James J. Morgan...Dianne K. Newman: It is May 12th, 2014, and this is Dianne Newman with Professor Jim Morgan at Caltech. We’re going to start this interview by learning about Jim’s

EA43-FrontMatter ARI 11 May 2015 13:12

James J. Morgan

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EA43CH01-Morgan ARI 11 May 2015 8:17

A Conversation withJames J. MorganJames J. Morgan1 and Dianne K. Newman21Environmental Science and Engineering Program and 2Divisions of Biology and BiologicalEngineering and Geological and Planetary Sciences, California Institute of Technology,Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Pasadena, California 91125

Annu. Rev. Earth Planet. Sci. 2015. 43:1–27

The Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences isonline at earth.annualreviews.org

This article’s doi:10.1146/annurev-earth-060614-105439

Copyright c© 2015 by Annual Reviews.All rights reserved

Abstract

In conversation with professor Dianne Newman, Caltech geobiologist,James “Jim” J. Morgan recalls his early days in Ireland and New York City,education in parochial and public schools, and introduction to science inCardinal Hayes High School, Bronx. In 1950, Jim entered Manhattan Col-lege, where he elected study of civil engineering, in particular water quality.Donald O’Connor motivated Jim’s future study of O2 in rivers at Michigan,where in his MS work he learned to model O2 dynamics of rivers. As anengineering instructor at Illinois, Jim worked on rivers polluted by syntheticdetergents. He chose to focus on chemical studies, seeing it as crucial for theenvironment. Jim enrolled for PhD studies with Werner Stumm at Harvard,who mentored his research in chemistry of particle coagulation and oxida-tion processes of Mn(II) and (IV). In succeeding decades, until retirementin 2000, Jim’s teaching and research centered on aquatic chemistry; majorthemes comprised rates of abiotic manganese oxidation on particle surfacesand flocculation of natural water particles, and chemical speciation provedthe key.

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Dianne K. Newman: It is May 12th, 2014, and this is Dianne Newman with Professor JimMorgan at Caltech. We’re going to start this interview by learning about Jim’s background. Takeit away, Jim.

James J. Morgan: My father first came to the United States from Ireland in 1920. He stayed inthe States for about six years, and then returned to Ireland in 1926. My mother and father weremarried the following year, and the day after they were married, they embarked for New York.They lived in New York for the next seven years. In 1932, I was born.

DKN: So what brought them to the States?

JJM: Well, my father first came to the States I think to look for economic opportunity, and duringhis time he became a conductor on the New York City trolley system. I think the second time hecame after my mother and father were married, it was simply to find a better life. They’re bothfrom Irish farming families. He owned the farm in Ireland but he wasn’t too keen on farming.I think throughout the five times that my father crossed the ocean in a steamship, the idea wasalways to find a better living than could be accomplished on either side of the Atlantic.

I went back to Ireland with my mother and father two years after I was born. The family stayedin Ireland until 1937 when they returned to the States for good.

DKN: Where in Ireland did you live then?

JJM: Knockballyroney, which is a townland of probably no more than 50 or 60 people; a collectionof farms in the county of Monaghan and in what was then simply 26 counties.

DKN: I see. So where did you grow up in New York City?

JJM: When we first came back in 1937 we settled in the Bronx. I went to parochial school thereprobably for four years, and then the family moved to Manhattan on the other side of the HarlemRiver. I tend to situate my time in New York by rivers. I was born in Columbia Presbyterian abouta mile from the Hudson River and when we moved across the Harlem River, we were once againclose to the Hudson River.

When the family moved to the west side, my mother tried to enroll me in a parochial schoolbut they said I would have to be left back a year because of the calendar; so she enrolled mein the public school, PS189. It was the best thing that had ever happened to me because I sud-denly had a wider view of the world than I think I would’ve had in four more years of parochialschool.

DKN: Did you have brothers and sisters?

JJM: I still have one younger sister who was born in Ireland in 1936, and she came back with thefamily in 1937. She lives in the New York area out on Long Island and we’ve been very close mostof our lives except for the rivalries that start when you’re young.

DKN: You moved back to New York right before World War II started. What was it like in thoseyears being in New York as a school boy?

JJM: In 1938, when I started parochial school, I had no sense of the larger world around me. Tome, the world was about a two-square-block area in the Bronx. I was aware when World War IIstarted, December 7th, 1941, because it was on the headlines of papers as I walked by newsstandson my way to school. That was my first awareness.

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DKN: At what point did you get interested in engineering or in science? How did you decide togo to college, and what made you interested in studying civil engineering?

JJM: When I was at Cardinal Hayes High School, a citywide high school for the working andmiddle class, I followed a sort of a personal curriculum. I remember studying business arithmeticas a freshman and mechanical drawing as a sophomore. Then I followed a menu of science coursesmore by impulse than anything else.

There was no one in the family that had a scientific background. The strongest thread ofprofessional background that I recall was teaching. My mother late in life said when I was fiveyears old I told her that I wanted to be a teacher.

DKN: When you were five?

JJM: Yeah, she said she had no idea where that came from because I’d never been to school inIreland. I think it was probably because I stood out in front of the farmhouse in the morningand watched the children from other farms going to school and I thought that must be a veryinteresting thing to do. This is all of course imagined because you don’t have very clear memoriesof your early life.

So I followed a curriculum in high school which was science, mathematics. And the sciencewas biology, chemistry, physics.

Entering high school, I had no idea of college. My ambition halfway through high schoolwas possibly to be a clerk in an insurance company because that’s what I knew kids in theneighborhood did.

I was hoping to go to Fordham University to study history, particularly American history, butmy aptitude tests that everybody was taking in high school indicated that I had a very strong poten-tial for science and engineering. I applied to several engineering schools: Columbia, City Collegeof New York, and Manhattan College. I got the best financial aid to go to Manhattan College.

My mother and father had a slight preference for a Catholic college. Manhattan College wasand still is a Catholic college. So that’s how I came to study engineering at a small Catholic collegein New York. Looking back, it seems chance is here and there, giving you different possibilitiesthen you have to make selections. I went to Manhattan College not having a clue in the worldabout what engineers did. There I was and I thought, “I’ve heard that electrical engineers make alot of money.”

I went there thinking I’d study electrical engineering. Manhattan College, being a small college,had only two flavors of engineering: electrical and civil. At the end of my freshman year, I workedfor Consolidated Edison, the power generator for New York, and I spent a lot of time at powerplants. For some irrational reason, I developed a distaste for electrical engineering. I think the realreason was that I had come to understand that electrical engineering was much more demandingof mathematical skills.

While my mathematical skills were certainly adequate, I didn’t have a big appetite for them.It occurred to me to look more into civil engineering, and I came away from talking to peoplethat it was more of a public profession than a private industrial profession. I chose at the end ofmy freshman year to follow what was called the civil engineering program and that’s when I firstbegan to learn about water.

DKN: So was there a professor in Manhattan College that made you particularly interested inwater? How did you hone in on that as your area?

JJM: Well, my sophomore year I met the man who eventually was my role model but had to waituntil my junior year to take his courses. Professor Donald J. O’Connor, who was charismatic, very

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intelligent, and a very good teacher. I signed up for the progression of courses in my junior yearthat were oriented to water. They included sort of the big engineering things like how to conveywater, how to treat water, and how to treat wastewater.

At the time I didn’t know it but Don was still working on his PhD, working in a New YorkCity consulting firm and teaching at Manhattan College. He was working on his PhD at NewYork University and finished two years after I graduated from Manhattan. His work was classic.It was a brilliant piece of work about how to predict the ability of rivers to replenish the oxygensupply from the atmosphere after it had been depleted through oxidation reduction reactions.

He was my major influence at Manhattan College, not the only one to be sure, but a ma-jor one. When I look back, I think of him as the first great influence on what my future wasto be.

DKN: All right, so tell me a little bit more about the nonacademic side of life in New York andyour interest in the Marx Brothers and other things?

JJM: I have to be truthful to you and tell you that had I never heard of the Marx Brothers whenI was in Manhattan College. My favorite humorists were a radio team called Bob and Ray whowere the first comedians that I was aware of who made humor out of everyday life experiences.I had a very good friend at Manhattan College, and we had great fun doing take-offs on Boband Ray.

The major influence on my personal life in and around New York City was actually socialaction. I became aware of a group of students at City College where my friend Jim Moran hadtransferred, and through him I met students who were very interested in social action within theiruniversity.

I became interested in student government. At the end of my junior year, I ran for president ofthe student council and won in a landslide and I have no idea why. I think it must have been thatmy opponent was less attractive than I was. He was from the arts and sciences school. I was fromthe engineering school. So how did I spend my time? I spent my time trying to be a very goodstudent but never trying to be the best student, trying to balance my time between extracurricularactivity and sports.

DKN: What kind of sports did you play?

JJM: Basketball, the city game. I started playing basketball in the schoolyard when I was 13 yearsold, and I stopped playing basketball at the age of 68.

DKN: What was your favorite position?

JJM: Shooting guard, outside shot because I knew that if I got too close to the basket I could getkilled. I was only about 5′10′ ′ and at that time weighed 150 lbs. soaking wet. Basketball was greatfun. I also loved touch football because at those days and at that weight, I was very speedy. One ofmy fondest memories is as a senior, the civil engineers winning the touch football championship,in the rain, in December defeating a team from physical education. That sort of had a specialfeeling to it.

I think that my acquaintance with humor was a melding of two. One was the New Yorkmaking fun of life in the city, and if I’d known about the Marx Brothers, I would’ve embracedGroucho fully, but I didn’t. I was more aware of movies as vehicles for serious subjects. I rememberseeing Julius Caesar with Marlon Brando when I was a junior and seeing Hamlet with LawrenceOlivier.

Among my closest friends at Manhattan College during my junior and senior year were peoplefrom the school of arts and sciences, especially from liberal arts. I really enjoyed sharing cultural

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events with them, going to the movies, going to a play, and so forth. Humor was what we did, buthumor wasn’t something we admired very greatly in people yet. I would come to admire that later

So life in New York kept me very busy. I also worked in the summers as everybody had to, tosave money to go back to the school in the fall.

I was a bit of a workaholic, but not only about engineering. I was interested in social action. Iwas interested in student government. I was interested in things like that and of course sports.

I would never have gotten through most of my life without sports because it was a great relieffrom the intense work of being a student. That’s how I met some of my future friends.

DKN: Maybe we should turn our attention to leaving New York now and moving into college.

JJM: Yes, a little story about that. I admired Donald J. O’Connor very much and his specialty wasthe oxygen balance in rivers and later in his life in estuaries where the rivers meet the ocean. I wasaware that Harvard was a very important place to be for environmental engineering in those daysbecause they were at the cutting edge of the same work that O’Connor was doing. But O’Connordid not encourage me to apply to Harvard. I never thought to ask him why, but 20 years later, Idid ask him and he made a very insightful remark which had stayed with me much of my life.

He said “I didn’t think you were fully serious about engineering” because of my student gov-ernment activities. This is what he told me, “When I was at Manhattan College 10 years before, Iwas doing the same thing you were doing. I was spreading myself especially into art.” He’s a verygood painter and he said it held him back for quite some time by not being focused. “I didn’t thinkyou were focused.” So the reason I went to Michigan is that an interviewer came to the campusto recruit prospects for the masters’ program at the University of Michigan.

I was very impressed by the very courtly and elegant man, Clarence Velz. He offered me afellowship in March or April and when I had the acceptance letter, I never looked at any otheruniversities.

As it turned out, I was later offered fellowships to MIT, University of Connecticut, so forth,but I already committed myself to Michigan and I am glad I did.

DKN: Then did you later get a PhD?

JJM: Much later. There is an idea in the Catholic Church of people who studied for the priesthood;they have something called a late vocation. That is, they discover later in their life, not when they’re14 or 15 or 16, that they want to be priests. Well, I discovered later in my life that I wanted to getan advanced education beyond the masters’ degree.

DKN: At what point did you meet your wife?

JJM: During the first two weeks in Michigan, I met Jean Macintosh at a party, and next monthshe left to teach elementary school in Long Beach, California. I didn’t see her for a full year. Shereturned the following year to pursue a masters’ degree at Michigan and I was still working on mymasters’ degree

Anyway, I met Jean again and in 1955 fall, during that year, we came to know one another muchbetter. At the end of 1956, I proposed marriage. She accepted and we were married a year later.

DKN: Was she from Michigan?

JJM: Yes. She was from the Detroit area, within the city called Highland Park. Looking back,that’s why I’m glad I went to Michigan. The other reason I’m glad I went to Michigan, it wasso different from New York City where, except for my time at Manhattan College, I was alwayssurrounded by asphalt, apartment house buildings, and walk-ups.


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I got to Michigan and followed a pattern that I’d learned at Manhattan College to just pick andchoose the courses that required the greatest commitment for me. That turned out to be a biologycourse at the medical school, advanced mathematics, differential equations, a statistics course, andof course all the courses that you had to take to get a masters’ degree in civil engineering; manyof which were repeats but at a much higher level than I’d been exposed to at Manhattan College.

When I left the University of Michigan with a masters’ degree, I thought I knew pretty mucheverything there was to know about what was then becoming known as environmental engineering

DKN: That’s interesting. So you went for a two-year program and then at this point you werenewly married.

JJM: No, I wasn’t married in 1956. We were married a year after I left Michigan and that’s whenI went to the University of Illinois. I was reading a magazine called the Journal of EngineeringEducation in the library and I saw that the magazine came from the University of Illinois. On animpulse, I wrote to the editor of the magazine and said if you happen to know any jobs teaching civilengineering, please let me know. By return mail, I got an offer of a faculty position at the Universityof Illinois because he literally walked down the hall and handed my letter to the chairman of civilengineering who probably thought, “We got a live one here.”

Anyway, I was offered the job and I took it sight unseen. I joke with my students that wheneverI’m offered a job, my impulse is to take it because I never know if I’ll get another offer. I wasn’t soself-confident that I thought there would be lots of offers for a guy with a masters’ degree from aMidwestern university

DKN: So what were you teaching?

JJM: At the University of Illinois, I was thrown into the fire, as they say. I would teach courseslike the design and mixing of plain concrete; I had a laboratory course in that. I taught a coursein surveying. I taught a course in water distribution systems. I taught whatever needed to betaught.

DKN: That’s hardcore civil engineering.

JJM: That was hardcore civil engineering at the start. In my second year, I was given the oppor-tunity to teach a course in water supply, which was getting closer to my professed interest at thetime. Over the first couple of years, I started to edge into teaching courses that were more aboutwater and water treatment.

DKN: What drew your interest into that area?

JJM: Well, first of all, when I went to the University of Illinois, I discovered the year before Iarrived, three people had retired and one person had resigned. To say the least, it was a skeletonfaculty, and the man who was given the responsibility was an assistant professor who had justarrived in 1955, and I’d arrived in 1956: Richard Engelbrecht, a very enthusiastic, biologicallyinclined young professor. In addition to teaching, I was recruited to join research projects thatwere underway, and he was by default in charge of them because everybody else had retired orresigned. I think it was just an accident of time.

Illinois was one of the great reputation schools in sanitary engineering throughout most of the1940s and 1950s, and Harold Babbitt resigned the year before I got there. It was just chance, butthrough Richard Engelbrecht, I got signed on to research projects that had to do with “chemistryin the large,” which is sampling rivers and analyzing the waters brought back from the rivers. Thethings we were sampling and analyzing were synthetic detergents, which were one of the newlyrecognized chemical pollutants.

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In fact, chemical pollution had not really been in the forefront of sanitary and civil engineeringprior to that. There was interest in phenols in the 1950s because they came from places like steelmills. I started studying phosphorus. I would bring the samples back to the lab and analyze themfor two things: First long-chain phosphates, not simple phosphate that we know as an essentialnutrient in all living things, but these industrial compounds called polyphosphates used to makebetter detergents.

The second component of the detergents was alkylbenzene sulfonate, ABS, and it caused riversto foam up to heights of 10–20 feet in different parts of the Midwest because it was going into thesewers and then into the rivers.

When I started sampling rivers in 1956, I could not drive a car. I grew up in New York andnever learned to drive a car.

DKN: No kidding!

JJM: So they hired an undergraduate student to drive me to every river. I sampled with him. Iremember he was a very bright enthusiastic young man, and he was, I think, a senior in engineering.I sampled with him eight different rivers in the state of Illinois, including the Mississippi. We wouldpull up to the bridge, lower the bucket down, bring the water up, put it into bottles and so forth, andtake it back to the lab. That’s how I started to realize that maybe my future could be in chemistry,not in the hardcore civil engineering that I was still teaching at that time. That was very importantbecause I was determined at that point to learn chemistry that I’d never learned before.

DKN: Did it motivate you to learn how to drive a car as well?

JJM: It took a full year before I would drive. I failed the driving test twice before we were married.After we married, Jean encouraged me to take a course from a driving school. When I passed theexam, we had already bought a 1953 Chevy. This was in 1957 and it sat there because neither oneof us wanted to drive it.

I had this awareness that how things move from place to place is a very important aspect ofwater quality, air quality, and all environmental phenomena. I could take one course free of chargefor every semester I was employed at the University of Illinois. I laid out a program for myself,with the advice of Richard Engelbrecht, to have a minor in chemistry and a second minor in fluidmechanics.

Over the next four years before I made a move, I was getting a strong foundation. First ofall, I had to study organic chemistry because I wanted to study biochemistry. So I had organicchemistry, interestingly enough, from a young assistant professor who had received his PhD theyear before at Caltech from Jack Roberts.

DKN: Really?

JJM: Yeah, Douglas Applequist, he was a marvelous lecturer. He was what we used to call a three-board man; that is, in a 50-minute period, he could cover three big blackboards. On the first examI got 27 percent and I didn’t know what to do. So I went to talk to Prof. Applequist and he askedme, “How are you approaching the course?”

I said, “I’m trying to understand,” and he said, “Wait a minute, you’re not supposed to under-stand organic chemistry at this level. You’re supposed to commit it to memory so you can use it.”I said, “Wow!” So I went back, and started memorizing things. On the next exam I got 99 percentand ended up getting an A in the course.

DKN: So what’s the moral of that story?


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JJM: The moral, at an elementary level, is don’t try to dig too deeply. Dig deeply later; and Idid. I was able to find more understanding in the subsequent biochemistry courses that I took,which were very good and taught by young professors who later became members of the NationalAcademy of Sciences.

DKN: Were all of the classes you were taking in the chemistry department?

JJM: Yes, or the fluid mechanics classes were in a program called theoretical and applied mechanics.I didn’t take any courses in civil engineering because that’s where I was working.

It was a great intellectual success for me. I took several biochemistry courses and I also tookan organic chemistry lab, which was the scariest thing I ever had to do at that point in my lifebecause you were let into the lab at 1:00 and the doors were closed and you had to be out by 4:00,twice a week.

Everybody was scampering to get the experiment done and they had to get back into the doorand close it. For a long time I was scared to death because you had to present your results; did youget the yield you were supposed to? I struggled through, because that’s what a lot of studying is,struggle, and eventually passed the course, both the lab and lecture. I got an A. I was so happy.

DKN: It sounds like you almost did an equivalent of an undergrad major in chemistry while youwere teaching in civil engineering.

JJM: I think that’s in effect what I did. Sometimes it was very daunting.

DKN: That’s very impressive. Okay, so after you acquired the equivalent of an undergrad majorin chemistry, what happened?

JJM: In the process, I had started to coauthor papers with Richard Engelbrecht on the work that Iwas doing on detergents in Illinois streams, which eventually led to three publications (Engelbrecht& Morgan 1959; Morgan & Engelbrecht 1960a,b). In that process, it occurred to me that I was notunderstanding things any deeper than phenomenologically. I was taking the courses in chemistrybut they weren’t actually integrated. So I started to think about what I should do.

DKN: I have a question though. Why did you like chemistry so much? Was it because you foundthe problems to be important societally? Was it also because there was something inherent aboutthe discipline, the way of thinking?

JJM: No, it was because I made the judgment that it was going to be very important in the futureand it had not been recognized as such up to that point. Rachel Carson hadn’t written her bookyet (Carson 1962).

DKN: That’s what I was wondering. When did that come out in the background of what youwere doing?

JJM: 1962. By this time her focus, as you may remember, was pesticides and other syntheticorganics that were interfering with ecological systems. There was an implication in her book thatif it’s bad for the ecosystem, it might very well be bad for humans, too. It was an eye opener, asyou probably have learned since. Anyway, it was my gut reaction, so to speak, that this was goingto be a big trade and I wanted to be in on it. I wanted to be near the front. That’s part of thecompetitive thing that comes with sports. But I’m not really competitive in that sense. I was justvery curious about how things really worked.

We published three papers. They were moderately successful. The last one was on the effectof these polyphosphates on water treatment. I helped design with another masters’ degree studenta mini water treatment plant in the large laboratory that had a coagulation basin, sedimentation

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basin, and sand filter at the end. We ran experiments to find out what happened when theconcentration of polyphosphates went up to higher levels. It was striking. The polyphosphateswere interfering with the efficiency of the particle removal process that we were mimicking inthis small laboratory model.

I later looked at how many times it was cited. It was cited 11 times. Now I didn’t even knowabout citation back then. One of the other papers that we published on the survey of the sulfonatesand the phosphates was actually cited, I think, 45 times, but I only learned that 40 years later. Ihad no idea.

You may know the name Ralph Wolfe, a brilliant microbiologist. One day Ralph Wolfe andRichard Engelbrecht pulled up in front of the laboratory and said we’re going on a field tripto look at filters in Illinois. We went to treatment plants and we had operators open up thesepressure filters, and you could see what was in the sand. It was all sorts of iron oxides and possiblymanganese oxides.

Now Ralph Wolfe was one of the important people in understanding how bacteria oxidizediron to make these iron deposits. That’s the only time I ever met Ralph Wolfe, but he was clearly animportant scientist, and he was interested in iron. So I thought, not only am I becoming interestedin chemistry, but it looks as though iron might be very interesting. I went over to the state watersurvey, just two blocks from the Illinois campus, and I asked to see Dr. Thurston Larson, whowas the head of the water chemistry section. He’s a very dignified and semi-austere man, but veryfriendly. I told him I’d like to know more and then he very candidly and off the record said if youwant to understand iron, there’s one person to study with. He said there’s this fellow at Harvard,Werner Stumm. So I applied to Harvard and was admitted.

DKN: What year was this?

JJM: Well, I applied in the fall of 1959, was admitted in the spring, and entered Harvard in thefall of 1960. Jean and I had discussed this quite a lot because she could tell the year after we weremarried that I wasn’t entirely happy at the University of Illinois. Even then, without knowing whatI was doing, I started applying to other sanitary engineering programs, Berkeley, Johns Hopkins,Harvard, and I told her I was thinking of applying to this place, Caltech in Pasadena.

She said, “Pasadena, you don’t want to apply there,” and I said, “How come?” “Well, I taughtin Long Beach in 1954 and 1955, and on occasion, I took the trolley,” that’s when they had trolleysup in Pasadena, she said, “it was the worst air I’ve ever experienced in my life.” It was right in thecenter of smogs right then at that time. So I never applied to Caltech in 1957–1958. I just droppedit and eventually went to Harvard.

DKN: In what department was Werner Stumm?

JJM: He was in an organization at Harvard very much like the one I came into later as a facultymember of Caltech. It was called the Division of Engineering and Applied Physics. He was anuntenured, young assistant professor who had only come over from Switzerland in 1956 and thiswas the fall of 1960. His original title was Assistant Professor of Sanitary Chemistry.

I immediately recognized this was a special individual. He was larger than life and learninghow to speak English but doing very well and had written a couple of important papers already.It became clear this was a man that I hoped I could work with.

DKN: Did you apply to him?

JJM: No, you apply to the program. That’s a little interesting side story. I applied to the Divisionof Engineering and Applied Physics and the water part of the program. I learned later they had a


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big fight about me on the admissions committee. Some people said, “Look, he’s been to ManhattanCollege, he’s been to Michigan, he’s been at Illinois, now he wants to come to us.” Gordon Fair,the great man of that program at Harvard from the 1930s into the 1960s, said, “Look at it this way,gentlemen, he’s been to three other schools. If he doesn’t work out here, we can blame it on any oneof those three other schools.” Gordon Fair was one of my great supporters at Harvard and was oneof my great supporters when I was being considered a faculty member at Caltech many years later.

There’s an interesting side story of Werner Stumm and Larson having met before I had met ei-ther one of them. They were at a meeting apparently in 1957 or so and didn’t know one another, butStumm knew who Larson was because he was already famous for his work on corrosion. And Stummwas developing a reputation for being a very modern corrosion scientist through water chemistry.

So he walked up to Larson afterward and said, “I admire your work very much.” And Larsonsaid “Yeah, and you know, there’s a guy, I forgot his name, this guy at Harvard who’s really doingexcellent work in this area. Maybe you know him. I think his name is Stumm.” And Werner said,“I am Stumm.” That was the beginning of a beautiful friendship between those two men.

DKN: You had two children in Illinois and then you moved to Harvard. So tell me what happened,once you moved to Harvard and committed to studying your PhD with Werner Stumm.

JJM: That’s right. I had to make a choice very early on about what I would propose as a majorand what I would propose as a minor. I remember going over to a professor of oceanography,Allan Robinson was his name, very bright young British man, and I said, “I’m interested in thepossibility of a minor in oceanography.” He asked me about my mathematical background.

He said, “You’ll never make it studying with me or oceanography in Harvard because it’s allmathematics.” I said, “Thanks, that’s good information.”

DKN: Good to know.

JJM: So I decided to look further and chose a minor in biological oceanography, which broughtme into contact with Woods Hole. The men at Woods Hole were both very eminent scientists,Bostwick Ketchum and George Clarke.

I took a microbiology course, a very good one with Kenneth Vivian Thimann, with a laboratorythat was almost my downfall because I could not keep cultures from being contaminated.

DKN: The old sterile technique got you.

JJM: It got me because I probably didn’t know what the hell I was doing most of the time. So itwas a good course. I learned a lot of microbiology and especially biochemistry. I got a good gradein the course, not an A. By this time I’d learn the meaning of Werner Stumm’s dictum whichhe used to tell a good friend of mine, “There are A students and there are students who get A’s.You’re a student who likes to get A’s, concentrate on being an A student.”

DKN: Nice, that’s great. What was your thesis on?

JJM: Well, I didn’t have, well. . .

DKN: You didn’t have a single thesis.

JJM: Not yet. In the summer after my first year, the summer of 1961, Werner put me on a projectto study the chemistry of aluminum in water and its use as a water treatment chemical. He said,“I don’t think anybody understands it.”

I worked in the laboratory very hard that summer doing experiments. At the end of Augusthe says, “Now you’re going to present this work at the American Chemical Society meeting the

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next month in Chicago.” I said, “What?” He said “Yeah, you can do it.” He didn’t even go to themeeting.

I went to the meeting. I was the first speaker on the first morning. I was terrified. I lookedand there was Larson sitting in the front row. I gave the talk. It was called “Chemical Aspects ofCoagulation.” Later that year I received an award for the best first presentation at an AmericanChemical Society meeting. Anyway, we wrote the paper together the following fall and we sub-mitted it to the American Water Works Journal, which was in the early days where I thought youpublished everything (Stumm & Morgan 1962).

Werner was happy to have a good paper. That paper was eventually cited 250 times by peoplein the water business, and my own view is that it had an enormous influence changing the waypeople thought about the chemistry of water treatment.

DKN: Did it change the practice?

JJM: Yes, it did, so that was very satisfying.At the end of that first summer and just after I came back from the American Chemical Society

meeting, I remember sitting down with Werner. He said, “Now what do you want to work onfor your PhD?” I started to say I could work on aluminum and then something caught me and Ithought, “I’m not really that fond of aluminum, I mean this looks like a very complicated subjectand it’s going to be filled with people now that we’ve exposed it and we’ve published a paper.”

I said, “I think I’d like to work on manganese.”

DKN: Why?

JJM: That’s what he said. “Why manganese?” G. Fred Lee, who had been a postdoc with Wernerin 1960, had done what looked to me like the definitive work on the rate of iron oxidation byoxygen in “God’s” buffers. I didn’t use the term because I didn’t know it at that time, bicarbonateand carbonate solutions. Imagine how brash I was, “I’d like to do for manganese what you andG. Fred Lee had done for iron.” He said, “Done.” That became my thesis topic, the chemistry ofmanganese(II) and manganese(IV) oxidation states in water.

The rest, as they say, is not exactly history but it was a very pleasant ride. That is, I workedvery intensely for the next two years because I knew I didn’t have a lot of time. I got my bachelor’sdegree in 1954 and here it was 1961, the clock was running. But he said, “Okay, I’m going to hirea research assistant for you. You tell her the experiments that you want her to make. We’ll fasttrack this.”

DKN: So did you meet your goal? Did you do for manganese in those years what Werner and G.Fred Lee did for iron?

JJM: I did. Well, you have to be very careful about overstating. I would say I got great pleasure.It was one of the great intellectual satisfactions of my life to take a problem from a cold start, andwith very little being known about it, and carry it through to a successful, I call it a successful,outcome.

Werner was like a proud father because I was his first PhD student.

DKN: Really?

JJM: Yeah.

DKN: How much older was he?

JJM: Eight years older.


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DKN: I see, very nice.

JJM: It’s interesting because later I had a very successful alliance with a young student who was12 years my junior, so it’s almost a decade generation. I was officially blessed to go ahead and forthe record work toward my PhD. I worked all through 1962 and all through 1963 up until Augustwhen Werner told me, “I’m throwing you out of the laboratory because I don’t think you knowwhen to stop making experiments.” He was right. “Just one more, just one more experiment, nowI’m going to find out about this.” So I gave Werner a draft of my thesis, and in the meantimeI had already been offered and accepted a job at the University of Florida. The reason for theoffer at Florida is very interesting. That paper that we published in 1962 on chemical aspects ofcoagulation in the Journal of the American Water Works Association (Stumm & Morgan 1962) wentright to this guy’s heart of science. He took it to be a kind of negation of what he’d been doing onthe chemistry of coagulation.

DKN: Which guy?

JJM: A.P. Black, Professor of Chemistry, University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida. So he askedthe journal editor to publish his commentary simultaneously with our article (Black 1962).

DKN: Wow, but then he hired you.

JJM: Then he put in the word that he wanted Florida to hire me.

DKN: Pretty good.

JJM: So when I went to Florida, I shared an office with the illustrious A.P. Black. We had a big officeand I started to co-supervise some of his PhD students. Anyway, that all came from that paper.

DKN: But that was before your manganese. . .

JJM: No, I was finished with my manganese work. I was now at Florida.

DKN: Right, okay but I thought with the chronology, I thought he offered you this job prior togetting your PhD.

JJM: Yes.

DKN: But you didn’t move down there until afterward?

JJM: Well, it’s complicated. I gave a theorem to all of my Caltech PhD students: Never leaveCaltech until you’ve written and defended your thesis. That’s because I violated that rule. I wrotea draft, gave it to Werner, and September 1st moved with the family to Gainesville, Florida. Iwas immediately absorbed in working there and so it got to be January and I had not finished thethesis. I had not gone beyond the draft.

Enter Jean. She said, “I can see you’re worried about this. I’m going to hire a typist.” We startedthat in January and in April, I finished the draft; that is, the typist finished the draft. I mailed it toWerner and he scheduled the exam in the middle of May. I went up and defended the thesis andwas successful.

DKN: Very good.

JJM: We had a little party at Werner’s house afterward and he said, “Now, I’d like to ask you tojoin me in writing a book on water chemistry.” Of course in my weakness, I thought well, that’sfar in the future.

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DKN: That’s how Stumm & Morgan was born.

JJM: That’s right. At that cocktail party after I defended my thesis.

DKN: I see, he got you in a moment of weakness.

JJM: Well, I was so happy.

DKN: Absolutely.

JJM:

DKN: Now we’re going to fast forward to the move to Caltech.

JJM: Okay. My move to Caltech took place in fall of 1965. There were several people whoencouraged the move. Very important was Professor Sheldon Friedlander at Caltech, who learnedof my interest in particles when we were serving on a review committee together. And then, ofcourse, Werner Stumm and Gordon Fair of Harvard.

When I came to Caltech, I was starting to get a clearer picture of what I wanted to do, so tospeak, for the rest of my life. I got deeper into particle research in Florida. So when I arrived atCaltech, I was starting to shape an agenda. Because I was coming to a very strong university witha number of strong disciplines, the theme that I imagined was a multidisciplinary one. That is,there would be a core of chemistry to the research I would encourage students to do. And therewould be a core of particles. I imagined, but wasn’t sure, that those would overlap in my time.

DKN: And what was the name of your department at the time?

JJM: Environmental Health Engineering was the name of the department in 1965. In 1970, it waschanged to Environmental Engineering Science, with an emphasis on the science underlying envi-ronmental engineering. It embraced air and water, and had some subdisciplines like radioactivity,so forth. The reason for changing the department name was to attract students who might notwant to be working in environmental health.

The other thing was teaching and supporting research students. I imagined that Caltech wouldbe a very good place to attract strong students and to give them guidance about what they mightstudy. But my idea was always to have students choose what they wanted to study, and my questionto a prospective student right in the early days was, “What do you think you’d like to do?” I prettymuch stayed with that question over the years.

I brought Frank Birkner with me as a postdoc. I had co-advised his thesis at Florida. He workedon particles, and he did a very, I thought, pioneering study on the kinetics of particles growinglarger in the presence of polymers in solution (Morgan & Birkner 1968).

That was the new technology that was coming on board. How to use long-chain moleculesin order to encourage, so to speak, the coming together of particles. In an engineering sense,this would then make it easier to remove them through sedimentation and filtration. And FrankBirkner spent 1966 at Caltech. The following year, Ching-ling Chen, who I had also co-advisedat Florida, joined me as a postdoc. He worked on manganese. At this time, I was starting to thinkof manganese both under the rubric of particles and also under the rubric of how fast can it beoxidized.

So I was returning to an early theme on my work at Harvard. In 1966, after I was at Caltechfor a year, I was persuaded to become the editor of Environmental Science and Technology, ES&T,and that was a post that I held for eight years. Those years were kind of challenging because I hadto establish the criteria for acceptance of papers in ES&T. I made some friends, and made somecritics, because I was the one who said yes or no.


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Anyway, that was a parallel stream. I spent about 20–25 percent of my time overseeing thepublication of research papers at ES&T.

DKN: What was your idea for the journal? What did you think was its mission?

JJM: Well, I wrote an editorial, which came out in the first issue in January 1967 (Morgan 1967).What I argued was that successful solutions to environmental problems came from fundamentalresearch, and as my colleague Friedlander was fond of saying, “environmental policy should comefrom the laboratory door.” And that was the theme, I didn’t quote Sheldon, but that was thetheme. I had to hit the ground running and be sure that was clear, and also that those were thepapers that I would favor in acceptance. I didn’t limit it to any part of science. I made it clear thatchemistry, physics, biology, and technology were all candidates for publication in the journal.

And I think we succeeded over eight years in making that stick. What I remember most aboutthe early days of the journal is that I was the only editor. There was no associate editor, and therewas a managing editor in Washington. By the time we reach the present, ES&T has an editorand eight associate editors, and a great number of papers. It’s been a great success thanks to mysuccessor and his successor and now the present. So it’s evolved, and I think well.

Now I told you that I said I had a theme and I was trying to implement it. And one of thethemes was speciation. And with a postdoc, Dr. Halka Bilinski from Yugoslavia, we had a seriesof experiments which combined the two themes. How fast can manganese be oxidized? This is alaboratory study. And what are the species in the solution that either encourage or discourage theoxidation? Now I have to confess that, to this day, I am still working on the final publication fromthat data. I think it was more difficult than I realized; that is, to bring kinetics and speciation underthe same roof, and to have a successful paper. So I’m still working on it, and I think probably bythis time next year, we’ll be able to submit it, maybe to ES&T.

So that gets me to 1967 and a very important event in my young scientific life, “The FrenchConnection.” It was the day before classes started in 1967; a student walked into my office andintroduced himself as François Morel from France, and said he wanted to take my course in waterchemistry.

I spent about half an hour trying to persuade him that that would be the wrong course forhim to take because I knew he was going to be a research student in the properties of blood,and the particle properties of blood and the fluid mechanics of blood and so forth. So I said this,“The course you should take is taught by Professor Norman Davidson, it’s the Biophysics ofMacromolecules.” I thought, well, I’ve convinced this young man, who I had just met. And thenext morning at 8:00 am, when I taught my class, sitting there in the front row was FrançoisMorel. He said, “You’re stuck with me. That course isn’t being offered this year.”

And that shows the importance of chance, I think, in making progress in certain areas. Hewas a very bright student, very questioning. About a month into the quarter, and we had becomevery comfortable friends with one another by that time, he said, “Have you ever heard of thecomputer, Jim?” I said, “I’ve heard of it, but I don’t know how to use it. And I’ve had a fewattempts to persuade people to do chemical calculations, but they say, ‘Oh, it’s trivial.’ Or they’dsay, ‘Oh, it’s much too complicated.’” François said, “I think we can do it.”

And so we set to work, what I call moonlighting, we would come to my house or we’d meetat the Athenaeum Bar in those days, and we’d start to sketch it out. And out of that collaborationover the next two years, while François was finishing his PhD research in the biophysics of blood,we got the first version of a program that we humorously called REDEQL, R-E-D for redox andE-Q-L for equilibrium, to hint that it was a very broad ranging program.

And in 1970, Werner Stumm, who’s heard about this young man, invited him to come toHarvard and compare his computer program, REDEQL, with a program developed at the Rand

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Corporation in Santa Monica, which was being touted by a postdoc there in environmental sciencesat Harvard. So François went, and they had what I now think is a shoot-out. And they both ran themost complete calculation available at that time for seawater, one with the Rand program, whichwas called CHEMIST, and one with REDEQL.

And impressively for Werner, they got identical results. But he found François program muchmore understandable because it used the coin of chemistry, equilibrium constants essentially,whereas the Rand program used the same data in a way, but cast it in a language of free energiesand so forth. So that was the beginning of REDEQL. We published a report. We “sold” theprogram to EPA, who desperately needed to know how to calculate speciation. And they fundedadditional research, which allowed François to stay with me for another two years before heaccepted a faculty position at MIT.

DKN: And those were two years as a postdoc? At this point he had graduated?

JJM: Two years as a postdoc; he defended his degree in 1971, and so he stayed for two more years,and was a very key member of my laboratory as it was growing at the time, because he was so quickand intelligent to spot things that other people might take advantage of. He was a very valuableresource to everybody around him. We published a key paper in 1972 titled “A Numerical Methodfor Computing Equilibriums in Aqueous Chemical Systems” (Morel & Morgan 1972). And wepublished an applications paper in 1973 with the undergraduate research student, Russ McDuff(McDuff & Morel 1973). He subsequently went on to work on ocean geochemistry. And so thatwas what I called the French connection. It was very fruitful.

François said, “Let’s give it away because if we sell it, we’ll have too many responsibilities.”Well, it turned out that giving it away didn’t solve that problem. If we gave it away, people stillwanted to know how to use it. But it was fruitful.

DKN: And didn’t it get renamed to MINEQL and other things?

JJM: Yes. A capsule of that story is that when François went to MIT, he started to show theprogram to some of the students there, and one of the brightest students, John Westall, took alook at it and said, “I don’t think it’s the most optimal matrix that is in the numerical method’smatrix.” We had chosen to have metals and ligands combining to form complexes, with the metalsin one place in the matrix and so forth. That’s a numerical detail. But John said, “We should dothe matrix differently,” and that led to the program MINEQL in 1975.

The MINEQL version was the one that became the template for so many other programs,including commercial products. So that was very important.

DKN: Just so everybody appreciates where that led, the names of the programs that we use todayfor chemical modeling, are they all descendants essentially from REDEQL?

JJM: They’re cousins. It is the one that most environmental or biological researchers today stilluse, some derivative of MINEQL; and later its small relatives MICROQL and so forth. Butthere was a parallel development going on in Earth sciences at about the same time, which wewere unaware of, and they were probably unaware of what we were doing. And so there’s aninteresting family tree, which has been sketched out, that shows the parallel and overlapping de-velopment. The program in geology had a different name. And so there’s been some merging of thestrengths.

In 1969, I became a full professor at Caltech, and I had literally been unaware that I wasmoving toward that direction. The day that I learned going into the Athenaeum for a 5:00 beerwith François, and one of the trustees said, “Oh, you’re the man that’s going to save Caltech.”Of course, they had just voted on my tenure. I don’t think he knew anything more about me


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than that. Anyway, that was four years after I came to Caltech. Then I started to have researchstudents.

In an outline that I showed you, I tended to describe my students and postdocs as either blue orred (Supplemental Figure 1, follow the Supplemental Material link from the Annual Reviewshome page at http://www.annualreviews.org). Nothing to do with republicans and democrats.The blue students, so to speak, were working on particles and polymers and the transport ofparticles through water and so forth. And the red students were working on manganese chemistry.And so over the history, if you look at my summary, it’s a mixture of blue and red, and that turnedout to be sufficient to have, I thought, a very dynamic research program, and gave students whoexpressed an interest in working with me some room sometimes to combine the two.

A number of students did combine the two.

DKN: And they’re the purple ones?

JJM: Well, the purple ones are the French. All the other ones are red or blue.

DKN: I see a few green appearing later.

JJM: Well, that’s biology.

DKN: Okay.

JJM: From time to time, a student would say, “I wonder if you could help me figure out thechemistry of what I’m studying,” usually with Wheeler North, who was a marine ecologist. Oneof those collaborations was with George Jackson, who studied trace metals and phytoplankton inseawater and kelp ( Jackson & Morgan 1978).

It was red, blue, and occasional green. Yeah. For example, later on in the 1980s, one of mystudents, Lisa Anderson, studied iron reduction and nutrients in kelp for the very embryonic stagesof the kelp plant and so forth. Now, as students came, in the 1970s especially, some brought theirown problems.

Fernando Cadena-Cepeda from Mexico brought a problem that had to do with the effectof temperature on the activity of bicarbonate ion in waters and soils, which is one of the mostimportant ions. He was a very independent worker and had a nice thesis that ended up showinghow temperature influenced bicarbonate ionic activity in aqueous systems, and wrote a programfor it and so forth. Then he went back to Mexico, became a professor, and then came back to bea professor at New Mexico State.

There are occasional students here who don’t fit any predetermined pattern of mine becausethey said, “This is what I want to work on,” and I said, “Fine.” Same thing was with acid rain.I was asked to visit Cornell in 1975 and advise Gene Likens, a very well-known and brilliantecologist, about how to measure the acidity of rain because he had come under some criticism.And I spent three days there, watched their methods, looked at their data, and said, “You’re doingit absolutely correctly.” And he said, “Good. Now how about the possibility of doing the samething in California because it hasn’t been studied in California?”

So I presented a couple of topics to a new student, Howard Liljestrand, and he said, “I thinkI’d like to do acid rain.” And he did wonderful work on acid rain, both in Pasadena and over theLos Angeles Basin, and a number of very successful papers were the result (Liljestrand & Morgan1981). From time to time then I would find the opportunity to do work on something that was acontemporary problem that didn’t necessarily have a long-term agenda following it. Manganese,of course, was always something that had a long-term agenda following it but then occasionallyother problems would be the student’s choice.

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Supplemental Material

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http://www.annualreviews.orghttp://www.annualreviews.org/doi/suppl/10.1146/annurev-earth-060614-105439


So you see, if you look at my charts, you’ll see blue and red, and then you’ll see lots of red, thenyou’ll see lots of blue. I’ll just mention a few highlights that I thought were successful bringingtogether of these particle and oxidation themes.

One was coagulation of iron oxide particles, hematite, pure hematite. Over the years, sincemy doctoral work, I’d come to the conclusion that the chemistry of the surface, which in turndepended on the chemistry of the water, was consequential for how fast particles could aggregate,get together. And that was the thesis subject of Liyuan Liang, a lady from Beijing. She studied thecoagulation chemistry of hematite and it was a very successful paper (Liang & Morgan 1990). So Iwas very happy with that. I gave her that as a suggestion, and she grabbed it and ran with it. But Idon’t put it under red because it’s iron, and it’s not about oxidation, it’s about particle coagulationand transport.

Another fruitful combination of the manganese theme with particle theme was the work ofMichael Scott, on the oxidation of arsenite by manganese dioxide, in particular, the manganesedioxide birnessite (Scott & Morgan 1995). He studied the pH and solution chemistry dependentrate of conversion of arsenite to arsenate, a more potentially toxic form, to a less—you’ll be awareof that from your own experience.

In 1985, a student came to me from industry. He had been a consulting engineer and he hada master’s degree from Berkeley and said, “I think you should be working on asbestos,” whichthen was a very potentially important problem because the waters of Northern California inthe Sacramento River and the Bay Delta area are in geochemical areas that are abundant in thechrysotile form of asbestos. The student was Roger Bales, and he said, “I think I can get themoney to do the research from the State of California.” He was one of my most entrepreneurialstudents; he raised the money and did some very elegant experiments (Bales & Morgan 1985). Hiswork was consequential for how asbestos could be removed from water in Southern California ifit developed that it was a very important, practical problem.

One of my geochemical students was Yigal Erel, now a professor at Hebrew University ofJerusalem, who told me he came to Caltech with two people in mind. He wanted to work withClair Patterson, a great geochemist, and he wanted to work with Jim Morgan, whom he’d nevermet. I said, “You’re welcome.”

And so his thesis was a very elegant combination of fieldwork, laboratory work, and speciationmodeling. We published with Patterson, I think about five very consequential papers all in thegeochemical literature (for example, Erel et al. 1990, 1991). And so it’s all blue.

DKN: How much interaction over the years did you have with your colleagues in GPS?

JJM: Quite a lot. The most with Patterson. Patterson, as I think you know, is eminent for hiswork on lead, both in dating the history of Earth, and also lead in the contemporary world. Andhe also studied lead in ancient societies, Roman societies, South American societies, and NativeAmerican societies. He was a very perceptive man, and he was very open to collaboration, as longas, as he told me, the collaboration isn’t as an engineer. I said, “That’s a bit of a problem, Pat,because I am an engineer.” He said, “No, no, you’re more. You’re more than an engineer. I thinkyou’re a scientist.”

That’s been the history of my life, though. I’m an engineer; I’m a scientist; I’m an appliedscientist. I tend to choose the problems that are amenable to the skills that my students andI have.

Patterson was very enthusiastic about one of my students, Tom Holm, who’s now head of theaquatic chemistry section of the Illinois State Water Survey. He decided he wanted to study tracemetals in lakes and reservoirs in the State of California. And before he undertook that, Pattersoninvited him to be a member of a round robin study to measure very low levels of lead in seawater.


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And so Tom agreed, and he ran the analysis in our laboratory using his method, which is anelectrochemical method, and Pat and his students used mass spectrometry. And Patterson said tome, “Holm is a very good student. He got the same answer that I did.”

One of the most fruitful interactions of all of my students was Alan Stone, now a professor ofenvironmental chemistry at Johns Hopkins.

Alan said, “How about studying organics and manganese?” Well his memory of it is different.He said, “You suggested it to me,” but I remember that he suggested it to me. Anyway, he studiedthe oxidation of the organic compound hydroquinone and then a whole suite of different organiccompounds, and found out their reactivity scales, that is, those which reacted fast because theproducts of the oxidation would not be the original compound. He published two beautiful paperson that in the mid-1980s, and then went to Johns Hopkins (Stone & Morgan 1984a,b).

Another very fruitful collaboration with a student was Mark Schlautman. Mark Schlautman wasaware that there was a growing interest in polyaromatic hydrocarbons, which were toxic in manyways. And he thought, “How are they transported? How do they get through water?” And he hada hypothesis, which was that they were transported by attaching themselves to humic acids. Hedeveloped a very nice fluorescence technique, and he studied the binding of a polyaromatic hydro-carbon compound. He had a very elegant result, which showed the pH dependence and the waterchemistry. His thesis was, Does the water chemistry matter for organic pollutants like polyaromatichydrocarbons? And does the water chemistry matter for their ability to attach to oxides which wouldend up in the sediment? So that was a very satisfying piece of work (Schlautman & Morgan 1994).

Toward the 1990s, I started to know Ken Nealson, who, I think, was at the University ofSouthern California. He started to ask me questions about Manganese(III). Because he said,“In your thesis, the title of the thesis is Manganese(II) and Manganese(IV), but what aboutManganese(III)?” And I said, “Well, if you read the thesis carefully—ever the pedant—I said,“You will find that I speculate about the possibility of Manganese(III), but had no environmentalevidence for its existence.” And I did, in the thesis; I made different complexes of Manganese(III)with EDTA and pyrophosphate. Later, I asked my student, Ken Klewicki, to take a close look atManganese(III) species in water, and their complexes with EDTA, pyrophosphate, citrate and afew other organic ligands (Klewicki & Morgan 1999).

And that led to a very interesting set of results, which had quite an influence on Alan Stone andhis students at Johns Hopkins because they saw the potential, but they also saw the limitations ofour experimental techniques. Alan had a more powerful suite of chromatographic techniques forstudying manganese oxide dissolution.

And my last student who pursued that theme was Tom Lloyd. He finished his thesis in 1998.And it was getting close to biology. It was iron oxide, manganese oxide, and deferrioxamine B, thebacterial exudate. It was a very elegant thesis. It still is. It’s been cited by many people. But Tomdid not have the time in his life to write up the results. He had to get on with supporting a familyand going into the world of business. So he is a guru of advising a large financial company onenvironmental opportunities. He was a wonderful student because he was interested in everything.And Tom just couldn’t bring himself to devote all that time to it. And I certainly didn’t want towrite up the elegant work that a student had done just on my own. I was one year from retirementat that point.

The other thing I mentioned very briefly was the book Aquatic Chemistry (Stumm & Morgan1970). It was first published in 1970; as a second, and unfortunately larger, edition in 1981; and asa still larger edition in 1996. That was four years after Werner Stumm had retired, and four yearsbefore I retired. It was an often-cited book.

The three editions together, according to one of my sources, have been cited about 18,000times. François had a very simple explanation for that. He said, “Everybody cites Aquatic Chemistry

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because they know whatever they’re interested in is in there someplace.” So when he and JanetHering wrote their book on aquatic chemistry in 1993 (Morel & Hering 1993), they made quitea point of saying, “What page in Aquatic Chemistry by Stumm & Morgan was actually beingreferenced?” And that was a discipline. I admire that. We never cited ourselves, but other peoplewould just cite Stumm & Morgan. “It’s in there someplace.”

DKN: That’s fantastic. Do you think there will ever be a fourth edition?

JJM: I was asked to put out a fourth edition in 2006, which was about ten years after the thirdedition. By that time, I’d been retired six years. I found that I had no appetite for a fourth edition.I could not imagine it could be less lengthy than the previous edition. And I advised the publisher,“I don’t think the time is now appropriate for a book that attempts to cover so much aquaticmaterial as our book did. I think it’s time for books on inorganic environmental or inorganicaquatic chemistry, organic aquatic chemistry.” Well, they didn’t agree with that, and their reason,of course, is that they have a vested interested in the brand.

They have persuaded one of my former undergraduate students to undertake a book with thetitle Fourth Edition of Stumm and Morgan Aquatic Chemistry by, and then his name. But that waseight years ago so I don’t know if that book will be coming out. And of course there have beenother books. I mentioned François Morel’s two books, one with Janet Hering. My student JamesPankow wrote his book called Aquatic Chemistry Concepts (Pankow 1991).

I think there was a clear need to bring together the threads of chemistry of natural watersinto one place. I remember Sheldon Friedlander said, “Jim, aquatic chemistry that sounds a littlefishy.” And I said, I was so optimistic, “Just wait and see, Sheldon.” So, it was a very successfulbook. I’m very pleased with it.

DKN: When did you get that Stockholm Water Prize?

JJM: 1999. I shared it with Werner Stumm. And sadly, three, four weeks after we both learned,on a joint telephone call, Zurich and California and Stockholm, he passed away at the age of 75.He knew he was in ill health, so he empowered me to go to Stockholm, speak for both of us. SoJean and I went to Stockholm, accepted the prize, and brought home one statue for Werner andhis wife and the check. There was a $150,000 prize.

DKN: Not bad.

JJM: Not bad for 30 years’ work.

DKN: What was that in recognition of? How did they describe it?

JJM: It was in recognition of research contributions to aquatic chemistry, especially the part thatthey thought was important, which was the science of pollution by agrinutrients because that wasone of Werner Stumm’s themes, and I had written a couple of papers with it. It was certainlypreeminent; it occupied a prominent place in our book. When I spoke, I addressed that, and I alsoaddressed some of the things that were more important to me in the Stockholm laureate lecture.

DKN: What were the things that you valued more?

JJM: Well, I wanted to talk about acid rain. By the way, this is probably not apropos of anything,but when I first started work on acid rain, Werner Stumm said, “There’s no such thing as acid rain,Jim.” He said, “Lakes,” he was focusing on lakes, “become acidic because of their own biochemicalprocesses.” I said, “I don’t think so. There’s abundant evidence in New Hampshire and other NewEngland states and Sweden and Norway that the rain titrates the lake.” So three years later, he


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invited me to join him in a paper on the chemistry of acid rain, together with Jerry Schnoor, a pro-fessor from Iowa who, I think, Werner believed in a sense more than he did me (Stumm et al. 1983).

Eventually, he believed both of us. Acid rain is an important phenomenon in certain states ofthe United States. We found out that the level of acidification was not high enough to be a dangerin most parts of California, except for a few lakes up in the Sierras.

Werner Stumm and I often had disagreements, which I’m happy to report were successfullyresolved, or we agreed to disagree. He never believed that manganese could be oxidized by anabiotic process, which might be interesting to you, as a biologist. He said his experience with oneof his students was that if you set manganese from lake water in a bottle on the shelf, after twoor three years, nothing had happened to the manganese. It didn’t become oxidized, which was indirect contradiction to my own thesis work 25 years ago. I took a close look at the data that he wasalluding to, and decided the experimental protocol couldn’t be justified. You had to have moreregulation than that. So in the end, we just agreed to disagree because he passed away before Ipublished “the definitive paper on manganese” by Jim Morgan, as Janet Hering liked to joke.

DKN: But where did it stand with the thesis? Did he not agree with the thesis you turned in?

JJM: But it was his student who said, “It’s possible that when Morgan did those experiments, fora short period of time, the pH became elevated before the solution was perfectly mixed.” Andthat’s a very reasonable alternate hypothesis. I went back and did some experiments in my ownlab with some of my students (Kessick & Morgan 1975, Davies & Morgan 1989), where we keptthe pH low and didn’t adjust it by adding base in. And we think we controlled it. I think there’sno question, in the long run, that in 200 days, manganese left in a solution at a pH of about 8.5 or9 will become oxidized.

The definitive work on that, I think, was actually done by P.J. von Langen at Monterey BayResearch Institute and Cal State Hayward. The pH of seawater, as you know, is about 8. And sohe did experiments where he collected the seawater and adjusted it up to like 8.2, 8.3, 8.4, and soforth. And then he used a method specific for Manganese(II), I had to filter samples in order toget the Manganese(II); solids were collected on the membrane filter. He clearly showed that therewas oxidation, and its rate increased as he increased the pH, but never got to the pH of any of myexperiments.

So that made me more confident than anything else, that the hypothesis was appealing, butnot completely defensible. I have no doubt that biology is the most important mechanism forconverting Manganese(II) to higher oxidation states in natural waters. That’s clearly shown bymany people. In my paper in 2005, I compare, as best I can, the three characteristic time scales of abiological process, of a surface catalyzed process, and of an aqueous process (Morgan 2005). And Iused the pHs of the experiments made by the biologists or made by the surface chemists. And I thinkit’s probably, in about half a page, the most concise rendering I could give ten years ago about that.

I’ve never been a critic of biology, although Werner Stumm was. Funny how it starts out. Hewas very critical of Henry Erlich. You know who Henry Erlich is?

DKN: Yeah.

JJM: One of the great microbiologists of manganese in water. He was very critical of HenryErlich’s work because he said, “How do I know that Henry Erlich controlled the pH?” I thinkthere’s no question that Henry Erlich knew how to control the pH. I met him in the late 1960s,early 1970s at a meeting. We had a very nice chat. He was a very soft-spoken, quiet man. And Iread his memoir in the review series. And it comes through—this is the real Henry Erlich, veryself-effacing, very modest.

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DKN: Yeah. He’s a really lovely guy. So have we covered the main hits you wanted to talk about?

JJM: Yes.

DKN: All right, so then I have a few other questions.

JJM: Good.

DKN: So at this point, if you were to give advice to young scientists in the field of environmentalscience, what advice would you give them about choice of topic, about ways to conduct theirresearch? Anything you think is important.

JJM: Well, after I’d been a professor for a while at Caltech, I was serving on thesis defensecommittees as a faculty member, and advising my own students. It seems trivial now, but at thetime it seemed very important to me: Make sure you have chosen a clear question. And my jokewas, “If you don’t have a good question, how will you know you have a good answer?” But I wasserious about that. I very often found that students were in the habit at the time of saying, “Ilooked at” or “We’re looking at.” Now I don’t criticize it. It’s a casual language. What it meansis, “We’re investigating,” I think, or going to. The big difference of the advice I would want togive now, that I probably was unable to give 30 years ago, is be sure you know the best availableexperimental protocols and methods. Once you chose a question, be sure that you have found thetools that will help you answer the question.

You know, I used to kid my students. I said, well, in the early days, in the 1960s, “I’m a sulfuricacid and rubber hose man.” That is to say my techniques, what I have available and what I canoffer to you, – are pretty simple.

I had good particle counting equipment, which actually was my dowry at Caltech. They boughtme a Coulter counter. That was my start-up money.

DKN: I see.

JJM: $15,000 to buy a Coulter counter in 1965. But it was very valuable, and it continued to beused by students in my lab and other people’s lab right through 1980. Be sure that you understand;environmental science today is spectroscopic, as well as analytical. You can’t answer some questionswithout the very best and most sensitive method.

If I were doing my work now, I would want to study manganese or any element like manganeseat levels of nanomolar to micromolar. At the time that I was working as a student in Stumm’s lab,we had no method that was better than 10 micromolar.

And so that leads to uncertainty about the generality of the results. I don’t think you can extendthe results to seawater if you’ve studied at 10 micromolar and you know that manganese in seawateris 1 nanomolar or less. So a good question, exploration of all the techniques that are valuable. Andthat will almost always mean now, interlaboratory work. That is collaboration among scientists,often from different disciplines.

I knew coming to Caltech that it was a multidisciplinary opportunity because I knew somethingabout the people before I came. I knew the work of Norman Davidson in chemistry. I knew alittle bit about the work of Sheldon Friedlander in particle science. So I imagined that the workwould be multidisciplinary. I never could be clear about whether I meant multidisciplinary orinterdisciplinary.

In the case of Patterson and my lab, it was certainly interdisciplinary. In the case of multidisci-plinary, only once a student can learn how to command several disciplines, as your recent studentSebastian Kopf has. I think the most important thing is the question. And hand in hand with that,is there a technique that will actually answer the question?


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DKN: That’s good advice. Now I know from my own personal relationship with you, what afantastically supportive teacher you are. And I don’t even know if you yourself are aware of allthe ways in which you’ve supported people through very casual supportive remarks. But it’s verystriking.

JJM: I always wanted to be a teacher. When I was young, I just didn’t know what I could teach.When I went to Manhattan College and experienced the teaching of Donald O’Connor, I said,“That’s something I can do.” Not just that I can do, but that’s something I really want to do.That’s why chemistry had to be studied very seriously.

My first year at Harvard, I became ill in the first semester, and so missed about a third of theterm, but I recovered. In the second semester, Werner Stumm said, “I would like you to be theteaching assistant in my water chemistry laboratory. Unfortunately, we have no funds. So I wantyou be a teaching fellow without stipend.”

I thought, “What the hell?” I was supported by a fellowship for that first year anyway. So I said,“Okay.” And the first lab, he said, “Here is a bucket and here is a broomstick. You’ll probably needthat to pry off the lid on the sewer out in front of the lab,” which was Oxford Street. He said, “I wantyou to bring in a bucket of sewage because the sewage flows right down one of the main sewersright there, and the students will need it to set up their biological observation experiments.” AndI thought, “Boy, this must be the real world of Harvard.” It’s not what I expected, but it seemedvery, very real.

So I stopped the traffic. I used the broomstick to pry up the lid of the sewer. I lowered thebucket down on a rope and brought up a good bucket of sewage and carried it into the laboratory.

DKN: That must have made quite an impression.

JJM: Well, see that’s something I actually knew how to do. When I went to Harvard, I didn’tthink I’d ever need the things that I’d grown able to do, like sampling rivers and collectingbottles of water and so forth. But here I was, a step up. I was collecting a bucket of sewage.Anyway. I’ve always thought teaching was important, and I’ve always thought that supporting thecommunity you’re in is important. And people say, “Why do you do that?” Some people, you knowfriends, and I jokingly say, but not entirely joking, “Because I was raised a Catholic with a socialconscience.”

And so that, in the background, without wearing it on my sleeve, has always been a part of myapproach to the world. If I’d had a more single-minded approach. . . Werner was always tellingother people things that he thought about me. And he told somebody else, “Jim could have beenvery productive if he’d worked harder.” That’s the same thing Don O’Connor told me when Iasked him why he didn’t recommend me to Harvard in the first place. But I had to choose my ownform of working harder. I couldn’t follow somebody else’s script.

Now Werner was an obsessive worker. I think he worked 16 hours a day because he lovedfinding out things in chemistry. I love finding out things, but it was very important for me to workwith others i

Documents

James J. Morgan...Dianne K. Newman: It is May 12th, 2014, and this is Dianne Newman with Professor Jim Morgan at Caltech. We’re going to start this interview by learning about Jim’s