Mildred S. Dresselhaus

INTERVIEWER: Today is August 27th, 2007. Brian Keegan is interviewing professor Mildred Dresselhaus for the MIT150 Oral History Project. Thank you for taking the time today to meet with us.

DRESSELHAUS: My pleasure.

INTERVIEWER: Now this project aims to capture aspects and perspectives of members of the MIT community who participated throughout MIT's history and it's on the occasion of MIT's 150th that we want to start to look back as much as to look forward.

DRESSELHAUS: When is the 150th?

INTERVIEWER: The 150th will be in 2011. April of 2011.

DRESSELHAUS: And you're hoping to get some aspects, some progress with it? You probably won't do everything that you want to, but it's sort of like the 250th anniversary of Mozart. They were rushing to get it all done by 2006. I remember somebody talking to me about that.

INTERVIEWER: Sure. Now we're going to skip ahead a little bit, maybe. We'll come back to your biography later, but maybe you can tell me, after you left Cornell in your postdoc, you were offered a job to come to MIT. What had you heard about MIT before? Tell me about the Project Whirlwind that you had been offered initially before you left for Cavendish.

DRESSELHAUS: Oh yeah. Well, Project Whirlwind, at the time I was offered that job, or that was the RA in the math department, at that time it seemed like an exciting opportunity. But I didn't really know too much about it. I didn't really know the history of these various computer projects that they had. They had had a previous project at University of Pennsylvania that happened during the War years, and that had a big impact on computation during the War years and brought computers into some level of contributing to computations for trajectories for missiles and so forth. But not that much I guess, because it wasn't very widely used. At that time, I guess people had already some idea of what computers might do, but only a very small inkling about it. So I had a chance to be involved in one of the early projects. And it would have been a totally different career had I done that, but I didn't come because I wasn't interested in it. I was just interested in the other opportunity more. So it was a choice between two good things. I know in a lifetime, you seldom have two really good things coming up all at once, and you have to make a decision. So my decision turned out okay for me. I have no idea what the other decision would have been, you know. It's sort of a useless issue. But looking back now at the history of computer science, that would have been a very interesting thing to be involved with.

INTERVIEWER: Now while you were at the Cavendish or Radcliffe or the University of Chicago, what awareness did you have of MIT or the research that was going on there?

DRESSELHAUS: The War years research formed a body of information that we use as text books. The radiation series was a terrific series on electromagnetic theory and many other things. So it was a constant reference source. I did a thesis on microwave properties of superconductors. That was a main source of information of microwave properties of materials and cavities and whatnot. So yeah, sure, MIT had a huge reputation, and it was kind of serendipity that I had a chance to join the system. And the reason I joined the system had to do with the fact that MIT didn't have a discriminatory policy against two members of the same family joining a organization. I didn't know exactly about the history of that, how many people before me benefited from that aspect, but it certainly made a difference. So that's why we came to MIT. It really had nothing to do with so much the reputation, except we joined a very good laboratory and we had exceptional jobs in that lab. In the history of science, when you look back nowadays, we have no jobs that were like the jobs that we were offered at the MIT Lincoln Lab, in so far as our obligation was to do basic research and to help people at the lab that needed to know something about solid state physics. What could be better than that, you know? It was kind of an open-ended job. Those kinds of jobs don't exist today.

INTERVIEWER: You mentioned that the nepotism rules played a big aspect in your decision to come to MIT. Who recruited you?

DRESSELHAUS: Ben Lax.

INTERVIEWER: And was there a research project he wanted you to work on in particular?

DRESSELHAUS: Basically, he knew both of us individually from our previous work, and he wanted us to work on things that we knew something about. But I had worked on superconductivity, and Ben Lax had formed an opinion himself that that field was finished; that once BCS theory came along and explained so many things - it didn't explain my thesis, but it explained many other things. And so he really didn't want me to work on that, but most anything else. So that turned out to be a great opportunity. You can look at a decision like that; being hired to do something other than what you knew about as a negative. But this turned out to be a big positive in my career, because I learned another field. And I had from my graduate school experience the background to work in many fields of physics. So this worked out really well for me.

INTERVIEWER: Now you worked in the National Magnet Labs when you came to MIT Cambridge campus, or you were out at Lincoln Labs?

DRESSELHAUS: Well, I was sort of half time at each place. The Magnet Lab, when I was hired at Lincoln Lab was in Building 4 of the main campus, right in the basement. And at that time it was just a laboratory of a professor. It wasn't a national facility or anything, but they had some ideas to make it into a facility. And I was one of the very few people working there. There was a very handful of people who worked with the high magnetic field facility at that time. It was not a big enterprise like it later became. So I was one of the "originals", so to speak, one of the originals.

INTERVIEWER: What was the atmosphere like in the mid-60's? What was the atmosphere like there? Who were you working with when you were at the lab?

DRESSELHAUS: Well the atmosphere changed quite a lot during the 60's. When I joined the lab in the 60's, everything was open, and physics was expanding greatly. That was Sputnik time. And there was a big, big expansion in science nationwide. And I was part of that. My hiring at Lincoln was part of that movement. But in 1964, there was kind of a big change that took place. This was caused by the Mansfield Amendment that said that funding of defense-related research should be related to defense. Well, broadly speaking, everything that we did was related to defense. So that was not necessarily a big restriction, but along with the Mansfield Amendment, there was a part about it that was accountability; that meant different people working on projects had to account for their time. Before that, just the output was sufficient. There was plenty of output coming from the lab; coming from myself and all the other people whom I associated with. So this was never an issue for us. But there was now an accountability of what you did between hour eight and 10, or something like that. And we'd been living with something like this ever since. In some ways it's good, because people should be held accountable for what they do. But in some ways it's bad, because it sort of stifles creativity. You can't be totally creative if you account for everything that you're doing. You need some time to just think.

INTERVIEWER: Now who are some of the notable or memorable people that you met during this early time you came to MIT, whether at the Magnet Lab or Lincoln?

DRESSELHAUS: Well, there was Ben Lax who hired me. And he was a great scientist. He and Gene Dresselhaus were involved with very beginning experiments of cyclotron resonance. So that's how he knew Gene. So he was very happy to have us work on anything connected with that sort of area. And I sort of got moving into the optical aspects of that, which Ben Lax was interested in. So I learned something that he wanted me to learn, and I wanted to learn it too. So shortly after I was hired, for the first six or nine months I was working with him on this project. I was doing semiconductors, just straight semiconductors like a lot of other people. And then I decided I wanted to do something that was a little bit more my own, and I went into doing semimetals. And that was something totally different. Lax had made a bridge to semimetals, but that was just a piece of the action; and I moved on to carbon-based materials from there. He thought carbons were too complicated, but you know he gave me the freedom. He had some confidence in people, and he gave us the freedom. As long as I worked on things that he wanted also, which I did, then he was happy. And I was happy.

So of course, when we look back at what was done, the carbon-related work turned out to be the important work, as history will tell us. But one has to do things that your colleagues need, you know, so that's part of it. So I didn't mind doing that also. And I learned new things from doing it.

INTERVIEWER: Now when you came out from your postdoctoral work and you came here to MIT, was it hard to find a niche in terms of applied physics? Everything in physics with high-energy physics and electrical engineering was just circuits. How did you find this area?

DRESSELHAUS: Actually, when I was out at Lincoln Lab, that was interdisciplinary research. So we had people in all fields working together. And I that was very much like the industrial labs in US generally; Bell Labs; GE at that time was a great lab too, Westinghouse and so forth. They all had similar approaches, and Lincoln was among them and was a great laboratory at that time when Ben Lax was there. And he was there for about half of my stay at Lincoln Lab. And then after he left to become an MIT professor, the atmosphere changed. It changed for two reasons. I think the Mansfield Amendment was part of it, that people had to be a lot more accountable. So the lab started counting beans; a bean counting exercise. And so, many of us didn't fare as well under that atmosphere, but for the most part, the research didn't change so much. It was just the rules that got to us. It was particularly bad for the women. There were two women out of 1,000 men, and this affected us because we had young children, the two women did.

INTERVIEWER: This was at Lincoln Lab?

DRESSELHAUS: At Lincoln Lab. Yeah, Laura Roth and myself. And so we both eventually left, because of these restrictions.

INTERVIEWER: So tell me about this transition from being a researcher out at Lincoln to joining the faculty here on the Cambridge campus in 1967.

DRESSELHAUS: The transition?

INTERVIEWER: Sure.

DRESSELHAUS: The transition, as far as the daily work, hardly changed. When I was a researcher at Lincoln Lab, I actually supervised a graduate student on campus. On campus, there were graduate students, and graduate students were always looking for research topics. For a couple of cases, the individuals sought me out. So I was actually working with some students before I became a faculty member. But when I became a faculty member, I had more students, and then I was responsible for lectures, whereas when I was just a person at Lincoln Lab, I gave guest lectures. So that was the difference.

But the mode of work didn't change that much. It was a bit of a continuum. So the biggest thing I felt was the freedom in time. I didn't have to account for the time. And it was just getting a lot of things done. As a faculty member, you know, you have things to get done, and nobody is telling you what time you do it. This worked much better for me than the system at Lincoln.

INTERVIEWER: Who recruited or encouraged you to come join the faculty, or made the appointment to the electrical engineering rather than physics?

DRESSELHAUS: That's an interesting point. There were several reasons. For one thing, I was recruited by the Department of Electrical Engineering. And recruited is really the wrong word. I was looking for a place that I could spend a little time to do research without the time clock; without the accountability aspect, because getting to the lab at 8:00 turned out to be really difficult for me. So the Rockefeller family had had a faculty fellowship that they started about a year before I had it. I was the second holder of that fellowship, and George Pratt, who had migrated from Lincoln Lab to MIT just before that time, but still spent some time at Lincoln Lab knew my situation and he put my name forward for this fellowship, and lo and behold, I received it. So that changed my career, because I, of course, accepted it. And that led to faculty appointments. I was at MIT for a very short time, and the folks at MIT realized that I would make a contribution to their program.

They were looking for somebody who could teach the students physics from an engineering point-of-view. So having worked at Lincoln Lab for seven years, I apparently had some background that way. So I was hired to do that, but everything else was pretty much the same. The research didn't change very much, and what I was doing was at the interface between electrical engineering and physics, anyhow. And later I got an appointment in the physics department. But in the early days, when I joined the MIT faculty, the physics department had a very, very small commitment to condensed matter physics and was heavily into high energy physics. And the electrical engineering department needed people in this area because materials were very important to devices, so it made sense for me to join the electrical engineering department. It was a good choice for me at that time and continues to the present, because I have a natural place in that department, but also a natural place in physics. Physics later developed a condensed matter program that is quite strong, and so I fit into that department as well.

INTERVIEWER: Now what were your initial impressions when you came to campus in the fall time? You were part time before, but tell me about what the student body was like when you came. I mean, the mid-to-late 60's, there was an increasing number of women on campus. Tell me about the kind of advising and teaching roles you took on.

DRESSELHAUS: Right. Well when I came, there were very few women actually. There were only four percent women, and fewer faculty This wasn't so many, and many of the classes I taught were all male. That is MIT had a smaller number of women and electrical engineering had smaller than average number, so it was a really small number. And because the fellowship that brought me to MIT had something to do with the scholarship of women in science, one of the planks of the Rockefeller Family Endowment for that fellowship was to promote scholarship of women in science and engineering. So I felt that this mandate suggests that I should do something for women in science and engineering.

INTERVIEWER: Was that considered a radical notion at the time?

DRESSELHAUS: No it wasn't it wasn't radical at all. I think it was pretty well accepted. I wasn't a radical. I was doing my job, really, because MIT had the talent pool. We had women here, already. And they were having a hard time, because there were so few. And it was believed at that time that admitting women was somewhat risky, because they weren't doing well. But upon looking at the situation, I felt that it wasn't the women, but it was the environment that they were in that contributed to their sub-critical performance.

So what happened was two things. I was involved with those, but these happenings were welcomed by the faculty, actually. These were not controversial. MIT had had different standards for admitting women than men. I didn't know that, but I found out about this when MIT asked me to be on the committee to admit students. And they had me doing women student admissions only, because the criteria were different. But when I looked at the admission of all students, I saw that it was really quite different. And so the first thing that we did was to have equal admission that would be on the same criteria, academic criteria. That fact increased the women by about a factor two, just overnight.

INTERVIEWER: What were those criteria?

DRESSELHAUS: It was where the cutoff would be on the SAT, etc. component and on the individual assessment. Those were the two criteria. They have interviews and personal characteristics. And then they have performance on exams. And those are the two main topics that enter into the evaluation, and for each of them they had different criteria at that time, some of which was subjective and some of which was quantitative. But it was under the assumption that women weren't performing that well, and many of them weren't. So if they had equal admission criterion, it was expected women would perform worse than they were at that time. But after discussing this among the few women faculty we had at MIT, we came to the conclusion that if we had larger numbers of women, they would do better. That conclusion worked out to be correct.

INTERVIEWER: Tell me something about the other women faculty here on campus. There was Sheila Widnall, Emily Wick, Laura Roth.

DRESSELHAUS: Well, Laura Roth wasn't a faculty member at MIT. She was at Tufts. There was Emily Wick in nutrition. We then had a nutrition department that later became the Department of Applied Biology. And we had Sheila. She was a very junior faculty member in aeronautics. And there wasn't much else in the School of Science or Engineering. I think Sheila and myself were the only ones, and I was tenured, she was untenured. That was kind of what it was.

INTERVIEWER: That was the extent of the women faculty you knew?

DRESSELHAUS: Well, we knew all of them, because there was a woman in philosophy, Thompson, and she had gone to the same high school as I from a long time back. It was a handful of women. I don't know, maybe six or eight. It was a very small number at that time.

INTERVIEWER: Now, would you have meetings? How well did you know each other?

DRESSELHAUS: Yeah, well we got together for lunch over at Ashdown House, every month or something like that. And we would talk. And we would say, we should do something to help the young women coming along. Because when President Wiesner came in, he had the idea of appointing more women faculty. And so we took it upon us to mentor them, because they were in all kinds of different departments, and many had no women. They were the first women faculty, and some of men felt uncomfortable in telling them what they should be doing to promote their careers.

INTERVIEWER: Now the women that you were mentoring or assisting, both at undergraduate, were there women at the graduate level?

DRESSELHAUS: Oh these are the students.

INTERVIEWER: McCormick Hall had just opened up; was an all womens dormitory in the early 1960's. Now did you spend a lot of time working with the women from there?

DRESSELHAUS: None of us spent a lot of time, because we were all working on our own careers. But we spent some time. And Emily Wick was the one who spent the most time, because she was dean of women students until about 1970. And then, when there was a change of the guard. There were some changes, and they had all the students under one dean. But the advising program for women students that Emily Wick had instituted had sort of crumbled at that point. And so the rest of us figured out how we could reconstitute some kind of substitute forum for women students.

So that's kinda how we got involved with that. I'm sure Sheila must have said something about that as well, since she was involved with that, and I was involved also. And in 1970 we started this course, What is Engineering that had some impact, especially on women and minorities.

INTERVIEWER: Tell me about that course.

DRESSELHAUS: Well we had the idea that when these numbers of women students started to increase, the women were enrolling in different departments than the male distribution. So we were concerned about that because of implications of faculty hires, and all of that. We were thinking forward that there someday may be even more women than 10 percent, maybe, which is what we had in, say, the early 1970's; which of course happened. And so we instituted this course in the very early 1970's, like 1972.

The objective was to introduce students to other topics that they might be thinking of for a major. So this was aimed at freshmen, to broaden their insights. We had very interesting people give talks from the engineering School, and we did some of the classes ourselves and some with interesting people, just like you're interviewing people of interest. We did something like that. And it was very successful. Our original idea was we'd have sort of a dozen people that would be kind of like one of the seminar programs. And in the first regular semester, the numbers increased to 100. And so we started running the course not once a year, but every semester. And then we took turns in taking the class, because we did this in addition to the other teaching assignments we had in our own departments. But it was a successful experiment. After four years it was taken over by the School of Engineering. I don't know, about three or four years that we did it, the two of us. And it then became something that had a different character, but it was still a good introductory course for expanding the horizons of students.

INTERVIEWER: What was your reaction to being tenured in 1968? What impact did that have? You had a young family at the time. And your research obligations, was that something you were hoping for, because you were tenured only after a year since you had joined the faculty?

DRESSELHAUS: I was tenured when I joined. My appointment was with tenure, I was a full professor when I was appointed. So it wasn't an issue, and I never asked about it. When they made the appointment, I don't remember any discussions about the levels. We didn't discuss conditions, particularly, and I was around anyway. I just made a transition. It it sounds very odd to you, but I didn't have anybody that alerted me to the idea that tenure was a big issue, so I didn't know it was a big issue, and it wasn't a big issue for me.

INTERVIEWER: Did it change the research? So it wasn't a big issue. You didn't change your research goals?

DRESSELHAUS: No. It had no impact on what I was doing. I just kind of continued. In fact, for the first five years that I was a professor at MIT, I still kept up some of my Lincoln duties, because I was running their seminar, and whatever. I had involvement with various researchers there, so I would spend time between the two places, like a day a week at Lincoln Lab. I think they paid some significant fraction of my salary for the transition period.

INTERVIEWER: So you were named associate department head for electrical engineering in 1972. Tell me about that.

DRESSELHAUS: When that happened, that was a transition, because that gave me many more duties on campus, and I found that I couldn't do those duties plus Lincoln, so I left Lincoln at that time. By that time, Lincoln had already changed quite considerably from 1967, when I came down to campus. So it made sense to focus on campus activities then. And in fact, my husband came down to campus in 1977 when I became a lab director, because then I had additional duties also that were more than I could handle myself. Because I had a very large research group by that time. And he wasn't very happy at Lincoln anymore, because the emphasis on basic research had changed quite considerably. And he wasn't all that happy with what he was doing, so he was happy to come down on campus.

INTERVIEWER: You were also director of materials science?

DRESSELHAUS: That's what I'm talking about. That's 1977. So I was with Lou Smullin until the end of his term as associate department head. And then when he finished his term as department head, it was a new group that came in, headed by Davenport. At that point, he had his own associate department head. When I was there, we had only one department. It was called The Department of Electrical Engineering. The Computer Science component was born during my time. When I was finished, then we had two very distinct associate heads. When I was there, we did have two associate heads, because the department was so huge, and the number of students was so large, that it was too much for one person. So that's the way that went. And so then 1974, when that was finished, I went back to just being ordinary professor and doing my thing.

But my life changed at that time through an external event. I was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1974. And along with that came a bunch of different jobs that they gave me to do, so after I was finished with my term as associate department head, I had other duties. So I was heading up the Bureau of Standards evaluation process. That was one of the jobs I got from the Academy. So that was quite a big job, because the Bureau of Standards is bigger than Lincoln Lab. It has a very large number of employees, and the laboratory was divided into different divisions, all of which were evaluated. And I was in charge of the whole evaluation process. So I learned a lot of things; gained appreciation of applications in industry and how industry and research laboratories interacted. I learned all kinds of things.

INTERVIEWER: Let's return a little bit back to when you were associate department head for EE. Now, this is kind of a heavy time for computer science in the late 1960's and early 1970's. Tell me something about how, was it just rumblings or whispers about the AI Lab and the Laboratory of Computer Science; the work that they were doing. Was it occupying a large part of the faculty's research interests?

DRESSELHAUS: When I started in 1972, there were rumblings, but it wasn't a big thing yet. But in the period of 1972 to 1974, you could say that computer science was born. And there was emphasis on trying to think of what a curriculum might be, and how the organization might be. And there were serious thoughts about keeping it within electrical engineering, because keeping the departments, the two pieces together, but having it as two components of the same department. It turned out, in the end, probably, that this was a wise decision. And I say this because other departments were split, like at Berkeley and different places. They brought their departments together again later on. And there were many places that have ECE, so electrical and computer engineering, which is sort of like what we have, electrical engineering and computer science. So the model that we set up was actually followed by other places, but the resources for creating another department came out of EE. So these were kind of difficult times for EE in some kind of way, because they had to do some belt tightening to make CS happen. But that seemed like the right thing to do, to us. So that's what we focused on, and when we look back, it was the right thing to do.

INTERVIEWER: How much did you interact? There's so many kinds of them mythological or strong personalities associated with EECS, between Hal Abelson and Marvin Minsky. There's all these people who were kind of making a name for themselves at MIT during the early 1970's. How well did you get to know them?

DRESSELHAUS: Well I knew them all. The two that you mentioned were in CS, so Bob Fano was their boss, because he was my counterpart on the CS side. But yeah, I got to know all these people. Our policy was to promote the careers of everybody that was in the department, and we put up with lots of people that had independent personalities, shall we say. But the idea was to make it all work, make them happy, but make the the whole greater than the sum of the parts. You don't want to squelch people, because that makes them unhappy and not so productive. And there's enough room in this place to put up with some difficult personalities, and you just have to keep them a little bit reigned in so that other people are protected. That's kind of the way to do it. Marvin Minsky was a great contributor. We had [INAUDIBLE NAME] also. And he was part of it. You know, he's a special personality.

INTERVIEWER: Now when you became director of the Center of Materials Science in 1977, did you enjoy these kind of administrator responsibilities that you had, or was there something about the research aspect, rather than the kind of academic --

DRESSELHAUS: Well, actually, I felt that running the Center of Material Science and Engineering was a better assignment for me than the associate department head. The associate department head had too many personality problems associated with it, you know, people issues. And running a lab had more research issues. So I had a big challenge when I took over, because we were about to lose our NSF block grant. We were in big trouble.

INTERVIEWER: We being MIT?

DRESSELHAUS: Yeah, MIT. And I was brought in to try to save the Materials Center and bring things back, which I managed to do. So it was my job, which I executed.

INTERVIEWER: How did the crisis precipitate or how did you resolve it? Can you go into that?

DRESSELHAUS: Well the NSF was unhappy with our program, basically, and we got some poor reviews from reviewers. These NSF labs get reviewed periodically. And so, we were put on a short string for contemplated termination. Well, I guess MIT wasn't too happy about that, because these laboratories served a very important purpose in providing central facilities for the whole Institute. So it wasn't only the people who got funding to do research, but the facilities that supplied all researchers that were very important. So I had to figure out a way to keep MIT people happy and also keep the NSF happy, which was done.

We all got together, and one thing that I did was I opened up the administration of the center; I involved a lot of young people. And I put a big effort on training future leaders for the center, because I felt that the natural term should be finite. It was kind of influenced by the length of our contract with the NSF, which was a three year cycle. So, I signed up for two terms, but I didn't make that widely known. Just the dean knew that, and the provost. And I kept to that. But I didn't plan on doing this as a lifetime engagement, so my idea was to build up the center, get it in good healthy form, and develop new talent that could be used for other administrative jobs.

See we had a big problem actually at that time, that during the War Years, lots of people were trained and became good at running things. And then they were running things, and the young people didn't get the experience, because the other guys were running things. So I recognized that this was an issue, so I put an emphasis into training people. And those people have gone on to do many things at MIT. So it was a good thing.

INTERVIEWER: So you finished up your post there in 1983 and you were also named physics faculty.

DRESSELHAUS: Yeah. What happened with the end of my term was a little more complex than what you said. What actually happened was in 1982, or the fall of 1981, I was elected to the American Physical Society to become President. The Presidency was assumed in 1984, but then I had a couple of years that first, oh I don't know, you have names for Vice President Elect, Vice President and so forth. You have different stages of this. But I became busy with that, and I kept doing all my teaching during all these years, whereas other people might have given that up. But I kept that on, and the reason was that we had no women teaching, almost. So for many students, I was the only female faculty member. I felt very strongly I didn't want to give that up, so I was doing too much at that time.

INTERVIEWER: What classes were you teaching?

DRESSELHAUS: Well, solid-state physics of various varities to the engineering students. But by that time, I had physics students as well.

So we were talking about the Center. We're now sitting here. This place here used to be an ion implantation facility, this very room. And then after a while, the number of uses decreased, as this became sort of a standard thing elsewhere. So we made a conference room out of it, which has been greatly used.

INTERVIEWER: You also became associate provost, right?

DRESSELHAUS: No, I never was. That's not right. Starting with the American Physical Society, then I had many jobs elsewhere. So I became treasurer of the National Academy, and so lots of things like that.

INTERVIEWER: Did you ever have aspirations for any higher leadership posts within MIT, or did you find the ones outside MIT --

DRESSELHAUS: No, in fact, when I was asked to do various things, because I was asked to do different things, I can't remember all the things, but I didn't want to give up my research program. So most of the higher administrative positions required strong compromises with how much time I would have for doing research. So I just didn't seek that, and I was busy enough doing service to society and the research community, generally, with all the stuff I was doing outside of MIT. So I was quite saturated.

INTERVIEWER: Your research covered electronic structures and various materials, intercalation, ion implantation, and then novel carbon forms, nanotubes, and now thermoelectricity. Is there a common thread through all these, an underlying interest?

DRESSELHAUS: It's all kind of, well, we started out with these carbon systems in 1961, and that soon led to nano-things, because in the early 1970's, when we started working on intercalation, that was a way to look at individual layers at the atomic layer. So I was into nano-stuff in the early 70's. And so everything that you mentioned has to do with nano. Thermoelectricity was a new idea that came to me. For 30 years, from 1960 to 1990, there was essentially no advance. The navy was interested in developing some kind of better thermoelectrics for submarine applications, that was their main interest. And they asked me if I had any ideas, so I said, well, we have all these new materials around now, nano-things. That could be interesting. I looked into it, and it looked like it would be very interesting. So we had a new field.

That was one field that I started and that I stayed with through its development, or much of its development now. Now, there are so many people working in it, so it's hard to find new things. You can't be in every field, fully. The carbon one, as that developed, went to nano structures, with fullerenes, and then nanotubes and graphenes. We have more things coming down the line, probably. So that's a natural for me. I stayed with that one all the time. And thermoelectricity I work on also, but to a lesser degree. And then there were other fields that we started that other people have taken over. So that's okay. You can't do everything. Coherent Optical Phonon Generation. I was doing an experiment with Eric Ippen when we discovered that field, and we wrote some seminal papers. But we couldn't get any funding. The time that that happened was just right after the Berlin Wall fell, and we were in kind of a bad situation in funding physical sciences; there was a recession in funding. So other people followed on with that field. We couldn't get funding. We started the field, but we couldn't get funding to work on it. So these things happen.

INTERVIEWER: Maybe you could explain in sort of lay terms what the fields broadly that you're interested in are, what intercalation or implantation or any of the kind of nanotubes; any one of the many disparate things you've become involved in. What's your favorite or --

DRESSELHAUS: They're all nano-related. So intercalation is the insertion of layers, one layer at a time of course, so let's say one layer, of a guest species into a host material. So it is nano in the sense you have one atomic layer. And then you can follow the properties of that layer, how it changed the host, and how it changes what gets inserted. Both of them change, obviously, through the interaction. And that's interesting. So that's one field that we kind of were into at a very early stage, and I stay with it as that field developed and went through its crest and became less important. You know, as these fields come and develop they sort of go through some kind of maximum, then they dissipate a bit. So I was involved with that whole process. But something like the nanotubes, that started a long time ago, because we've seen nanotubes in high resolution SEM images a long time ago, but didn't pay any attention to them.

INTERVIEWER: Tell me about your metallic versus semiconducting investigations in the nanotubes.

DRESSELHAUS: Yeah, well what prefaced that was I gave a talk at a conference, and saying what would be really interesting is if somebody could think about what properties nanotubes might have as individuals, just one layer of them. Because that was like intercalation where we had just one layer. But now we have it wrapped up. And the idea was that an object like that could have very interesting properties. So I made a talk about that the structure would be very novel. And then I sorta sketched some interesting projects that we could work on in that field. So this was kind of a talk at a conference, talking about nanostructures. It was a fullerene conference. So you can imagine that a nanotube is built out of making bigger and bigger fullerenes. That was the way I presented it at the time.

So people seemed really interested in this. I saw different people scribbling lots of stuff down, so I said gee, maybe this is interesting. So I had a visitor who arrived like one month after I gave the talk, a theory person who was doing a sabbatical here from Japan and said I why don't we work on this and see what the properties really are, instead of giving the problem away to everybody else. Let's do it ourselves. So then a second Japanese guy on the same fellowship but from a different place, and they didn't know each other came by wanting to talk to me about projects that I thought were interesting. So I suggested this to him too. And I said, oh maybe the two of you might enjoy working on this together. So that was the beginning of this. That's how this thing was born.

INTERVIEWER: What's come of it?

DRESSELHAUS: Well, lo and behold, about a half a year after we published our paper, making the prediction that these kinds of tubes would be especially interesting, because you meet properties that they had. Somebody soon figured it out. Two groups at IBM and NEC figured out how to actually make these nanotubes. But it took six years between the time that they were discovered and the experiments were done to show that our predictions were correct. Part of the reason is, when you have a new kind of material, it's hard to control and hard to make it reproduceably. The amounts of material available were so tiny that the appropriate experiments couldn't be done right away. So it took a little while.

There was also a non-believing community out there. The research communities are always very conservative. They like to believe what has happened before is correct. And when you come up with something that's revolutionary and new, they don't like this. So until the day we publish the paper, there was mostly unbelievers. Then of course, when you have the smoking gun, then it's all over. And after that, there are no non-believers, but there is total conversion.

INTERVIEWER: Now, you've seen many fads in the materials science and applied physics come and go. There's the hot talk of high temperature superconductors that they're always just around the corner. Now we talk about nanotubes are going to change everything and whether or not that plays out has yet to be determined. I wonder if you had any thoughts about what role the hype has in securing research funds and sheer basic research versus sort of promoting false hope about it.

DRESSELHAUS: Yeah, well, hype is bad, because hype builds up false expectations, and then eventually you're caught. Because if you hype something, it's never going to be quite as good. You have to, I think, be pretty honest, about what the time scales are going to be. And I think that we have to be very careful, because we were burned by these high temperature superconductors. I think at the time that they came out, people really believed that making these would be pretty easy. Because you know that the one thing about High-Tc superconductivity that was interesting is that the recipe that was given, anybody that tried it within a few weeks could reproduce it. So it wasn't so elusive. Most other things that are in the condensed matter realm are difficult to reproduce, especially if they're not correct. It takes a long time and then people find the truth. Well like this Schoen thing that we heard about conducting polymers. That false announcement kind of killed the field, because that's worse than hype. That's false results, false data. But even hype is detrimental because it builds up false expectations. So we should be careful not to do this. I've been involved in a whole bunch of different national studies, and I try to call it the way I see it and not to exaggerate. But I could understand why there was hype in the case of the High-Tc, because people were so excited about the fact that we had - superconductors go up to 23 degrees kelvin with great, great effort. And then all of a sudden it went up to 40 and 90 degrees in six weeks. It was unbelievable that something like that could happen, and that everybody could reproduce this. So they thought this field would be easy, a piece of cake. But it turned out it wasn't like that. Control of materials and the engineering aspects turned out to be a lot harder than anybody ever imagined. And the theory has turned out to be a lot harder too.

INTERVIEWER: So when it comes to these sort of basic science concepts, whether it's high temperature superconductivity or fusion or these ideas that are very much rooted in basic science and trying to apply them into realizable technologies for society, they almost always somehow end up being disappointing, whether or not they don't deliver on the right time scale or don't realize the expected gain.

DRESSELHAUS: But there's no delivering on a time scale, because research just doesn't work that way. There are breakthroughs. So High-Tc was a breakthrough. But then the follow up part has proved very, very difficult. There are many interesting things that come out of this on highly correlated systems that are interesting to a physics afficionado, but people thought there would be industries, gigantic industries, flowing from with the kind of money that was put into it, initially, by industrial labs and the government. All governments, not only US labs.

INTERVIEWER: Is it a question of not having enough basic research dollars or not having enough industry interest? Does it just vary based on the varying sciences?

DRESSELHAUS: Well, we go into things in a big way, you know, in the beginning with great enthusiasm, which is fine. That gets a lot of things discovered. And then, of course, it's shown that this is really a hard problem and a sustained effort is required to make further progress. Lots of people back out at that point, but there are a few that would like to continue, and it's very hard for those people to find funds. So we need some funds for those people. So we go too big, and then we go too small. We have this spike and then we undershoot. High-Tc will find some kind of place. There'll be some kind of applications. We have a few now with interference filters. We need more than that. I think it will come with time, but who knows? The LASER was a little bit like that, but that wasn't hyped up. So people weren't expecting big things, and now we have lots of applications from lasers. But it took a long time before the applications came. Quantum mechanics, another good example took a long time. And that wasn't hyped up, because nobody thought that that would have applications. But High-Tc seemed like a natural for application, but the applications happened slowly, and nanotubes seems like an obvious one too, but it's more difficult. I think nanotube applications are coming. There are companies now, that are forming. And High-Tc companies, well there's American Superconductor. They've done pretty well, actually, as a company. They've survived. It hasn't become another ATT, but look what ATT did. They went up, and then they came down.

INTERVIEWER: You've been awarded so many honorary doctorates and awards at the national level, as well as holding positions in the American Association for Advanced Society, or APS. Is there something you feel like you haven't accomplished yet? Do you stay up late on Octobers waiting for phone calls from Stockholm?

DRESSELHAUS: No I don't, as a matter of fact. I feel I've been more than honored. You know, I don't do science to get honors, so anything that comes along is a big surprise to me. Every one of them has been a surprise, and I haven't looked for anything. Actually some of them, they give me opportunities. Like this last one, with L'Oreal, with women in science. That was a little bit, well not totally unexpected, because people would talk to me about it. And because I knew the other winners, they would say to me, how come you don't have this prize? I said well, I just wasn't awarded that prize. That was my answer every time I was asked that question, but then eventually I won. But the point about that prize that's changed me in some ways is that I feel like I ought to be doing something about it, because the L'Oreal company, they put a lot of money into advancing women in science and engineering worldwide. And I understand why they do it, because it's good for their business. So I can understand that aspect. But for me, I don't really care about their business, but I care about the principle. And they're always looking for some kind of ideas. So if I can furnish some ideas, then we make a good team. So that award is a little different than some of the others, where you get the award and that's the end.

The award from the Heinz Foundation was another one where I felt it changed me somewhat in thinking about what the applications of my science could be good for. So sometimes you get an award that has an impact on you, and then all the honorary degrees. That has the following things happening, because all of these different universities consider you all of a sudden as an alumnus, and they give you jobs to do. So it isn't that it's an event that ends with the day of the award, with those kinds of activities.

So I guess that the awards have one impact on me, making me feel that the work that we do in science has some relation to society. MIT likes that, actually. They encourage us to do that, so I think I'm in a good environment for this.