Dan Arp Oral History Interview, October 3, 2019

CHRIS PETERSEN: Today is October 3, 2019. I'm with Dan Arp here in the Valley Library, and Professor Arp is an emeritus faculty member, distinguished professor, and a former dean of two different colleges. We'll get into all of that, talking a lot about his OSU experience, but we'll endeavor to capture a complete picture of his life as best as we can, so I'll ask you: where were you born?

DAN ARP: I was born in Sutton, Nebraska. Sutton is a small community in south central Nebraska, an agricultural community. I grew up on a farm in Nebraska.

CP: In the same location?

DA: Same location, yeah. The farm was a mile and a half from the city. City? Town. From the town. That was the high school I attended, was Sutton High School, elementary school. Grew up on a farm and loved it.

CP: Tell me about your parents and your family background.

DA: Let's see-Dad, of course, was a farmer. He had a very diversified farm in Nebraska. At that time, that was not uncommon, but he was raising corn, wheat, alfalfa, sorghum, grass, and much of that went into the livestock that we produced on the farm, both cattle and hogs. He was never losing a lot of money in one commodity, but he was never making a lot in the other commodity, but it all worked out in the end. Mom started out as a schoolteacher, so she had a couple of years of college and then taught at a one-room school out in the country, country school they called them at the time. She was doing kindergarten through eighth grade, maybe one or two students per class. She did that for I think about seven or eight years and the farm had grown to the point-and by that time there were three or four of us kids running around the place, so she 00:02:00stopped that and became full-time mom and farmer with Dad. I'm the second of five kids, so an older brother, and then two younger sisters, and the last one's a brother. A big family. Not unusual of course at that time growing up in Nebraska. A good group. That's a little bit of Dad's profession. Dad was the sort of guy who got involved in things, so he was president of the school board. He was in farm bureau. He was engaged politically and in all sorts of things. Mom was also engaged but not quite to the same level that Dad was, and I think the kids all kind of inherited a little bit of that. We would also get pretty involved. As a kid growing up, got involved in activities. Cub Scouts I think was the first thing outside of school and church activities that we got involved 00:03:00in. I do remember-I guess I was about ten years old, and Dad said, okay, now you've got to choose between 4-H and Boy Scouts, but we just don't have the bandwidth to do it all with five kids. I chose 4-H. It was a great path for me. 4-H was a really important part of my life growing up as a kid. It gave me a lot of opportunities. Let's see, what else?

CP: Tell me more about that connection with 4-H.

DA: Dad was a leader. My dad had gone through 4-H and before he had any kids he took over a leadership role in 4-H and so we grew up before we were old enough to be in 4-H going off to 4-H meetings with Dad. When we were old enough we, of course, sure we're going to join. We learned the pledge before we became 4-H members. The club that Dad ran was called Eastside Livestock 4-H Club. Eastside 00:04:00of the county, so that was the name that he gave it. He would get some of the other parents to help out, but he managed the whole thing. It was mostly around livestock, but of course the great thing about 4-H is you can do all sorts of different projects within your club. You just have to find somebody who thinks they know something about electricity and then you can do an electricity project. My older brother did sheep. I did hogs and cattle. But I also did rope and electricity and, gosh, what else? I can't even remember. I did welding one year. All sorts of different projects. So it gave you a chance to learn different skills. 4-H is one of those organizations that perfectly suited my personality in its blend of independence and teamwork. You were a part of the club. You got together and had club activities and that was important. But you 00:05:00also were responsible for your independent projects. For me, it was just right. Dad was a leader; I think it was 35 years before he finally stepped down. The group at the time in the club we gave him a small, kind of a miniature version of a hog panel that you would use to guide hogs around and they'd all written their names on it. I still have that. I'm very proud of that.

My sister followed in that tradition. She's a couple of years younger than I am. She didn't do a livestock club, of course, but she did the club that was more oriented towards the girls in 4-H and took care of their sewing and cooking and so on. She also was a leader for something in the neighborhood of 30 or 40 years before she finally said okay this is now something for the younger moms to take care of. 4-H has always been an important part of our lives. I'm not sure I 00:06:00fully appreciated, in fact I did not fully appreciate at the time its connection to the land grant university. It was a youth organization in the county. Looking back at it, we would interact with the county extension agent who was in charge of 4-H. I just assumed that was his job was 4-H, but of course he had a much bigger job. 4-H also helped me in college because when I went to college, I applied for a scholarship through 4-H. It was actually the Union Pacific Railroad who made the money available, but it was through that 4-H connection that I was offered that scholarship. We'll probably come back to that point later on, but that turned out to-is historical accident, right? So much of our lives are historical accidents and that was one of those because it set me down 00:07:00a path. In order to accept that scholarship I had to be in-the major had to be either in the College of Agricultural Sciences or in Home Economics. I did not see a career path for me in Home Economics, but I was able to manufacture one in the College of Ag Sciences. I wasn't headed towards a career in agriculture at that time. In that particular moment in time I thought I was going to be a physician. But there was a major in the College of Ag Sciences called Agricultural Biochemistry. The Biochemistry piece got my attention and I talked to the advisor there and said this is what I'm doing. Do you have any issue with this? He says no. It makes perfect sense to me. You can switch to a chemistry major next year. That's what I did.

I'm getting a little ahead of the story here. I did switch to a chemistry major, but before I did that I had the opportunity to start working in a research lab 00:08:00in Agricultural Biochemistry and that's really an incredibly important part in my development college, graduate school. That gave me that pathway. I was doing it because of my interest in science but also because I needed to make some money to help pay for college expenses and I started in that lab washing dishes and the person that I was working with kept challenging me to the next step. Within three years I was running complete experiments that involved planting soy beans, growing them, testing them for a settling reduction assay, which is a way of assaying how much nitrogen fixation they were doing, keeping the records on it and doing the statistics at the end of the experiment. That opportunity to get into that laboratory was critical in all the decisions that followed. I continued to work there for three years.

The mentor there-I'll mention his name now and maybe we'll come back to it later-but it was Bob Klucas. He was a fairly young faculty member at the time 00:09:00and my advisor was the one who directed me to him. He contacted me in the summer. I let the advisor know if you hear of anything I'd like to have a chance to work in a lab. He contacted me in the summer. Summers I spent back on the farm working. That's how summers were spent: back on the farm helping Dad. Get this letter and it says hey we got this new guy. He's interested. Dad goes, well, you better drive up to Lincoln and meet with him so he knows you're interested. It's a 70 mile drive, so it's not out of the question. Okay, so jump in the car. Make an appointment. Drive up. Meet with him. This Bob who becomes my mentor goes well, why'd you drive all the way up here for this though? I said, well-. Well, no of course you got the job. I'm glad to see you're showing some interest in it.

That fall started in the lab and again from there he just kept drawing me along. 00:10:00Really had a lot to do then with the decision to go to graduate school. He just kind of kept putting those-it's almost like putting carrots out there or putting seeds out and not telling me what I should or shouldn't do, not sitting down and having long conversations with me about well these are your skills this is what you ought to do. It was more about well, you want to try this? Yeah, okay. Then, we'll try this. Oh, okay. [Laughs]. Next thing I knew I realized that I loved research. Stop me, if I'm-but to go back in that story, when I was a kid growing up in the farm at age nine, I wanted a chemistry set. I don't know why I wanted a chemistry set, but I was pretty sure I wanted a chemistry set. Mom and Dad looked at it and went okay, but it says here age ten and above. They went and asked the high school chemistry teacher who was also the principal of the school what do you think? Do you think it'll be okay? He said, yeah I think that a 00:11:00nine-year-old could probably manage this okay.

I get my chemistry set. I set it up down in the basement. Mind you, this is not a finished basement. This was the place we stored the foods and potatoes and so on. I had a little desk down there. I set up my chemistry set and I'd go down and play with things every once in a while. Did that for several years. About that same time, I think I realized I had somewhat of a penchant of ability here. I was writing papers fourth and fifth grade where you'd have an assignment to write something. I was explaining the difference between elements and atoms and molecules and I don't think my teachers really understood the difference at the time. But I was, oh, I get this. This makes sense to me. all those things built together then to direct me to science and ultimately towards research. To be 00:12:00fair, I kind of lost my way for a while. As I was finishing up high school, I didn't really know what I wanted to do. I didn't know the pathways. That might be something we come back to, but how critical it is to show students pathways that you can follow. You can do this. you don't have to-there's one thing you can do. I didn't have anyone around me who had completed a Ph.D., who was doing research for a living, or who had done research for a living. I didn't even know that was a possibility really. Guidance counselor at high school says given your grades and your personality you ought to think about being a medical doctor. I went, oh okay. That sounds pretty good. It worked out really well, because I knew, we're now in 1972, I knew that in order to get into medical school I had 00:13:00to take science courses and get good grades. I liked science, so that made me work hard so I'd get good grades. That set me up well for going to graduate school in the future. It didn't take long before I kinda figured out that I didn't like the sight of my own blood, let alone other people's blood so what was I thinking about here in terms of a medical career?

Fortunately, by that time I'm also starting to really enjoy the work I'm doing in Bob Klucas's laboratory and doing well in my chemistry courses and then hit my passion which was biochemistry and still is biochemistry. Maybe this segues a little bit into Linus Pauling. I didn't know it at the time, but I still remember this moment in biochemistry class where they showed us a crystal structure of a protein. It was the one that Pauling had done. I didn't really appreciate that at the time. I saw that structure and I was just amazed by it. I 00:14:00thought that could occupy my attention for a very long time, learning how that works and how that structure came about. From that moment on, I was pretty sure I wanted to be a biochemist. That gets us through some of the early development and some of those choices and then off to graduate school.

CP: Let's back up a little bit.

DA: Yeah.

CP: It sounds to me like the earliest-if we were to crystallize the earliest interest in science it begins with that chemistry set. Where do you think that came from?

DA: I don't know where it came from specifically. I've always had a curiosity about how things work and trying to understand how the pieces fit together and in an evidentiary way. So what's the evidence that leads us to believe that this 00:15:00is how things work? I don't know where it came from. My mom's still alive, an incredibly smart person, but didn't have that opportunity to develop it in that way. My dad was very inquisitive but not a hard-core scientist. I do remember that he had books on his bookshelf that he collected, well, actually after he graduated from college, books about plant pathogens and so he approached things in very much of a learning way. What's the evidence that leads us to believe that this is the right way to raise cattle? And was always reading the farm journals and things to get better ideas about how to do things. I think it was a combination of traits that I picked up from my dad and my mom together, but 00:16:00again it wasn't like they could take me to this research scientist that they knew socially or something like that. I'm not entirely sure how it got started but fortunately I had teachers along the way who saw that and helped nurture it to the extent that they could.

That same chemistry teacher, high school chemistry teacher and principal, was still there when I took high school chemistry and so he nurtured that. My wrestling couch was the physics teacher. He was probably a little bit better wrestling coach than he was physics teacher, but he was a pretty good physics teacher and helped us to learn physics through experience, so hands on, which at that time was a bit of a radical way to approach it. At that time, you're supposed to be sitting in rows being lectured to and learning. High school math 00:17:00teacher who challenged us, again, we're in small farm community. There were 52 students I think it was in my graduating class, and the math teacher was pushing us to learn advanced calculus. He took us through differential calculus and was moving us into integral calculus. When I got to college, I was well ahead of my peers in terms of my science background. A variety of things came together to help stimulate that interest in science.

CP: Was college always in your sights?

DA: Yes, I believe it was, much like 4-H was always in my sights. I don't know why, but it was just-I was never told you will go to college, but the fact that Dad had gone to college and Mom had gone to college I think it was expected and I knew I wanted to go to college. I was tracked into the college prep courses in 00:18:00high school. I wasn't off taking the shop courses. It was pretty clear that other people thought that that's where I should be headed. I was always ready to go to college. The choice to go to University of Nebraska-Lincoln was pretty-I mean, again, you just look at the paths other people are taking. Nobody was going out of state. There were some smaller colleges in the state that several people were going to, but for me the opportunity seemed better at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, so that was a pretty easy choice for me. It's also where my dad had gone and earned his degree. I do a little aside on that: Dad was a member of Alpha Gamma Rho. If you look at the Greek letters they kind of spell out "A-R-P." Dad had been in Alpha Gamma Rho for a little while and his mom, my 00:19:00grandmother, came to Lincoln and was pretty impressed that my dad had his name on the building already as a second year student in college. So he was Alpha Gamma Rho. At any rate, all these little signals all the way along that I'm going to go to college.

CP: What was that transition like coming from a small community to a big school?

DA: It was tricky. It was tricky. I was fortunate all along that I had an older brother who was blazing a lot of these paths for me. He also went to the University of Nebraska. He got into a dormitory and he encouraged me to go to the same dormitory, which I did. That helped to have some connection. Yeah, it was a pretty big deal because all of a sudden, I'm in this different world, some of which makes sense to me, but parts of which don't.

Again, the science things made pretty good sense to me, especially that first 00:20:00couple of years. There were things that I had been exposed to already in high school, so I was able to keep up with the studies. I also took some courses-I got a letter before I started my freshman year from the university based on your test scores you might want to join our honors logic course. Okay, sure, I'll do that. It was a disaster. I had no idea what the guy was talking about and managed to eek out I think it was a B+ in that course. Mix of experiences. My days were pretty much classes, work in the laboratory, and study in the evening. Weekends I spent courting my soon-to-be wife. I would drive back to Sutton, again it's about an hour and a half drive, and spend time working on the farm during the day and then dating my soon-to-be wife at night.

CP: She was also from Sutton.

DA: She also was from Sutton. We grew up about 8 miles apart and started eyeing each other I guess as I was finishing up my senior year and she was at that time a junior so came back and we got married between my sophomore and junior year. So we were kids. We didn't know it at the time, but that's what people did so we did it. We've now been married 45 years.

CP: That was not uncommon back then, necessarily, to be married before you graduated from college?

DA: Yeah, no not at all. It was probably a little bit, no this is unfair-unusual that we got married and she wasn't pregnant, but yeah. Often that was the driver that would get people to get married a little earlier. No, no. we just wanted to be with each other, and she's just been an amazing supporter of my career all these 45 years in different ways. If we look at the administrative career, she 00:22:00was there supporting me. I'm jumping ahead a little bit, but especially in the Honors College and the College of Ag Sciences, it's a team project and we would show up at football games and if you know how that works you got the Valley end zone and you walk into this room with 100-150 people, and it got to the point where she would, okay I'll go take care of these people, you go meet with those other people you need to meet with. She'd go meet with the donors who became friends and take care of that while I'm off meeting with another group of donors and we'd get together and share, okay what'd you learn. That's just one way where she's been supportive of my career over the years. Yeah, so where are we?

CP: Well, so, we're at the University of Nebraska and it sounds like you found a way to game the system a little bit.

DA: Yes, yeah to be fair, yeah [laughs].

CP: To get the money that you had to work in the direction you wanted to go. It 00:23:00sounds-was chemistry always the ambition as far as a major?

DA: Yes.

CP: Okay.

DA: Yeah, I was always interested in chemistry. I enjoyed chemistry. It made sense to me. I saw lots of career paths in chemistry. It was the choice for me as an undergraduate degree.

CP: How did that connection with that laboratory come about?

DA: The laboratory that I worked in as an undergraduate.

CP: Yeah.

DA: In the summer between my freshman and sophomore years I heard from my advisor in agriculture biochemistry that this guy was looking for someone part-time to do some work. I responded to that and he took me in and saw some potential there that I didn't know I had at that time, really. Again, the most important thing he did for me was show me the pathways, show me the opportunities. Then when it became time for me to think about next steps, he was 00:24:00able to guide me to graduate schools that made sense for me to apply to and go to based on my interests. That's where my interests in nitrogen fixation began as well. That's what he did in the laboratory. He was studying soybeans in particular, which enter into a symbiosis with the bacterium and provide the plant with its nitrogen needs. We were trying to understand what's called senescence, so as the plant's growing there comes a point where the bacterium is no longer providing nitrogen. It senescences. It stops doing that. If we could extend that just a little bit, even a few days, might that make a difference in terms of the nitrogen profile of that plant and the soils that they're growing in. That was the work that we did and were studying at that time. That led to my very first scientific publication. A paper that Bob published but he was kind 00:25:00enough to put my name on that paper as an undergraduate. I had done a lot of work on it, but I wasn't the intellectual driver. Normally you're kind of looking for more of that intellectual contribution and I was really more the research technician on it, but it made a big difference because it said to me you can do this.

CP: By the end of the Nebraska years you have decided you want to be an academic.

DA: [Laughs]. Well, not quite. That was a path that I saw, but farming gets in your blood. Farming is a career that you love and even with all its ups and downs and the challenges that it presents it's hard to walk away from farming. Even at that point I still was struggling between a farming career, which would 00:26:00have plopped us right back into the community that I grew up in. My wife's family, she has a huge family there as well with cousins and everyone farming. You could see that life. It was pretty easy to see how that would play out. This other one was still a bit of a mystery. Though I'd learned a lot about it, it was still-I don't know, I've never been a professor, I didn't know anyone who's been a professor. Even as I was graduating and had been admitted to the University of Wisconsin-Madison into a very prestigious biochemistry program, I'm still thinking maybe I'll go back and farm. My dad, bless him, well, hmm, okay, well let's go and take a look at what this might look like. He drove me and said maybe you could rent this feed lot from this person I know who's trying to get out from under and doesn't want to do it anymore. I'm looking at that and 00:27:00going, huh.

So I could work for this person for 20 years or 10 years and maybe eventually be able to buy it and so on and so forth, or I can go and take a chance on this new adventure. I took the chance. From that point never really looked back at a farming career as something that I really wanted to do, but clearly it has influenced my career. You see where I end up then is Dean of Ag Sciences. Now I'm off to graduate school. Looked at three different universities, and actually one of them was Oregon State University for graduate school. There was a particular individual that I would have worked for, and his name was Harold Evans. Harold was part of that nitrogen fixation community at that time. He was one of two National Academy members on campus at that time but he wasn't taking students. My mentor at University of Nebraska-Lincoln had worked for him so he 00:28:00was able to check into that, and yeah I'm sorry not taking students.

Then I went to Michigan State and University of Wisconsin. Both were very good in biochemistry and particularly plant biochemistry and said okay. Visited both. Both great universities, but it was a pretty easy choice for us to go to the University of Wisconsin into the biochemistry program and ended up working into a lab-Bob Burris. Bob also a National Academy member, eventually earned a National Medal of Science, so a very distinguished individual but also just the most wonderful mentor that you could imagine. He just knew how to bring the best out in people without beating it out of them. So he was really great. I also met a life-long friend who had a connection back to Nebraska but we didn't meet in Nebraska. We both worked in the same building. We actually washed dishes 00:29:00opposite each other's walls. He was on that side and I was on this side but separated by three years. His name's Paul Ludden. Paul and I became great friends and our careers developed together. Paul enters into this story again when I get my first job at University of California Riverside, because that's where he had a job. That's another part of the story, the great friends you meet in graduate school, some of whom become life-long friends. We just finished a week in Southern Utah visiting national parks together. Where are we now?

CP: We're at Wisconsin. We're transitioning into becoming a graduate student.

DA: Transitioning to graduate school. This was, to the rest of the world, Wisconsin and Nebraska are both in the Midwest. If you're from Nebraska, 00:30:00Wisconsin doesn't feel like the Midwest that you know. it feels pretty different. At that time, we're now 1976, and in Nebraska there were two political parties: Democrats and Republicans. My parents were Republican, so that was where my connection was at that time. I like to tell people only half-jokingly when I moved to Madison there were also two political parties: the Democrats and the Socialists. A conservative in there was, boy this felt really different. But it also helped open up the world, open up our eyes and expose us to even more than what I'd started to be exposed to at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Now I had these paths, had ideas about things that I could do, but wow. I mean, now it's just so much bigger. The world just got bigger for me. 00:31:00I worked in a lab, so, you know graduate student, now the challenge is can I really do this? Because I get in this lab and these guys are so smart. The fellow graduate students. I'm young, but they're all so smart. They know so much. They know the literature inside out and I could never be like this. You dig in. You do the best you can. You hope you'll make it through. I got through qualifying exams. Okay, I've got that done.

Then there was this iconic moment: there had been a really esoteric, it seemed important at the time, it's a very esoteric question about how the enzyme nitrogenase was working, a certain aspect of it. It was something that people had talked about and I sat down and thought about it and I thought you know if this theory is right then this ought to be happening and we ought to be able to test that experimentally. I couldn't quite trust myself, so I shared it with the other graduate students and the next thing I know they're going oh, yeah. I 00:32:00don't think they pushed me out of the way, I think I stepped out of the way as these upper-classmen were then at the chalkboard working through all the details of how this experiment would be done, but it didn't come from me. So, I'm going, okay chances are I can make this work. That was a really important moment I guess in my confidence-building as a graduate student. Then went on and finished the graduate degree about four and a half years. Finished that up and published the papers you're supposed to publish. A great experience. Had our first child, so our daughter was born in Madison.

CP: Did you do any teaching during this time?

DA: Just a little bit. The laboratory courses where you'd serve as the Teaching Assistant in a laboratory course. That was the experience I got as a graduate student. But it's pretty good experience. You're not lecturing but you're organizing. You've got to get everything ready. This is biochemistry, so it's at 00:33:00the interface between-it's not organisms that are living so you have to deal, so they want to stay alive. It's not chemistry where these are all chemicals that you can mix and they're fine. It's at that interface. So, these are now these proteins that Linus Pauling is studying that once you get them out of a living organism they basically want to die. They want to de-nature and go away and you're trying to-how do we keep these alive, that's not quite the right word-how to keep them active, so the temperatures and the salts and the PH's and all these things that you have to manage to get these proteins and doing some assays with them and some tests and show the students. It was a great way to learn. But no lecturing, no formal lecturing.

CP: Tell me a little bit more about Burris, working for him and him as a person.

DA: Yeah, so he was in his early 60's when I came into the laboratory. There was speculation that I might be his last graduate student, so it takes a few years. In fact, I wasn't. I think he accepted three or four after me and saw them through to completion. He showed by example. He got to work early, stayed there-he didn't stay until eight in the evening, but he put in a full day, worked hard. He was respectful of everybody, even if your ideas didn't make sense and everybody else knew it. He didn't make fun of you. He didn't ridicule you. He'd just talk about why it didn't make sense. Then you'd move on, you went, oh yeah, right and you'd learn and go on and do the next one. He valued 00:35:00people. Science was important to him, that's what he did in his life. He valued that, no question. He also knew that you didn't have to be a scientist to be valuable as a person. He didn't dismiss people just because they weren't scientists, if that makes sense.

Also, the way he ran his lab. Again, he gave people a great deal of latitude to develop, to bring your projects along. His job was to nurture it, but it wasn't something where he scripted it on a daily basis. You wouldn't sit down with him every day and go well, here's the results from yesterday what should I do today? No. We would get together as a group once a week and we would each talk about what we had done in the preceding week. Then he'd comment on it. The other students and post-docs and folks would comment on it. Then, I think it was three 00:36:00or four times a year we would write up our two or three pages of here's what I've accomplished, here's where I want to go with it. Then we'd meet with him one-on-one and do that. But it was also the case that his door was always open. You didn't ever feel like well, I can't bother him. No, you could bother him. You could pop in and ask a question. It was a great, again, it fit my personality perfectly. This was the way I wanted to work. I didn't want to be told on a daily basis this is what you should do.

But I also needed some nurturing. I needed someone to help me know that I was on the right path, that what I was doing was making sense. He was great. That was the method I adopted with my graduate students. It worked. You'd get the students who would be a little bit perturbed at first that I wasn't telling them 00:37:00or giving them that daily, they were expecting daily advise from me on what to do. I don't have that much advice to give. You've got to figure this out to a large extent. Once they realized that the goal of earning a Ph.D. is really to become competent at doing independent research, that the way to do that is to become independent. You're not going to get that if somebody's telling you on a daily basis this is what you need to do. Once they figured that out and realized at some point I gotta figure this-then they were fine. But at first it was hard on some of the students. That's graduate school. A great experience. Madison was a great town to live in. The experience of the other graduate students was wonderful. Again, life-long friends built there. I still stay in touch with a lot of those folks. Finished that up and now it's time to think about a 00:38:00post-doctoral opportunity. Then, as now, you don't go straight into academic jobs. You're mostly going to go and do a post-doctoral stint someplace. The possibility, and I try to remember who raised this possibility with me and I think it was Paul Ludden, this friend that I mentioned, who said you know there's this bright, fairly young, nitrogenase biochemist in Germany that you might want to work with him.

At that time, most people were coming the other way. You had Europeans, not so many Asians, though that was starting at that time, were coming to the U.S. to work. The thought of leaving the U.S. and go and postdoc in another country was a little backwards. I went home and talked to my wife about it, pretty much expecting her to shut it down. No way I'm taking our eight-month-old daughter to 00:39:00go live in Germany for a year and a half away from grandparents and so on, and I think her first question was, well, this isn't forever, is it? I go, no, of course not, it'd be for, you know-Oh, well, well that'd be kind of fun. So I was, okay, once I got back up again and realized this was a possibility in her mind as well, applied for a NATO postdoctoral fellowship and received that and now this person I want to work with, he just has to have lab space. He doesn't have to pay my salary. Contacted him and he said, well, sure when could you start? Then it all built from there. Again, what an incredibly transformative experience. Our world grew again.

There were three things that came out of that in terms of our personal experience. One was the scientific training and the opportunity I got there, but 00:40:00also what we learned about the rest of the world and especially how the rest of the world was seeing the U.S. at that time. We had just elected an actor and cowboy as president, Ronald Reagan. They were all quite curious about that and so on. We were the first space shuttle. They were all quite amazed that we could do that and so on. A lot of these things were happening, and they knew more about U.S. politics than most people in the United States did. I think it was the first time I fully appreciated how influential the United States was. Later on, the Olympics and the Olympics were in Russia and we said no we're not going to go, and other countries followed suit and so seeing the role that the U.S. 00:41:00had in leadership. I really didn't fully appreciate that when I was in the U.S. The other thing that you learn is about yourself. You learn so much about what you can do and how you can deal with this challenge. Germany, a very western country. Very westernized, right? Very much like the United States, but very different at the same time. Language, for example, this is another bit of an aside, but in high school we were told that you needed a language to get into the University of Nebraska and the only language offered at my high school was Spanish. I took two years of Spanish in high school. Got to college and they said no, you don't have to have a language to get in, but if your degree is in chemistry you have to have a language to get out. Here are your choices: German and Russian. I wasn't going to do Russian, so I chose German. Did two years, 00:42:00assuming I'd never use it.

Now here's an opportunity to go to Germany and oh, I wish I'd worked a little harder at remembering some of that German. My wife, on the other hand, had grown up in this small farming community speaking German. Her family, Germany heritage. Their church services were in German. We figured, well, between the two of us we'll manage. Then, of course, we're told, oh, you know everybody in Germany speaks English. You really don't have to worry about it. Okay, we're good. We get there and we no more than get off the plane and it suddenly hits you: yes, these people can mostly speak English but it's a foreign language. You're asking them to speak a foreign language in their own country. We worked very hard to speak German as much as we could. Wanda, my wife, had been away from Germany for six generations. When she would speak, people would look at her 00:43:00with this funny look. They recognized the dialect, but it wasn't quite right. They were pretty sure where she came from in Germany, but it wasn't quite right. It had gotten arrested and then started to evolve in this farming community. It was a great experience and one that I have shared with students as often as they'll let me, how important it is to get out of the country and live out of the country, not just go to if it's Tuesday I must be in a Munich tour but actually live outside the country.

CP: I'm curious to know what it was like specifically to be in West Germany. This is the period of time where it was two Germanies.

DA: That's a wonderful question. It was wild. We were only 100 miles, something like that, from the border. We were in the small town of Erlangen right next to 00:44:00Nuremberg. It's in Bavaria. The border wasn't very far away and it was an armed border at that time and we would hear these stories from people-this was just common, everybody knew these stories-about how the machine guns weren't pointed towards West Germany, they were pointed towards East Germany and so on and so forth. You could visit Berlin. You could drive there, but they timed when you started and when you finished the trip. If you were off, you know, when you got to Berlin, if it took you longer than it was supposed to, there were going to be some questions to answer. It was that kind of a situation. Mayors, people who would run for mayor of a village along the border, would campaign on I'm going to reunite the Germanies. Everybody's like yeah right, you know. I left there, we left there, believing that the Berlin Wall would never come down. I just 00:45:00could not see a set of circumstances that would make that happen. Of course, ten years later it's gone. It was really interesting. It was also when we got off the plane, so this is in, so we flew into Nuremberg, the first time we had been in Germany, we get off the plane, and there are U.S. tanks going down the street. That's also the first time we kind of come to realize oh this is yeah, we don't really occupy Germany but we're a pretty strong military presence still in Germany in 1981, early '81. Yes, yeah, an interesting question. You definitely felt that.

CP: Well, you finish the post-doc and it's time to get your first job, and it's in Southern California.

DA: Right. Then, as now, the challenge is matching your expertise with a job 00:46:00that becomes available. You have this list of where you want to work, but if they don't have the job it doesn't matter and it might be ten years before they have the job, if ever. You kind of learn, one of the things you accept if you want to follow an academic career is you can't get too choosy about where you're going to live. There were probably parts of the country we would've said no to, but Southern California wasn't one of them. I had an aunt and uncle living in Bakersfield. And, my good friend Paul Ludden, that's the first academic job he took was at the University of California Riverside. He was there for two and a half years and was able to go to Madison, Wisconsin, so back where he got his graduate degree and where his wife grew up and his job was available. I was 00:47:00looking for a job. They flew me from Germany to Riverside to interview me for the job. They liked me and I liked the department and so I took the job, and I took their house, which they hadn't sold yet, and I took their dog. No, I'm kidding about the dog. But I did end up in Paul's laboratory as well. I kind of followed in his footsteps there. They had a certain expectation about what I was going to be like based on what my friend had done. And I did okay. I did fine.

CP: Tell me about those years.

DA: Good years. Really good years in many ways. University of California at Riverside, part of the UC system, so they knew how to run a research university and really took good care of people. Their infrastructure in terms of just managing the day-to-day running of university was very good. I didn't really 00:48:00appreciate it at the time because I didn't know what it took to run a university, but they did a good job. Enjoyed the work there. Was able to establish a research career. I started my teaching career there and enjoyed the colleagues that I worked with. I had a very supportive department head. I had the opportunity to interact with a lot of good people. Socially it worked out really well because we entered into a group of friends that all had young children the same age, a kind of diverse couple. Let's see, one Air Force pilot at the time, one other academic, two other academics, another hospital dietician. So it was a diverse group, but we bonded and so socially that was really good. We still get together with those folks. Every other year we vacation together, so strong ties were developed there and was starting to, how 00:49:00do I say it, I guess recognize an ability in administration, so recognizing that on a committee assignment I could usually figure out how to make it work where my colleagues, who were smart people, would often just kind of stumble through them, just couldn't seem to figure out, or didn't want to. I'm not sure which it was, but they weren't doing it. So, why would I leave?

We were there seven years, and it was quality of life. The iconic moment there-so our daughter's now five years old, six years old, no, yeah five years old, six years old starting AYSO soccer and my wife's driving 45 minutes to go 10 miles down the freeway to AYSO soccer practice that lasts 35 or 40 minutes and then because traffic had let up it only took 30 minutes to get back the 10 00:50:00miles. We just looked at each other and went this-I mean do we want to retire here was the conversation. Well, no, so then what. Well, we need to start thinking about where we might want to move to. Riverside was struggling with pollution, air pollution was pretty bad then. Crime didn't affect us personally, fortunately, but it was there. We knew that there were metal guards up at the high schools already at that time, and traffic. A lot of factors that we just couldn't see changing in a timeframe that would work for us. Then made the hard decision that it's time to start looking for something else. That's when the job here came up.

CP: Scientifically things were going well for you.

DA: They were. Yeah, very well. Yeah very well. I was really fortunate early on with the grant writing. Something clicked with me and writing grants. Not that I 00:51:00didn't get them turned down. I did. But early on in the career the first three grants that I wrote all got funded. That was unheard of. I sent one to NSF, one to USDA, and one to, what'd the other one go to? Oh, DOE, the Department of Energy. All three got funded. For an assistant professor to have three grants was unheard of. I was able to then hire some really good people, one of whom stayed with me for almost 20 years, made the move from UC Riverside up here, became a research assistant professor, and associate professor in the Department of Botany and Plant Pathology. Things were going well. Again, a very supportive group. There was a little tension between the Department of Biochemistry and the Plant Science Department. So, who's supposed to be teaching Plant Biochemistry? I was hired to teach Plant Biochemistry, so I stepped right in the middle of that, but it was fine. I just started teaching my course and students loved it, 00:52:00for the most part. No, actually they did love it. I think it's fair to say they did love it. Because the wannabe medical students would sign up for it, because they knew it was a, how do you say, a reliable course, right? So, if you put in the time you could get a good grade. If you put in the time to learn the material as I was teaching it, you could get an A and then that bolstered their chances of getting into medical school. When you're starting to appeal to the pre-meds, I guess that's a good sign.

I was happy to be teaching them some plant biochemistry because they sure weren't going to get it anywhere else. Things were going well there professionally. I could see a career path there. In fact, they made it hard to leave at the last minute by offering some things that, yeah, just were pretty nice. But-so by that point I'd already applied at, so the job came open here. It 00:53:00was Harold Evan's position. I mentioned him earlier. He was a National Academy member. I knew Harold. I didn't know him well. We knew each other primarily because he and Bob Burris were such good colleagues and friends. I had been to Corvallis one other time. I came here for a meeting that Burris was invited to but couldn't come so he sent a postdoc and I to come out here and talk about some work that we were doing with non-leguminous nitrogen fixing plants. That was the first time I'd been in-well, actually second time I'd been in Corvallis but for a lengthy amount of time and of course just kind of, wow, this is pretty nice. One could live here. But that was when I was a graduate student. Now, Harold's approaching retirement or had retired and they're looking for another 00:54:00person to do nitrogen fixation. I apply for the position, one of just a few people they interviewed, and they offered me the job. You know, much like the earlier conversation we had about farming. It's sometimes hard to make a decision to move. I'm sitting there going through pros and cons, what am I going to have here and there. This is where Stella Coakley of course comes into the picture, because she's the one recruiting me, one of the key persons. She was the department head at the time. She had the good sense to bring me back for a second visit but to bring my wife. So now Wanda for the first time gets to experience Corvallis and in a very short visit, she's like why wouldn't you move? She and I have a different memory of this, but I'm pretty sure my memory is accurate, that she said, well you do what you have to do but I'm moving to Corvallis.

At any rate, we accepted the job and moved. Of course, it's worked out very well. Again, so appreciative at the University of California Riverside who had helped get my career started and I felt bad that we left. But we were there seven years and we would go away for a weekend and come back into town and it never quite felt like we were coming back to home. Within the first few months of being in Corvallis when we'd leave and go to the mountains and come back it felt like we were coming home. It just felt right to us. It was just a good community to be in. For a lot of reasons, we made the move. One of the first things that surprised me about moving to Oregon State were the things that I didn't put on my list of reasons why I should move, and one of them, I have to 00:56:00credit Ken Williamson with, so Ken, the civil engineering professor doing bioremediation, hired Lew Semprini, he shows up within a few months of our arriving here and says hey I hear you're doing this kind of work I think we have some collaborative possibilities together and that established a relationship with the environmental engineers on campus. It never occurred to me that that was a possibility. That, of course, you've talked to Lew Semprini, so then Lew and I started collaborating and had various levels of collaboration up until the point that I retired, really. That was terrific really to have that opportunity. Then the other thing I was picking up on the interviews but came much more apparent once I got here is the low barriers between collaboration across 00:57:00departments. I mentioned that biochemistry and plant science at Riverside were kind of, you know, and that's so typical in major research universities. But here, it wasn't then and it isn't now. The spirit of collaboration here is so strong and it's one of the things that everyone points to as part of what makes Oregon State University so special and such a good place to work at.

CP: It sounds like it was a terrific first impression in a close to ideal environment. However, the university was going through a budgetary crisis also.

DA: [Laughs] It was. It was.

CP: I don't know at what point in 1990 you showed up but it couldn't have been more than a couple of months before Measure 5 passed and significant cuts were initiated.

DA: Right.

CP: What are your memories of that period?

DA: It was very hard for two reasons. One, was the university. I was a bit 00:58:00insulated from that. They probably weren't going-I never worried for my job. Those battles were really played out at a different level. John Byrne was dealing with those. We can come back to John. John's a good friend now. I didn't know him so much at the time. We were dealing-my job was to write grants and teach. I did that. That really didn't get influenced that much. It was starting to impact what the department could do. But there was another place where it had a huge impact and that was on the schools. Part of what drove us out of California is our kids were becoming school age and California had Prop. 13, which did the same thing but ten years earlier, five or ten years earlier. It had a huge impact on the schools. Class sizes went from reasonable low 20s to 00:59:00mid 30s. Our daughter was going to a kindergarten class with 37 students in it. It makes no sense. You just can't. It didn't happen overnight. When Measure 5 passed, we saw all too clearly where it was headed. It didn't happen overnight. The sky didn't fall. But with time there was this erosion. First, all of the, what were they called the supplemental positions went away. Then the class sizes started to increase and before long Oregon has now caught up with California. California in the meantime is pulling out of that and reinvesting in education. That was tough. It turned out to be one of the continuous cycles of budget cuts to the university. We had to learn how to deal with it.

It was both, again, what it did to the university but we also saw what it was 01:00:00going to do to the schools as well. Part of why we became so dedicated to the schools-so my wife worked in the school system. I volunteered in the school system. We were committed to keeping our kids there, never really thought about moving them out into private schools because we just believed so much in public education. That's a good insight.

CP: Let's talk about research.

DA: Okay.

CP: This is the primary thrust of your job at OSU and you're very successful. Can you take us through some of the main themes of the scholarly work that you did?

DA: Yeah, sure, I'll try with apologies to any colleagues who would ever listen to this, because I'll have to do it in a way that makes sense, but my work's 01:01:00always been in some aspect related to the nitrogen cycle. This is the idea that basically bacteria, for the most part, move nitrogen to different chemical forms primarily in the soils as they get something out of that for doing it. In the case of nitrogen fixation, bacteria are taking nitrogen from the atmosphere and converting it to a form that they can use for their nitrogen needs to make those proteins that Linus Pauling, that we talked about earlier. In some cases, then can provide that nitrogen to the plants as well. I studied those as an undergraduate, as a graduate student, and early in my career as an assistant professor. There's an enzyme at the heart of that process called nitrogenase. This enzyme-nitrogenase-people are still studying it. It's such a fascinating 01:02:00enzyme, very complicated. In its biochemical activity, as it is taking nitrogen and reducing it to ammonia, it's also producing hydrogen and that's what I studied.

I studied the production of hydrogen as well as the use of that hydrogen. It's essentially a byproduct of nitrogen fixation and yet some bacteria had figured out wait a minute there's a molecule full of energy, I wonder if I can harvest that too. They use an enzyme called hydrogenase to do that. That's what I studied. That kept my career going for, like I say, several years. That's how Harold knew because Harold Evans was studying the same thing. Now I get up here and I have to credit Mike Hyman who is the post-doc I mentioned who moved up here with me and stayed with me for several years. As we're establishing a laboratory here Mike had studied nitrification as a graduate student and opened 01:03:00my eyes to that. It was an understudied part of the nitrogen cycle but a very important part. Now bacteria are taking ammonia and converting it to nitrate, so that's an oxidation. They are using it the same way we use oxygen. They are using other sources of reduction and they're converting that ammonia to nitrite and nitrate. Agriculturally incredibly important because farmers are using ammonia as a nitrogen fertilizer. Ammonia stays put in the soils because of the chemistry. Once converted by bacteria by nitrate it now moves with the water. It rains, it leeches in the ground and surface waters and contaminates those. All sorts of issues come about because of nitrification.

I say, alright let's do the biochemistry there. It hadn't been worked out. I'm a 01:04:00biochemist. Let's see if we can start working on this. Submitted a grant to USDA. Said, okay, yeah, go to work on that. This is where the connection to Ken Williamson and Lew Semprini comes in, because this same enzyme that is initiating the process of nitrification also works on a number of environmental pollutants and starts their degradation. Now, we go okay, let's write to EPA and get a grant to fund that aspect of the work. They go, sure, we'll fund that for you. Get started on that. That opens up lots of possibilities, now lots of collaborations. Additional grants come as a result of that. The enzyme that initiates nitrification-ammonia monooxygenase-is working with ammonia in its gaseous form, so that led us then to gas utilizing enzymes in general.

That had been my career moving in that direction: nitrogen's a gas, hydrogen's a gas, ammonia's a gas. Then we realized this monooxygenase has a similarity to methane monooxygenase. So, they're bacteria that will use methane as their carbon and energy source, grow on methane. Okay, so we look at that. Then we realize that there's, again, Lew is an important part of this story because he had been looking at butane oxidizing bacteria or bioremediation as well. Then we got involved in that. Again, Lew is writing a grant to do the bioremediation but they're saying you need somebody to do the biochemistry. Lew comes to us and says can you do the biochemistry on this? Well, I've been doing gas utilizing enzymes my whole life, why not look at another one? This turned out to be really fascinating because we pretty quickly realized it's completely understudied but 01:06:00that there were three different ways in which bacteria were harvesting butane. One bacteria did it this way, another did it this way, another did it this way. This was completely unknown.

We were able to open up that study of those, the alkanes with the short chain alkanes, the butanes, the propanes. Methane was well-studied at the time but these others weren't. I think everybody thought well it's the same. No, it wasn't. It wasn't the same. It was a lot of fun to get involved in that. We pitched that to NIH, and they said yeah sure we'll fund that. That gave us that, get going on that project as well. Some of the themes and always, I mean, in science you're always spiraling up. What do I mean by that? Well, you're working on this aspect on the spiral but then you run out of tools to do it. You used 01:07:00every tool that's available at the time to understand what's going on, but then you come back to it higher on the spiral with a new set of tools. For us, that new set of tools became molecular biology. Now we're able to get in and get at the genes and take a look at those. I didn't grow up as a molecular biologist. I was more interested in the enzymes and still am. But the genes give you a blueprint to understand those. We were really fortunate in that the Department of Energy helped on the human genome. It was divided out across different parts of-DOE and NIH were doing different chromosomes. One of the groups down at Los Alamos, I'm sorry-Lawrence Livermore, yeah, I also had a collaborator at Los Alamos, but this was at Lawrence Livermore and they were looking, okay, what do we do with this sequencing capacity we have now? At that time, it was still a 01:08:00pretty big deal to sequence even a genome of a bacterium. A bacterium is one one-thousandth the size of a human genome. Still to be able to do it was a pretty big deal. They were looking for some projects and for some proposals, so we pitched this one. What they were interested in was carbon sequestration. Our bacterium uses CO2 as its carbon source.

Now, the idea that it would actually sequester carbon was sort of silly, and they knew that, but still it met their other criteria, so they said okay. It wasn't like a grant in the sense that they sent us money. It was, no, you send us DNA and we'll sequence this thing for you. They collaborated with us on it. It wasn't just hands-off. It was working together closely. My charge was to make 01:09:00sure that the group of nitrification scientists in the U.S. and globally were involved in the project. That was my job was to bring these folks together and engage them in this process, which I did. That then created this community of nitrification scientists that just keep going. We got one genome. Well, now let's get the next five. Let's get the next ten. Let's get the-and so it created a community of nitrification scientists. Then we got a grant from NSF to create a nitrification network. They had grants specifically to do this kind of work, part of which involved writing the book. The book I co-edited was part of that effort but so were a series of Gordon conferences and those are still going today. I don't attend them anymore, but they got started as a part of this work that we were all doing together and that community. That's incredibly gratifying 01:10:00to see that that group that this field of science that was quite a bit understudied and underappreciated is now caught up with the rest of the nitrogen cycle and other aspects of it. Sorry, I've lost track of where we are now.

CP: Where was your laboratory? Which building?

DA: Cordley.

CP: Ah.

DA: Yeah [Laughs].

CP: Venerable Cordley Hall.

DA: My laboratory was in Cordley. I actually took over Harold Evans' laboratory. That's an interesting story because Harold was still there and had half the lab but he really wasn't using it so he'd kind of let us in there and so eventually I had the space that I needed for this growing program that we have. Yeah, I was over in Cordley. Fourth floor, right below Andy Blaustein's laboratory. Andy would regularly flood our laboratory. He would fill his aquariums and forget to turn the hose off and we'd have water dripping down. We became good friends, and 01:11:00I employed his wife Cathy in a science education group that we started, science education partnerships. I was over in Cordley. It wasn't a fancy new lab, but it met our needs and it was fine. Cordley has struggled since then so it was one of the things if I jump forward a little bit to Dean, it felt very good to be in a position to at least advocate for the needed improvements to Cordley, which are-it's going to be a little while to get it all done but at least they're in progress now. That felt really good to be, again, historical accidents, but you're in the right place at the right time to be able to say, no this is why this needs to improve. Look folks, there's more research dollars flowing through Cordley than any other building on campus, don't let anybody tell you otherwise. 01:12:00That's the truth. The quality of the facilities have just degraded to the point where folks can't get their work done. We need to fix this.

Fortunately, we had a provost who was listening. We had a, what was Anita Azarenko's title at the time? But she was listening. She understood. The right players came together to say-Roy Haggerty was interim Dean of Science at that time. Cordley has mostly folks from Ag Science and Science, so all the players came together. The folks in Cordley did a great job of coming together and talking about their needs and how we're going to make this work and yes this is going to be disruptive but what do we want when we come out of the other end? I think the key thing that really made that happen was, I just told you the research importance, but the vision that the folks in Cordley, and this is John 01:13:00Fowler, Joey Spatafora, and Dave Maddison said yeah, but it's not just about research. It's also about how we integrate research with undergraduate education. We can create a spectacular opportunity here for students if we do this right during this remodel. I think that's when the provost and others went okay let's do it. Yeah, my lab was in Cordley.

CP: Let's talk about teaching a bit. It was interesting for me to look at your Vitae and see a couple of themes emerge in some of the courses you taught. There are courses that you would expect you to have taught but there's also an interest in teaching scientific and research ethics. Tell me about that.

DA: Okay. It's interesting that you identify that as a theme, because that theme 01:14:00has continued even as I've retired. I'll explain that. Maybe I can explain it. There were courses that come along. Your disciplinary courses. You go in and you teach plant biochemistry. You teach plant physiology. You teach what you need to teach and there's a textbook there and so on. But these were courses that don't have a formal curriculum, don't have a formal textbook like the ethics and science course that I taught. I never shied away from those courses because there wasn't an active curriculum or an active set of things you were supposed to get to the students, so I was willing to take it on. I always got collaborators. With the ethics course-Courtney Campbell over in Philosophy. He goes sure I'll help.

We worked together on that course. We would bring in guests and things and speakers and so on. I was comfortable with that. Then the same thing happened in 01:15:00the Honors College. When the Honors College was started Joe Hendricks of course became Dean and one of the pieces of that was twice a year introduction to thesis course would be taught: how do you find a mentor, how do you do your thesis and so on. I think I volunteered for that one with Joe. I think probably out of concern that the 2/3 of the students were science and engineering and they were going to learn how to do research from a sociologist, just didn't sit well with me. Joe was gracious. He said I'd love to have the help. We taught that course 19 times together. Over a ten-year period, we taught it 19 times together. It got to the point where we could complete each other's jokes in the course. Through that, I became a close friend of Joe's. That was an example of 01:16:00that kind of course where I didn't care that it didn't have a set way to do it. We could just figure out how to make it work.

Same thing happened with Brenda McComb when she wanted to teach a course on how to help students get into graduate or professional school. She asked me if I would help with it and I said yeah, absolutely, be happy to help with that. In the Honors College I taught a couple of off-target courses as well that weren't my professional training. I did one on energy IQ. I looked and realized people were trying to figure out, this has been ten years ago now, how do I conserve, what do I do, and didn't fully understand the issue. I said well, I'll teach this course. It's a course called a colloquium, so students can come from any 01:17:00discipline. You don't have to come in with an expertise in chemistry to understand this course. In that case, it was Skip Rochefort who heard that I was going to teach this course. I think he was concerned for the students if I was teaching an energy IQ course, how could a non-engineer be teaching about energy. He said, I'll help you. I said, fine. That'd be great. He brought in another engineer whose name is escaping me right now but who since has left. The three of us taught that course together. Food IQ is another one that got started. That was Lauren Gwin who stepped in to help with that. Lauren is the co-director of the small farms program. Then I retired and approached by Honors College, would you like to teach some courses. I'm like yeah what do you want? Said what do you want to do?

I said, well I'm very concerned about partisanship in politics. It bothers me 01:18:00when I hear my friends referring to anyone of the opposite political party as an idiot, because they're not, just because they're not in your politics. I also picked up on some alarming concerns about science as well, and how people were making their decisions around science and realized that so much of this is around tribalism. It's the group that you belong to that influences how you think about these issues. Pew science report had pointed out how if you looked at half a dozen different science issues and you look at where scientists were it's a proxy on what science is telling you. These were things like global climate change, GMOs, vaccines, evolution, nuclear power I think was one of them. The science is here on all of them and then look at where the public are. 01:19:00I was, of course at that time Dean of the College of Ag Sciences and looking at gosh where people are standing on GMOs and this doesn't make sense. The science is very clear. Yes, let's approach it with caution but most of what you're hearing doesn't make any sense. It's not based on the science and then realizing that's not how people are making their decisions. I had spent-that's why I got involved in science education believing that a scientifically literate population would make good choices about these things. Then I had this hit me so hard that no it's really about the tribe you belong to and the way it works is that if information comes into that that supports your worldview or your view of GMOs, then you readily accept it, whether it's good science or not. It doesn't matter.

On the other hand, if something comes in that refutes your worldview, you readily dismiss it. Okay, now what do we do. A colleague had just read-Bill Boggis-who was my Executive Associate Dean at the time, had read the book Righteous Mind, written by Jonathan Haidt, who talks about why good people disagree on politics and religion. I read that book and I said I can teach an Honors College course based on this. I did. Brought in the science piece. Brought in the speakers to help with different aspects of it. Again, it was one of those courses where it's not my expertise, but it fits this theme of I guess not being afraid to try something new and different where there's not a set curriculum that you have to get the students to so they can be ready for the next course in that series or something like that. I had just completed that 01:21:00course that kind of fits that theme as well which we called a field to fork class. My wife and I, I mean she really gets credit for co-teaching it, but over a three-day period we took ten students to a total of ten different farms and processing plants and things and each day we would come back to our house and we would prepare together an Oregon-based meal around Oregon produce and then we'd enjoy that meal together and then have conversations after dinner about what we'd learned that day and what were the take-home points and then go out and do it again and did that for three days. Again, a course that brings people together from different disciplines. We're not worried about getting it all. We're just trying to move along a little bit in terms of what we know about how farms work and farming in Oregon. That's a little bit of the courses I've taught.

CP: Another theme that emerges, and this is not a surprise having heard a bit of your story, is mentorship and the emphasis you've placed on that.

DA: Yeah.

CP: Clearly you had some important mentors early on for you that steered you in that direction.

DA: I did. I was incredibly fortunate. We've talked about that high school chemistry professor I mentioned. I count him as one of those early mentors. In my undergraduate years, Bob Klucas, we talked about him, and he really was a critical mentor. Unfortunately he passed away of brain cancer a few years ago. Up to the point he passed away he remained the sort of person I could call up and ask what do I do here? What do I do there? He readily admitted that the only bad advice he ever gave me was not to get married as young as I did. He, of course, was right, because we were way too young to get married, but it worked out. He said I shouldn't have told you that. Bob, the rest of the advice you've 01:23:00given me has been really sound, so we'll forgive you on that. Then graduate school, of course Bob Burris but also Paul Ludden who has been a friend but also been just really helpful over the years. Then, here it's kind of sad but it's Roy Arnold.

CP: Yeah. He just passed away a couple of days ago.

DA: Yeah. Roy was a great mentor. He was really important in bringing me here. Again, just a little bit of an aside here. In the interview process I'm coming into a position that's part science and part ag sciences. So, Stella Coakley is running this department that's got a foot in each college and she's doing her job recruiting me. Now I'm here for the interview and we're talking it through. 01:24:00I had just earned tenure at University of California Riverside. I didn't want to go through that again. It was kind of small of me, but it mattered to me. I talked to Fred Horne who was Dean of Sciences, said no sorry you have to go through it again. I talked to Roy Arnold and he says you know, oh, I think we can make that work. Okay, Roy. Of course, Roy had grown up in Nebraska. I grew up in Nebraska. We had this instant connection that just over the years then, because Roy's approach and personality were not unlike Bob Burris. He never tells you this is what you need to do, this is what you should do, but always offers sage advice.

He was a guy that I would go to-for example when the Honors College came up. Roy was involved in the Honors College. I said, Roy what do you think of me in the Honors College. He was able to give me really good advice. When the transition 01:25:00to the Dean of College of Ag Sciences occurred, again, it was a bit unusual the way that happened. I couldn't really go out and talk to a lot of people about it, but I did talk to Roy. That was really, really helpful advice to have that from Roy. I've had lots of other good, I wouldn't want to suggest that I didn't have other people helping me along the way at OSU, but if I had to pick one person out Roy was the one who I would describe as a mentor in what I would define as the real meaning of the word mentor. It's one of my pet peeves is we misuse mentor way too often. In fact, you can't really assign mentors. It's someone who earns your trust, right? It's a wise and trusted advisor. That's not something you can say well this is going to be your wise and trusted advisor. 01:26:00Those are some people who have made a lot of difference in my life. Certainly, my parents were there as well.

CP: It feels to me that is a role that you took seriously for yourself and tried to pay it back by mentoring lots of other people. I look at your vitae and I see you're mentoring high school students. That's not necessarily typical for a distinguished professor.

DA: No, but yes, I saw the value of that to me-I talked about pathways and that is so critical to give people a pathway just to show them the possibility. That was always important to me to mentor. Any of those opportunities that came along I was going to try to do it. I'll always try to have undergraduates in the laboratory to give them an opportunity to taste, find out if this was something they wanted to do. The high school students, yeah, that was an apprenticeship in 01:27:00the science and engineering program. Saturday Academy was running that. It was an opportunity to bring students in. As soon as they approached me, I said sure. I think we did ten students over a period of ten years. Every summer we had a student in the lab. It was as you would expect. Some of the students went on to research careers. Others ran screaming and running away from it, because they went, this is not what I want to do with my life. That was important for them to find out.

I felt like I was giving them a gift to find that out in high school. I didn't know it until I was an undergraduate in college, but they were able to find that out earlier. Graduate students the same way. I've always enjoyed working with students. With graduate student development there's always this, I guess I'll call it the ah-ha moment, where they turn the corner and are now doing 01:28:00independent research. They're not asking you for direction every time. Instead, they're coming in and saying this is what I planned out. This is what I learned. This is what I discovered. This is what I think it means. When that happens, I just felt so good as their advisor to know okay you're on your way. You're launched. You've turned that corner. Postdocs and others as well. Just really enjoyed and still do. The College of Ag Sciences has Leadership Academy and I've met with my student this year, so I'll help mentor her through the Leadership Academy this year. So, I still look for those opportunities when I can.

CP: You referenced your interest in connecting science and education and there was a lot of money that helped forge that connection. I counted five $1.5-2 million 01:29:00grants in the late '90s through the 2010s and I'm interested in learning more about that and learning more about Chris Matthews who was integral to that, somebody else who I've interviewed and have a lot of respect for. I gather the two of you worked on this.

DA: We did. You brought up Chris. Let me just step back a step. When I was being interviewed to come here thirty years ago. I wasn't being recruited into a biochemistry department. I was being recruited into a botany and plant pathology department. I'm not a botanist or a plant pathologist. It was really important for me to be able to connect with biochemistry. I talked with Chris when I was interviewing, and Chris made it very clear that they would welcome me as a collaborator and they could probably make me, I would have standing in the department. I could take graduate students through the department, which I did over the years. Opened up a lot of collaborations.

Andy Karplus and I trained a student together. My last student, a terrific student, a terrific experience, got us a science paper. Those collaborations with biochemistry and biophysics started because of Chris Matthews. But Chris also recognized early on the importance of us as academics engaging in science education. This was at a time, and still is a challenge, elementary school teachers in particular don't get a lot of training and the high school teachers that have the training don't get access to a lot of the tools they need. I don't know how long had I been here-a few years and Russ Meints who was then director of the Center for Genome Research and Biocomputing came into my office and says you know we're being told by Bruce, who was the head of AAAS at the time, that 01:31:00academics need to get more involved and you like to go volunteer in the schools. How can we make this more formal? What can we do? We talked about it. We said well we need to tap into all of our colleagues who are experts and figure out how to get them engaged in science education.

We did one really, really good thing. Rather than just cram this down the throats of the high school and elementary school teachers, we got a couple of them involved. We made them part of the organization. Instead of us telling them what they needed, they could tell us what they needed. In setting it up that way we immediately gained their trust, confidence, that this wasn't just going to be another someone how they ought to be doing their jobs. So grew that. Got started on a shoestring budget, really. We didn't have any money. We'll do this all volunteer. Then along came the opportunity for the Howard Hughes Medical 01:32:00Institute who were providing these grants, substantial grants, to do this kind of work. The first one was written by George who was at that time in zoology and a National Academy member, left shortly after that but he spearheaded the first one, got it funded and included science education partnerships as part of this effort. He left and then Chris took it over and Chris wrote the next one and then Chris handed it over to me and then I was the principal investigator on the next two or three I think it was.

For over a decade we had this funding coming in to help us do this work. It funded science education partnerships. It funded the program that Kevin Ahern runs in the summer with students. It funded a lot of the SMILE activity. SMILE of course had a much larger budget, but it helped with a part of what they were 01:33:00doing as well. That was a good time, a good experience. Then there was another grant that I wrote for a GK12 grant. This was the National Science Foundation doing a pilot project to essentially put graduate students in classes as teaching assistants. So, wrote that grant. It's another $1-1.5 million grant. We selected about a dozen graduate students in three school districts that we were working with and the students really showed up and helped do science education in the classrooms, which was very successful. The teachers loved it. Students loved it. Graduate students learned a lot from it, but it wasn't sustainable. NSF viewed it as a pilot project, expecting that the universities would somehow pick this up. Universities of course looked at it and said yeah, it's a great idea but we can't afford teaching assistants for chemistry labs so what are we 01:34:00doing paying for K12 education. It just doesn't make sense for us. Anyway, it was another fun project.

CP: The last question for today.

DA: Okay.

CP: Because we're over 90 minutes now.

DA: Okay.

CP: I'm interested in service work in particular in your connection with the Faculty Senate.

DA: Yeah, so Faculty Senate. Again, just recognized a need. You can't complain about the Faculty Senate and then not participate. I think the first time I got elected as a Senator it was because I forgot to take my name off the list, but I got involved. Then, served in a couple of the committees. That's where a lot of 01:35:00the work of the Faculty Senate gets done, of course, is in the different committees. I think I served on the promotion and tenure, that's right. I was on that one. That was kind of interesting because that was a few years after we had done the post tenure review revamp. The university, oh okay we can't just assume the professors are doing their jobs. This was feeling pressure from legislature. Kind of a national movement that professors aren't being held accountable, I think is probably the way to say it, once they get tenure. It wasn't really true, but we wanted to get ahead of that curve.

So created this post tenure review thing. The problem was that it didn't really work and some colleges, I won't name them, but they start with an E, just weren't doing it at all. Others were doing it, but you realize that the university really couldn't follow through on a development program for a faculty 01:36:00that's struggling, but there were no resources to help them. It really wasn't working like it was intended. I got on that, I was the chair of that committee and Sabah Randhawa didn't tell me what to do but it was pretty clear what needed to be done. We need to change the way we're doing this and so we worked our way through that knowing we would have the support of the provost if we came out with a reasonable policy at the end of that. That was that one.

There was one other one that I served on. But the big one, of course, was the Executive Committee. I served on the Executive Committee for a couple of years. That's where I really learned about the university. Up to that point, my world was College of Science, College of Ag Sciences, engineering collaborations but still was pretty small view of the world. Once I got on that Executive Committee 01:37:00then you really learn about the university and all the different pieces of it and how they fit together or don't fit together. That was a good experience. Probably, I mean, I probably would have run for Faculty Senate President but about that time I moved into leadership roles as Dean and you're prohibited from running for-for obvious reasons. You can't be on the Faculty Senate if you're a Dean. I enjoyed that part of my life, too.

CP: That brings us to a good stopping place, I think.

DA: Okay.

CP: We'll talk about being Dean next time around.

DA: Alright.

CP: And your administrative career.

DA: Okay, great.