I was on the

half year. Therefore I graduated from elementary and high school in February. My

father insisted that while going into high school I needed a job during the summers. So I

worked as a copy boy in the regional newspaper there, the Long Island Star Journal. A

copy boy’s job in those days—before the internet and electronics, etc.—was to take

material, typed material, from the editorial office, the newsroom, if you will, the city

desk, through a door into the composing room, where the linotypist would translate that

eventually into lead plates for the presses. I also had to take the galley proofs from the

composing room and bring them next door into the city room, where they could be

edited. One of the rules there was that the editorial staff should not, unless absolutely

invited, enter the composing room and vice versa. The composing room people were not

allowed to come into the editorial office. That was sort of a rule. So I was the only one

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that could pass between these two areas without invitation, because I was the messenger

between them. So I did that for every summer, starting when I entered high school and I

worked every summer, and gradually I was promoted, if you can call it that, to be the

attendant of the morgue, the newspaper morgue, which of course is where all the

clippings are kept and filed. So I worked at that and also as a copy boy, etc. I remember

that during the summer of 1948 after I had graduated from high school the editorial staff

called me to the city desk, you know, with all the writers, the editor, and the city editors

arranged around a long and wide table. They sat me down and asked, “What do you plan

to do now after high school?” because I had not mentioned anything to them that I was

intending to enter college. Indeed, they were all prepared to send me to college and

wondered whether I would go. Of course, I then had to admit that, yes, I had applied and

had been admitted to college. So that was the highlight of my work there. I worked at

the paper in the summers all the way through my undergraduate years. I became a staff

writer and a feature writer. They would send me out to interview x, y and z. That was a

standing joke. They would have certain people that were always being interviewed but

no story was ever published. They were the “strange” people in town. They would send

me out, all laughing, of course, but behind my back, to see how I would handle these

interviews with these odd, eccentric folks in town. But I enjoyed it very much. I also

wrote obituaries and that sort of thing.

Q: When did you graduate from high school?

A: In the spring of 1948.

Q: I suppose you had always expected that you would go on to college.

A: Yes.

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Q: Where did you go?

A: I entered Middlebury College in Vermont, a small coeducational school. It was my

father’s alma mater. He had earned his undergraduate degree there. At various times in

my younger life I had visited the college with my father during alumni weekends, etc.,

and I really liked the school. That was one of several schools that I applied to.

Middlebury accepted me at that time and I was very pleased.

Q: What was your major as an undergraduate?

A: I majored in biology and chemistry. It was sort of a combined major. One of the things I

mentioned before about the art teacher in high school who taught us line drawing, and

how to do it, came in very handy in the comparative anatomy class. It was taught by a

biologist. Professsor Harold Hitchcock was his name. He was impressed with my

drawings, of which I still have some of the innards of frogs, etc., that he would have us

dissect. Using that skill, I could make good drawings, I must say, of what I saw, using

the technique that I learned in high school. He thought they were wonderful. He sort of

became my mentor and encouraged me to continue in biology after college. I had still

had to decide exactly what I wanted to focus on in graduate school.

Q: Did you have jobs while you were in college?

A: Yes, at the newspaper during the summers. In college I also had a job as a waiter in the

dormitory dining hall to pay part of my non-tuition expenses, which wasn’t all that much

in those days. But, even so, my father insisted that any spending money I would have

other than tuition I would have to provide. Later I joined a fraternity and became a cook

or dishwasher and the then as the house “maid”. As the maid of our fraternity house, I

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had free board and room. So I essentially worked both in college and in the summers.

That was my money to use.

Q: When did you graduate as an undergraduate?

A: I was in the class of 1952 and graduated in May of that year.

Q: Then what did you do?

A: I applied to a number of graduate schools. It was sort of discouraging at first. The first

few applications that I had sent out were not accepted. Then an acceptance came in from

Brown University and then I was accepted at the University of Minnesota with a

scholarship. Still later came an acceptance from the University of Chicago. They offered

me a full fellowship. That meant tuition and expenses, room, the whole thing, which I

accepted. So in October of 1952 I headed to the University of Chicago for graduate

study.

Q: What was your major as a master’s student?

A: That’s sort of interesting. I went there with the broad view of majoring in biology. I had

no really good concept of what graduate school was all about. I remember arriving there

in early October and was interviewed by somebody from the microbiology department..

Of course I felt that I knew something about that field because my father was a

bacteriologist. But I wasn’t following my father. So I was interviewed there and the

advisor assigned me courses. At that point, I asked the advisor “I have the fellowship

and I would certainly like to thank the chairman of the department. Is that all right to

do?” He said, “Well, yes. You can do that.” So several days later I went to the office of

the chairman of the department to thank him. I was granted an interview with him …

Professor William H. Taliaferro. He was sort of a gruff man. Well, he was staid, let’s

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put it that way. He didn’t know exactly why I was there and what I was thanking him

for. But I felt I should thank him. I mentioned that I had some experience in

microbiology because my father was a microbiologist. I said, “Is there anything I could

do to help and sort of repay you for this nice fellowship.” He said, “No, no, no.” Then a

day or two later I got the call from his secretary who said, “Would you please come

back?” I was hired then and there as a graduate student technician in his laboratory. He

would pay me to work in the laboratory! He arranged with the dean that it would not

interfere with my fellowship. So I was pretty plush when I was in graduate school in

terms of having a job where I did my dissertation research, which turned out to be in an

area of immunology. When I arrived at the University of Chicago I had never heard the

word immunology before. But he was an immunologist and that’s how I got into

immunology.

Q: What is that a study of?

A: The immune system.

Q: When did you get your master’s?

A: I didn’t. I went right to the doctorate. I received that in December of 1956. I should

mention perhaps now that in those days, which were just postwar, much of the interest in

science right there at the University of Chicago was on the effects of ionizing radiation.

So much of the research by my mentor, and therefore myself and another graduate

student, was to study the effects of radiation on the immune response. In those days a

major concern during the Cold War was radioactive fallout from a possible nuclear war.

Namely, the deposition of radioactive materials and what long term effects this would

have. So much of my research there along with my fellow graduate student was studying

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the effects of radiation on the immune response. Because of this situation the

Department of Defense and the then Atomic Energy Commission were frankly loaded

with grant money. This was prime business for research, the study of radiation effects on

biological systems. So it was plush. He was able to hire me because they were throwing

money at anybody who was in that area. So my mentor, Dr. Taliaferro (pronounced

Tolliver) and his wife Lucy, had substantial grants from the Atomic Energy Commission.

Q: Did you write a master’s thesis or do you not do that if you are just going on?

A: No. I went right to the Ph.D. I wrote a dissertation on my research. My fellow graduate

student and I worked on this major project as a team. Then it came time to write our

dissertations. So we sat down one day under the instructions from Dr. Taliaferro that we

should divide up the work into two dissertations. So Dieter Süssdorf, my fellow graduate

student, and I sat down and divided the work into two parts. “You can have that

experiment and I’ll take this experiment, etc.” Together they were actually one study.

Q: And it was on the effect of radiation on the immune system?

A: The immune system is very sensitive to ionizing radiation since radiation inhibits cell

division, which is an essential part of the immune response . The question was: If you

had radiation from a nuclear blast and the subsequent fallout, how could your immune

system be protected? It was well known at that time that radiation protection could be

afforded by being shielded from the radiation by lead, which would absorb the high

energy radiation. But one couldn’t walk around in a lead suit. The question then

became: Could you protect the individual somewhat by selectively shielding certain

tissues or organs? We were talking about the immune system, about which was very

little was known at that time. Where did the immune response take place in the body? It

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wasn’t very clear. It was suspected that it took place somewhere in the intestine or

organs such as the spleen, bone marrow, perhaps the liver. So Dieter and I worked out

techniques where we could surgically shield particular organs. In other words, open up

the animal (we used rabbits) and then shield certain tissues or organs with lead chambers

we designed and made with which we would surround the organ. Then we would

irradiate the rest of the animal’s body with high energy x-rays to see whether that

shielding protected the immune response to a subsequent immunization. We found very

interesting things. Yes, the spleen was involved. If shielded, the immune response was

partially protected. But more important was that the rabbit has a very large lymphoid

organ known as the appendix, of which we only have a vestige. When we selectively

shielded the rabbit’s appendix, immune response was almost fully protected. So this

gave us some idea where the immune system or response in the rabbit was focused.

Q: When did you get your Ph.D.?

A; In December of 1956. Afterwards, I stayed on there on the project because we were still

being funded at that time. Dr. Taliaferro wanted us to stay on and continue with some

experiments that had not yet been completed. So we both stayed on about a year or so

after that in his laboratory there. Then the issue obviously came up as to post doctoral

work. My colleague, Dr. Süssdorf, decided to go to Cal Tech. He was accepted there to

study the immune system under Dr. Dan Campbell, a noted immunologist of the time.

Dr. Taliaferro urged that I accept a postdoctoral position at what is known as the Argonne

National Laboratory, which is one of the Atomic Energy Commission’s laboratories

along with Oak Ridge, Brookhaven , Hanford in Washington, and others. There was a

biology division at the Argonne Laboratory, which is about 25 miles southwest of the

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University of Chicago. I was taken on there as a postdoctoral research scientist. My job

there was to study the effects of low-level irradiation over extended periods, a few doses

per day or almost constant radiation per day, again on rabbits. Again, we were studying

the effects on the immune system of long-term radiation, such as it would be with

radioactive fallout, effects on the immune system. So I did that for several years there.

Q: What did you find?

A: Long-term low-level radiation in terms of the rabbit did not significantly harm the

rabbits’ immune response. The rabbits were irradiated 23 hours a day in this special

room in which the radioactive source, which was cobalt 60, was raised into the center of

the room. The cages were arranged in a circle around the center of the room where the

radioactive source was raised. This radiation protocol lasted for weeks upon weeks.

During the one hour each day I had to go in there to attend to the rabbits while the source

was retracted back into a canister welled deep in the ground below. I would go in and

clean the cages, test the animals, and do other chores and then get out of there before the

source came back up again. But by that time, now in the late ‘50s, the effects of radiation

damage to the immune system had been pretty well documented, though certainly not

understood completely. That emergency emphasis during the early days of the Cold War

abated somewhat so that the interest there also faded. Also I wanted to move on to a

more permanent life in research. That came later on.

Q: Were you married at this time?

A: I was married and had a child at this time.

Q: What was your wife’s name?

A: Karen.

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Q: What was her educational background?

A: She was a nurse. I met her at the University of Chicago. She was in a nursing school

associated with the Mayo Clinic. The students spent time in Chicago at one service, then

at the University of Illinois for another. In other words, the school sent the nurse trainees

to other facilities for specific training in different areas.

Q: You said you had a child.

A: I had a child.

Q: What was his name?

A: Was Paul.

Q: After I left Argonne I went back to the university to finish up some things and complete

some work there for about six months. Then I was interested in finding some

postdoctoral place elsewhere. I was getting my career started. It turned out I interviewed

at a number of places. One place was the Radiation Branch of the National Cancer

Institute. I was invited to come and be a research scientist in that branch. I was to work

with a scientist there. He was doing similar types of things. So I went there in the fall of

1960.

Q: Where was that?

A: In Bethesda, Maryland, at the National Institutes of Health. My laboratory and office

were two levels underground because that’s where all the radiation apparatus was

located. A year or so later the radiation branch then dissolved. The people in the

radiation branch, including me, were then incorporated in what was known as the

Laboratory of Physiology. I continued my work, not so much on radiation but more on

the immune response itself and other areas of immunology. Unfortunately, the person I

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was to work with left for another position after 6 months. It sort of left me hanging out in

midair trying to find my own research direction, which I think impeded it. I never did

have a postdoctoral appointment in which I had some mentor who guided me. I was on

my own from the day I got my doctorate, rather than having someone to work under. If I

had it to do over again, I wouldn’t have done that. But at the time that was important to

take the opportunities that were there. Since the need was there, I followed that.

Q: In 1968 I was invited to interview for a job at the University of Kansas in the Department

of Microbiology under David Paretsky. They had had an immunologist, whose name I

have forgotten, but who went on to the University of Hawaii. Thus they were short an

immunologist. There I was. One of the faculty in the department at KU at that time was

a parasitologist who knew me from the University of Chicago. This faculty member, Dr.

Don Dusanic, recommended they should contact me. I was contacted by Dr. Paretsky,

the department’s chair, who asked whether I would be interested in the position at the

University of Kansas. So I came out in early February of 1968 for my interview and gave

the traditional seminar on my research. I’ll never forget that. It was in early February

and I was staying at what was then the Holiday Inn, which was at the southwest corner of

23rd

Street and Iowa. I remember that night because there was a vicious thunderstorm. I

was coming from the East Coast and the Chicago area. Whoever heard of a thunderstorm

in February? But there was a wild thunderstorm that night. I remember that. At any rate

after negotiations, etc., they offered me the position at the University of Kansas, which I

gladly accepted. I arrived in Lawrence, Kansas, in the late summer of 1968.

Q: You were coming at a very interesting time. A lot of things were happening here.

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A: That sort of caught me off guard. When I arrived, the Department of Microbiology was

in Snow Hall, long before it was renovated. My laboratory was up in a loft. It was very

temporary because the new Haworth Hall, down the hill on Sunnyside Ave., was under

construction. I knew what my new laboratory was going to be like. I started out in Snow

Hall. In late 1969 or 1970, we moved into Haworth Hall.

Q: I mean there were a lot of protests then.

A: Yes, the antiwar, the anti-Vietnam War and all of that was taking place, including the

burning of the Union. So I lived through all that. I had not been to an academic

institution for a number of years. So this caught me by surprise. I’d never been in a

university situation like that. The University of Chicago is rather unique in its approach

to education. But the University of Kansas was more traditional, like most universities.

Q: What was unique about the University of Chicago?

A: It was a very intellectual place. Not to say that the University of Kansas wasn’t, of

course. But the University of Chicago had a reputation, developed during the Hutchins

era. No football, no big sports, nothing like that. Undergraduate education was a willy-

nilly affair, great books and all this sort of thing. While I was there the association

between the graduate students and the undergraduate students was limited. The classes I

was involved in were graduate classes. Very few undergraduates were involved. So

coming here a major part of the emphasis of the University of Kansas was, by far, the

undergraduate population, which obviously outnumbered the graduate population. At the

University of Chicago, it tended to be more even. The undergraduate population seemed

relatively small.

Q: So I suppose those protests didn’t really affect your department much.

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A: Well, it did. We had one faculty member who was very much involved in the turmoil.

He eventually left for a position elsewhere. But I was more interested in getting myself

established at that point. I had other things to do. I had research projects, and had to try

to get grant money and other obligations. Nevertheless, I was sympathetic with the tone

of the antiwar attitude. But I didn’t demonstrate. I didn’t get involved in that. I didn’t

understand what was going on.

Q: I don’t suppose you were ever eligible for the draft because you were in school.

A: Right. I was in school and I was with the Atomic Energy Commission people in

Chicago. Before working at Argonne National Laboratory, I had to go through what is

known as a Q Clearance. The FBI investigated me from one end of the world to another.

So I have a complete history in the FBI files because of that Q Clearance.

Q: I suppose you taught courses here as well as did research.

A: I’ve always been interested in teaching. Even at the National Institutes of Health we tried

to organize some classes for the staff and personnel. The National Institutes of Health is

not an educational institution. It’s a research institution. But we tried to do some things

there. I got involved in some short courses. So I have always been interested in teaching

for some reason. I can’t tell you why. I was brought here to teach immunology, which I

did. I learned a lot of immunology by teaching it. My area of immunology had been

very narrow. So I had to learn a lot more. I taught immunology for a most of my years

here. At first that was the only major course that I taught.

Q: Did you originate any courses?

A: Yes, I did. Well, I modified the immunology course because immunology was in a state

of transition in the late 60s and 70s. I learned new things. So the whole course had to be

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updated on a semiannual basis. You couldn’t teach the same thing six months in a row.

Then I also taught other courses. I taught microbiology when I was asked. I taught some

graduate seminar courses, including a graduate level immunology course. I also taught a

course in tumor immunology. Much of what I taught was based on immunology

One particular thing that I have enjoyed teaching very much over the years has

been the Freshman Honors Tutorial classes. I taught that every year for 15 years or so.

Q: Were those undergraduates?

A: Oh, yes. I have taught the undergraduate biology and the undergraduate immunology.

Q: Did your research interests continue to be various phases of immunology?

A: It had more to do with the cells responsible, the tissues, the organs. It was a systemic and

cellular immunity approach rather than a molecular approach.

Q: You’ve had publications, I suppose.

A: Yes, I’ve had about 30 publications and presented papers at various conferences.

Q: Any books?

A: No, I have not written a book.

Q: Did you ever have a sabbatical?

A: Yes, I had one sabbatical in the 40 years I’ve been here. I went to England to work with

an immunologist there. It was in a laboratory associated with the University of London.

I worked with them for a half year, a Spring/Summer semester. I enjoyed it very much

and generated a couple of research papers out of that work..

Q: I suppose you’ve been on various committees.

A: Oh, heavens, yes.

Q: Any you especially remember?

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A: Here at KU?

Q: Yes.

A: A number of them. In the late or mid 90s I became involved with University governance.

That extended all the way through 2004. I had about 10 years of that service. I served on

the University Council. I was president of University Council for two terms in a row. I

also served on SenEx, the Senate Executive Committee. I was chair of SenEx for two

years. So I was very much involved in governance for a long time.

Q: Any particular issues you remember?

A: Not any particular issues. A number of them came up. I served on a number of

University Council committees having to do with a variety of educational issues and

faculty rights and privileges, for example. I worked on the calendar committee as well. I

also served on several College committees because I was a member of the College of

Arts and Sciences.

Q: Have you had honors while you’ve been here?

A: Yes. Back in ’97 I had become increasingly involved in academic advising. I was

already very interested teaching skills and in education in general, particularly with

respect to undergraduate students in addition to my graduate students, of which I had

about eleven Ph.D. students over my years here. I also had four master’s students. But

my interest in education in general kept coming up again and again. I became involved

in advising and served on advising committees, etc. In 1997 I received The Ned

Fleming Trust Award for excellence in teaching. That same year I received the J. Michael

Young Academic Advising award. I received other awards for advising, the latest in

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2008. I’ve been elected or named Outstanding Educator by KU’s Mortar Board chapter

four times, from 1978 through 2008.

Q: Do you remember outstanding former students who have gone on to greater things?

A: A number of them, yes, particularly my graduate students and also some undergraduate

students, especially those undergraduate students in my honors tutorial classes. Students

invited to the honors program are required to take what is called a Freshman Honors

Tutorial class. It is a one-credit hour class that all entering honors students take. There

are many sections of this class, and I have taught one of them for a number of years.

There are about 12 students in each tutorial section. The topic of most of my tutorials has

been the incidence, causes, and consequences of misconduct in scientific research.

Most of the tutorial students were very bright. I can’t even think of all their names, but

many of them have gone on to graduate study. One was Jay Kimmel, who has become an

expert in foreign relations. He wanted to be a foreign affairs officer and did so. The last

I heard he may be in Uzbekistan. He learned the native language over there. A truly

remarkable young man. I remember another honor student (whose name I can’t

remember now) who seemed sort of interested in the sciences, perhaps medicine. One

day during a tutorial class we two were discussing things in general. She mentioned that

she played the harp. I said, “Do you like the harp?” She said, “Oh, very, very much.”

Since one of the jobs of a tutorial director, was to serve as an academic advisor in the

selection of courses and majors, I remember that I encouraged her to continue her harp.

As the semester continued her premed aspirations faded as she focused more on the harp.

She has now become a professional harpist in symphony orchestras. I believe in allowing

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students to reach within themselves and find where their true interests lie and then having

somebody to encourage them to follow those true interests.

Q: I suppose you belong to professional organizations.

A; Yes. The American Association of Immunologists, AAI, and the American Society for

the Advancement of Science, and the Radiation Research Society, the Microbiology

Society and some other professional associations.

Q: Have you held offices in these?

A: No. But within the university I chaired the Department of Microbiology for four years in

the late ‘80s. I didn’t enjoy that particularly because it took me away from other things,

the research and teaching. I was interim director of the Human Biology program for a

while. I served on that committee for many years. One venture that I enjoyed over a

number of years was participating in the teaching a short course in immunology. Earlier I

mentioned Dieter Sussdorf, who earned his doctorate with me at the University of

Chicago. He became a member of the immunology faculty at the Cornell University

Medical Center in New York City. In the early ‘70s he became involved with a company

called the Center for Professional Advancement, which was based in New Brunswick,

New Jersey, near Rutgers. This company offered 3 to 5-day courses in just about

everything, in the sciences and technology. I remember one course they offered was high

pressure piping. I couldn’t imagine a five-day course on high pressure piping. One

division of this company offered courses in the pharmaceutical areas. My colleague,

Dieter Süssdorf, was asked by the company to offer a course in immunology. This

course was offered not to traditional students but to people from various industries,

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particularly pharmaceutical companies, and their staffs. He asked me to join him and I

agreed. We offered that course for many years. The last time it was given was in 2002.

Q: Where was the course offered?

A: The course was given in New Jersey at their facility or in various other places.

Sometimes we would go to the company. If a company like Squibb or Merck wanted the

course given for their people alone, we would teach the course at their facility. The

course was anywhere from three to five days long. Thank goodness I like to teach

because we started at 8 o’clock in the morning and ended at 6 p.m., almost nonstop

teaching for five days. That was really something. We also taught the course in Europe.

The company had a branch in Europe, so we taught it in Amsterdam and Geneva.

Participants from all over Europe would come and be our students. These were

professional people who wanted to learn basic immunology.

Q: Have you been involved in community activities here?

A: Yes. I’ve been involved with Audio Reader. That’s one thing I want to get back to now

that I am retired. I did that for a number of years in the early 80s or thereabouts. I

recorded books for Audio Reader. I’ve been a supporter since then. I’m a supporter of

and a participant in Lawrence Community Theatre. I don’t act. But if somebody will

give me a hammer I can wield it during set construction!

Q: You help make sets.

A: Yes, and ushering, too.

Q: Do you have other interests?

A: I’ve always been interested in music. When I was back at the National Institute of Health

in Bethesda, I joined an organization known as SPEBSQSA, the Society for the

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Preservation and Encouragement of Barbershop Quartet Singing in America. I became

involved with that for the eight years I was at Bethesda. When I came to Lawrence there

was a group here that lasted for a little while. For a while I directed the Sweet Adelines,

which is the women’s barbershopping group here in Lawrence. At the University of

Chicago I formed a group of male singers. On the East Coast at that time it was a very

popular singing format. It is called an augmented octet, in which there two each of

tenors, leads, and baritones but there are three bases instead of two. So I organized one

of those groups at the University of Chicago. It was the one thing I did other than do

research. All through college I was in the college choir, right from the very beginning.

Q: You’re retiring later than most people do.

A: Yes. It just came to me that maybe it’s time. But I’m not really retired in that sense of

the word. I’m not an employee of the University of Kansas but I still advise at the

University Advising Center up in Strong Hall. I had asked if it would be all right if I just

continued advising on a volunteer basis, so I advise there. Last summer I went through

the orientation and enrollment of incoming students, which the Advising Center does

with New Student Orientation. This fall and spring I’ve had regular hours at the

Advising Center. And I am on schedule again to do the new student orientation and

advising for the next class that comes in this summer. That starts in June.

Q: You must really have enjoyed your work here.

A: Very much.

Q: What is your assessment of KU, your department, past, present, hopes for the future, that

kind of thing?

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A: Well, I think the University of Kansas is a wonderful place. I don’t have any real

criticisms. It has its ups and downs and its faults, like any institution. I guess in the

sciences, at least in the sciences that I know here, the emphasis is on graduate students.

My interest, quite frankly, has been not only graduate students but undergraduates as

well. I’ve been associated with undergraduates for so long with advising and the Honors

Program, and the courses I’ve taught at the undergraduate level. I guess I have a “thing”

about undergraduate education. I feel this is the time when one can take people who are

just beginning to wonder which direction they want to go, to find where they can excel,

what diverse opportunities lie out there that they have no idea they even exist. That is

why the advising is so important to me. The only disappointment I have is in my own

department, which is called Molecular Biosciences, which had absorbed the Department

of Microbiology. That was sort of a disappointment because the latter used to be a very

strong group of microbiologists. Now it is sort of amalgamated into this huge operation

called Molecular Biosciences. It’s lost some of the flavor, the camaraderie that I

remember, particularly the interest in undergraduate as well as graduate education. I

would hope that in the sciences there would be more interest in undergraduates, but not at

the expense of the graduate level which is, of course, essential. I think that is certainly

very important, obviously. Indeed, KU is a research institution. There is so much one

can gain at the undergraduate level. I’m only speaking of the sciences. In the social

sciences it is probably a different story.

Q: Is there anything else you’d like to add that I forgot to ask?

A: No, I think we’ve covered the sorts of things that you asked. I could go on endlessly with

anecdotes, I suppose, but I don’t think that is terribly important.

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Q: Okay. Thank you very much.