MEN VS. MICROSCOPES

Du Pont Director of Research Praises the Liberal Arts College as Necessary Training Ground for Future Scientists

NOT LONG OUT of Dartmouth, he had completed graduate work in chemistry and was a young instructor at Harvard. He was concerned about the future use of his training, and unsettled. Pressure to publish the results of research, almost as an end in itself, was great. Although he had to his credit published researches in photochemistry (on the photochemical activity of quinine sulfate in ultra violet light) and in physical chemistry (on the adsorption of gases), he did not feel that the mere publication of specialized researches'was what he wanted to do. Yet he had the proper background: the fundamentals from Professor L. B. Richardson, well-known Dartmouth disciplinarian, an instructorship at Dartmouth, a Ph.D. from Harvard—he was naturally interested in science and the possibilities of research. But the publication of papers in chemistry was not enough.

So the young Dartmouth man sought advice from an older Harvard man. Over a period of some years as instructor and professor, he also had been restless and concerned about the best use of his own technical training.

"What is wrong with me? What should I do?" asked the Dartmouth man."I am not satisfied to continue research in narrow and limited aspects of chemistry and end the matter with a publication in some journal."

The Harvard man paused. "Your heart is not in it", he said. Then with slow seriousness, "Decide now what it is that you want most to be doing when you are 45. Then go ahead without further hesitation."

The Harvard man explained that he too could not be satisfied by papers with pinhole vision in chemistry, for he needed a larger view of the impingement chemistry had on other sciences and he wanted to persuade scientists to break down the barriers and to develop the fields requiring knowledge from several sciences.

The Dartmouth man felt he had received good advice, and so he made his choice: negatively not to confine himself to papers on chemistry, useful though they might be, but positively to apply his training in chemistry and creatively to correlate fields of scientific knowledge through industrial research and to provide those things which would lead to better living.

The Dartmouth man was John C. Woodhouse '21. He is now Technical Director of the Grasselli Chemicals Department of E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company. With as many as 150 research investigators trained in a range of the physical sciences, his organization helped to solve widely diverse problems related to winning the war against Germany and Japan. Now its chemists, biologists and engineers are concentrating on the problem of bringing a more abundant and, they hope, a happier life to human beings all over the globe.

The Harvard man was Dr. James B. Conant. He became President of Harvard University—the executive head of an association of international scholars devoted to creative research and publication.

Dean Stearns Morse made a trip to Wilmington, Delaware, last spring to talk to the Delaware Dartmouth alumni. In informal discussion late in the evening he raised some questions about which he as Dean of Freshmen was deeply interested. What is it that makes educated men of greatest value? What ought the colleges to seek in applicants whom they admit, and what was most important to give to undergraduates going through college? In this era of constantly growing emphasis on technology and on specialization, what exactly is the value of Dartmouth's broad liberal-arts curriculum? He learned that John Woodhouse held an unqualified belief in the value of Dartmouth's cultural training as a prerequisite for specialization in scientific work and a career in technical fields.

Indeed, John Woodhouse believes that a broad liberal arts course, the kind which he received as a Dartmouth undergraduate, is a great advantage, almost a necessity, for one who is to apply scientific research to the problems of industry and agriculture. He points out that in today's complex research, with its reliance on teams of scientists, the choice of problem is of critical importance. Once a choice is made, there comes the overall plan to solve it. In each, consideration must be given to many factors outside the principal science involved—and normally outside the physical sciences at all. Economics enters at once, and so do legal considerations. The languages play a role, especially English, with the need to provide a clear and concise statement of the matter to coworkers, whether technically trained or not. Scientists are notorious for their ability to conceal the significance of a problem or, even more, of the results they obtain, by obscure statements in a specialist's multi-syllabled vocabulary. This confuses the explanation of needs and accomplishments about as much to a fellow scientist in another field as it does to a man in the street.

Quite aside from the training an undergraduate at Dartmouth receives broadly in languages, science and social sciences, his development as an individual is, John Woodhouse believes, of great importance to his ability to be a sound and successful research worker in industry. He tells the story of a colleague who after many years of hiring technical personnel was led to consider the success or lack of it in the several hundred men who had worked for him. First he reviewed the men who in the course of time had made the most significant accomplishments and was somewhat surprised to find that they were not only those whose scientific academic records were outstanding. There were some whose training had been questionable because they had come from small colleges unable to provide courses in specialized fields. Then he turned to the number at the opposite end of the scale—those who had "flunked out" of their jobs. Of these, an insignificant fraction, less than one in ten, had failed in technical training alone. The failures were those who were lacking in personal characteristics and in background in fields other than science which a liberal arts college should provide.

Dr. Woodhouse's own experiences illustrate his point about the need for a diversified background. Going to Du Pont to be a specialist on corrosion problems, he took along experience gained in working as a consultant for paper mills and power companies in the East and Canada on the eccentricities of electric steam generators. Circumstances eliminated the corrosion problem and he was assigned a job on high pressure "catalysis." You know that one. It is the way the newspapers make everything from Nylon to fertilizer out of coal and air and water. (John Woodhouse also knew that the answer "catalysis" in reply to a question in L. B. Richardson's freshman chemistry class was good for a zero. It probably still is.)

A "by-product" of one piece of research undertaken under his direction in 1930 was a colorless liquid superficially just about like water but capable of setting up to a crystal clear plastic. The chemist calls it a methacrylate polymer, and you see it in every shape from bomber noses to hairbrushes. It appears also in shapes less easy to spot. One of the critical needs after Pearl Harbor was for an agent to replace and to improve on unavailable natural rubber in jellied gasoline incendiaries. The solution, in a methacrylate, was seen almost within hours after the requirements were stated to Du Pont. Methacrylates were not new to the chemist, for they were the subject of one of the first Ph.D. theses ever written in this country—more than fifty years before the "by-product" methacrylate was found and used. It was the background aside from chemistry which indicated the wide usefulness for these materials and resulted in their being produced.

Most of us look on the first practical application of atomic fission in the atomic bomb as the top technical accomplishment of the war period. The physicists' studies provided the essentials for that, but without the combined efforts of workers in almost every division of science and engineering, it could very well have remained in the laboratory. John Woodhouse recalls one early critical meeting in 1942 at which there were men with over thirty types of training. To men in his organization whose background lay in a dozen diferent subjects came praise from the government for their work in developing the bomb. Often it was the men with a training apparently unrelated to the problem who from their broader background suggested an answer and put it across by their ability to explain and to cooperate.

Though nominally a chemist, Dr. Woodhouse is interested in biology because he believes that among the major sciences biology most likely will provide in the years ahead the newest and most basic discoveries for the improvement of world conditions. According to this assumption, scientists can make use of the discoveries of biology through the aid of sister sciences, especially chemistry and chemical engineering. Again there crops up the need of cooperativeness and understanding among personnel specialized in individual fields if discoveries are to be developed and used. To cultivate these qualities in men we need the training provided by a liberal arts college, which gives speaking acquaintance with more than one physical science, appreciation of economic and social values, and the ability to express results in oral and written language easily understandable to others.

That cooperation between chemists and biologists all broadly trained before specialization is an absolute necessity is not merely an idea; it is a fact which John Woodhouse supports with results from the research he has directed during the war, mostly concerned with the control of pests. These are of significance today in the world-wide battle to provide an adequate food supply against the greatest threat of famine modern civilization has seen.

Few persons realize that losses to the food supply of this country alone from pests which should be controllable through a combined attack of biologists and chemists run, even in a period of normal prices, into several billions of dollars a year. The list of pests is a long one, but some of the chief ones are weeds, insects, rats, and worm parasites of animals.

"We could guess that the first atomic bomb trials 'somewhere' were successful," says Dr. Woodhouse, "when word came in July of 1945 to stop work on a synthetic plant hormone that could destroy the rice crops of Japan."

Today a relative of that chemical is being sold as 2,4-D weed killer. People use it on their lawns to kill everything except grass. If lawns were all that 2,4-D could save, one might have nothing more to say about it. Newspapers carried a story last July about the heavens opening up and dumping millions of gallons of rain on fields which already had millions of gallons not yet absorbed or evaporated. Farmers had discovered that the ordinary methods of cultivation could do nothing to save the corn crop from being smothered and killed by weeds. Desperate in the face of almost certain loss of the crop, they decided to gamble with the chemist's weed killer, 2,4-D, and they won with the most needed corn crop in history.

"The point," Dr. Woodhouse observes, "is that a chemist working on a particular paper concerned with a minor particular problem would not have advanced very far in solving the weed problem in this interrelated world. 2,4-D was discovered because men from different fields pooled their information. Facts were needed about chemical properties, facts about cellular structure in plants and animals, facts about plant and animal growth. A team of men who could understand the other fellows' problems and express their own results intelligibly was what was needed." What about insects?

"We used to worry in the early days of making DDT," Dr Woodhouse says, "because the Army would have a batch on a truck for air shipment overseas before we could have told whether we had drawn DDT or sawdust from the reactors."

Originally used only on insect pests of man or plants, DDT is now so successful with cattle that records in this country show 30 pounds more beef per cow from cattle treated with it, and its application among South American herds result in even greater gains in weight. DDT has some shortcomings, especially toxicity to warm-blooded animals, but that disadvantage has been solved by a related compound already in production. The chemist calls it a methoxy analog.

"Request came to us early in the war," reminisces Dr. Woodhouse, "for a chemical which would be a more effective killing agent for rats but safer to other animals than anything then known. From a list of chemicals supplied by the chemist came ANTU (alpha napthyl thiourea) to protect war supplies against rats and to find even more extensive use saving food storages today. The tests proving out the compound were all made naturally enough on the common Norway or white rat because it is easiest to handle in the laboratory and because it is the species normally found in our cities and on our farms. Far less than a milligram (a milligram is about as much as you can heap on the head of a pin) is a lethal dose to a kilogram (two and a fifth pounds) of rats. It looked like the solution to all rat problems until someone persisted in having it tested on black Alexandrine rats and discovered that a dose roughly five hundred times as great was needed. The man who raised the question did so from a background quite unrelated to biology."

Himself the product of a liberal college, John Crawford Woodhouse, trained in chemistry, expert in biology, director of research workers in a number of fields, and investigator of world problems in terms of nutrition and agricutlural production, cannot help reflecting on the values that Dartmouth should emphasize in this post-war world, especially as his son Bob has entered as a freshman this year and another son, John, hopes to two years from now.

As an inquirier in the field of education, he is like President Dickey, the faculty, the student body, and the alumni—he asks simple questions: what is success, how can it be won, what should one study, how can one be sure of happiness?

As a scientist and an executive in a longestablished and large corporation, Dr. Woodhouse has his own point of view about education. He begins by examining what he believes a fallacy still popular today: money-success-happiness; millionaire-supersuccess-ecstasy. Happiness and usefulness cannot come through mere wealth. Nor can they be assured by a narrow training aimed only and immediately at financial security.

Unsound as the basis for education are studies motivated by mere security, which presumably impels a large proportion of the 330 Dartmouth juniors and seniors now majoring in economics, and mere security should not be the criterion for selecting a college or a curriculum.

"Might it not be," asks Dr. Woodhouse, "that many men going into the so-called practical courses to the exclusion of broader education do so because they do not realize that a college man is not valuable just because he has salted down a large number of specific facts? Unlike a carpenter, he neither attains maximum usefulness nor achieves his maximum success in his twenties or thirties. A man who concentrates on utilitarian subjects, in the narrow sense of the word, to the exclusion of the aesthetic, philosophic and religious, may be unconsciously assuming that he will not grow after thirty and that his best work will be done before thirty."

But Dr. Woodhouse hastens to say that he is not interested, except incidentally, in the aesthetics taught at Dartmouth, the liberal college. He is primarily interested in work to be done in a troubled world and how it may be accomplished best with interior satisfaction to the doer. If a man can contribute ably to that work, a corporation like Du Pont has a place for him and adequate financial remuneration. The stress for mere personal security leaves him cold. Young scientists applying for a position may explain that the reason why they are choosing a large corporation rather than some other place to work is that they are impressed with the fact that it is diversified, large, and long established and that they can feel more cheerful in its employ because if a depression should come they would be less dependent on their individual accomplishments, whereas in other businesses less well entrenched, they might be dismissed.

"I believe that you would be dissatisfied with any openings we have at the moment," is Dr. Woodhouse's tactful comment to such men as he rises from his chair. The motivation is wrong, and a college graduate seeking a research position with such words gives himself away, his inadequate approach to life and his lack of curiosity and sense of responsibility about the world today, characteristic of men who are clerks by temperament.

In speaking about successful education —and John Woodhouse considers that Dartmouth educated him successfully in terms of fundamentals—he has some definite ideas as to what studies are good for all undergraduates, but he prefers to speak only in terms of the education of future scientists.

His main theme is: 1. A liberal education is not a pleasant and useless luxury for a future scientist; it is a necessity.

2. A chemist who insists on being only a chemist can occupy only a limited position in the present-day world. He must have a good understanding of, let's say, biology, botany, pathology, mathematics, physics, and geography.

3. He must have imagination and intuition.

4. He must be articulate.

Nor is John Woodhouse eccentric in such a point of view. "Not long ago a group of us at Du Pont who are in charge of direction of research were discussing what would be best for our sons on the assumption that they were going to follow in our footsteps," says Dr. Woodhouse, "and not a man was in favor of a training completely scientific. That is, all of us wanted our sons to go first to a liberal college and not to rely alone on even the most excellent technical schools. The consensus was that technical schools and graduate schools of the leading universities serve their purposes best after a scientist has had some years of a liberal college."

And leading technical schools make very evident that they share this view by the arrangements they provide in normal times for the transfer of undergraduates from the better liberal arts colleges and the admission to advanced work of men who have graduated from such colleges.

One of the most vexing and persistent problem? which Dr. Woodhouse faces at Du Pont is the problem of communication. Too many potentially able scientists remain negative because they are inarticulate, incapable of telling fellow scientists what they are doing and what it means in terms of other fields. They can neither speak intelligibly enough nor write clearly enough. And sometimes communication is at a standstill when scientists hear the presentation of a thesis expressed in a vocabulary and a thought—length slightly different from their own. Too often thoughts are obscured with words. A scientist cannot speak to a business man who wishes to expedite the development of technical discoveries.

"A future scientist should take English —all the English he can possibly get," is John Woodhouse's conviction.

That French and German are much overemphasized is another of his convictions. "Germany will hardly play her former role in science in the predictable future," he says. He would stress Russian because of our need to understand as much as we can of developments there. And he has a strong liking for Latin as the basis for English and as a logical and disciplined language in and of itself. A transition to any of the Romance languages would be easy for one trained in Latin.

He feels that no good scientist should be without history, for it gives perspective. Over and over again Dr. Woodhouse reverts to examples of how "intuition" and judgment which the liberal college should develop as a result of its humanistic training, combined with sound scientific knowledge and the ability to understand and communicate, is what counts for accomplishment in an enterprise like Du Pont.

"It can't be entirely accidental that many of the great inventions in a field come when it is not well enough developed to be too scientific, and when reasoning from other fields has to be applied to its problems," remarks Dr. Woodhouse. That may be why he and his colleagues are so much interested in chemicals as applied to insects and other pests. There is plenty of work to be done on such chemicals as DDT, which will kill most bugs but not aphids and is toxic to some crops. It is one of the problems at Du Pont to find out whether these insecticides, though harmless enough to men, may not turn out to be cumulative poisons. In brief, the chief goal is to find synthetics which will attack only food-eating bugs and ignore beneficial ones. Presumably it can be solved.

John Woodhouse's desire to keep his perspective in terms of human values may be one reason why he likes mountains (Dartmouth's liberal-arts education did not frown on a chemistry major who headed occasionally for Moosilauke). The village he likes best is Chocorua, New Hampshire, and the city which he likes least is New York. New York does not have much canoeing, fishing, or hunting, or many mountains. His two sons, Bob, Dartmouth '51, and John, an applicant for the class of 1953, think well of their father as a mountain climber, but the father thinks better of his sons, for during his vacation this year he had a goal of climbing a mountain only every 48 hours but during theirs they climbed a mountain every 24. The research executive who during the war put in seven days a week, not to mention evenings, who has some sixty patents in chemistry, chemical engineering, and applied biological subjects, likes to reflect on the detachment and energy the White Mountains can give.

"I like Chocorua because of its simplicity," he observes. "A doctor whom I know there makes only a fifth of what he could easily make in a large city, but he has a more independent, perhaps a more useful, and certainly a more enjoyable life. He understands life about him in the large and sees his fellowmen against the backgrounds of their homes and businesses. And so he lives well. He reminds me of some of the European scientists who have come to this country. Though they have less equipment to work with than Americans—infinitely less than we think we require—they seem to turn out good work and are quick in seeing implications, which means that they have a larger cultural background. They are more than products of scientific schools; they seem like products of a liberal college with rich cultural backgrounds. And they seem happy with so little."

JOHN C. WOODHOUSE '21, research director for Du Pont, whose views on the educating of future scientists are presented in this interview article.

LABORATORY VIEWS OF TWO OF THE CHEMISTRY (LEFT) AND PHYSICS COURSES OFFERED IN DARTMOUTH'S STRONG SCIENCE PROGRAM

A BALANCED EDUCATIONAL DIET, as advocated by Dr. Woodhouse, is given to future scientists in humanities courses such as this, taught by Arthur Dewing '25, Professor of English, in Baker's Treasure Room.