John Essigmann SM ’72, PhD ’76

INTERVIEWER: This is the 150th Celebration interview with professor John Essigmann. Let me start by saying where did you grow up?

JOHN ESSIGMANN: I grew up in the neighborhood. My parents were brought up and lived in my early life in Woburn, Massachusetts where I lived until I was four. We lived with my grandparents on a small farm there. Then at the age of four moved to Medford. I went to public schools there. Then grew up in Medford and then went to college at Northeastern and then came to MIT for graduate school. So I've never actually lived more than 10 miles from here. So not a lot of imagination there, but it's a great place to live.

INTERVIEWER: Tell me about your family.

JOHN ESSIGMANN: The family. Let me start with my grandparents since we had lived with them when we were very young. So as I said, we lived with my grandparents in Woburn, and my grandfather was a German immigrant, a tanner. There are many interesting stories. He worked in the tanneries that were the subject of the book, A Civil Action. In fact, he died of a primary liver tumor, and ironically that became my field many years later, and I'm probably more qualified than anybody to know that that was almost certainly and industrially induced tumor because we don't have much of that kind of tumor in the United States. So he was a tanner.

My paternal grandmother was an Abenaki Indian from northern Vermont. They had met -- he was a mill worker, so tanners went wherever there were mills. He happened to work in a mill, and my grandmother, he stayed in the same home where my grandmother lived. As a Native American, so at the age of 15 went to work and was working as a nanny for a doctor's family in northern Vermont. They got married and moved to Woburn. Had a small farm, almost completely self-sufficient.

Then my dad turned out to be very good in math, so he got to go to college. He had a great experience, both at Tufts University, and then he switched to MIT from which he graduated in 1947. Very good engineer, and I think that's where the beginning of my connection to MIT happened.

So a little bit more about the family. My dad, the household in which he was brought up, being brought up on a small farm I think is very telling. There wasn't a lot of money around. You had to fix things that were broken, there were animals that needed to be tended. I can still remember, my earliest memories are really of my job as a four- year- old was to feed the chickens. So my grandfather could build almost anything out of wood. So his day job was as a tanner, night job as a parent and keeping up the farm. My grandmother worked as a seamstress, taking in things that need to be sown for local people. What I can remember is that she, because of her background, never threw anything out.

They didn't buy a lot because it was a farm, they didn't produce a lot of waste. So, for example, if there were a plastic bottle, just to take one example, and it had colorless, colored, whatever. When she was done with it, she would find another use for it to store things. But more commonly, she was very artistic, she would cut it up and make plastic flowers out of these plastic bottles. I always think of the film that I grew up with, The Graduate, where there's this line 'plastics', and I always think of my grandmother when that happens, because that was her line, 'plastics.' This is something very useful.

If anything broke, like if a ceramic cup broke, the pieces were swept up and then she had kind of a clay that she would use to make her own pottery. She'd keep all of the broken pieces of ceramic and metal, whatever, and she'd embed them into the ceramic of these pots and so on. She'd make flower pots and teacups and all kinds of stuff. So nothing was ever wasted from their home. Sort of like at the end of the week when, as we called it, the Ashman, showed up, there was just a little tiny package of stuff like banana peels that perhaps-- well, no, actually banana peels they put in the compost.

So, I think that that environment conditioned my dad to become an engineer. He became an engineer, as I said, trained largely here, and then went off to his career at Northeastern where he was a teacher.

INTERVIEWER: So, in this environment, when did you first know that you interested in science?

JOHN ESSIGMANN: Well, my dad was an engineer, but he was really good with math. In fact, he taught at Northeastern. His main role was to teach math to engineers. So as a kid it was just logical to go to dad to ask for help with math. It was striking to me how little science he knew. We distinguished math and science. He didn't know anything about chemistry, he certainly didn't know anything about biology. He knew about physics, but not the broader areas that are taught here at MIT, for example. The freshman year at MIT is physics, chemistry, math, biology and then a humanities. He didn't have a strong science background.

So, I was brought up in a math-oriented environment thinking about problem solving, I think which is something that engineers do. But it was not until high school, I think. We had a really good biology and chemistry teacher that -- I think it's so important how one teacher can influence a pack of people. My two sisters and myself went to the same high school. We all became biology majors at the same college, Northeastern. One teacher can have that kind of an impact. Phenotypically I've gone off and studied chemistry and engineering and other things. But I think that I picked it up in high school.

INTERVIEWER: Did you choose to go to Northeastern because your father was teaching there?

JOHN ESSIGMANN: Yeah. The times were very different. I would say that I didn't give a lot of thought to college. I didn't come from a family where thinking strategically about college for the kids was something that was on my parents' minds. I think my parents had the view that things will always work out, and people find their way. Just think for yourself. I didn't even know you did things like study for SATs. You just showed up and took them, and didn't realize if you study for them you could get a higher grade. The bottom line was that for me going to college was something that I didn't really think much about. It was a preparation for a career. I really felt that going to college would give me the next step. I thought I'd only go to college and I'd get a job. That's what most people did.

I got to go to Northeastern for free because my dad taught there. So my two sisters, and myself went to Northeastern. My mother got her Bachelor's degree from Northeastern. She was a secretary, helped put him through school, and then took advantage of the financial benefit. We all get employee benefits and she got to get a break on tuition at Northeastern. So, my two sisters, myself, and my mother all got our undergraduate degrees from Northeastern. It was a great place. I think it still is. It's a great place.

INTERVIEWER: You also did sort of an interesting thing at Arthur D. Little while you were at Northeastern. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

JOHN ESSIGMANN: So, let me tell you about the Coop Program at Northeastern. One of the reasons that Northeastern became well-known was because it had a decent education program. But what happened was you would go to school for three months and then you got a job working for three months. The jobs were good. If you did well academically you'd get an even better job than someone who didn't. But everybody got a job, so they're called Coop jobs, in your field and it helped to prepare you for your career. As I said, a lot of kids from Northeastern went off right out into the industrial world. So these were for teaching or whatever -- a big education program at the time.

So one of the big selling points of Northeastern was the fact that you could get a job, and not only was that experience, but you could almost pay for college, going through your five years. It was a five year program. So that was attractive to me. I'm not going to say I chose Northeastern for that reason because I only applied to one college, to be honest with you, Toby. You could apply one place and you'd get in. But it was something that from birth was in my mind. Through my dad having his students over to visit and up to our cabin in New Hampshire, I got to see this wonderful impact that working had on the undergraduates. It's as good if not better -- maybe a little bit better than our UROP system, which I think, if you look it up, what we do in our undergraduate research opportunity system, that's about the best thing that we do for our undergraduates.

So Northeastern provided a great opportunity to get out into the real world. It provided an ability to graduate for a lot of kids without debt or with minimal debt. And it provided access to education for a lot of people that otherwise wouldn't, and in particular in the Boston area, that otherwise wouldn't have access to education. May I say a little bit more about Northeastern. It's reminding me of some other things from the time.

I had a friend who was in high school. He got admitted both to MIT and to Northeastern. He ended up going to Northeastern, and he was saddened by this. It had to do with the fact that he came from a very lower- middle class background, he was Italian, the first generation to go to college. This was before MIT had, what we call now Need-Blind admissions. So family finances were absolutely a factor, and this fellow's first name's Ernie, his ability to go to MIT. I can remember during our freshman year at Northeastern we came over to walk on the campus, and Ernie was feeling kind of bad. We were standing on this little atrium that's outside of Hayden Library. And he was just, gee, I think that I possibly would have really a much greater shot at success in life if I'd had the opportunity to come to MIT. Ernie did fine. He came here for graduate school. All paid for, because we pay for graduate school off of our research grants and so on.

But I think that one of the things that I would look at that has -- Northeastern filled an important role at that time for taking a lot of kids who were quite intellectually gifted, giving them the opportunity to get a good education that would allow them to go the next step. I think that among the many things that I admire Chuck Vest for was really putting his foot down and saying I don't care if we're going to suffer trouble damages and Federal lawsuits, we're going to defend our financial aid policy, Need-Blind admissions. That means that MIT is able to provide access to education for just about anybody. I think it's a terrific thing.

INTERVIEWER: I agree. So we didn't talk about Arthur D. little yet though.

JOHN ESSIGMANN: Oh, let me tell you Arthur D. Little. So, you get a Coop job. In my case, I'd been very interesting in athletics all through growing up, skiing in particular. I always wanted to stay busy. In high school I had a job as an orderly in the emergency room at a local hospital in my senior year and in my first year of college. It's in your second year of college that you get your Coop job. I was a biology major. At that time I was thinking about going into medicine. Every job I've had I've loved. The one when I was a senior in high school and first year in college as an orderly in the emergency room, I got to see -- well, I delivered two babies. It was an accident, but in the middle of the night people come and there's a baby on the way. I had a baby, very sadly, die in my arms. It was what they call a blue baby. And I got to experience an amazing range of things. It told me I could be a doctor and I'd really like it. But there was a problem for me. I noticed that medicine was what I knew.

Everybody knows what a doctor is and what a doctor does. It's a great default option. It is, I think, for a lot of students at MIT today, but there's a bigger world of careers out there. So I thought, well I can do this medicine thing. But one thing that's a little bit of a problem for me is that it's enormous excitement punctuated by these long periods of boredom where you're doing the same thing. How many times can you remove a sebaceous cyst and have it be interesting? Whereas sometimes you're going to see something strange and it might be malignant or something. So you have to stay focused every minute. There was a lot of boring aspects to clinical medicine.

So I learned later that a lot of people go to MIT, they get into more of the diagnostics, and they get into the real specialized stuff, which is not routine medicine that happens in a little local, Lawrence Memorial Hospital. So when it came time to picking a coop job, you have a Coop advisor -- I forget her name, Carol something -- and she sat down, she said, John, you're a biology major. You can keep that job you've got in the hospital, that's good. I said well, what are my other options? She said well this is where advising comes in. She said, I noticed that you do very well in chemistry. We have an opportunity, she said, one of the best Coop jobs in Northeastern is with this company industrial consulting company called Arthur D. Little. You've got a personality such that you're a team player, you've had a lot of work experience for somebody that is 18 and a half. I'm going to send you out, you can interview for that job. They don't take biology majors, only chemistry majors. They may require you to change your major, if you like the job.

So I went, I interviewed, it was amazing. I got offered the job. I didn't have to change my major, which was good. I worked for four years in the analytical chemistry group for Arthur D. Little on projects that literally -- the way I often put it is that the job they first gave me involved weighing something out, diluting it to ten milliliters, making a 1:10 dilution, putting it in a machine, making a measurement. And talk about boring, I mean the hours just flew by. I just knew that lab science, bench science, was the kind of thing that was for me. I couldn't even believe they were paying me $8.75 an hour to do this. It was like amazing. First day I made up my mind, I'm going to be a laboratory scientist. That was interesting because all my friends went to medical school, because I was in the biology class. I was not competing with them at all. I just said I'm going to become a scientist and then I made my career plans based on that.

Let me give you two examples of why Arthur D. Little is a great place to work. It's something that I think contrasts a little bit with the UROP system here. So first of all it's eight hours a day normally, but everybody works 10 to 12. The problems can change on a daily basis or they can be you have some problems that you have to drop everything and work on because something has happened. When I was there, Ted Kennedy's car tragically went off of Chappaquiddick Bridge. Mary Jo Kopechne passed away, and the Kennedy family wanted to know if the brakes were operative on the car. So the day after that, the car was towed into Arthur D. Little. So this was something that everyone needed to drop everything in order to solve a problem because the press was very interested.

Example two, brominated vegetable oil. New York Times runs an article in the morning edition that says there's Sprite in his Fresca. Basically brominated vegetable oil might be used in one or the other to stabilize the grapefruit emulsion. Our client -- I'm not going to say who it is -- it was either the makers of Coke or Fresca or Sprite, contacted and they said what we'd like to do is to know is our competitor using brominated vegetable oil, because someone has declared that it causes cancer. We've got to know by noon. As the person at the low end of the food chain who's always available, I was given that job and I had until noon, and at 11:15 I go out to the supermarket to pick up Sprite and Fresca and you bring it back and you do an x-ray analysis and it tells you that there wasn't any bromine there.

So, at 11:59, a 19-year old gets on the phone with our client and says your competitor is not using brominated vegetable oil. Long pause. That cost him a lot of money to find that out. Then I said, but you are. Then long pause. Then they said, how much will it cost us to find out what they're using? We had a grant -- we called it contract at that time. So as a 19-year old, I had a chance to -- everything was about filling out your time card -- as a 19-year old, I had a chance to do business, as well as science, and learn what my time was worth, had access to world-class instrumentation.

Two other stories. One was in 1967 a man at Yale, a chemistry professor, invented high pressure liquid chromatography, which is a separation technique. Every lab has one, my lab has five of these machines. So it was invented in '67. But then after 1967, there's a big push because now someone had invented an academic lab, now it was an engineering problem. How are we going to make a machine? How is this going to become commercially something that you buy for $10,000, $20,000 -- a machine that you'll put into every lab. Picker Nuclear was our client.

They became Varian Aerograph, a major instrument manufacturer, hired Arthur D. Little and said we want to be first to have a product on the market, please drop everything for a year -- so I worked on this for a year -- we would like to have the first commercial HBLC. I was part of the seven-person design team. It was absolutely spectacular. It was so much fun. Imagine your application to MIT that comes after that, that you've got intellectual property. In fact, I had a company providing some of the material that went into these machines. So I got to work with a great group of chemists and chemical engineers on instrument design, and again, thinking about money -- commercial success was important.

Then finally, there was an artificial sweetener that some of you may remember called cyclamate . It was between saccharine and aspartame in history of artificial sweeteners. The Sugar Research Foundation wanted to know if cyclamate were bad for people. There was no evidence of this at the time. But they needed to find out. It was in the Sugar Research Foundation's interest to find out if artificial sweeteners were bad, as compared to sugar, which now we know causes obesity. But it wasn't an issue at the time.

So, this is again, it's in the late '60s. The Environmentalist Movement is afoot. People are concerned about chemicals in our environment and do they cause disease. So my job was to feed people in prisons -- it's not legal anymore -- and in hotels, that lived in hotels, cyclamate at one and three grams per day, and then I would collect their urine and feces and look to see whether the one and three grams of cyclamate that went in also came out. It involved a lot of analysis of feces. That's one of the strongest tests of your stomach for science is to analyze people feces. Again, I thought that was a great job.

So when I chose what I was going to do next, I thought working at the chemistry biology interface, I was really trained for that. And through this instrument design, which had a lot of impact on the life sciences world, and working with patients in clinical trials, and developing the analytical methodology that underpinned the trial was important. But also the fact that our results showed that the stuff was broken down in people. Again, as a responsible scientist, this came out, we published this in the literature. I think it led to the removal cyclamate from the market.

Almost the day I started MIT, cyclamate in 1970 was removed from the market. I felt as though I had a -- you know, scientifically I don't have a view one way or another on whether -- I don't say I'm going to study this because I want it to be removed from the market. But I studied it and we got data that said okay, it's important to get this off the market, and then let nature take its course and the politicians removed it.

INTERVIEWER: Tell me how you wound up going to MIT.

JOHN ESSIGMANN: How did I get to MIT. I mentioned I just sort of stumbled into college -- I applied to one college, I got in, and then just let the eddies of life just sort of guide me, went from one job to another. I've got to say it was really almost the same thing when it came down to coming to MIT. In the fall of my senior year, my boss, a man named John Funkhouser called me into his office at Arthur D. Little, and he said, you know John, we would love to have you stay here and work here. Lots of people make a career working in science doing exactly the kind of thing that I know you love doing. He said that all the department heads have got together, but we want to provide you another option, which is it's time to think about graduate school. It's the fall of your senior year. I hadn't really thought about it. The Vietnam War was going on. I was thinking, like everybody, your student deferment would end and I'd probably get drafted or something else. The late '60s were a very tumultuous time in the United States.

So John Funkhouser, he said, we all went to MIT, he did, said and we've made a few calls. If you really want to go to the chemistry department, that's where we went, we're chemists, and you basically can get in. You've got the credentials for it. They're not going to bend over and lower their bar, but it's the place for you. And I said, geez, my dad went there. It's not something that's been a dream of mine since I was young, but my dad was a real practical guy, I admired my dad a lot, and I'd certainly like to go and interview.

So I came to MIT in the fall of 1969 for an interview. It turned out the chemistry department was just closing out one of its divisions. It was the analytical chemistry that I was interested in. It was the only division that had an interest in making measurements on biological systems. I didn't understand why. I understand today how institutions like MIT make decisions. You know, we're a finite size, if you're going to open something new as a new field's created, you gotta take something away. So MIT was at one of those moments of soul searching of what they should do. So they were basically saying okay, we're cutting off this division. It would be the one that I would want to join.

So I decided okay, this is what I wanted to do, but I can look at other places. On my way walking out, I remembered a family friend I hadn't seen since I think I was 10- years- old, and her name is Emily Wick, and she had received her PhD from MIT. She was an undergraduate at Mount Holyoke. Received her PhD in the chemistry department at MIT. When I was a kid being brought up, my dad who had gone here and Emily Wick were in a social circle of people who loved skiing. Every weekend they would drive up to the White Mountains, they would climb Wildcat Mountain, there was no snow ski lift at the time. Then they would ski down, a group of MIT people -- it would be like the outing club, the MIT Outing Club today. Emily was in that crowd. I remembered that she had worked in industry and then gone back to MIT. I assumed she was in the chemistry department, but it turned out she wasn't. She was in what became the applied biological sciences department.

So I just decided to drop by, though she was a dean at the time -- one of the undergraduate education deans. Her secretary Dottie Bowe, isn't the most friendly person in the world, recently passed away, and I said I doubt that Professor Wick would even remember me. My name is John Essigmann, and I'm just passing by if she happened to have a minute. So Dottie went into Emily's office and I heard this scream, "Johnny!" Which is what I was called when I was a kid. She certainly had remembered me. She sat down and she talked with me, and I told her why I was there, after all the family stuff. Emily said ah, you just applied to the wrong department, that's all. She took me over and she introduced me to the people in what became the applied biological sciences department, than it was called nutrition and food science, and they had a toxicology group. There was just immediate resonance. It was what I wanted to do.

So, moved the application to that department and the rest was history. So that's how I got to MIT.

INTERVIEWER: Do you remember what your first impressions were of MIT, of the culture, and the students, and the faculty.

JOHN ESSIGMANN: Yes. I remember what my first impressions were of MIT. And again, this is somewhat conditioned by the fact that I had been an undergraduate at Northeastern, which was a school that taught allcomers from the neighborhood. Northeastern was men and women and different races, I mean diversity central. Because they had taken away the -- first of all had an education school, and a lot of women at that time were interested in becoming teachers.

The second thing was they had provided access to education. They were taking away some of the financial barrier. But my first impression walking down the Infinite Corridor was this is incredibly white and incredibly male. It was that way for about four or five years after my arrival. I thought this must be a very boring place. Then you'd heard of tech tools -- I don't know if they still use that term or not. I was afraid that this would bore me to death, to tell you the truth. But then again, they had just invented UROP I think the year before.

When Emily took me to visit labs in her other department, there were undergraduates there. While they were all white and male, they had a great time. Almost all of them lived in the Greek- system, they were brothers. They had obviously a culture that went back many, many years with events that were held all the time. Playing hockey in the alley. Things that just were really cool. So I found that I really liked the undergraduates, that while they were a little mono-dimensional, I found that they weren't geeks and nerds, they were real normal people and that I'd liked them. Then, of course, it became better as MIT diversified later. But my first feeling was this is awful white, awful male, and I don't think I'm going to like it here.

INTERVIEWER: During graduate school, did you have any particular mentors or influential professors who stand out?

JOHN ESSIGMANN: Mentors in graduate school, many. I found that coming from Northeastern, everybody has some self-doubt, and everybody has self-esteem issues. My classmates in graduate school had gone to these really elite colleges. A person who became my very, very close friend, who later became the MIT Bursar, Shirley Picardi. Shirley was introduced to us at our first gathering of graduate students as the top Harvard chemistry graduate in 20 years. People, not realizing how that could -- taken and deflate the egos of others. But they were real proud of Shirley, and they should be. For my wife, Ellen and me, and Shirley and Tony Picardi were our closest friends in graduate school.

So it was a little intimidating, and so you needed some support. I think that one of them, one of my things to support my self-esteem came from the fact that all this experience I had as an undergraduate just gave me -- I was like years ahead with regard to be able to design and do experiments. Doing lab work was always easy. Classroom, what I found was that some of my mentors were people like Shirley. I learned what it was like to work in a group of contemporaries, and they had worked in groups as undergraduates. I'd worked with my wife as an undergraduate. We were undergrads at the same place at the same time studying the same thing. This was a big group. I learned that MIT gave you problem sets every week that are harder than an average person can answer. And they expect you to work collaboratively to solve the problems. Some of these other graduate students were really good at this. They just knew how to organize a team and solve a problem and then we would go have fun after that. It was very nice.

My first older adult mentor is a man named Jerry Wogen. He became my thesis advisor.

INTERVIEWER: And a ski buddy.

JOHN ESSIGMANN: Ski buddy, that's right -- I taught him how to ski. It was a reciprocity here to a certain extent. Jerry became my thesis advisor. He's still one of my closest friends. He just turned 80 years old. He has just an incredible style of being able to see the minute details of any complicated problem. But being able to zoom to 30,000 feet and be able instantly to express how it affects the person on the street. That kind of ability to shift perspective. He taught people from his lab, and I think that you'll find a lot of people have gone out and done work of some impact or as perceived as having impact to people only because they're able to communicate with anybody about what they did. Make it understandable. My dad and I were very close, and I look at Jerry as a father figure as well. And since my father passed away, increasingly Jerry has maintained the older adult that you go to in times of trouble when you need wise advice. So, Jerry Wogan.

Then there's our other partner in research, George Buchi, a chemist's chemist. In chemistry, chemistry has more beauty to it, and you're like an artist, you make molecules that haven't been made before. But how you make them sometimes is really important, because at the end of the day you want to sell them. The fewer the steps, the more money you make. It's pure MIT economics. George was really good at keeping the number of steps small. He had probably the most critical, analytical mind that I've ever met. Every time you sat down with him, you have to bring all the data. He would take calipers out of his desk and make his own measurements on the spectra that you brought him. He would find every reason to undermine your conclusions. Then send you back to think of experiments that you would never be asked to do any place else. In the long run he taught you to raise the bar, to have standards that were of this place, I think. So that was George's mentoring role.

Then a third person I'll mention is Steve Tannenbaum. Steve is the ultimate generalist. He was an undergraduate here, graduate student here. What they call a lifer. Actually, I don't know if you've heard that term, but he's an MIT lifer. Steve, pound for pound, is probably the most versatile scientist/engineer that I've ever met. It doesn't matter what the problem is, he's able to pull out of 50 different fields tidbits of information that put together a framework in which you can operate and ask questions. Not always right, but he's right often enough that it's truly inspiring to just sit down with him and say here's a problem for you, Steve. Can you think outside the box? And he's never lived in a box, so he's just able to go like all over the place.

A fourth person might be a man I didn't really know that well but admired a lot, Sam Goldblith, a former vice president of MIT. Sam is perhaps best known in the administration as being a brilliant fundraiser. He, again, was a lifer. He was drafted or enlisted in the military the beginning or World War II. Was part of the Bataan Death March, and both Japanese and westerners have acknowledged over the years that they were able to stay alive because of Sam Goldblith's ability as an engineer to be able to keep them alive. You can imagine you're walking through a jungle and you don't have a lot to eat. You gotta make sure that you're eating stuff that you can eat, but then at the same time, maintain a microbiological standard that will keep you from getting diarrhea or any kind of infectious diseases.

So, Sam received a lot of accolades after the War, not only for helping our side, but the Japanese as well. That began a career in international service that resulted in him winning, I forget, it's whatever Japan's most senior accolade they give to a person who isn't Japanese. So it began a lifelong -- War began a lifelong friendship with your enemy that resulted in a) good comradeship, b) good business, c) good education.

The reason I mentioned Sam as a mentor is because in everybody's career there are bumps in the road. There was a funding glitch at one point in which three of us were without funding. I had come to MIT on a Fellowship and that Fellowship ended and a bookkeeping error had resulted in there being no money for me for my second year. Sam, in a very senior position at MIT said no, we're not going to let you go. He was able to scrape together the money and he kept me here, because I couldn't afford it. Then I got to know him over the years, including when I was a faculty member. We go to lunch once a year and it was just sort of like a wonderful opportunity.

Then I'm going to say Emily Wick as the last one, because while I never worked with her -- she left around 1973 or '74 to become the provost at Mount Holyoke. I think she felt a little responsible for me in that she had played a role in getting me there, and she wanted to make sure that I was well advised and well mentored. I'll just point out that Jerry Wogan's first high impact publication also had Emily Wick's name on it. So they were good friends, and I believe continue to be to this day. So she was my other mentor.

INTERVIEWER: So how did you become part of the faculty at MIT?

JOHN ESSIGMANN: I got my PhD in 1976. My wife almost immediately started graduate school here. MIT at that time told me that they wanted me to take a faculty position. I wasn't sure it was the right thing for me -- I'll just say that at the outset. But my wife and I had a long talk about it, and we decided that--. I'm sorry, I want to back up for a minute. MIT said we want you to be a member of the faculty, but in order to get a job here we think it's a good idea to go away to do a postdoc and then come back. So you'll have experienced another environment. Increasingly, at the time MIT was -- well, MIT's always been concerned that perhaps we're a little too inbred, and consanguination is not a way to build a strong gene pool.

I think that my department had even picked a laboratory at the University of Wisconsin that they felt would benefit me because I would be the able to come back with the state-of-the-art, most rocket science toxicology and it would be good in cross-fertilization. So I talked with my wife about it, and we decided that we were too much of a couple to be able to want to live apart. She had the opportunity to come to MIT, and that's something you don't turn down. So we decided that I'll take my professional risks and I went and I decided to do postdocs with partly in my parent department, but I went to work in biology with Jonathan Cane, who's still here. World-class molecular biologist. I was at the time what you would call a chemist, and nobody in chemistry at that time did anything in biology, aside from biochemistry. But certainly nobody did anything with bacterial viruses.

During the time that I was a student in a postdoc, I really felt that my passion coming out of industry was for -- as I saw in industry, biology and chemistry work together very well, and particularly in drug development and drug testing and so on. There were large environmental chemicals out there and why are they dangerous? Because they effect biological systems. So just many reasons why biology and chemistry should be working together, but they weren't at MIT.

So, I thought if I'm going to be a chemist working in a biological environment -- I had an undergraduate degree in biology, but that wasn't world-class, and I'd never worked in the field. So I should work at the most basic level, genetics. I went to work in John's lab for a year. He taught me -- again, the most menial things always fascinate me. How to, what they call titer or measure bacterial viruses, growing in bacteria. I learned everything I could about molecular biology, but in particular the field of genetics. Molecular biology is really cool and very sexy and very modern. Genetics is crossing things and being able to correlate the structure of a gene with the function of whatever that gene encodes, be it protein or RNA.

I found genetics was both fascinating, it was quantitative, and it had chemical basis.

So I chose, by working with John Cane, I said, you know what's really interesting to me is chemicals damage DNA, chemicals from the environment. Sometimes that's bad. Aflatoxin can bind to DNA, that DNA can mutate and cause a liver tumor. Sometimes that binding is good. The drug ciplatin can bind to DNA, and somehow that will selectively destroy the DNA of a tumor. But how do you make that bridge between the chemical binding and the biological event of mutation or death. There wasn't really any science that bridged to that. Working in John Cane's lab I realized that the skill sets that I picked up in chemistry and then in genetics, I could really be the person who would initially make that bridge.

So while I had lost a couple of years -- actually I had a very prolonged postdoc that was almost five years, but I picked up a skill set in a new discipline that I was really able to bring in as a very coherent project. The department once again showed an interest in me, and they asked me to apply. But now it wasn't like a slam dunk that I would get a job. I started in '81. I don't know when Affirmative Action came in and the requirement for what they called Serious Search, which I think, of course, is a very good thing. But somehow in that period of time there had been a transition from you want a job, sure. A single individual could offer you a job, a department head, versus a committee that has to go through all kinds of paperwork and so on.

When I applied for the job in 1980 for the job that I started in January of '81, there was a lot of paperwork for you to go through. In fact, there were a lot of applicants, and very excellent women were applying for the job. The woman who was the applicant for the same job as me -- first of all, became a great friend, Marsha Rosner. And then secondly, a phenomenal cell biologist. Thirdly, she was well-known within MIT because she worked in the cancer center -- a very relevant field for toxicology. And a great publication record. So Marsha Rosner and I were basically competing for the same job. We defined roles for the same job.

What MIT decided to do is to offer it to both of us. This is where I think a great department head comes in. It was Jerry Wogan, my thesis mentor. I remember when I joined the faculty, the first thing that he did was he said, I'm no longer your friendly friend from skiing and all these other things. Now, if anything, I'm going to be treating you harder than anyone else, because I feel what they call a conflict of interest. So my starter package was very modest, $12,000. That's considered a joke nowadays. But he said, you're a resourceful guy, John. You know where everything is. You can borrow things and everything. I said yeah, I can do that. I wasn't in any way offended by the low start-up package.

He sat with Marsha and me, and Marsha said, you know I completely understand, this is an awkward situation. But Jerry Wogan, Marsha Rosner, and myself we're all very mature. She said you know, I'm right out of my postdoc, and it would be horrible if John and I have to come up for tenure at the same time. She said how would you feel about me being able to take students and have John start in year one me start in year two. But I'll be able to transition from my postdoc, start building a group, and getting my resources together. John doesn't need to do that. He's already well-established within the department. And that'll set up us not being in competition with another. Because we wouldn't come up for tenure at the same time.

A very mature woman, became a head of a department, and a great one, at the University of Chicago. Her husband, Robby, was in the physics department at Harvard and he went to become the head of Argonne National Laboratory out in Chicago. So they moved. So we never actually did have to come up for tenure and be in competition.

But what I learned was there's a way you can sit down and work out boundary conditions of relationships early on where you're doing anticipatory calculations as to what kind of problems might occur down the road that would affect relationships within a department. Jerry Wogan was very good at being able to deal with that. So the department offered me a job. The start-up package wasn't good. But I was friendly with my contemporaries, and of course, this is MIT. We become collaborators and all to get into the same collective vehicles of grant support and so on.

So MIT offered me the job and I took it. This is something that very few people know, but I almost decided to become a senior research scientist here rather than a professor. We have what we call parallel track where you become a research scientist, principles research scientist and senior research scientist. I was pathologically afraid of public speaking. I never gave a single presentation in college -- it wasn't part of the educational system.

My thesis defense as a graduate student was I think the third public presentation I ever gave. Every time I gave a talk in public I'd get this kind of hyperventilation feeling. I think they call it speaker's anxiety. I could not imagine what it would be like to walk into a classroom with 100 students three, four times a week. It would be agony. I loved working in the lab. This self-doubt dealt with the problem, but this self-doubt with regard to whether or not I could actually do it almost resulted in me saying the easy path for a guy like me is working at a place like MIT where I can get all my own grant support, have complete freedom to choose what I work on and maybe have a lower profile, but for me that's pretty good.

INTERVIEWER: So if that was the easier way and kept you in the lab doing what you wanted to do, why are you a professor?

JOHN ESSIGMANN: Again, it's a mentoring thing. My boss, Jerry Wogan -- I call him my boss -- who's my thesis advisor and then he became department head. This is where I think knowing your colleagues is really good. He knew what my concerns were because we our friends. He called me in one day and he said John, I have a problem, I need a friend. The head of the department, and he was the chairman of an NAH review group. He was always doing that. He was on the National Cancer Advisory Board and various things. So he said I need somebody to give 10 lectures for me, and of course, it's relevant to your background, it was genetic toxicology, and I'd like you to teach with Bill Filling, it's a favor. So this was before I became a faculty member.

So it was 10 two- hour lectures. I think he knew that for, if someone's a first year professor, that's what you would ask them to do is about 10 lectures. It was put as a request from a friend. I still look at it as one of the hardest things I ever did, but I did it, and I discovered I liked it. At the end, he asked how I liked it. I said it was really fun. I learned a lot and stuff. He said, you can do this. So that's how it happened.

INTERVIEWER: Because you do chemistry toxicology, biological engineering, can you talk a little bit about collaboration at MIT?

JOHN ESSIGMANN: Collaboration at MIT is I think one of the things that brings people here and keeps them here, and especially in my field. Again, I think it's very much the way things happen in industry. In industry you've got a goal of success and people working together, people from different backgrounds working together is a great way to solve a problem in a reasonable amount of time.

So collaboration at MIT. I came here to work and tried to get into the Wogan Lab because it was so collaborative. I mentioned that Jerry Wogan worked collaboratively with George Bushi. He also worked collaboratively with a man named Arnie Demain, who eventually became a biology professor here. Arnie was, before MIT, the director of industrial fermentations at Merck, and a bunch of engineers. Let me give one example of collaboration, both at MIT and how it has to translate into more global collaboration.