Bob Conn, Applied Physicist, Nuclear Engineer, and World Leader in Academics, Philanthropy, and Public Policy

For those alumni who best appreciate and actualize the power of a Caltech education, the opportunities are twofold and deeply interrelated. On the side of basic science, Caltech has proved to be a premier institute where the mysteries of nature can be probed and illuminated, and where the tools to forge new knowledge are shared by world-leading experts. And on the side of applied science, the same tools of discovery can be put toward the greatest challenges of the day to surpass previous limitations in technology development. This duality, where impact and discovery are taught as mutually-reinforcing endeavors, encapsulates the best of Caltech's mission.

This was exactly what Bob Conn gained during his graduate research years at Caltech. His interest in pursuing nuclear engineering within the Applied Physics program propelled him simultaneously in the two directions demanded by the study of nuclear physics, with the goal to create scalable - and peaceful - forms of nuclear energy. In the mid-late 1960s, when the environmental and economic downsides to fossil fuel energies were becoming painfully obvious, one solution was to devise civilian nuclear reactors that were safe, efficient, and scalable. For Conn, who took great advantage of the recent arrival of Professor Noel Corngold to Caltech's faculty, this meant delving into the extraordinarily complex physics that underlies nuclear energy processes. Corngold, trained in the "old guard" tradition where physicists were not bifurcated into the strictly separated domains of theory and experiment, had conducted important work on the magnetic moment of the neutron and the underlying theories that provided an intellectual framework for neutron physics generally. Like his mentor, Conn pursued a dual path. The practical demands of nuclear engineering required a greater understanding of how neutrons move through materials, and he contributed to this field for more than a decade.

As he reflects in the discussions below, Conn's thesis work would put him on a trajectory for path-breaking advances in plasma physics and nuclear fusion energy. Less obvious at the time was the values that Caltech instilled in Conn that were destined to make both his scientific career uniquely broad and varied, and the leadership qualities that would make him an institute builder and a global scientific leader.

Even in retrospect, Conn's path was anything but linear. Born in Brooklyn and athletically gifted to the point that playing professional baseball was one potential path, Conn doubled down on science first as a high schooler at Brooklyn Tech, and then as an undergraduate at the Pratt Institute, where he completed a degree in chemical engineering with additional studies in physics and mathematics. As Conn emphasizes, although Pratt is generally known more as an art institute, his science education was first rate, and he felt well prepared for the rigors of a Caltech PhD program. As a young assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Conn continued his work on neutron transport and the fundamental and unresolved questions that remained about the rates of neutron leakage as they passed through materials such as graphite and beryllium. Conn also understood that commercial fission nuclear reactors were already in operation, and the main technological concern at the time was the safety of civilian nuclear energy.

For Conn, the attraction was to pursue a field where the science was not fully understood - and where, if the science worked out as hoped, what would the engineerings systems designed to make nuclear fusion power look like? The answer was nuclear fusion - the same processes that power the Sun which could be replicated here on Earth. That challenge captured Conn's imagination, and he would remain focused on this challenge for the next 30 years. The lure of nuclear fusion - which pointed to a plethora of benefits, including minimal waste, no chance of disastrous meltdowns, and a scalability infrastructure that could allow for the building of small and gigantic reactors alike - would put Conn on a path to leadership within and beyond science. In 1972, he launched the Institute for Fusion Technology at UW-Madison, which marked one of the world's first and most sustained efforts to deal with both the scientific and engineering challenges associated with triggering and capturing the vast amounts of energy and heat from the fusion of hydrogen atoms in a nuclear reactor. The timing of Conn's leadership of this initiative was fortuitous; in 1974 the worldwide economy suffered an economic shock after the Arab oil embargo cut off supplies in protest of American support of Israel during the Yom Kippur War, thereby adding yet more reason to find alternatives to fossil fuels.

Building from his leading investigations of both magnetic and inertial confinement approaches to nuclear fusion reactors, in 1980 Conn moved to the University of California, Los Angeles, where he established the Institute of Plasma and Fusion Research, for which he served as founding director. It was at UCLA that Conn began to couple his scientific eminence with leadership in the domestic and international policy domains, out of his recognition that scalable paths to fusion power would require political engagement and coordination on a worldwide scale. It was also at UCLA where Conn became more fully involved in experimentation, and he developed a new approach to the study of the interaction of plasmas with materials, which is a crucial issue in any fusion energy device. Pulling together a team of experimentalists, Conn's group built and operated a device with great scientific success, so much so that the laboratory he founded continues to produce leading-edge results to this day. Alongside these scientific activities, Conn's perspective became crucial in his advisory roles in the US Congress, the Department of Energy, the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, and in numerous international bodies.

In retrospect - and following his successful training of the next generation of nuclear fusion engineers and scientists - these developments presaged Conn's academic leadership at UC San Diego's School of Engineering in 1993. Widely hailed as one of the most successful deanships in modern academia, Conn transformed and expanded the school to one of the best in the world, and his efforts received a significant boost with the support of Irwin and Joan Jacobs, who made an extraordinarily generous endowment gift, and for whom the school was named in 1998. In addition to profound improvements at the departmental level, Conn led numerous academic-private partnerships that cemented San Diego's leading status as a technology and innovation hub in fields as diverse as telecommunications, biotechnology, and computation. Conn's facility in forging relations in the private sector were undoubtedly bolstered by personal experience; in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Conn cofounded a startup company that combined his expertise in plasma science with newly identified needs in the semiconductor industry, thereby giving him crucial insight on the best approach to innovation at the interface between industry and academia. This successful experience proved to be the starting point for Conn's leading work in venture capital, where he found himself on the "other side of the table" listening to enthusiastic people describe their ideas for new companies that could change the world. In this role, Conn's role was to choose from among the best proposals and husband them toward success.

In 2009, Conn was named President of the Kavli Foundation. After a lifetime of scientific research and academic service, Conn was well positioned to deploy the Foundation's considerable funding capabilities to support the most challenging scientific problems across the global stage. Founded several years earlier by the Norwegian American Fred Kavli, who was a visionary technologist and real estate investor, the Kavli Foundation's mission as Kavli defined it focuses on discovery at the largest scales (astronomy and cosmology), the smallest scales (nanoscience), and the most complex scales (neuroscience and consciousness). As the second person to lead the Foundation, Conn significantly deepened relations with extant Kavli research institutes (including the Kavli Nanoscience Institute at Caltech, his alma mater), and he established new Kavli institutes both within and beyond the United States. Under Conn's leadership, the Kavli Foundation tripled its endowment, and he played a crucial catalyzing role in the development of the US BRAIN Initiative, which was the first grand challenge problem supported by the US Government in the 21st century. Its focus was on neuroscience and breakthrough research in neurobiology. Perhaps just as significantly, Conn built bridges between science and the broader public at a time of rising mistrust and misinformation surrounding the scientific enterprise. Conn's devotion to science philanthropy during these years is perhaps best exemplified by his co-founding of the Science Philanthropy Alliance, a network that today boasts 35 individual organizations with a collective endowment in excess of $140 billion dollars.

In the following discussions, Conn's recollections and perspectives form a unique and deeply thoughtful review of the modern history of science and engineering, as told from the vantage point of a leading figure who lived through much of it. As one of his generation's most respected and accomplished scientists, and the recipient of many of the world's most prestigious awards and honors, including, most recently, the Vannevar Bush Award from the National Science Foundation, readers might be surprised at the humble and gracious tone that suffuses Conn's reflections. That fact should be be an inspiration to everyone regarding the power of education and the possibilities that result from hard work, well-defined goals, good mentorships and good partnerships. As a historical document, the conversations that follow mark an authoritative record on the zenith of American scientific leadership - but also as a blueprint for optimistic days that surely lie ahead, when the challenges of the future will ever more demand the dual approach of basic science discovery and engineering solutions that is the hallmark of Conn's career.

DAVID ZIERLER: This is David Zierler, Director of the Caltech Heritage Project. It is Tuesday, November 7, 2023. It is my great pleasure to be here with Professor Robert W. Conn. Bob, it's wonderful to be with you. Thank you so much for joining me today.

ROBERT CONN: Happy to do so, David.

ZIERLER: To start, would you please tell me your titles and institutional affiliations?

CONN: At the moment, you've caught me not long after I've retired. I retired at the end of 2020, so come this December 31, I will be retired three years. The affiliations at the moment are three. I am a Distinguished Fellow in the School of Global Policy and Strategy at the University of California San Diego, largely because I am working on policy matters and policy issues, particularly science policy issues. My other two affiliations are my Emeritus status as happens also at Caltech. So, I am the Walter Zable Distinguished Professor of Engineering and Dean of Engineering, both Emeritus, at the University of California, San Diego. And I am the President and CEO Emeritus of the Kavli Foundation in Los Angeles. Those are the titles that appear in my email signature block, and they are related to academia and the Foundation. Don't use anything else. While there were other roles that I've had in the past, they're not appropriate for something like this, I think. They'll come out in the conversation.

ZIERLER: Who is or was Walter Zable?

CONN: Walter Zable was a grand old man of the generation before mine, maybe even back to World War II or just thereafter. I was born in 1942, and he was 15 years older than I was. Walter was from Massachusetts, was educated at William and Mary College, and went on to be the founder of a major defense contractor, Cubic Corporation. Cubic Corporation is headquartered here in San Diego. At the time that I came in 1994, whether it was on my coming or within a couple of years of my coming, the campus convinced Walter that he should endow a chair for whoever would be the dean of the School of Engineering, which had just become a school of engineering with my arrival. Before that, we had divisions like Caltech have. Therefore, I became the Walter J. Zable Professor. Then, they made professors of a certain rank "distinguished." For many who don't have endowed chairs, they use the word "distinguished" for people who are quite senior and are very good. That's the origins. Walter Zable and I would at a minimum once a year have lunch together at a place he liked, an old-fashioned place that he Viennese food. It was dark and [laughs], but we sat opposite each other, and I caught him up on developments at the School. He was one of those people not unlike a Simon Ramo—very highly motivated, very driven, who built his company from the bottom up.

From Engineering to Science To Policy

ZIERLER: I want to get a sense of your overall intellectual trajectory of your career. Perhaps I could frame the question like this: when did you start to get involved in matters adjacent to science but not specifically scientific, matters relating to policy and education and things like that? When did that happen for you and what were the circumstances?

CONN: You're talking now after I become a faculty member, but I will tell you that during the time that I was educated, went to college, and went to graduate school, my interests shifted from what I'll call hard-core engineering—and I was a chemical engineering undergraduate—towards science, and especially towards physics. The love of physics just was something I couldn't escape. On the other hand, switching completely to physics seemed hard. I came from a background where I'm the first person in my family to go to college. I'm still the only person in my family to ever have gotten a doctorate degree. So, well, you've got to get a job. We didn't come from a wealthy background or anything like that, so the guidance was always, "Be an engineer. You can always get a job." It wasn't, "Be an engineer. You'll have fun." It wasn't, "Being an engineer, you'll do this or that." It was, "You'll have a job and can make a living that's better than—" my parents' living. My dad was a postman.

So, I started out in chemical engineering; the trajectory took me more towards physics. We'll take an interregnum here. Your question started out being about policy. What I'm trying to tell you with this little front-end story is that while I did get involved in what might be called policy issues early on, it was more about social justice issues—minority education - when I was young. So not science policy and not policy at the national level. That didn't really occur until the 1980s, more than a decade out of grad school. My focus in those earlier years was technical science and technology research. I remember my first faculty position was at the University of Wisconsin. I had finished in 1968 at Caltech. I had never been out of the country.

So, while still at Caltech, I applied for an NSF postdoc, which in those days paid $10,000 if you had a family as I did, with a wife and two kids. Europe was still recovering from the War, so $10,000 a year was a fortune. I came home with money. You couldn't spend it; it was so inexpensive at that point.

So, I spent a year or two as a postdoc mainly to get the experience of living abroad. Then, I found my first faculty position, and that's a story in itself. It has a lot to do with Noel Corngold, my Caltech thesis advisor, who just passed at 93 last October. I went back to campus to deliver a eulogy for him. So the policy side started to emerge in the late 1970s, about a decade after I had gotten my degree. But I was going to say that I recall my mental framework, what did I think about the world at large when I was young was that, fundamentally I wanted to do scientific and technical work.

The man who hired me, the chair of the department at the University of Wisconsin, was a great guy, Max Carbon. But at the time, I couldn't imagine why anybody would want to be the chair of a department. Why would you spend your time on things of that kind? I mean, it just seemed to me a total waste. Okay, you've got to hire people like me, and maybe I was pretty good, and that's something to take pride in as a chairman. You're upping the grade of the whole group. But you know, you're not doing technical work. You're doing these other things. In the 1970s, I just couldn't imagine the idea of administrative work of any kind. [laughs] And I didn't have enough of a reputation to do real policy work. I did, however, do a great deal when it came to minority enrollment in engineering in the country.

I got very involved in that right after getting my faculty position in Wisconsin. That took guts doing such a thing early on, but that's another story. The policy work at the national level really began around 1980. Then, it just snowballed through the 1980s into the 1990s. You get a reputation if you're reasonable on these committees, as someone who—if you know your stuff and you're reasonable -- people want you. It's just the way it goes. Now, that doesn't mean you can't be a pain in the ass every now and then, and express an alternative point of view, but if you express it appropriately and don't fall on your sword over it, or threaten to, things go well. So, the policy didn't begin until the 1980s.

ZIERLER: As you say, with a formal training in engineering but a love of physics that kept pulling you towards physics, what's the takeaway for your motivations in research? Where is it about building? Where is it about discovering how nature works?

CONN: I would call myself without question and applied scientist driven by the need to solve a problem. First of all, at Caltech at the time, my PhD is in a field called "engineering science". You tell me what this is. Right? Engineering science was the vogue in the 1960's. The idea behind it at Caltech and other places was, what you really should do is learn the sciences, and then you'll be able to apply them, and you'll always have the fundamentals. There's a lot to that. Much of my technical work spans a wide range of areas, and I think the reason it does is because of this education at Caltech, the engineering sciences, which today they call Applied Physics at Caltech. They don't have engineering science, but they do have applied physics. That's really what I did.

My motivations, however, were to solve problems that were big problems in the world. This is very different than, say, Feynman, who wanted to understand nature at its most fundamental levels. Sure, I was interested in those sorts of things, but I went to graduate school at Caltech and studied what amounts to nuclear engineering. They didn't have nuclear engineering per se, but they had a sequence of courses that amounted to nuclear engineering. Why? Well, in the middle 1960s, nuclear power was just emerging in a commercial way. No air pollution. Very small amount of waste. It might be high level radioactive waste, but it's not a lot of waste. You can stack all the waste 30 feet high on a tennis court. It's a small thing. If you were an idealist in those days, that was what you wanted to work on. You wanted to bring to humanity an energy source such that they didn't have to worry about energy anymore; it would fundamentally be clean.

The definition of clean, if you were in Los Angeles in the 1960's, meant no air pollution. No coal. No oil. Not even gas. You wanted something with basically no emissions. Nuclear is still the energy source of the future, and we still get 20 percent of our energy from it, but things changed 20 years later. But in the middle 1960s, nuclear engineering was so physics-underpinned, underpinned by physics, that I could basically have my cake and eat it too. I could study physics all the way to the basic stuff of quantum mechanics and particle physics to nuclear physics, to this and that and the other thing. On the other hand, I learned a lot of engineering—control systems and fluid mechanics and structural engineering. So, when the time came to figure out what to do, I had in mind to have it be energy related. So, it starts out in the mid 1960s when nuclear power is just emerging in a commercial sense. The first nuclear power reactors - are being built and coming online at that time.

By the time I go to Wisconsin, nuclear reactors are built and most of what we know and need to know about how a nuclear reactor works, we knew. So by 1970, there was not a lot of applied physics of a fundamental nature left in the problem. That's a different story about how I went from a focus on nuclear power to a focus on the fusion energy problem. Because fusion energy was much further behind fission energy in terms of development, and many of the problems that had to be addressed were fundamental physics problems, that was now what attracted me. I always say I would be called a "use-inspired basic scientist", or a use-inspired basic engineer. I wanted to develop the basic information needed to succeed at developing a new energy source, and I had a broad enough background that I could look at any energy source—and in this case it was fusion—from soup to nuts. From the physics of what's going on inside the plasma core of a supposed fusion reactor all the way out to how to capture the energy, neutron transport, shielding, conversion of the energy. I did steam tables as an undergraduate. You probably don't even know what I'm talking about.

ZIERLER: I don't know. What is a steam table?

CONN: Right, right. You wouldn't know what a steam table is. But chemical engineers and mechanical engineers in the 1940s, 1950s. and 1960s had a little book, about this size, three inches by five inches, or four by six or something like that, and you looked up what the temperature is, how everything goes as a function of this temperature as well as the pressure, and so on. There were tables telling you how all about steam—we weren't doing steam engines, but we were doing steam turbines. The way you make energy is you make steam and drive a turbine.

ZIERLER: As we know of course, Livermore announced in December of last year this incredible breakthrough in fusion. Given your longstanding interest and leadership on the topic, in broad historical terms, what is the significance of this announcement, and realistically how much closer does it get us to the dream of large-scale fusion as an energy source for the future?

CONN: Let's separate your question into its two parts. First the history of all of this and the meaning of the laser fusion experiments that were done in 2022 and reported and continue to be reported. Then secondly the situation with respect to an actual practical energy source, based either on lasers, or the other approach, which uses magnetic fields to confine a hot plasma. Can we do that?

ZIERLER: Absolutely.

CONN: The history of fusion for energy purposes is long, distinguished, and extraordinarily daunting. It is Sisyphus pushing the rock up the hill, and the rock keeps falling back and semi-crushing Sisyphus, but he keeps pushing. That push has been going on for 75 years. We know that fusion energy can be released in a weapon. We established that in 1950, 1951, that you could make a fusion bomb work. In that case it was really the equivalent of what people today call a hybrid reactor. That is, you use a fission bomb to compress the fusion thing. The fusion has all these neutrons that come out. They then amplify everything going on with fission part, and you can get almost an infinite yield. So, the H-bomb was called "the Super" for a reason.

So, we knew how to do that. It was classified for a long time. Many other tricks are still classified. But we know it works in a certain circumstance. Fast forward 70 years to NIF. The idea originally was developed at Livermore, led by a guy named John Nuckolls. John was famous for not having a PhD [laughs] and having sort of been the father of small-yield nuclear weapons. In other words, it was easy to figure out ultimately how to make them really big. But how to make a nuclear weapon with a smaller yield, that was really hard. Nuckolls made major contributions to that in the 1960s. The laser was invented in 1960. The masers were in the 1950s. The Nobel Prize went to Townes and Schawlow for the masers.

As people went along they asked themselves, "Could I use the laser in place of a nuclear weapon to drive fusion energy?" Imagine now a weapon. You have a nuclear fission bomb sort of sitting next to a fusion bomb with a lot of deuterium and lithium-6 and things like that in the middle of it—tritium maybe, too—and this fission bomb goes off and drives the compression of the fusion secondary. Think of it as a primary and a secondary. That secondary compresses dramatically until the fusion fuel actually ignites, and then burns out through and produces an enormous amplification of the neutron flux which then amplifies the number of fission reactions taking place. That's how that works.

The secondary is the sort of central feature if you want to make fusion work here on Earth. And you have to say, I can't use a nuclear weapon to make this compression of the fusion fuel in the secondary. What else can I do? The idea that John Nuckolls had was "What if we could make a powerful laser., We could illuminate a target, a very small target that fits on the head of a pin. If we could illuminate it uniformly from all sides, we could push the outside towards the center. If we could get it to maybe a thousand times compression—which imagine a thousand times the density of steel, something like that—I mean, it's an incredible pressure, but that's what you need

And you have to hold it. But if you can do that, and you use deuterium and tritium, which are isotopes of hydrogen, then the deuterium and the tritium can ignite in the center because there's a shockwave that's propagating through this fuel pellet The shockwave is created by the pulse of laser energy on the outside, and it ends up driving this pellet into a thousandth of its original size or a five-hundredth of its original radius, and it becomes so dense that it sparks in the middle. When the waves collide at the middle, they give up their energy and they heat the material. If they do it properly, the material at the center heats up to temperatures like ten kilovolts or more, a hundred million degrees or more, and the fuel then starts burning. When it starts burning, the deuterium and tritium transform into helium and a neutron.

The helium is very energetic and it has a range that is larger than where the little fireball at the center is occurring, so the rest of the target, which is relatively colder, gets heated up, and it gets to fusion temperature, and it produces alpha particles that raise it a little further, and before you know it, you're propagating the energy out through the cold fuel, heating it up, making it fuse, and you get a lot of yield. That's what they did in 2022, and that took 70 years to do, other than in a nuclear weapon.

So, it's an extraordinary achievement. The Sisyphean analogy or metaphor is appropriate. It is a milestone, without question, just in the human—the word I'm looking for is when you never give up- the human determination to succeed, this intense desire to reach a circumstance nobody has ever reached before, and see what happens. That is not just curiosity; it's determination. And we've had determination for 70 years to try to make this happen. So, I think anything that takes humankind 70 years to do is a big deal. And they did it. Now, how much further do you want to go? I can tell you exactly what the—

Scaling Fusion Energy

ZIERLER: To keep it at a high level for now—we can go into more detail as we get into this in the chronology, but regarding the forward-looking aspect of my question, how does this announcement and grand achievement get us closer to fusion as a viable energy source on a large scale?

CONN: What it tells you is we finally know how to do the physics. It's as simple as that. What happen now is that they will increase the energy of the laser on this little target, which is like a cylinder with two holes in the end of it, and hanging in the middle of this little cylinder is a ball of deuterium and tritium [laughs], like on a little thin string—as they increase the energy that heats up that cylinder, which is made of a high atomic number material—gold or something like that—the walls radiate and this is what drives the implosion. It replaces the fission weapon in a hydrogen bomb. And it makes the stuff compress and do a propagating burn. Once you achieve that ignition state, if you increase the laser energy by just a little bit, you get what we call a nonlinear response. Instead of the output being linearly proportional to the input, it's nonlinear; it goes way up.

So, you put another ten percent of laser energy on the target, you get twice as much energy out. The gain that they're going to get in terms of energy out over energy in is such that they are using about two megajoules of laser energy at the moment, and if they used four megajoules, they'll probably get a high gain, meaning they'd get 200 megajoules out, or more. Four megajoules on target, you might get a hundred megajoules out, that's a gain of a twenty-five relative to the energy you put on the target. That is more than sufficient to be the core of something that might be practical as a fusion energy machine. Because any energy machine, if you're going to make energy, you'd better get more energy out than you're putting in, right? There are thermodynamic limits but that's how it works. What is the likelihood that we'll see a laser fusion power reactor anytime soon? Nothing is impossible. We've seen that through 70 years of trying to push the rock up the hill, we finally got to the top and the rock rolled down the other side.

From a technological point of view, I spent a lot of time studying this from the time I got to Wisconsin in 1970—we sort of invented the field of fusion engineering in that decade. A colleague of mine, Jerry Kulcinski and I, really did it. With a large group of people, but the vision was ours. So, I studied laser fusion in the 1970s and asked the question, what would it take to make it a power reactor? Those questions haven't changed that much, and they're hard. You're setting off a micro-explosion at ten times a second yielding hundreds of megajoules of energy per pulse, trying to build a machine that might have 500 megawatts of thermal power and 200 megawatts of electricity coming out. That's a hell of a lot of energy. And you're doing it ten times a second. So, how do you build something to capture the energy? Call it a chamber around where the central explosion goes off. Neutrons come out. They have a mean-free path, meaning the distance to their first collision—they're 14-million-volt neutrons, so they're high energy -- that is the order of ten centimeters—four inches—before they make a collision. Well, four inches is a hell of a distance! If you want to stop almost all of those neutrons, multiply that four inches by a factor of ten at the minimum. Now, I've got 40 inches. Well, that's a yard [laughs] in round numbers, or a meter. So, you have to build something relatively thick around the target to capture the energy. Then, if you want to shield the outside, you've got to put more around the outside to make sure that no more of those neutrons leak out, and any induced radiation that they cause can get out. You have to capture the energy. You have to cool the chamber. You have to exhaust the chamber with every shot made.

And you have to build a laser that's not like the laser today. The laser today is a tenth of one percent efficient. It's a glass laser. It fires twice a day. It heats the glass up every time it fires. You need to do this ten times a second, not twice a day. So, if it's glass, how will you design the elements such that they don't absorb—which they do now—any of the heat associated with the laser light as it propagates down these various tubes and chambers, steered to be focused in on the target in the middle of the chamber? You want something 15 to 20 percent efficient. Today it's a tenth of one percent efficient. So, that's a big challenge. And it's a big challenge to figure out how, as I said, to make the glass elements ones that don't absorb much of the energy that is propagating through it, so it doesn't heat up. And on and on we can go. All of which says to me it's not around the corner.

ZIERLER: Of course the announcement came out of Livermore. The experiment happened at the National Ignition Facility, the NIF. In broader terms, of course leadership there has been very clear that this is an achievement that extends beyond this particular laboratory. How are we to understand it as an achievement of the national laboratory system writ large under the Department of Energy? How are we to understand it as a partnership between private enterprise, startups who are interested in fusion? How are we to understand the contributions in academia? And how are we to understand this—?

CONN: Let's stop with that troika of how we understand. I think it's important in the laser fusion case—what we call laser fusion and what we're talking about—to recognize that it has been supported primarily by the country's program in nuclear weapons development. Its purpose is not to make energy. Its purpose is to achieve the physics that I described to you, this propagating burn, and then test what happens against all of that the tools we have for predicting how a nuclear weapon might work. So, it has been justified over all these years not as a future energy source but as an element of a critical program the country has to verify the workability of its stockpile of nuclear weapons.

Secondly, it gives the nuclear weapons laboratory something very exciting to attract young minds to work at the labs. Even if they don't think they want to work on nuclear weapons, if they work on the physics of lasers and laser fusion and they have inventive ideas, ultimately that will help the national security side of things. So, the first thing is to understand why they're doing it. They're not doing it for energy output. They're doing it for the nuclear weapons program. A side benefit is that it might have some impact on the future energy program. The Department of Energy has taken that feature and emphasized it, to the point that almost the role of the National Ignition Facility in the context of the nuclear weapons program is a little swept under the rug. That does not give the proper picture to the public of what this facility is, and what it is for. Nonetheless, what it has achieved, as I said, is net energy out. Laser energy on target to energy out.

The energy into the laser is ginormous relative to the energy out. But for the energy hitting the target—okay, good. What does it mean for the practical development? There's one way to look at this that is kind of intriguing, and that is that the Livermore program is the physics verification program for anybody wanting to develop a fusion reactor based on laser fusion. You don't have to build your own laser system and prove that it works. What you can do is say, I know the physics of the targets work. How do I make targets cheap enough to survive and come in at ten times a second and be able to clear the chamber, and the next one comes in and on and on. You could start to focus on some of the engineering issues associated with trying to make laser fusion practical, knowing that we know how to make the physics work. That's a big change from before this announcement. And there are startup companies who want to do this.

Now, I think it'll be a long time, and people who put private money into any company have a view of time to return on capital. I invest a dollar, when am I going to get the dollar back? It is hard for me to see how they get the dollar back in anything less than several decades. Which means the time cost of money is expensive. You're not getting your money back for a very long time, and you better multiply that money by the inflation through the period, so you get back real return. Most investors don't have a 20-year horizon. In my view, it's a minimum of that, and probably longer. Nonetheless, it's exciting, and people might decide at very large firms with very large funds, it's worth five or ten percent of the size of their fund. If you get five people and put that together, you can come up with a billion dollars. That's how it could work and that's why you see some startup companies on the laser fusion side. You see many fewer on the laser fusion side than you do see on the magnetic fusion side, and that's another question we could go into.

ZIERLER: The last part of my question—beyond the Department of Energy, academia, private industry—to what extent is this an international achievement? Is this something that requires partnership beyond the United States?

CONN: Not for the physics.

ZIERLER: We can understand this as an American achievement.

CONN: Yes. The British know everything that we've done. The French have a big laser—they have something called LMJ, Laser Mégajoule in Bordeaux. So, they have a big laser. The Brits have big lasers. And I think they all understand what we have done. But I think it's fair to say, because of the classification that surrounds this kind of a program, it is for the most part a distinctive American achievement.

ZIERLER: We talked about your concerns regarding fossil fuels and environmental issues—air pollution, global warming. What about even from an earlier perspective international relations and the instability that is caused by oil? To what extent was that a motivating factor for your interest in pursuing nuclear energy as an alternative energy resource?

CONN: I wasn't sophisticated enough at 25 to have that perspective. But I gained it. In the mid 1980s, the role of working together internationally to develop fusion energy became a major element of U.S.-Soviet Union relations. In 1985 at the summit between President Reagan and Chairman Gorbachev, they agreed that one of the things we could do together and build some confidence in the relationships between the two countries, was to try to develop fusion energy. The Russians were the inventors of the primary pathway for magnetic fusion energy, so something we haven't yet talked about. It's a machine called the tokamak. The tokamak is actually an acronym from the Russians—toroidal magnetic kamera. A kamera is a chamber. T-O stands for toroidal. The M-A-G stands for magnetic. So toroidal magnetic chamber. The tokamak is a Russian invention. It turns out it is also the best performing magnetic fusion concept from a physics point of view.

It was invented in the early 1950s, so the time scale is not that far away from the hydrogen bomb. Sakharov, their father of the hydrogen bomb, was involved in the invention of the tokamak with one of their Nobel laureates, Tamm. So, they were pursuing this program for more than 20 years and had a breakthrough in 1968. That's an interesting story by itself about international relations, because that was the height of the Cold War. We had responded to Sputnik. We were going to land a man on the Moon. We did so in 1969. But they had a breakthrough with the tokamak in Soviet Union in 1968. What was that? That took place at the Kurchatov Institute in Moscow. Who was Kurchatov? He was their kind of Oppenheimer. What did they achieve? They had this machine—the way to think of it is to think of the inner tube of a large tire. It has got a big, major radius to the center of the tube and a smaller minor radius, the radius of the tube. It's a circle. It looks like a donut. Blow the donut up.

Around that donut you put magnets that will make a field along the axis of the donut and also one that goes around the donut in the short dimension. So, it creates—if you think of a long wire and then a field that's going around the long wire, it can make the magnetic field turn into a helix. Okay, that's as sophisticated as I want to get. But it turns out that if you design the magnetic fields properly, you can confine this plasma in this inner tube. Now, the inner tube is a metaphor. It's actually plasma with the highest density in the middle of the inner tube, and then it fades away like a Gaussian towards the outside. The thing about the tokamak that was unique was that it was self-heating. You run a tokamak—think of an electrical transformer in your house. How does it work? It has a primary side and a secondary side.

You run a current through the primary side and it induces a current to flow in the secondary side. You can step the voltage up like that or step it down. You can make a big current or a small current. It's called induction, and that's how a transformer works. A tokamak is nothing more than a single-turn secondary of a transformer. The plasma can carry a current. So, if I ramp up the primary, I build a bunch of coils and then I run the current up. As I run the current up, an electric field is created and runs around the middle of the torus. If I have an electric field running around the middle of the torus, it drives electrons, it drives a current. The laws of physics. There's a resistance. You run current; it is resisted.

But what does resistance do? It heats the medium! So what happens in the tokamak is that the current that has induced the flow, they discovered and reported in 1968, could heat the middle of the plasma to about 30 million degrees, 300 electron volts. That was astonishing. Because everyone in the United States, and everywhere were using many approaches dreamed up to confine plasmas with magnetic field but had no way of really heating the plasma effectively. And the plasmas were dominated by impurities coming in from the wall. They would radiate the energy that you were able to put into the plasma and keep it cold. So, we were nowhere 20 years after Lyman Spitzer invented the stellarator. But now the tokamak was not any longer nowhere. The international feature of that was that the Russians at the time were making the measurement of what the temperature of the middle was by an indirect means, knowing the current and looking at some diagnostics they had.

But they didn't have lasers, for example. So, they couldn't scatter laser light off the plasma, which is a technique you can do—it's called Thomson scattering—to measure the temperature of the electrons. But the British had that. So, they made an agreement with the Brits to bring a laser over to the Kurchatov Institute in Moscow. They hooked that laser up to this tokamak, got the proper window—because it's vacuum inside—and fired the laser, did the laser scattering experiment, and confirmed to the world that indeed the temperature was 300 electron volts. It revolutionized magnetic fusion research. Everyone switched to tokamak. Princeton, which was our biggest lab at the time that was not a weapons lab, was pursuing the stellarator idea. I don't want to go into what a stellarator is—it's a complicated beast—but it is a torus. So, they took the coils that made it a stellarator—they took those magnets off, put on the magnets that would convert it into a tokamak, and that became the first tokamak in the United States.

It was called the ST, Symmetric Torus. They immediately put in plans at the Department of Energy to build a bigger one, which they did, and that was enhanced by the 1973 oil crisis. Suddenly we wanted—we were going to explore everything, because it was a mess. They got money to build a big one called the Princeton Large Torus, and off we went on the magnetic fusion track. The middle 1980s idea was to build a tokamak of sufficient scale and power that it would achieve an ignited plasma in the way that has just been achieved in laser fusion. The plasma would ignite and burn and keep itself hot from the fusion products depositing their energy into the plasma, and you could test how to build then the machinery around this to make a practical fusion energy machine. It was called ITER, which is Latin for "the journey." It's still being built, 40 years later. I was on the original technical advisory committee that consisted of four people, one from the United States, one from the Soviet Union, one from Europe, and one from Japan.

We were the technical oversight committee for the project. I wrote the first Scientific American article about ITER in 1992 with my three colleagues. That was aimed at international cooperation. The machine is an internationally cooperative effort. Components are being built all over the world and being delivered to the site, which is now being built in France, in Cadarache. It has been a beast of a problem. If you think that laser fusion for 70 years, pushing the Sisyphean rock up the hill, try building this machine! It's likely to cost 20 to 25 billion dollars. It's complex. It has had one technical issue after another, and I don't know when it's actually going to begin operation. But, in the interim, and this will complete the story of fusion to today, we have come from the 1970s and 1980s to achieve plasmas, that is, an extraordinarily hot gas of ionized particles, plus charged and minus charged, so ions and electrons. So, it's a fluid, but it's a very complex fluid. There are lots of collisions of the particles within this fluid.

We call it kinetic when you have to take account of the particles hitting each other. I don't have to do that if I flow water down a pipe. But if I do it with a gas that's a plasma, I do have to do this. The turbulence and the transport of heat and particles from the middle to the outside is extremely complex relative to ordinary fluids. One of the great triumphs of plasma physics of the last 40 years is we understand today, from very fundamental principles and very basic experiments, how and why the heat and particles in the tokamak transport as they do from the middle to the outside. So, we can have confidence that we could build a machine with the right parameters that will in fact achieve ignition, in the same way that the laser fusion device has achieved ignition. I have high confidence that that is doable. Now, the question is who will do it, and when will they do it? ITER is supposed to do this, but it is so large, so complex, and such a complex international adventure—it's really an adventure more than a venture—that it's not obvious to me that you couldn't build much more rapidly a device to do at least the ignition faster than building the ITER machine will do.

A company has spun out of MIT called Commonwealth Fusion that aims to do just that. They are utilizing the technological advances of the last 40 years. For example, high-temperature superconductors were discovered in the middle 1980s and went on to get people Nobel Prizes. Now, some of those original materials can be made into wire, can be made into filaments. I went and saw them this summer, and you can flex them like your finger [laughs]. It's like a fettuccine noodle. These are normally brittle materials. So, the technological and engineering advances that have occurred over the 40 years in high-temperature superconductor, it just blows your mind. It's astonishing. They are planning to build a tokamak using high-temperature superconductors running at 15 to 20 degrees Kelvin, and generate at the edge of the coil a magnetic field of 20 tesla. That's 200,000 gauss. The Earth's magnetic field is half a gauss.

So, that's 400,000 times the strength of the Earth's magnetic field. I tell you, that is a big field. And the stresses in the magnets that you use to generate the currents that produce those fields, the stresses go like the square of the magnetic field. So, as I go up in field by a factor of two, I get four times the stresses, et cetera, et cetera. So, nobody has ever built a magnet of this scale with this high a magnetic field. We've built a high-field magnet, but very small one. Now, we have to build at a big size. We have to put a donut chamber inside it. Coils that go around; they sort of fan around the torus. I'm showing you on the screen. It's hard to necessarily describe that, but you might have a set of 16 D-shaped coils that are just abutted against each other towards the middle but that fan out as you go around the machine. You run currents in them and that makes the toroidal magnetic field that goes along the inside. That's where you put your plasma chamber.

At this level of field, you can build a much smaller machine than ITER, maybe by a factor of ten. So, it's smaller. It's much more compact. And to do an experiment to achieve ignition, whereas ITER might have a three- to five-meter major radius—that's 15 to 20 feet from the center out to the middle of their chamber—this high field thing might have a major radius of a yard, something of that order. Without going into the particular details, it can be a much smaller device, much less expensive to build and operate. It takes a lot of development because nobody has ever built coils of this size at this field. So, they may run into trouble. But within a decade, I think they will be able to do this experiment and demonstrate ignition in the tokamak. At that point we'll have two ways forward. We'll have a magnetic confinement approach that might be a way forward, and we'd have the laser fusion way forward.

Each poses its technological challenges and engineering issues, which I studied to extraordinary depth in the 1970s. Those problems still exist. They have to be overcome. You have to make the right choice of materials. So, will fusion energy be practical? Yes, on some timeframe. People have always said it's 30 years away, and it's still 30 years away. On the other hand, with the small compact machines, one could at least visualize doing an ignition experiment within five to ten years, following it with an engineering-style test facility in another decade, and by a final decade, at least having the basic knowledge both in physics and in engineering to start to think about building a demonstration fusion energy device. That would be my way of thinking about it. But only if it's a compact, small device. Because anything larger than what I'm talking about here just costs too much to develop.

Peaceful and Bellicose Applications

ZIERLER: On that point, as you've laid out there are these two options. Are the political and economic costs so great that at some point society will have to decide to go all in on one or the other, or is it possible both can be pursued in tandem?

CONN: They're going to both be pursued in tandem because of the nuclear weapons applications of the laser fusion approach. So, laser fusion will be funded for other reasons, and that eases the pain and the political discussion about putting up enough money. The magnetic fusion side has a tougher row to hoe, because it doesn't really have any nuclear weapons aspect to it, so it has to be funded for its energy prospects alone. That's why I think you see a number of these small approaches to fusion energy being supported by private investors. After all, even if the timescale is 20 or 30 years and you have a fund that will last that long, and you only put ten percent of that fund into something like this, you may end up with an extraordinary position of both intellectual knowledge and patents underpinning a new energy source. Presumably the sky is the limit on the return on capital over the very long term. But I emphasize very long term.

ZIERLER: I want to switch to a different topic. When you have gotten involved in business ventures, in the world of private capital, in the world of startups, where is that directly an outgrowth of your academic expertise and where is it simply people you've met and ideas that you've come across and it's something that you keep very separate from your academic life?

CONN: As I said to you, in the 1970s I couldn't understand why anybody wanted to be a department chair. All I wanted to do was to work, day and night, on technical matters—physics problems, chemical physics problems, scattering, some fundamental problems, some applied, some very applied. I always had a panoply of problems that I was working on. My love of the physics turned into a love of chemical physics. How do atoms and molecules collide, and when do, they undertake reactions and things like that. I did a lot of work on that in the 1970s. That was keeping my physics or applied physics ideas alive. Of course the plasma physics kept those ideas alive too. But mainly in fusion, I kind of did the engineering. Now, repeat the question one more time?

The 1970s was not when that happened. What happened was in the 1980s, we developed an experimental facility at UCLA. I'm a theorist, but I had this idea that the interaction of a hot plasma with the surrounding walls of a chamber that was supposed to be the vacuum chamber was crucial. We knew from a lot of experience that plasma leaks out, and when it does, it hits the surrounding wall and you can knock gases from the wall. They can knock on some atoms that the wall is made of. When those atoms get into the plasma, they ionize and radiate, and they radiate so much that they prevent you from keeping the plasma hot.

So, the nature of the plasma boundary layer is crucial to successful experiments with the core, where the core gets to very high temperatures. So, I wanted to build a facility that could simulate the plasma interacting with the surfaces of the wall. A colleague of mine had developed—in the EE Department, Ted Forrester at UCLA—he had developed a way of making plasma that he was pursuing for moving satellites around, plasma jets. JPL would be doing that. Dan Goebel, who was his student, is today a member of the National Academy and works at JPL. He got into the National Academy himself for his work on plasma engines, aimed at moving things around in space by small amounts -- you have to generate some pulse, some impulse, and they do that with a plasma engine. I saw that this kind of source could be used to simulate the boundary layer of a plasma.

So I hired Ted Forrester's student, Dan Goebel, and I convinced the Department of Energy that this would be a smart way, and a relatively inexpensive way, of studying a very fundamental problem in fusion energy development. I had a terrific grant manager at the Department of Energy. I remember his name to this day, Greg Haas. And he bet on me. That was the bottom line. It was, "I'll give you the money. Try it." It was not cheap—$300K, something like that—but we built the device. We borrowed the magnets for the device from my colleagues who had a spare set of magnets; I asked who had a spare vacuum chamber, who had this, who had that. With baling wire and hammers and nails, we put this device together. We called it PISC-ES—Plasma Interaction With Surfaces and Components, hyphen, Experimental Simulator. The PISCES experimental program, by the way, still exists 40 years down the road, now at UC San Diego, and it has been extraordinarily productive for more than 40 years.

I've now handed it off, obviously, in the 1990s, to my plasma physics colleagues at UCSD, but it turned out to be one of those pearls, where you place a bet, your instincts tell you it might work, you get somebody to back you, you do it, and it's better than you ever thought. That was an example that led me four years later to say this could have commercial applications.

That's where the business side first comes in. We had some people from a German company at the time, called Leybold-Heraeus. They made all the vacuum pumps. But they also made materials that put coatings on plastic, so your potato chips stayed fresh. That was actually a plasma-deposited coating on plastic, and they made these big machines to do this and it made the packaging impermeable and keeps the food inside fresh. Anyway, somehow I got in touch with them, and they came to see my laboratory.

One of the things about this machine is that it is very impressive. Just think of yourself have a meter or meter-and-a-half-long tube; it's a cylinder, and it's got ports on it so you can look inside. You know, it's an "Excalibur Sword"! You turn this source on, and it produces a sword down the middle. Bright! Pink! The color of the light depends on the gas you use, but these guys looked at that and said, "Holy mackerel, that's one hell of an intense source." Now, there were not plasma physicists, and it was too easy to convince them that it was okay. But they were interested in developing this. The application they had in mind was densifying coatings on eyeglasses—so this is all about business. So, what were they interested in is antireflective coatings on glasses. It turns out—do you have anti-reflective coatings on your glasses?

ZIERLER: I do.

CONN: When you put an anti-reflective coating down, it's a film, a thin film. How is it deposited on the glass? It is deposited by the weak plasma in a chamber where you have the material that you want to deposit the anti-reflecting particles on your eyeglasses and make the film. The denser that film is the better anti-reflective coating is. How do you make it dense? Well, if you just do it in a—like straight chemistry way, you have vacancies and you have holes and you have places that the atoms don't all fit into. If you bombard that surface with a very light set of ions, you move the atoms all around and they all find the right places on the lattice that's inside of the glass, and they densify. So, they saw this as a way of densifying coatings on eyeglasses, which is a giant market. Why is it a giant market? Because it's paid for by insurance in Europe. This is 1984, 1985.

So, getting anti-reflective coatings on your eyeglasses is very expensive in the United States, but in Europe, it was seen as a benefit, and Leybold saw a big market. I decided with my graduate student to form a business. I had a terrific graduate student who had done his PhD on a tokamak device with me. His name was Greg Campbell. Greg was one of the smartest kids I knew, and he was a terrific engineer. He was educated in engineering at Cambridge, even though he is American. At Cambridge—pretty good engineering. He said, "Bob, I don't want to be an academic like you. I don't want to be a professor. I want to go into business." I had found these guys who were interested in this source, so I said to him, "All right. Let's try to start a business, and I'll try to get a contract to get us money to develop this thing that these guys want." That's how we started a company called Plasma & Materials Technologies, PMT.

It started with this idea that we had developed, with funds from the government, and it turned to be an extraordinary source for making plasma. There were applications involved. Now with Leybold, I had somebody who knew what the market was, so I didn't have to think about that. They were telling me there was a market. And they were willing to give us money to develop this product for them, and we gave them the intellectual property rights to use it, and they would pay us a royalty once they did. They gave us an agreement for the development. I think it ran over two and a half years at about a million dollars a year.

My student and I hired a couple of people. We set up ourselves in a shack in Burbank. And we [laughs] started to build the company. That's how I got into business. It was a startup business. We self-funded it through these contracts that I had gotten. I stayed on the faculty at UCLA, and I consulted with the company a day a week, but I knew what I was doing, and so we could get our money.

Greg Campbell was terrific at trying to run the company on an everyday basis. But around 1989 or 1990, we could see that the royalty arrangement that we had with Leybold was never going to get us to be a big company, that it would be limited in its income. This is really where the first spark of trying to build a large business came from. I had built things. I had built a big plasma fusion institute, the Fusion Technology Institute at the University of Wisconsin. I had established the Institute for Plasma and Fusion Research at UCLA. So, I was a group builder, an institution builder, sort of counter to that old thing about why would a guy ever want to be a department chair? Well here I was building institutes. Now, they were research institutes, and I never wanted to be a department chair, and I never was. They were research institutes. But they were institutions that needed a leader. That was like building a department. How do you do that? It turned out I had a real skill at this.

So, let's build this company. In 1989, 1990, we had another invention for a different type of plasma source, very appropriate to the time. This was a period in the late 1980s when the feature size on a silicon wafer was about one micron. Today it is about a hundredth of that or less. But one micron was a point at which you made a transition from using chemistry and a low-pressure discharge plasma like a fluorescent lightbulb for the etching, deposition of materials, and making your chips. But below about one micron, the feature size is too small for you to use just a generic gas which is dominated by collision between the gas particles rather than be more fully ionized. You needed real plasma, and you therefore needed a density that was a thousand times less than the density they were using. We knew how to do that – this was our wheelhouse.

That's the density at which plasma physics is done for fusion experiments. So, we invented this source that produced plasma that was at this low density at a millitorr of pressure. One atmosphere is760 torr, so this is about 10-6 of an atmosphere, roughly. This plasma source had the characteristic that it had a magnet associated with it, but the magnetic field was canceled out in the middle, so that the plasma would come out of the source and flow like an expanding funnel down to the surface and illuminate the surface of the wafer very uniformly. That was what was needed, because we were going from four-inch wafers to six-inch wafers, to eight-inch wafers, to twelve-inch wafers.

We got the first eight-inch wafers that IBM was producing in those days to test the uniformity. This idea that we could uniformly etch or deposit materials on semiconductor wafers and make semiconductor wafers that could make semiconductors was a big idea. We began by finding a person who worked with a venture capital firm right outside UCLA called Brentwood Venture Capital.

Brad Jones was the partner's name. He was young then. Fabulous guy. Harvard undergraduate in chemistry and so on, and then an MBA from Stanford. One of those kinds. He watched us. We didn't want to give up control. He said, "Let me just invest a few hundred thousand dollars. It will be okay. I'll take very little ownership." Eventually what happened is that we got going, we raised some angel money—that means less than a million dollars—and then Brad Jones led an A round for us, the first round of serious funding. That was five million dollars in 1990. That's a hell of a lot of money. And, off we went. We built some extremely complex multi-chamber devices that are used on the factory floors to this day for making semiconductors chips, built mainly by companies like Applied Materials and Hitachi and Lam Research, and so on and so forth.

We were the last semiconductor equipment company to try to be a big company, because it just became too capital intensive to do it beyond that. But we were able to build these machines and they had sufficient potential that we had an IPO on Nasdaq, an initial public offering on Nasdaq, in 1995. So I have the experience in going public with a company.

We had raised four rounds of capital after that first A round to get enough money to succeed. So, I learned about business. How do you start a business? How do you raise money? Who do you talk to? How do you talk to them? What are they interested in? How do you present your business pitch? It's not giving an academic talk at a scientific meeting, right? It's very different. That was how I got into business and learned about investing as well as learned about building a private company. We did build that private company, and it had over 100 employees at the time I left.

I separated from it right around the time it went public because I wanted to come down to UC San Diego to be the new dean of Engineering. So, here is this guy who in the 1970s can't imagine being the chair of a department, and can't understand why anybody would want to do administrative work of any kind, and I've transformed into a guy who has led the formation two major scientific institutes, one at Wisconsin and one at UCLA, and then he builds a company, and now he wants to build a great school of engineering.

So, I transitioned over time as I matured. I recognized that I had not only a talent for technical work, which I did—I'm in the National Academy elected at a very young age, in 1987; I think I'm 45 at that point. Crazy! Just crazy, I'm telling you—to somebody who is institution building, company building, school building. That's a story in and of itself. Where did the instincts come from to successfully do all of that? What are the features that were common to all of those things? How do you go from good to great, really?

We did it with these institutes. We did it with the company. I did it again at the Kavli Foundation. I did it at the School of Engineering. There were metrics for good to great, and those metrics - I think about hard. Because you have to go from good to great—in business, it's kind of, do you have a successful business that can grow and make money and can just continue on? That's the metric. In the academic world, it's quite different. What are the metrics of greatness for a school of engineering? People hate the rankings, but they all look at them. [laughs] What do you need to do in a university setting compared to an industrial setting in order to build something truly great? I had had, before coming down to be dean, transitioned from somebody hating the administrative stuff to realizing I had a talent to build institutions that would be sustained over time and would make a difference for the scientific fields in the case of the institutes that they were built for, in the case of a business that they would sustain the business, or in the case of the school that it would go from good to great and have enough base that when I left, it wouldn't go from great to good; it would stay great.

So, there are these two issues—building greatness over time and then sustaining greatness over time. Caltech, which I love dearly, has been sustaining greatness for a century or more. They never get too big. They never hire large numbers of people. They're sort of onesies and twosies, and yet somehow they manage to have extraordinary people. They have extraordinary taste, and it has made them the greatest technical university on a pound for pound basis that the world has ever seen. How do you do that overall? They sustain greatness. When I came to San Diego, the challenge was to build it. All of a sudden, I had going from somebody in the 1970s who was just crazy about research, spending every Saturday there for six hours doing equations and research, and this and that and the other thing, to a person who wants to build a great institution – and asks how you do that. That's a whole other story that I'm writing about at the moment. Does that help frame things?

ZIERLER: Absolutely.

CONN: That's the business. That's how it fits in. That's how it fits into my transition from the 1970s of an extraordinarily focused technical person doing engineering physics and chemical physics and all these things I did, to somebody who transitioned 30 years later to wanting to be an institution builder.

The Options for Funding

ZIERLER: A very broad question that I'll ask you to draw on your deep perspective in academia, in private enterprise, in the foundation world—and that is, how do you fund all of this? What have been some of the key lessons you've learned about where government funding is best, where private philanthropic initiatives are best, where seed investments from the world of commerce is best? What have you learned about the best mixture to fund science and engineering?

CONN: First, what kind of science and engineering are you funding? I remember one of the venture capitalists, Brad Jones, who backed my company and led the Series A round, who said to me, "We don't fund science." In other words, the risk associated with "I don't understand all the science" is too large for most startups. So, you have to have done the fundamental work, usually at a university, that takes the risk out of "fundamentally, I don't know what I'm doing." Now I know what I'm doing; how do I translate it, how do I scale it, how do I apply it—these are all different questions. A lot of times you can fail at that, too, because while you know the fundamentals, they don't scale. But if you think they do, you at least—that's the issue – have a fighting chance. Scale-up and demonstrating value along the way is the constant to everything. If you're in a university, developing value along the way means building your technical reputation. On a personal basis, it shows up—you get promoted to full professor, me at 32. You get an endowed chair at 37. You get elected to the Academy at 45. Those are metrics, on a personal basis. On an institutional basis, the Institute for Fusion Technology exists to this day at the University of Wisconsin. It's 50 years old. The Institute for Plasma and Fusion Research still exists at UCLA, not quite as successful as the one at Wisconsin but successful enough. The business was acquired in an M&A transaction, so it disappeared. It got acquired some years after it went public. The School of Engineering is still ranked 11, 12 at UC San Diego. It was 44 when I arrived in 1993/94 Those sorts of things are the way I measure what's happening outside. Some are individual measures. Some are measures of how you do in research. Some are measures of how you do institution building or company building. Does that help a little?

ZIERLER: Absolutely.

CONN: What happened is, the only interregnum in my career from that almost linear trajectory and transformations along the way was when I stepped down as dean of Engineering at UC San Diego. The question was, what do I do next? I ended up doing two things next, in sequence. But at the time I stepped down as dean in 2002, I ended up with an opportunity to become a high-level executive at a major defense contractor, SAIC—Science Applications International Corporation. For whatever reason, that's a big, steady state operation in which you get in there and you try to make a particular segment of the company very profitable, or more profitable than it has been. I could have done it. I wasn't excited about it. While I was thinking about what to do next, the largest venture capital firm at that time in San Diego, based in La Jolla, came to see me and said, "Would you be interested in being a managing partner at a venture capital firm?"

I knew venture capital from being on the other side of the table. I knew that that was exciting. Whether I could do it well on the other side of the table I didn't know. But in the end it was exciting enough that I turned down the big corporate position to become a managing director at a VC firm. It was semi-successful, I would say. I didn't have two or three 20Xs—20 times money in—but I had a number of doubles and triples, 4X and 5X. But it was the only time I was a square peg in a round hole, because I didn't think that I should be the leader. They had a senior partner. That partner was the leader in the firm. What to build; not too much. The job is finding great opportunities, convince your partners that those are the opportunities that might be the best to fund, and then nurture the company, and do everything you can to have the company become successful. Others are doing most of the work. You're doing a lot of hard thinking about what is likely to be valuable from a startup and business point of view. The firm turned out to actually have functional problems.

The leader wasn't a very good leader. The partners weren't as affable as they should have been. One guy didn't really want to invest; he just wanted to run companies, so he'd find something to run, and then leave to run it. He'd be an absentee partner. He'd become the CEO of the company rather than being a partner who invested.

I learned a lot about how a VC runs and about how not to do it. But I was in my sixties at the time, and I said to myself, for the first time in my life, "It's not your job to lead. It's your job to help stabilize it. It's your job to be successful at investing. But it's not your job to be the leader. You've not had a history of investing, and these people did. Somebody else should lead." That turned out to be a mistake, and it didn't go well in the end for that firm. But I left it at the end of six years and joined Kavli, and that was another good to great run. So, except for this six- to seven-year interregnum, what all my efforts and positions have in common is the quality of going from good to great. Create a new technical field. Create institutions. Create a business. Create a great school. Create a great foundation.

Those five "up and to the right" experiences are really what characterize my career. I'm proud of it. Meaning 20 years ago I don't think I recognized many of the things that I recognize today, but now I'm old enough, as I said in my acceptance speech for the NAE Ramo Founders Prize—philanthropy is something that is best done towards the end of one's career, when wisdom complements experience. You can have a lot of experience but what you do with it depends on the wisdom you have at the time you're making decisions. Whereas venture capital, while I did it in my sixties, is best done in your late twenties and early thirties. So, there's a couple of inverses, and one worked out great. The other one, I would not call it failure, but I wouldn't call it a great success either. And it was the one time I didn't have great success in large part because I didn't lead.

ZIERLER: In reflecting on your decision to lead the Kavli Foundation, what were your motivations, and to what extent was it either a continuation or a departure from your academic career?

CONN: The continuation was that the Foundation fundamentally supports basic science. In going back to my undergraduate days and my interest in going from chemical engineering towards physics, I really wanted to do science—I really love science. Maybe I love science more than anything else technically. And I love applied science. Yes, I can do engineering, and I do it, and I do it well, but it's not my love. So, when I went to Kavli, the Kavli Foundation is supporting basic science. And three of the four fields that they've chosen to focus on knew; they had theoretical physics, which I knew about, and they had astrophysics and cosmology, which I also knew about. It's physics. A different kind, but you know. They also focused on nanoscience, which is surfaces and materials at small scale – the scale of atoms and molecules. I dealt with plasma-surface interactions in the PISC-ES experiments, so I knew that. I knew solid state physics from my broad education at Caltech.

It was the field of neuroscience about which I knew nothing. So, Kavli had all the elements. A challenge where you've got to learn about a whole new thing, but a couple of things where you know a lot. And the Foundation was young. It was only nine years old. So, it was good, but it wasn't well known. It was another opportunity to go from good to great. Now, there was an interesting—and I'll share this with you—there was an interesting second interregnum for me from late 2008 into early 2009. That was in the 2008 financial crisis. Everything in venture capital froze. Rather than working to build companies, everybody was working to survive. Cut staff, cut spending, make sure you've got enough money to get as far down the road as possible without collapsing. My partnership—when I joined had five other partners.

By the time we got to the start of 2008 there were only three of us left. That's the dysfunction I was talking with you about. The upshot was that as we got to the summer, I was actually beginning to lead. I had identified a fourth partner who was based in L.A. and was complementary. I had biotech partner, I had an operating partner, and I had myself as a technical person, and this person I was recruiting would bring another perspective. We were ready to kind of get going, and the economic crisis hit. Nobody could raise a dime, and as I told you the function of VC was survival.

My two partners then decided, "This is a long downturn. We can run the few companies left ourselves. We don't need Bob." So, in October of 2008, I separated from the firm. Now, they gave me a lot of money to separate, and I had no trouble financially, but for the first time in my life I was out of a permanent job. And that's an experience. In the end—I'm almost choking up—it's those circumstances when you find out what you're made of.

On top of that, in that period, I had injured my back, and I had had an operation in September of 2008 to put a pin in my back. It really didn't relieve the pain. So, I was struggling physically, and suddenly I found myself without work. [pause] Try it sometime. So—it was an extraordinary thing how I got to the Kavli Foundation. I'm happy that it all worked out as well as it did over the long run. But I will tell you from the summer of 2008 through April 2009, and even for the year or two after I got there and began working at the Foundation, it was very difficult. That was a transition I don't wish on anybody. But look what it turned into. Okay! Who made that happen? Raise my hand. But I believe that if you're looking at history of a person – and I am and shall always be a Caltech graduate, so it's the history of a Caltech graduate—most people don't face a life change of the kind I faced in 2008, and have to turn it around to produce something remarkable at the other end.

ZIERLER: Did you ultimately find relief for your back?

CONN: It's a good story, and the story is—I could hardly sit in a chair for more than five minutes, and I couldn't stand up for very long. What to do? I was being treated at UC San Diego at that time. They kept thinking it was a problem with the middle of my spine. I do have spinal stenosis and so on. Everybody does to some degree when you get into your sixties. But the problem wasn't that. I know the cause. I know how the problem originally came about. I had driven back from Palm Springs in a car that was a clutch car and decided to take the mountain road instead of the freeway. So, I was constantly going like this with my left foot, pressing on the clutch, as you go around this curve and that curve.

Oh, it was all going to be great fun, right? By the time I got home, I had wiped out the lower left side of my back, and I didn't know what I had wiped out. When I went to see them, they kept thinking it was something in my L4, L5, L6 in my spine. So, the answer is no. I spent four months in extreme agony. And yet, I had had a call in the summer of 2008 from the search firm that was searching for the new president of the Kavli Foundation. I had said to this person, "Thank you, but I'm helping now lead my partnership in raising our next fund, and I really am committed to that, so the timing just doesn't work out." The irony of course being that those partners whom I cared so much about threw me overboard.

But I knew Kavli was still searching. I was on the University of California—the president had a board called the President's Board of Science and Technology. They would meet a couple of times a year at the headquarters of the University of California in Oakland. There was a meeting in early December of 2008, and Fred Kavli was on that committee. I knew Fred casually from saying hello and attending those meetings, which I had continued to attend even as I was doing venture capital work. I wanted to give back to the university. This was a good way of also staying in touch. So, I was on this committee. I said to my wife at the time, "I'm going to go to this meeting and try to meet Fred Kavli."

I got a Southwest Airlines flight, and I stood up for the entire flight. From the time they took off and turned the seat belt sign off until the time they put it back on, I walked to the back of the plane and stood on the plane. Could not sit. My two—they're older children in their late fifties now, so then they would have been in their late thirties then— live in the Bay Area. I stayed with my daughter.

They picked me up. They drove me to the hotel. The night before, there's a dinner. They drove me to the dinner. I had to lay in the passenger seat all the way back so I would be lying in a prone position to try to ease the pain. I loaded myself up with four ibuprofen [laughs] to try to relieve the pain. They drove me to the restaurant. I got out and I said, "I'll call you as soon as I can get out of here." I went into the dinner, and there was a gathering. The dinner started. I got to meet Fred, and we talked a little bit. Good. The next morning, same drill. They drive me to the UC headquarters. I go up to this meeting. Every 10-20 minutes, I've got to get up out of the chair and stand behind the chair and hold onto the chair. But the key thing and my motivation was, meet Fred Kavli and talk to him. We met during one of the breaks. I said, "By the way, I had a call from a search firm about your president position. What's the status? Have you filled it?"

He said, "Oh, no. Would you be interested?" I said, "Right now the circumstances are different from four or five months ago, so if you're interested I'd be happy to talk." As soon as that was over, I excused myself from the meeting, called my daughter, went downstairs, laid in the car, got back on the plane, flew to San Diego. A day later I get a call from the search firm—"They want to meet with you." I'm still debilitated. We meet in the boardroom of the headquarters of the Kavli Foundation, which was also the headquarters of Fred's business. He had a real estate business in addition to his foundation.

I went from San Diego to Ventura lying flat on my back. My wife drove. I laid flat on my back that night at the hotel. I loaded myself up again the next morning with four ibuprofen. My wife drove me to the building. I got out and I gritted my teeth, and I went into that boardroom. Fred was nothing if not old fashioned. He believed in wood-paneled offices and low upholstered chairs. Low chairs were the worst thing for me. I sat in a chair that was too low at the end of a boardroom table, surrounded by members of the board and some others, and for two hours we went at it, so to speak. I got out of there, thought it had gone well, called my wife, went down and got in the car, laid prone in back. We're driving home and we get a call—"They want to offer you the job." Now what? How am I going to do this?

ZIERLER: Were you forthcoming during the discussion about your difficulty?

CONN: No. No. I'm out of a job. I'm going to figure this out. This is where grit comes in. You have to just believe you can do it, and that whatever issue you've got at that point can be made to go away or pass. While I had no idea how it was going to go away, I couldn't let my infirmary interfere. After all, at that point I was 66. The last thing the Foundation needs is to hire somebody who is ill or is infirm or can't put all their energy into the job. I wouldn't hire myself. So, the answer is no. I did not reveal that I had this difficulty. To me it was a difficulty that I at some point would be able to resolve. It wasn't like I had cancer or something of that sort. Anyhow, Fred called me up very enthusiastic—"We're going to talk about it"—and then we get to the end of December, and all of a sudden the phone goes dead. I don't hear anything from anybody—not the search firm, not Fred Kavli.

No idea. Finally towards the end of January I get a phone call. It turned out that Fred had had a cancerous lesion on his lower leg that had to be treated, and that was why he went radio silent. But he was so proud, he wouldn't tell me. You asked about grit and pride; well he had grit, and he had pride. So, I had radio silence because of his issue. [laughs] Eventually we got together, and he said, "When can you start? I want you to start right away." I said, "I've got a number of things that I have to wrap up." I had nothing to wrap up. April 1, to give me two and a half months to figure out how to get my back fixed.

Sure enough, what happened is I eventually gave up on UC San Diego and I went to Scripps Clinics. I found a neurosurgeon and I told him, "I've got this pain in my lower back"—and I put my left hand behind my back and pointed to the location, just to the left of my spine. He said, "Oh, that might be your iliolumbar ligament. Has anybody ever offered to give you a cortisone shot there?" I said, "I've been telling them for four months [laughs] that it's right here. They've been shooting me in the middle with epidural."

So, he gives me a cortisone shot. Within three days, I had relief. It lasted for three to four weeks. I went back; he did it again. Now, it lasted for two months. And I have done that ever since—to this day, every three to four months I get a cortisone shot in my lower back. That level of dosage over that level of time doesn't do you any harm. The guy was an experimentalist. I love him. Because he's a touchy-feely guy, and he's intuitive. He said to me, "Tell me this" and "tell me that" and he looked at the X-rays—and then he went over here, and then he said, "Okay, let's just do it." Entrepreneur. Things happen outside the box. It basically - I won't say cured me - but it made everything totally manageable, and the rest is history. That's a story of grit and determination.

ZIERLER: And faith. Faith that you'll get a solution before you have to start.

CONN: All of that, all of that. And the psychological weight of—financially I'm okay, but still I don't have a job [laughs]. The weight of that is great. That's how I got going at the Kavli Foundation. Then, I had to learn to live with Fred Kavli. He was based in Oxnard, and I was living in Del Mar. So, I would take the train up on Monday mornings and come back on Thursday afternoon. Kept an apartment up there. Fred passed in 2013 of a different cancer that debilitated him from late 2012 until he passed about a year later. At that point—and Fred was a very controlling person. I mean, it was his foundation, it was his money, and he sort of had an instinct about what he wanted to do and why he wanted to do it. So, he was treating me in a way where I don't normally do well. I was more like the chief operating officer, more like the president than the chief executive officer. But I managed. I knew what the circumstances were. But when Fred passed, I became president and CEO. That was in late 2013.

From that point on, it was Katy-bar-the-door. We went from good to great really in seven years. Because the first three years I was there, it was mainly okay, one more of this, or one more of that. Fred didn't want to take risk, and he didn't want to try this or that. There was a lot of constraints on what could be done. Within a year I got the board to decide to move us to Los Angeles. You can't be a great foundation—what great foundation is based on Oxnard? Or even based in Santa Barbara, where Fred lived and wanted the headquarters of the Foundation to be. You'll die in Santa Barbara - you won't be a great foundation. [laughs] So we moved to the west side of L.A. Things of that kind. Both infrastructure, where you're located, how you think about it, and how you seize opportunities became everything in those last seven years.

ZIERLER: There's so much more to cover. We haven't even gotten to Brooklyn yet, and yet our time is up for today. Let me pose one last question, and then next time we'll go back and establish your narrative chronology.

CONN: I love this. I have to say I love this. Part of why I love it is, A, it gets me to talk about a long life at this point. I do have some significant medical issues I'm going to have to deal with in the next three weeks, so we might have a break for a while. Not cancer, but a heart thing I've got to get taken care of. But, you know, Caltech gave me everything I needed to succeed. Now, they didn't give me my grit and they didn't give me my drive and they didn't give me a lot of things about personality. But learning how to succeed in an extraordinarily competitive environment amongst extremely smart people, that was Caltech! That plus the extraordinary level of quality is what Caltech gave me. Without it, I'd be a different person. I was thinking about MIT and Stanford and Caltech at the time of finishing undergraduate school. For me, the smallness of Caltech helped enormously, as well as—the first year I arrived, the graduate school guy I get to know who wants to major in the same thing, he's an undergraduate from Yale. I'm an undergraduate from Pratt Institute in New York, a liberal arts college. How am I going to do this? [laughs] It worked out! But if it weren't for Caltech stretching me and helping me develop my full potential academically and intellectually from a technical point of view, my life would have been very different. So, I sort of say yes to almost anything Caltech asks. [laughs]

ZIERLER: [laughs] Bob, here's my last—

CONN: We need a little more time [laughs].

Optimizing the Recognition

ZIERLER: Here's my last question today, which stems of course from all that you learned and gained from Caltech. You have been the recipient of so many awards and honors, and you're the member of so many scientific and engineering societies. You've sat on so many committees to determine colleagues and peers who get these awards. My question is, what is all of that for? Beyond the feeling good and patting one another on the back, what is the world of awards and honorifics good for in terms of furthering the research, furthering the science, furthering the engineering?

CONN: I have a line in my acceptance speech, a different line, that probably applies to this. One of the things being celebrated at the annual National Academy of Engineering meeting is the new members. All the new members come, and they're inaugurated into the National Academy. They're elected. And they're elected by the National Academy. An Academy member has to propose them. Seconding letters are required. There are committees involved and they make the decision. I had a line that said, "To those of you new members, my hearty congratulations, but you now have"—in essence I said your election to the National Academy gives you the imprimatur to have your voice heard. Think about service to the nation. Serve committees that make policy, on all manner of things, where you can now give back, and where your voice will be treated as one with high credibility. So, some of these awards are enabling of you to have credentials, things different from your bachelor, master, PhD. They're credentials about how you've done along the way of a long career. To the degree that those credentials open doors for you to give back, that's a big deal. To the degree that you are interested in that sort of thing—and not everybody is—then you can make your voice heard, and that is a good thing in my view. So, I said to them, service is one of the things that you should think about doing now that your voice is a bit louder. I don't mean it in a bad way. Meaning—

ZIERLER: Impactful.

CONN: —"Oh! You're a Nobel Prize winner?" Everybody wants to know what they think. Now, they (the Nobel Prize winners) don't know a lot about many things [laughs]. They're a scientist in some area and you ask about something in left field, and what do they know? Just like me; what do I know? Nonetheless whatever they say has a certain degree of credibility to it, just by dint of what they've achieved. I think people who are lucky enough to have received these honors have an obligation and to be sensible about giving back as they can. And my experience is that they are . David Baltimore—just remarkable. You talk about somebody who has been through trials and tribulations! So, give back.

ZIERLER: Bob, this has been a phenomenal conversation. Next time we're going to go back to the old country. We'll go back to Brooklyn—

CONN: [laughs]

ZIERLER: —and we'll continue the conversation then.

[End of Recording]

ZIERLER: This is David Zierler, Director of the Caltech Heritage Project. It is Monday,

November 13, 2023. It is my great pleasure to be back with Professor Robert W. Conn. Bob, once again, great to be with you. Thank you so much for joining.

CONN: No problem, and I'm looking forward to our conversation.

Back to Brooklyn

ZIERLER: Our first conversation was a terrific wide-angle view of all of the things that are important to you in scholarship, in society. Let's take it all the way back to the beginning now. Let's go to Brooklyn. How many generations back does your family go in Brooklyn? Is there an Ellis Island story here?

CONN: There are two. They go back to Brooklyn but only back to about when I was born. My father's family is the Cohns. They were German immigrants from somewhere in northwest Germany in the 1880s, I think. They moved to America, and they settled in Albany and were farmers. I don't know all of the details, but what I gather that farming proved to be difficult and making an adequate living was hard, so eventually they moved down to New York City. This would be my father's grandfather, so my great grandfather. My father's father was born in the City, but I never knew.. So, my great grandfather and my great grandmother on my father's side came from Germany in the mid 1880s, somewhere along that line. As I said, Albany, difficulty, moved to the city, more job opportunities I'm presuming. They had a big family. And they were Jewish. Cohns. They lived in New York and made a living at this and that. I actually don't know what my great grandfather did for a living other than the farming story, and he certainly did not farm in New York City.

They lived in Manhattan. At some point they did okay, and so they were living not in Little Italy and the Lower East Side but more up like 14th Street, around Madison or at Third Avenue, something like that, in Lower Manhattan. So, they go back three generations. That is, my great grandfather had a bunch of kids. One of them was Charles Cohn. He ended up marrying my grandmother, also born here but of German origins, and this is a religious story too, by the way, about religion shifting over generations. Her name was Dorothy Moll. I knew her. She lived into my young childhood. The two of them got married and they had three kids, the first being my father. Then they had my father's brother, Charles, whom we called Uncle Chic. And then they had my aunt Dorothy. The years of birth were 1912, my father, 1915 my Uncle Chic, and 1917 my Aunt Dorothy. My father's story I know very well. It's one of these classic stories of trials, tribulation, and disaster, and how you get through it. Barely.

And I mean it. My father, uncle, and aunt is separated by about five years. So, when my father was ten, his brother was seven, his sister was four or five. And then my grand, their father, disappears and the family is left somewhat destitute. My Dad was born in 1912, and that would have put it around 1922. I'll tell you the rest of that story in a minute.

My grandfather grows up Jewish, but he meets his wife—she is Protestant. I've got to keep the generations straight, and I never talk about my great grandfather's generation which is why I'm goofing it up. If I just talked about my grandfather, grandparents, everything would be copacetic, but I put an extra generation back there. All right, so my grandfather and grandmother have the three kids. He leaves at about 22. But my father and his two siblings are raised Protestant, because the mom, my grandmother, was Protestant. She was a German Protestant, probably Lutheran. She marries a Cohn, a Jew. Under the Jewish tradition, you raise the children in the religion of the mother.

My father, in the early 1930s, meets my mother. They somehow are both down there in Manhattan. My mother's side of the story is more of an immigrant story. That is, my grandfather and grandmother on my mother's side were both immigrants from Italy, and both Sicilian. They both came in the great Southern Italian immigration to the United States sort of around the 1900 to 1915 period. It doesn't go back as my other great grandparents to the 1880s, the Italians weren't coming yet. The Germans were still coming. My grandfather on my mother's side was a shoemaker and her married my grandmother, who was much younger than him. Their first child was—and there's a story here about first children—and their first child was my mother, Rose Marie Albanese. A-L-B-A-N-E-S-E. A great Italian name from a small Italian town just southeast of Palermo, called Piano degli Albanesi.

So, there we are, two Italian immigrants meeting in New York. They had four children. My mother is the first. The second is Joey, and he was what, in the old days—and in my family—called mentally retarded. My mother would make up stories, so I don't know what really happened. She says he had some kind of rheumatic fever when he was a baby. But he ends up mentally retarded, what we call that now—I don't know what the politically correct word for it is today, but that was the word used then, and it meant you were quite limited mentally. A wonderful guy, very heartwarming, but more childlike than anything else. That's a story in and of itself about the family—that is, the raising of the child in those days with that limitation.

The third is my mother's sister, Theresa, my aunt Tess. The fourth is my Uncle Sal. So, there were four children on my Mother's side, three children on my Father's. When my father and mother got married, basically the family on my mother's side mainly had to join together. I was born December 1st, 1942, so just shy of a year after Pearl Harbor. At that point, my father was in the Post Office.

He had taken the exam in 1936/37, another story that I'd like to tell, an early story, because it's a story of America, [emotional] which is mostly a story of hardship and tragedy. We have rose-colored glasses when people talk about those days. Life was very hard. In any case, at that point around 1940 was when they moved to Brooklyn, to answer your question. They had lived basically in Manhattan and the Bronx. The Lower Bronx had a very large Jewish community. My father's family ended up living on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx. But my mother's family stayed down in the Little Italy area. After they got married and my father got the job in the Post Office, he started to make something of a living. Brooklyn was still farms, even in 1940. They were still farming out by Coney Island and Gravesend and those areas. There were large open patches of farmland. They were being developed.

One of the areas that got developed had mostly Italian immigrants or Italian people who had come from Italy living in it. This was south of Kings Highway. Kings Highway in Brooklyn divides the borough in two. Jews lived to the north of it, Italians lived to the south of it, the Irish lived to the west of it [laughs]. This was because all of the city, including Brooklyn and the Bronx, ended up self-segregating. It wasn't that there were rules that you couldn't rent this or that. It was people seemed to want to be with their own more than anything else, and that's how you ended up with all the ethnic neighborhoods in New York. So, they built a new development out there south of Kings Highway and west of McDonald Avenue, which meant the West streets, from West 1st, West 2nd. We lived on West 11th.

They rented an appointment from an Italian family who had bought the house. Where they got the money from, who knows. But they're going to grow. They buy the house. They live in the apartment on the ground floor, and there's an apartment on the second floor. This was luxury. Rents were cheap. It was far from the city. But the subway, the New York City subway system, spanned the city. So, it was equivalent to moving to the suburbs, even though they weren't suburbs of the city; they were the city. But it was de facto a suburb at that point.—[phone call] hold on.

I was describing Brooklyn. I grew up in Brooklyn, indeed, and I was born in Kings County Hospital. The county of Brooklyn and the old city of Brooklyn are one and the same. But the county is called Kings County, and I was born in Kings County Hospital. The comment about the apartment is that this was when New York still had plenty of room in the boroughs, so the growth was occurring within the city boundaries. Whereas after the War and into the 1950s, there was much less room for growth and then the growth took place on Long Island. Levittown got built and all of that. So, there's a lot of history over this period of time.

ZIERLER: The family name—when did Cohn become Conn?

CONN: Yes! That's a story of religions. When my father married my mother, as you might guess, my mother is of Italian background. She was born here, but she's Italian so she's Catholic. Most Italians are Catholic. But some very important ones are not, which we know from history. Nonetheless, so now again the religion shifts. This is the second shift. It has gone from Judaism to Protestantism to Catholicism. The question?

ZIERLER: Of how Cohn become Conn.

CONN: They got married around 1938 or 1939, somewhere in there, and my mother didn't want to have people think that she was Jewish, or that we were Jewish, because we weren't. My father was Protestant, she was Catholic, and they were Christians. So, she asked that the name be changed, and never told us kids. I found this out in adulthood. Although I figured it out [laughs] because my uncle and aunt on my father's side were still named Cohn into the late 1950s. They didn't change their names. When my mother changed the name, it was fundamentally out of not wanting to be thought of as Jewish, and maybe some prejudice against Jewish people, but I can't say that for certain. But fundamentally it was self-identity.

ZIERLER: What neighborhood did you grow up in?

CONN: Gravesend. Bensonhurst and Gravesend are the two areas that I grew up in. She moved with my father to an Italian neighborhood, but they changed their name before I was born, so when I was born the name was C-O-N-N. So, that's the story of the name.

ZIERLER: What schools did you go to?

CONN: I went to public schools. I want to go back, David, and talk a little bit about the family history.

ZIERLER: Please!

CONN: Could you make a mark about the public schools, and we can pick up from that?

ZIERLER: Sure.

CONN: I went to all public schools, and that's sort of my growing up. But before I tell you about the growing up, the context is, where did all this family come from? I'm still the only person in my entire related family to ever get a doctorate degree. My sister and I remain the only two who have ever really gone to college out of our entire family. So, there's a generational story here. The achievement, if you want to call it achievement—educationally and otherwise—occurred with myself and my sister, and the question is —why? So the story of the family matters, because why do some people end up doing certain things and have certain drives and all the rest, and other people coming from the same backgrounds and the same lineage and even the same culture and family, don't? It has always been fascinating to me.

I explained that my grandfather on my father's side and my grandmother had three children. Let me tell you the story of that family. Things seemed to be going along fine, and suddenly my father goes into the hospital at ten to have his tonsils taken out, and when he comes home, his father is gone. Nobody knows what happened.

Almost assuredly, the issue is family life. I'm told my grandmother had postpartum depression after the third child. Whatever happened—my grandfather could have also been killed. Why did he disappear? Because I mean they had money. How did my grandfather get money? He drove a truck. He may have driven a truck—a Prohibition-related [laughs] truck, delivering booze and stuff like this. Anyway, he disappears. My grandmother is left destitute. Her family has disowned her, and my father's family—my grandfather's family had disowned my grandfather, because it was an intermarriage. In those days, inter-religious marriages were bad stuff, as far as the culture was concerned.

So, she's now destitute. One of my grandfather's brothers—his name was Julius—somehow takes pity and gets her a job as a super in a tenement building. Take care of the building. If it had any heat, throw the coal in the fire, things like that. My father is ten, his brother is seven, and his sister is four. So, he, my father, starts working at ten, delivering groceries from the local markets, and people would give him tips for doing it. They sort of semi survived, but my father is forced to stop school at 12, 13 at most. Then, he just survives by wit. He was a good dice player, craps. He would do things like—[emotional] it brings tears to my eyes about this stuff—he would, for example, get the guys when he was a teenager together at the local school and he would become a bookie. He'd say, "On a nickel bet, I'll give you odds two to one, if you can make a basket from here. Three to one if you can make a basket from here." Da-da-da-da-da.

On average, he was a good enough judge of what people could do with a basketball that he made money, made some positive outcome. They went along like this into the early 1930s. He meets my mother in the early 1930s, and they start dating. Come 1935, it's the Depression. They're making some money by God knows what. My aunt, who is the youngest, becomes the secretary at a company. My uncle starts playing around, becoming a bit of a photographer for commercial things. And my father is making money with pickup jobs. In 1935, he decides, I've got to get a job. The Post Office, the government job, was very attractive—it paid good, but he had to take this exam, against all the college graduates in New York, who also couldn't get a job. So, they had a test—you had to take an exam—to become a letter carrier, a postman. Parcel post, whatever you did. So, he says to my mother [laughs], "Rose, I love you, but I have to use all the money I have has to go to going to this school, Delahanty's in New York—so I can learn enough to take this test." That goes on for two years. And then he passes.

Now, he has a job. [laughs] He went back to my mother and said, "Rose, I got a job." He had said to her, "I can't afford to date you. I can't afford to go on dates." So he says, "I have a job. Would you want to go out Saturday night?" She said, "What, do you think I'm easy?" [laughs] "How about the following week?" "Okay." That leads to their getting married, and the year is in fact 1939. He got the job in the Post Office in 1937.

After they got married, my mother had difficulty with pregnancies. I don't know whether she had a miscarriage before I was born but she had several afterwards. In any case, now with this job, they could afford to think about moving to Brooklyn, and that's how they got to be able to pay the rent and to live in Brooklyn.

Still, my mother had three teenagers—a ten-year old, a fourteen-year-old, and a seventeen-year-old. She's 25 or whatever, so they're moving along. My mother's aunt goes out to work. The uncle who's retarded ends up in a State institution—in the early forties, they can't quite take care of him. All the men are off in the military. The state had a wonderful system in those days of caring for people with disabilities. So, they—I'm sure emotionally it was very difficult, but they were able to get him into a facility in Upstate New York, Wassaic, New York, east of the Hudson River.

That's where my uncle Joey lived the rest of his life, which is an interesting story about my childhood, going up to visit him. That left the aunt, who was maybe 22 now, my uncle who was perhaps 17—so he wasn't drafted in those days; he didn't get drafted until I think 1944. They were all living together in this apartment. The apartment was—I remember it—luxurious, by standards then and now. It had three bedrooms. Can you imagine that? One for my parents, one for the brother and the sister, and the other for my father's Aunt. It had a living room, dining room, and a kitchen. So, they were able to manage in this enclave because it was pretty large.

During the War, my father's brother, younger brother, got drafted early on and he spent the War in Panama. My father got drafted in 1943 after I was born. He was a letter carrier, so he went into the Army and did the mail. My aunt, my mother's younger sister, went to work. My mother got pregnant in 1942 and had me, so she stayed at home. My father's younger sister Dorothy, named after her mother, has the first of a number of nervous breakdowns.

That's an important story because depression runs in my family, on my father's side. And I have a story about that. My son has a story about that. My father has a story about that. And his brother has a story about that. And his sister had several really difficult periods. Anyway, we're all together. My mother has to take in my aunt, my father's sister, in—my Aunt Dorothy—because she has a nervous breakdown. So, now she's living with them all and they're taking care. That's how we start out in Brooklyn. They managed to get through the War.

My youngest uncle, my mother's youngest brother, ends up in France. But after the War, everybody comes back to Brooklyn. That's a nice transition point, where my mother's family now consists of her brother and her sister, and they're living with us. My aunt Dorothy recovers and she and my uncle Chic on my father's side decide to live together for economic reasons, to share the cost, and they move and live in the Bronx. Even though they're Protestant, they're named Cohn, and they live in a Jewish neighborhood in the Bronx. That's the immediate family.

My father's tragedies, if I could put it that way, is he loses his father at ten. He comes out of the hospital; the guy is not there. You could never get him to go to see a doctor or a hospital. The story of how they met, they got together, and how they got through the Depression—kind of amazing. But we end up there in the early 1940s when I am born, where we've gotten out of the city, before the big migration to the suburbs, by migrating equivalently to the suburbs, made possible by the New York subway system.

The subway terminus for five lines was Coney Island. If you know the geography of Brooklyn at all, think of an oval, and here's Manhattan. Let's see; I've got to do it backwards for you. So, here's Manhattan. That's the west, not the east. There's Brooklyn. There's Manhattan. Manhattan going that way, the East River. We're way south at the bottom of Brooklyn. In the southeast portion of the borough is Coney Island. Immediately adjacent to Coney Island as you move north is Gravesend, and immediately north of that is Bensonhurst. Then, you get all the neighborhoods. So, we were two subway stops—that's how you measured it—two subway stops from Coney Island. My dad could get on the train and take it into Midtown Manhattan and go to work at the post office in Midtown Manhattan. Without the subways he couldn't—they'd still be living in Manhattan.

So, the New York City subways as they built out like a spider enabled the city to grow in the same way that after the War and in the 1950s, building highways enabled people to leave and go to new places, and we've seen that over and over again.

Where would you like to go from here? I'm born. [laughs] Oh, I've got to tell you the tragic story on my mother's side. She, with the siblings that I mentioned, in 1934, even a bit earlier than that—she would have been under 20—her mother leaves. So, on my father's side, his father left, and he was ten. On my mother's side, my mother is a teenager and her mother leaves. Probably abusive relationship with the grandfather. He was extremely jealous, and he drank wine. So, now she's left with the three siblings, and the shoemaker father. They have an apartment. In 1935, probably in a drunken stupor, my grandfather trips, falls down the stairs, hits his dead, and dies.

So, now my mother is 20—1935. She has been working in the sewing industry, the garment business, working sewing machines. Suddenly she has got to provide for the three kids on whatever she can make in the garment industry. Here's how I know that by changing the name, I know that she's not prejudiced against Jewish people. She worked in the garment district and the man who was her boss was named Davidovits. Jewish. They become fast friends. He recognizes she's really smart and she's really good. He encourages her to go along. They were friends their entire life, and I knew them as kids. Wonderful people. But because he saw her potential, she could make enough money to be able—it was piecework. He would give her the sewing where the piecework paid the largest amount per piece, like putting a collar on a coat.

In any case, she is now left to raise the family. My father has his brother and his sister, and they're caring for a depressed mother and managing that—my grandmother. And my mother's mother—my grandmother—is nowhere to be seen. Really hard. My mother had to leave school at 14-15 when this happened, or a little earlier, when the mother left, and the father died. Long story short, I get these two tragic figures who meet, each of whom has had an abandonment occur. That had a big psychological effect on how they looked at the world. Not just the depression, but the abandonment, and that story stuck with me. So, now we're really into 1942 and I'm born, and then the War ends. I think that's enough. It gets me too [emotional] emotional. Enough is enough.

ZIERLER: It's quite a story. It's quite a web of overlapping stories. It's remarkable.

CONN: It's a story of survival. It's a story of quick-wittedness. It's a story of using whatever smarts you have to get through it.

ZIERLER: Yeah. Bob, let's bring you back into the story. Let's start first with elementary school. What P.S. did you go to?

CONN: 248. When it got time to go to kindergarten, the neighborhood school was P.S. 248. It had only recently been built, because these were suburbs, again as I said, in the city, but de facto suburbs. So the schools were being built where the houses were being built. And it's a high number, the school's number, which tells you something about the times [laughs]—it wasn't Public School 1 or 2; it was 248. I started school there and I went to elementary school there, through the sixth grade. By the way, fabulous school system. Who were the teachers? And this is very important for my generation. Mainly Jewish women who had gone to college. Very smart. No other opportunity than teaching or a secretary someplace. So, my generation had a benefit that no subsequent generation has had, which is that because of bias and prejudice and culture in the system, women didn't have opportunities other than things like teaching, especially if they wanted to get an education.

So, they'd get an education and go into teaching, and you got the best and the brightest. Once women's rights came and women had many more opportunities, the best and the brightest often went elsewhere. So now in the teaching corps, you have good people, both men and women, but more average. There was a filter that occurred during my years that made a big difference, so the educational system was terrific.

In any case, I can tell you pretty much the names. They combined first and second grade and my teacher were Mrs. Diamond. My third grade, Mrs. Elfenbein. I'm living in an Italian neighborhood and there are all these Jewish names. Fourth grade, it was Mrs. Boyer. Fifth grade was somebody I'm not sure I remember. Sixth grade, Mrs. Newman, the only non-Jewish name [laughs] in the collection.

So, I went there. As far as I can tell, I got a very good education. I also learned things about culture, about how kids get along. Those days in Brooklyn, even though the parents were very concerned about you, you were let out and left on your own, especially when you got to be eight or nine or ten. We would roam all over the place. I had a childhood experience of being bullied and that marked me, in the fourth or fifth grade. I got bullied. I was a big kid, and still, I didn't want to fight. Anyhow, one story or another, there's a lot that goes on in those days that influenced my world view.

One is my uncle Joey, whom I told you—I gained enormous empathy for people with disabilities [emotional] because I lived with him. If you extrapolate that, I end up with an extremely ecumenical view of the world. I don't have a bias against people of any kind. I'm very, very liberal in that regard.

But I think it came from the lesson that despite the fact that my mother was very smart, very bright, a little bit biased, and maybe more—the internals of the family were much more—I just watched, and you could see what was needed to make the world go round. That occurred all through my childhood. My only times leaving the city, ever, was to visit my uncle Joey in Upstate New York. The family after the War began to have cars, and they made a pact. Every month, one of the siblings would drive up to spend the day with him. It was an hour and a half, two-hour drive north of New York. Every three months, I'd get a picnic. We'd go upstate to the Adirondacks and take my uncle out. We had lunch. We'd go to a park. We'd walk on trails and so on until it became late in the day, and we had to come back. That was my exposure to non-urban life. No other exposure. I'd visit my uncle and aunt, but they lived in the Bronx. That wasn't really [laughs] countryside, right? Sticking with elementary school—my father loved baseball. We did a lot of playing. I guess I was about ten and they started to form little neighborhood teams.

We didn't have anything called the Little League or anything like that. Parents would just gather and form a team, and then this team would play that team. I fell in love with baseball. My fifth-grade teacher at the time knew that I'd fell in love with baseball and loved baseball. We couldn't afford at that point a glove. What happens over time is that most people's salaries keep going up, but my dad's stayed flat. So, over the years, during my childhood, we moved from the six-room apartment to a four-room apartment to a two-and-a-half-room apartment, where by the time I got to high school, my sister and I were sleeping in the living room on a trundle bed, my parents had the bedroom, and there was this tiny kitchen. That was it. Because I think of the insecurities—and I know this is a little wandering, but these points come up because they're triggered—why didn't they buy a house like everybody else?

My mother couldn't stand the insecurity that we might not be able to pay the mortgage. The childhood experiences between my father and my mother—he was more adventurous despite his experience, but she less. By the way, remember I said they're both first children, and I'm a first child. My mother is very first childish in a classic way psychologically. My father is quieter but he knows what he's doing. And I'm raised—my sister doesn't come along until I'm eight and a half. So, I say to my sister to this day, "I'm an only child and I've got a sister." [laughs] Because psychologically I'm an only child. Anyway, that's P.S. 248, and one day, my fifth-grade teacher brought in and gave me a glove. I'll show you the glove.

ZIERLER: Oh, wow. [laughs]

CONN: This is what I have left. That's a real Yankee hat from 1960. I played for the Yankee Rookies in 1960. And this is the glove, with the leather broken, from fifth grade. I put a ball in it to keep the pocket. You used to do this. You'd oil it up—take olive oil or something like that—oil it up, and then you'd tie it, with a string, so it would form a pocket. [laughs] So this is a childhood glove. Wow! Just imagine what that feels like to have somebody do that.

So, baseball started to become a big part of my life around eight, nine, or ten. My father took me to the World Series. I saw one game of every World Series from 1949 when I was probably seven or seven and a half, through 1955, 1956 when I started high school. Then, my mother said, "You can't take a day off school." [laughs] Can you believe this? I could have gone to a World Series game, but you can't take a day off school. Unbelievable! The World Series was always played in New York in those years. Sometimes you didn't have to leave the borough. Like the Dodgers would play—anyway, we'd get on this train, that was a real adventure, and we would take the train from one end of the city to the other. I lived about as far south as you could live, and Yankee Stadium is in the middle of the Bronx about as far north as you can go.

We would take an hour-and-20-minute train ride to where—it was an elevated train at that point. We would change trains to get through Manhattan and we'd end up going to the game. He brought bleacher seats for a dollar. I saw some pretty great games. Anyway, you're going to find as we go through this story—baseball plays a central story. Remember that baseball is a team game. It requires leadership. I was a catcher. It requires somebody to watch the whole thing. If you're leading an enterprise, I don't care what it is, many of the characteristics that exist when you play baseball exist in real life in business, in the academic world, et cetera. I believe those lessons were very formative for me. We'll come back to that because what did, how did I do it, what do I mean I played with the Yankees, and so on and so forth. But it was a big part of my growing up. In the 1950s, baseball was the sport in the United States. We played football and we played a little bit of this and that, but baseball was really the game. Okay, we'll get back to elementary school. What else can I tell you?

ZIERLER: Where did you go to middle school?

CONN: Boody Junior High School. That was also a neighborhood junior high school. In New York, they had six grades of elementary school. By the way, I started elementary school very early, at four and a half. I went to kindergarten at four and a half. Not because I was smart, just because of dates. I was born in December, and in those days you had to be five by April to start school. Now, you have to be five by the prior September, so everything is thrown back six or eight months. I started at four and a half, went through six grades of elementary school plus kindergarten. They had seven, eight, and nine in junior high school, and then high school for three years. That was the structure of the school. I went to Boody Junior High School. In the sixth grade they gave you tests.

I remember taking this kind of like an IQ test, I suppose. IQ tests have got such a bad reputation and what people put on the tests. Like I remember a question I missed stuck that in my mind from that time: what is the temperature outside at which it is acceptable to go to the beach and go swimming? Sixty, seventy, eighty, ninety. I said, when do I go to the beach? Normally it's at least seventy degrees. I circled seventy. The answer was eighty. Or I circled seventy and the answer was eighty. But whatever the hell. That's not testing—that's testing knowledge, not what they thought they were testing.

In any case, that test, they had 22 grade levels at Boody Junior High School per grade. So, when I went into the seventh grade, the Classes were labeled seven-one, seven-two, three, four, five, all the way down to about twenty. And I was in seven-one. So, I did pretty good on that test. If you were just above that, you would skip a grade. You go into a program that allows you to finish junior high school in two years. So, I went there, to Boody, and it was terrific.

The seminal thing that happened was in the eighth grade, somewhere during the academic year my teacher gave me a letter to take home to my parents. The letter says, "We want to recommend your son to go to [emotional] one of the special high schools, Brooklyn Tech. Do you give permission for him to take a test?" [emotional] You would think that's an easy decision. But what it meant was an 11-year-old is going to get on the subway and go somewhere every day, on his own. Maybe I was 12. This is seventh, eighth grade. So, I'm twelve when they are considering whether or not I should do this. I graduated high school at 17, so I would have started at 13. Anyway, long family discussion. The core thing about that decision was education is everything. So, they knew what they missed by having to leave school in the eighth grade, the ninth grade, whenever they left, and they wanted me to have an education. [emotional] So they agreed, and sure enough, I ended up getting into Brooklyn Tech, which jumps over junior high school but explains the seminal step that got me to the high school that started with my ninth grade.

ZIERLER: Was Stuyvesant or the Bronx School of Science ever in consideration for you?

CONN: Somehow the letter came home and said Brooklyn Tech. My father actually went to Stuyvesant—that was his local high school—but it wasn't a special high school in those days. But yeah, they had Stuyvesant in Manhattan, Bronx High School of Science, and Brooklyn Tech. In any case, it would have been a half hour to 40 minutes to get to high school at Brooklyn Tech, an hour at least to Stuyvesant, an hour and a half to the Bronx. I don't recall the idea of the other schools. I remember of course Brooklyn Tech.

Now, those middle years are fascinating years. You're really coming of age. I finished elementary school at 11, so I had two years in junior high. Those high schools you mentioned are four-year high schools. So, I did the seventh and the eighth grade at this junior high, but then I went ninth grade to Brooklyn Tech. That's how I started the school years.

Brooklyn Tech, by the way, there were more men teachers in junior high school than in elementary school, and there were many more men teaching in the technical high school than earlier. The math classes were often taught by men. It seemed to me to be, by the time I got to high school, the teaching corps was more 60 percent women, 40 percent men? A lot more men relative to the primary and junior high years.

ZIERLER: It was boys only. No girls at Brooklyn Tech then?

CONN: Brooklyn Tech was an all-boys high school at that point. It was also my introduction to racial diversity and meeting people outside my neighborhood. I really didn't have friends who weren't of Italian ethnic background. Baseball opened it up a little bit, but baseball in those days—sandlot baseball, not school baseball—they were usually neighborhood teams that got pulled together. As I got into high school, I met many others, and I played sandlot ball all through high school, played with people like Joe Torre, so on and so forth. These were all from different parts of Brooklyn, and as we got to high school we would go a little further to play than when we were in elementary. When I got to high school, it was my first real introduction to diversity. I met my first African American friend in high school. Not too many of them, but big enough student body that there were some.

And people of all stripes, all ethnicities, all ethnic backgrounds, all religious backgrounds. That was very important in my view, separate from the quality of the technical education. I not only got a good education; I got a cultural education. Not in the sense of music and dance and so on, but in the sense of the mixture of people coming from different ethnic backgrounds and what they thought, and how they thought, and whether they were similar or different, and what were the differences, and did you like the differences, or did you find the differences scary? The more familiarity you got, the more the differences were celebrated rather than scary. So, the high school was doubly important. It was like going to an equivalent of a Caltech or an MIT, but it also had a very wide mix of people. Brooklyn is a big borough, and most of the people—when I was living in Brooklyn at that time, the population was about three and a half million, and they were of all stripes and all comers, so to speak. That's that piece of story. We could go more into it if you like.

The Rigor of Brooklyn Tech

ZIERLER: Tell me about the Brooklyn Tech curriculum. How rigorous was it?

CONN: It was quite rigorous. What I mean by that is that mathematics, looking back, is always the key determinant of rigor, especially at Brooklyn Tech, Stuyvesant, and Bronx High School of Science. Everybody took four years of mathematics. One of the wonders is that when I got to the end of the junior year, I was good at math, but I became terrific at math in college, not in high school. I was very good but not great. I became [laughs] more than very good once I got into college. And don't ask, because you usually don't think of somebody blooming in college, but I bloomed in college, really bloomed. But in high school it was pretty rigorous. And broad-based. Language. French. I hated it. It was the only D or F I ever got, - French. I couldn't stand languages. But I had two years of languages in high school.

I loved chemistry. I loved physics. I didn't take biology by choice. You had to take two sciences, but you could then take other things if you didn't take the other, and I didn't like biology, I only partially liked chemistry, and I loved physics. And you took them in that order. Chemistry and the physics. I think it was quite rigorous.

Most people ended up with at least three years' worth of pretty rigorous science. Everybody ended up with four years of mathematics. You couldn't avoid it. The rest of the curriculum seemed pretty balanced.

There was another part of the curriculum—because it was Brooklyn Tech, as opposed to Bronx Science—which had more engineering orientation than they did at Bronx Science or Stuyvesant. So, we had shop, and we had a lot of the working crafts. I worked the wooden lathe, and then I worked a metal lathe. I made the tool bits, and I did this, and I did that. So, I learned a lot about mechanical things and some electrical things through the shop courses that they had. I don't think they were meant for you to think about becoming a metal worker or a wood worker; they were meant to teach you about how you make things, and to some degree, how it's hard to make things.

I look at it now in retrospect and there's theory and experiment; the theories can be fabulous, and they can be closely predicting of the experiment. But if you go in and make something, in those days you can never make it really perfectly. So, you learned about error. What error can I live with? How accurate does something have to be? I think it taught me, "Don't be anal." To this day I can calculate in my head and say, "The answer is roughly this." That should be perfect for anybody, because what the hell is the difference between whether it's 140 or 143.5? You're close enough, right? If you get the answer within ten percent, it's fine in most cases. I think a little bit of the shop stuff taught me how hard it is to be accurate.

For example, obviously I told you in high school we were living at that point in a very small apartment. I had never had a pet. I wanted to have a pet! My parents said, well, let's think about what would fit. Well, above the refrigerator you could put an aquarium and have tropical fish. Great! Can we go buy an aquarium? No. We don't have the money for an aquarium. You build it! [laughs] So I went to the shop, and I got aluminum [?] and bent the things to make an angle like that, made myself a tank. They helped me get the rubber sealant and get the glass to fit against the rubber sealant, fill it with water, and put the pressure against everything, and hope for the best. I learned about sex. Because nobody ever talked about sex. But we would get these swordfish, little orange fish, and they used a penis, to procreate. Not all fish—all fish may lay eggs, or many of them do, but how they fertilize varies. So, all these fish were in my tank—neons, and this ones and that ones, zebrafish—and they were all behaving a little differently. It was kind of curious. Kind of like the diversity in life. Anyway, that was my pet.

ZIERLER: What activities were you involved with in Brooklyn Tech? Did you do drama, music, newspaper, sports?

CONN: All sports. I didn't do the newspaper. I didn't do drama. The things you're talking about—music, drama—college. In high school, it was studying the things, doing homework, and I would always be done with my homework by the time I got off the train coming home, so I'd have time for baseball. [laughs] And sports. I played baseball in high school. I played sandlot ball from the time I was ten or eleven right into going to college. It's how I got to college, by the way. The combination of Brooklyn Tech and baseball is why I ended up being able to afford college. Otherwise I couldn't have afforded it. I would have had to go to Brooklyn College or City College or something like that. I would have had to live at home.

ZIERLER: The way you explained your sensibilities in science and engineering in our previous discussion, where it was always engineering but your love of physics went away—was that instilled in you at Tech? Did you get the combination of physics and engineering as a high school student, or that comes later?

CONN: That comes in college. In high school, I'm not thinking about engineering versus other things. In other words, they didn't say, "This is engineering," and "This is science," and so on. You had shop. That seemed like engineering. You made things. So, making things was engineering. And we learned—I learned—drafting. From an artistic point of view, I can visualize, and I have a great visual acuity. It's one of the things that has helped me later with science and engineering and intuition. I can visualize. A lot of the visualization I'm convinced comes from Brooklyn Tech. They had you do draft. So, we did do engineering things. And I liked drawing. So, I wouldn't say I disliked engineering, and I wasn't really drawn to other things. I was drawn to baseball and girls. [laughs] That was what I was drawn to. So, I think that the specialization, the subject matter that I came to love, came later. Then, it was just what was I good at, and then what were the other things that I could do and wanted to do.

Building the fish tank, working in the shop, doing mechanical drawing, learning how to make a blueprint, and all that stuff—I learned all of that, and it helped me visualize, what would a building look like? What would this look like? What would that look like? What would certain things look like in three dimensions? I'll tell you one of the most astonishingly important courses I ever took was solid geometry. Nobody today takes solid geometry. Nobody. It's a giant loss, because it's the visualization in three dimensions, not two. That was the last math course I took in high school, and it was really a remarkable experience. If you combine things of that kind, I think a lot of the visual—being able to make pictures in your head about what might be going on in physics or engineering comes from that education.

ZIERLER: Were you a strong student? Did you graduate near the top of your class?

CONN: I don't honestly remember, but I was a good student. Whether that's top of class, bottom of class, I can't remember. Brooklyn Tech is the largest of the three special schools, so there were like a thousand kids per grade level, in a giant building. It took up a whole city block. We probably had 4,000 kids at the school at any given time, a thousand per grade level. So, I don't recall. I recall the following: I did very well grade-wise, certainly good enough that when the time came for college, I was finding but where did I rank, I don't remember, and I don't even remember seeing such a thing.

But I had to do pretty well from the schools I was able to apply to and get in. So, indirect. I applied to Michigan and got in. I applied to Penn and got in. The recruiters, the alumni from these schools, would often come to Brooklyn Tech and meet with kids to encourage them to go to this school or that school. There's a long personal side to the elementary school, how I grew in middle school, what were my foibles, what were my pains, as well as what I was good at.

That was true of high school, too. One of the things that emerged was a fear or an insecurity, of how was I going to pay for it? Yet being an only child and having a strong personality, which I did - I had battle royales with my mother. The Jewish comedians make the jokes about the Jewish mothers; she was a Jewish mother. Without question. Probably Jewish mother squared. So, very controlling. It was the control that I rebelled against. By the time I was ready to go to college, the biggest thing for me was to get out of the house. How was I going to do that? Yeah, I could have gone to City College. I didn't want to do that. I didn't want to go to Brooklyn College. I didn't want to get on a bus, and I didn't want to live at home. Forget it! I don't think I even applied. But I applied to Penn and got in. They gave me a scholarship, but it wasn't enough. I got into Michigan. They gave me something, but it wasn't enough. It was half your tuition and then you've got to figure out how to pay for the rest.

It turns out—and this is important to the trajectory—I went to college at Pratt Institute. Now, Pratt Institute, if I got off the subway at Flatbush Avenue and walked to my high school, that was about ten blocks. If I walked out of my high school and walked to Pratt Institute, it was only another 20 blocks; just keep walking east. So, I went to college within 20 blocks of the place I went to high school, in downtown Brooklyn. Why did I go there and how did I end up there?

Mainly I wanted to get the hell out of the house. [laughs] But there were many, many small colleges in New York—Siena College and St. John's and this one and that one. Many of them didn't have the resources to give you an athletic scholarship. They weren't big athletic programs and there were no athletic scholarships. So, the coaches of the athletic teams at those places like Pratt knew one way to try and get a good ball player is also to try to go to these special high schools and recruit the kids there, because they're probably smart enough to get in. And they could get in, and the athletic director guy could say, "He qualifies for an academic scholarship."

That's exactly what happened to me. My academics were good enough to get me an academic scholarship at Pratt. It was a big one. It was full tuition, half room and board, and a job for the other half that I needed.

ZIERLER: That's everything right there.

CONN: It's everything right there, David. And if you think about my mindset at the time—A, I've got to get out, and B, I can't afford most things that were in front of me. C, I didn't want to go to the City Colleges—it was a miracle! And I didn't have to play baseball if I didn't want to. They didn't have a requirement. Because I was good enough to get in, and the coach put me up for these things, but once I got them, they were mine. They weren't things you could take away. For example—because I stopped playing baseball at the end of my freshman year. Another story. Why did you do that? Then I went back as a senior. I had just gotten married, at 21, and I played baseball. The most fun I ever had playing baseball in my life was my senior year in college. But I was missing the sophomore and junior year, because I was going to become an intellectual. I was going to wear a black turtleneck, and I was going to read Dostoyevsky, and I was going to—and I did! I did. So, my intellectual growth occurred in college, both culturally, in literature, everything else, including the technical side.

In any case, I was second string all-city, catcher. In all of New York City. They would do these ratings of the kids. I do remember, because there were only two of us, there was the guy ahead of me, and me. The guy ahead of me became a catcher for the Yankees and then for St. Louis. So, they were pretty good ball players. This Pratt coach saw me and suggested I apply. I did, and in the end that's how I got to Pratt Institute.

ZIERLER: What was Pratt known for? Was it an engineering school primarily?

CONN: It started like MIT, as a trade school, for the technical trades in the 1890s. It was founded by Charles Pratt He owned Pratt Oil Company and sold it to Rockefeller when Rockefeller was putting together his big trust. He used his wealth to find this trade school. But ultimately, to this day, it really is known for the visual arts and architecture. There are many great contemporary artists who got educated at Pratt, architects who got educated at Pratt. Library science was a big deal. Why, don't ask me, but it was. At the time, they had engineering. It was the remnant of the trade stuff of the 1890s, 1900s, and it evolved turned into engineering, just like it did at MIT. They had all the engineering majors, but they were obviously not MIT. But it was fine. What they were known for was art and architecture. Great school. Fashion design. Great in all those areas. They used to say Madison Avenue and its advertising agencies was filled with Pratt graduates.

Serious Science at Pratt

ZIERLER: How did you come to chemical engineering?

CONN: That's an interesting story. At that point, as a freshman, I wasn't sure what to pick. But I took freshman chemistry, and I took freshman physics. I'm jumping ahead, but it turned out as a freshman I blossomed. During the freshman year, we took 20 to 22 units in a semester. I had five courses. Calculus was a five-hour-a-week I think a five-credit course. This was this four credit course and that three credit one. We carried big loads. The physics course I guess was four units. At the end of freshman year, I remember staying up all night to study for the physics final and drinking coffee and things like that. I got the highest grade in the class and the highest mark—obviously an A or an A+, whatever it was. The same thing happened in the calculus class. All of a sudden I was blossoming. That's what I meant by "blossomed in college."

I took a chemistry course, and at the end of the first semester of chemistry, apparently I did so well they said, "You don't have to do all the lab experiments"—which I wish I had actually done—"You can do a special project in the lab for the lab portion of the chemistry." Chemical engineering required you to make a choice at the end of the freshman year, whereas with all the other majors, you could make the choice at the end of the sophomore year.

I discussed it with my father, particularly. His view was, "Well, you know, over in New Jersey, there's all these refineries, and there's all these plants up there. You could make a really good living! So, Robert, you've got to think about making a good living." Chemical engineer looked like a kind of engineer that would achieve this. I didn't know what an electrical engineer was.

In other words, there wasn't an obvious example. I remember a story in college. In my senior year, I was a chemical engineering major, and they brought in a man from industry who worked for a pharmaceutical company on Long Island. He was their chief engineer and had just retired. I remember this guy teaching us this final engineering design course, always being very dapper. He obviously had done well. But he said to us, he was going to take us to this pharmaceutical company where he had worked on Long Island and show us how chemical engineering works in practice, kind of the early biotech industry and drug-making industry. But he said to the class, "We're going to meet this one and that one." We ended up meeting the president. And he said something to the effect—there's a vice president of something in every family. I went, "What? This guy is so out of touch. He hasn't got the foggiest idea of what the hell is going on in the world." Pardon my French.

ZIERLER: [laughs]

CONN: Right? And you could see the bias come out. "Well, everybody who's walking and talking has a vice president in their family." Anyhow! [laughs] Back to chemical engineering, you could make a living. I seemed to be doing well at chemistry, so I chose chemical engineering. I didn't know what a physicist did. I didn't know what a mathematician did. Electrical engineering was kind of spooky. I had built my own amplifiers and hi-fi systems, bought the parts from Lafayette Electronics, and built my own hi-fi and stuff like that, but I didn't really know what these people did. But somehow an oil refinery and distillation columns—when I was a freshman and I had this chance in the second semester to build my own thing, I build distillation columns- that I seemed to intuit. I learned about different vapor pressures and how you could separate things and concentrate things. Basically a refinery is a distillation column of a particular kind. Anyway, I think those are the reasons. I can't promise you that they're accurate. But always in the back of my mind and in my father's mind, and my parents, was "Be sure you can make money."

ZIERLER: What did you do during the summers?

CONN: That's another story. "Make sure you can make money." They didn't want me to work in high school My parents wanted me to play baseball. You've got your whole life in front of you to work. All we ever did was work, from childhood. Not our son. So I had only one summer job, at a dollar an hour, where my father's sister, my Aunt Dorothy, worked.. She was the secretary to the head of a company that sold everybody who was building buildings in Manhattan the hardware—the locks, the doorknobs, the hinges, all the metal stuff that went into building a building, this company provided. I worked in the storeroom, swept the floor and kept the things proper in the storeroom. I did do that for the summer, but only one summer, I think between my junior and senior year. In those days, they had work rules, by the way. At that point you couldn't work for a company, a real job—you couldn't work a real job without being 16. I had started high school at 13, so I couldn't work 13, 14, 15. So, when I got a chance to work, which was between my junior and senior year, I did have a job.

I worked 40 hours a week, took a train into the city, and I learned about that. The other job that I had was that over the last two years of high school, and even my freshman year at college. My father was able to get me a temporary job at the post office during Christmas season, when all the cards were being sent and so I learned about boxing mail, and putting the mail in your backpack, and then carrying the thing out and delivering the mail to the addresses and so on. They called it a route. Root [phonetic] or route [phonetic]; that's another interesting thing between you say "root" and I say "route." But in any case, I learned a little bit about what my father did for a living. That was good.

So, I had some work experiences, but never anything that involved engineering or science, or so on. It was either delivering the mail or sweeping the storeroom. So, I didn't work, but their philosophy was, "This is the only time you've got to play. So Play. You've got all your life in front of you to work." By contrast, my kids worked all through high school, bagging groceries, doing this, because my view was, working is a good experience and it builds responsibility and you earn your own money and you learn how to manage your own money, and things of that sort. Whereas their view, my parents view, given their background was, "We don't want you to work until you absolutely have to." So that's the story of working in high school. In college I did work in summers, and they were important experiences, but we're again jumping ahead.

The Road to Caltech

ZIERLER: For the last part of our talk today I want to set the stage of course for Caltech. First, this is a fairly parochial life you're living at this point. It's all Brooklyn. How did you even learn about Caltech? Where did you hear about it?

CONN: You've got to go back to high school. I get to a technical high school. I do well. But I told you, when you asked me did we go to music or this or that—baseball and girls was it. That was my culture. I had met a girl, who—she became my first wife, and we were married 32 years, Gloria. She lived across the street from me. Still, when I was in high school, there were some farms remaining in Brooklyn. On the corner of the street that I lived on was in fact a big lot, Italian family owned it, and they farmed. They had a little grocery store; called it "The Shack." One day I walked into that grocery store, and I saw this girl. [laughs] Boy, was she beautiful! And—"I've got to meet this girl." So I did. All of this is going to bear on the question, how did I get to Caltech. Gloria and I were high school sweethearts.

We did our prom together and stayed out all night. I stayed out all night with the guy who was the primary pitcher, who was my best friend—Johnny Klvac. His family came from Czechoslovakia in the 1950s, somehow got out. Anyway, she and I are together. Through college, while I dated other people, I still was sort of her sweetheart. That becomes how I get to California. Getting to California is how I learn a little bit about Caltech. By the time I got to my senior year, Gloria had moved from Brooklyn—her family moved from Brooklyn in 1960 to Sylmar, California.

Another great story about family squabbles. They had a big family. She had like ten or eleven uncles and aunts. Her mother's family was large. They had some kind of family squabble, and her mother decided to pick up stakes and leave.

She had a sister in California. Pox on the rest of this damn family, and up they go in a car and drive to California. Gloria, who was still a senior in high school, stayed with a girlfriend—the parents put her up, across the street from me—and she finished her senior year in high school. I was a freshman in college. Then, after that, she was in California. So, as soon as I could figure out how to get to California, I figured out how to get to California. The first time I just saved up enough money to buy a plane ticket. This must have been 1961. Yeah. Christmas break 1961. I bought a ticket—this is a terrific story—so I buy a ticket, TWA, nonstop to L.A. on one of the first jets that went into service to do transcontinental trips. It left from the great Eero Saarinen designed terminal, and now I knew all this stuff from Pratt—TWA terminal at Idlewild Airport, which became JFK later.

We take off. It's mid to late December. We're on the plane. We're just about to be in California given the timing of the flight. The pilot comes on the plane and says, "Well, folks, I've got some unfortunate news. Los Angeles International Airport is fogged in. Nobody is landing. So, we're going to land in Ontario." The only Ontario I ever heard of was in Canada. [laughs] I said, "We're going to land in Canada? How the hell am I going to get to LA?" Of course it was Ontario, California. We landed there, we got off and they bussed us to LAX. My girlfriend and her father—and my life partner today, Carole, who was the best friend of my first wife Gloria. They are waiting, And that was my introduction to California.

But the story of getting to Caltech was, I did very well in college. And I did extremely well on the GREs. I never was all that good at standardized testing like the SATs. Didn't seem to me I was very bright. But I killed those GREs. I got 800 on the math GRE. It's crazy! Anyhow, I started now applying to great schools.

I figured now I knew what I really want to do. I went on several job interviews in my senior year. One was to Bell Labs, but it was the Bell Labs in Allentown, Pennsylvania. They were making the very first semiconductors. I remember the lab that I went into. The fellow who was running that facility said to me, "But you know, these days if you really want to work here, you should go get a doctorate degree. Go to graduate school." So although I could have gone to work at the oil refinery, and some of my colleagues did, I was now deep into science and engineering. I wanted to go to grad school.

I applied to Stanford. I applied to MIT. Then, there was this place called Caltech. It happened to be in Pasadena. Gloria's family lived in Sylmar. We had our first child when I was a senior in college. So we visited all those places starting my senior year. The combination of—I loved Caltech's size, but I think I would have liked Stanford as well. But Caltech seemed perfect, and Gloria's parents lived 45 minutes away.

I didn't much care for the weather back east, and I wanted to get to California. We needed to get to California. But I had a four-month-old baby, and grandparents being nearby was a big deal. At Caltech, bless their hearts, I had an NSF—I told you I did really well—so I had an NSF graduate school fellowship. It paid 1,800 bucks a year plus $500 for each dependent. So, I got another thousand dollars for my wife and my daughter. That was a small fortune in those days. I realized; I like Caltech. I like the other places too. Stanford is pretty good. But I have family here. The combination of family and reputation made the decision for me. That's how I ended up choosing Caltech over Stanford and MIT. I did not know really about UCLA in those days and did not apply. Didn't really think to apply to any other place as far as I can remember. I didn't want to stay in the East, so except for MIT—I didn't apply to Cornell or any other place. Friends went to Cornell. So it was Stanford or Caltech, and for the reasons I've given, we chose Caltech.

ZIERLER: Were there famous professors from Caltech that made you think this would be an exciting place? Did you know names like Richard Feynman or Linus Pauling?

CONN: No. But here's what Pratt did. They brought famous people to Pratt to give special lectures. The person who came to Pratt from Caltech was Jesse Greenstein.

ZIERLER: Oh, wow.

CONN: The head of Astronomy. He gave this remarkable lecture. I can't tell you the particulars, but it had to be about astronomy and astrophysics. I just loved it. That's how I first learned about Caltech, Jesse Greenstein. Giving this lecture to—a sort of backwater technical school, from a technology point of view, and a small school without a graduate program. How they got him there, I have no idea. But that was the cultural reach that Pratt had.

Now, that was how my cultural interests really spread - in college. We should come back to that. My college roommates were architects and art majors, and this and that and the other thing, not engineering. I really got introduced to the arts, to literature, to an awful lot of other things in college. That was where the wings truly spread, both in science and engineering but also in every other subject. Jesse coming was an example of that kind of breadth of culture that the campus provided. That's how I first learned about Caltech.

The Baseball Option

ZIERLER: Did you ever think about, or did you ever have the talent to think seriously about going pro or semi-pro in baseball?

CONN: Yes and no. In high school, as I told you, I was quite good. The Yankees had a program at the time called the Yankee Rookie program. They had an old scout named Arthur Dede—D-E-D-E. Arthur Dede in those days went back to the twenties. He was a catcher. He had played Minor League ball, and he had played some with one or another of the major teams. At that point, he was clearly in his late sixties or so, he was a scout for the Yankees. His job was to scout the New York City area for baseball players. Just in my own area, Joe Torre, Joe Pepitone, Bobby Aspromonte, Ken Aspromonte—these guys all made it to the majors. And some of them were terrific. I remember Rico Petrocelli hitting a home run off me, the great shortstop for the Boston Red Sox. So, it was a hotbed. You could put together, say, a class C or class B baseball team from the people who were in New York graduating from high school.

He would scout these schools and then when I was in my senior year, they asked if I would want to be part of this program called the Yankee Rookies. The idea behind it was, you didn't actually give up your college eligibility. That is, they didn't pay. But what they did is they paid for everything. They gave you Yankee uniforms. That's where that hat is from. I had Elston Howard's uniform the year that I played that summer. What we did was we barnstorm as the Yankee Rookies. What it did was to build a Yankee fan base in addition to maybe one of us would turn out to be a real pro and they'd sign us. I wanted to go to college. I wasn't going to sign. I had already decided that. We barnstormed the East Coast. I played in Providence and Springfield and Allentown, back to Allentown, and this place and that place. Upstate New York. Schenectady and so on and so forth. I spent the summer traveling around.

We'd put on these uniforms, and what they would do is they'd go to the Minor League cities where there were stadiums. They'd bus us everywhere of course. We'd stay in hotels, just like the real stuff. Not the best hotels, by the way. And we met girls. But I can't tell you about that! When you put on a Yankee uniform—! Anyway, [laughs] we barnstormed around. And they would make an exhibition game for the local Minor League club to generate interest in the town, in the region or the city. "Yankee Rookies coming to town! See the future Yankee stars! Playing in Springfield tomorrow night"—or wherever the heck it was. They'd advertise it, and we'd get three or four thousand people to a game. That's a lot of people to a Minor League game. We would play these Minor League clubs, and we held our own. That was my exposure.

On the other hand, I had what I know today to be the beginning of arthritic hips. I was a catcher. I could never get my ass as close to the ground as everybody else. I'd look at my colleagues who were catchers, and they could go like this with their knees, sit way down. I would sit like this. I couldn't go further. I didn't know it at the time, but it turned out I had a hip dysplasia issue, and I ultimately have artificial hips. Between that and the slider—fastballs and curveballs, okay, I learned hitting was very hard. A slider? Give me a break. Really hard pitch to hit. I saw some of that in high school, and I realized I was probably going to be a 200 hitter [laughs] and I've got these issues with my hip, and I had a separated shoulder from a crash-in at the plate, and I thought, "I'm going to college."

ZIERLER: [laughs]

CONN: So I never really entertained seriously going and playing Minor League baseball, but I had the experience of playing Minor League baseball. And that was this whole thing we've got to come back to, of what baseball is, not just as a game, but as a life experience, what's baseball really all about, and what experiences do you come away with, and what do you learn about how to do leadership?

ZIERLER: Last question for today, and I think this will be a great segue to next time—your mindset coming to Caltech, this theme which developed, as you explained in college, at Pratt—combining the engineering sensibilities with your love of physics—did you come to Caltech set on marrying these interests?

CONN: Yes.

ZIERLER: Did you know that you wanted to do engineering but from a deeply physics perspective?

CONN: I knew that. That, I knew. By comparison with going to college and picking my major in college, I came to Caltech very purposeful. What I wanted to do was save the world by helping nuclear power develop. I wanted to do nuclear physics and nuclear engineering. Caltech, bless its heart, didn't really have nuclear engineering, but it had people who could let you put together a major in that area. I think there were only three of us in all of the graduate school who took up that major within the Engineering Science program of the time. I think Milt Plesset was the head of that, a great fluid mechanician, in the mid 1960s. I came to Caltech with the idea of studying to be a nuclear engineer, which was the field it seemed to me that combined physics with engineering in a powerful way, and which had a purpose that I could see.

So, I was really applied science at that point, because I wanted to work on something not to discover the secrets of nature and that's it. I wanted to work on something where I could help the world be a better place. Now, I didn't understand, David, at that time, that studying basic science is enormously powerful as a way of making the world a better place. That's a very sophisticated idea. For this 21-year-old with the background and exposure that I had, I wasn't capable of recognizing that. What I knew was, well, you've got to make a living, you've got to do something that makes a difference; how can you combine those two things into something you might really like? That's what I knew, where I knew if I did that, this would combine physics, mathematics, engineering, da-da-da-da, and I should be a happy camper.

ZIERLER: And you knew enough Caltech would be the place to do it.

CONN: I did not. I didn't care. I figured—they said they had these things. They said they had a course in this thing. [laughs] They said they had something. I visited the campus, and I talked to people in my senior year. I visited Stanford, MIT, and Caltech. As I told you, I talked about this with the people who I visited with and they told me, they had this and they had that, and that I could do it. They had just hired Jerry Shapiro as an assistant professor who got his PhD in nuclear engineering at Michigan. They had Harold Lurie who was a nuclear engineer. And they had guys—the name of the textbook was Meghreblian and Holmes. They were both at JPL. They wrote one of the earliest textbooks on the introduction to nuclear engineering and nuclear reactors. Very Caltechian style. That's the textbook we used. So, Caltech had a presence. Not a large one, but enough of a one.

ZIERLER: That's a perfect place to pick up for next time. Bob gets to Pasadena; we'll take the story from there.

[End of Recording]

ZIERLER: This is David Zierler, Director of the Caltech Heritage Project. It is Wednesday, November 15, 2023. It is wonderful to be back once again with Professor Bob Conn. Bob, as always, great to be with you. Thank you so much.

CONN: You're welcome. What is this, our fourth session now? I don't know, third or fourth.

ZIERLER: We're on the third, but I hope there's many more to come.

CONN: Well, there will be, and I'm happy to do it with you, David.

ZIERLER: Last time, you set the narrative for where your mindset was, wanting to do nuclear engineering, wanting to do something that would have a positive societal impact. I'm curious, were you at all thinking about Caltech and the Manhattan Project, even before you got to Caltech? Obviously, Oppenheimer is famous now because of the movie, but there's a really deep connection between nuclear physics, nuclear engineering, that goes back to the Manhattan Project. I'm wondering when you came to Caltech if you associated Caltech with atomic bombs and World War II.

CONN: I did not associate Caltech with atomic bombs and World War II, but I was very alert to the nuclear weapons development program during World War II. I had read about it as an undergraduate. I think I even wrote some article about it in the student magazine. I think I was alert to the fact that the labs, Los Alamos in particular being the original lab but Livermore as well, were operated by the University of California. I was aware of the weapons program, and I was aware of UC's connection to both Los Alamos and Livermore. All I knew was that.

What they actually did and what they really did at the labs, I was always curious about it. I will admit, despite the extraordinary fire produced by a nuclear weapon—Oppenheimer described some of the solutions as "sweet" – that I was terribly curious how a nuclear bomb works. About an insightful way of solving a physics problem, Oppenheimer would say—that's a "sweet" way to do it. Understanding how a nuclear weapon actually worked was just a natural curiosity. I was really interested to know. Not necessarily that I wanted to work on that, though who would know? I wasn't close to a choice of that kind when deciding to come to Caltech. But I was aware of the connection between nuclear weapons, nuclear reactors for military applications—submarines and eventually aircraft carriers—and of course nuclear weapons.

ZIERLER: When you got to Caltech, coming from the Pratt Institute, did you feel well prepared vis a vis your fellow students? Did it feel like you were entering the big leagues?

CONN: [laughs] The first question and the second question are a little bit different. Did I feel I was well prepared? I did. I took four years of mathematics at Pratt. I learned complex variables as an undergraduate. I took the math major courses as an undergraduate rather than the engineering major courses. At the junior level, even at Caltech, they may have a different course in advanced calculus—they used to call it advanced calculus; I don't know what they call it now—at the junior year. There was an engineering version of that which was to be your terminus—the last true mathematics course you took. Versus a math major who took—I remember they called it the Black Widow, from Widder—W-I-D-D-E-R—the Harvard professor who had written the book. We used books like that for the mathematician's version of third-year mathematics.

There was a guy at Yale, Hille, who had written a book on complex variables which we studied from and was the book we used when I was a senior. So, I had a lot of mathematics. I thought I was adequately prepared in physics, although I didn't take a heck of a lot of physics courses. They didn't offer a lot of physics courses at Pratt. So, I was a little bit behind, perhaps, in that area. I was a chemical engineering undergraduate major, so I was very good there.

The course, by the way, that motivated me to start this transition towards physical sciences and nuclear engineering was actually physical chemistry. I had a very good course in physical chemistry as a sophomore at Pratt. That's where I found that physical chemistry is mathematically based; it's like physics! [laughs]

When you really think about it, it's like physics. I hated organic chemistry, because it was rules-based, and then you had to remember all these things, but the rules didn't always make so much sense, particularly if you didn't understand the chemical bond a la our good Linus Pauling. It was a lot more like biology, which I didn't take—also very high level, very empirical, but not mathematically grounded. Whereas physical chemistry was very mathematical. So, I felt that I had enough physics, enough chemistry, and I felt very comfortable about the mathematics. But the other half of your question was "Was I prepared to compete with the students at Caltech?"

ZIERLER: And did it feel like the big leagues to you, when you got here.

CONN: Big leagues. That was the word you used. Absolutely. And how did it feel like the big leagues? Well, the student body. I mean, I didn't know a lot of the faculty. Of course I knew they had great faculty, and I knew the history. As I told you, my officemate through graduate school was Jim Duderstadt. Jim's undergraduate education was at Yale. Other people came from Johns Hopkins. They came from relatively well-known places—MIT—and would come to Caltech for graduate work. Caltech undergraduates would go to MIT for graduate work. In fact, Caltech at the time liked to have their undergraduates go elsewhere for graduate education. So, yeah, suddenly I was competing with people who were from very well-known and very good undergraduate schools and who had an engineering or a scientific education at those places. Now, I had a scientific and engineering education at Pratt, but I had no real way other than the GRE scores to understand how I might compete. I could feel that difference. So, yes, I was quite concerned, would I be up to snuff? Would I make it or not? When I first started. I don't want to say I thought I was going to fail, but I did feel like, I'm going to have to show my mettle here and it's going to be a little different than doing that at Pratt Institute.

ZIERLER: What year did you start at Caltech? Was it 1964?

CONN: 1964. September of 1964.

ZIERLER: What were some of your early impressions? What sticks out in your memory when you arrived on campus?

CONN: It's a small campus, not unlike Pratt. They had just built the building that was the library, at that time named the Millikan Library. It was just a beautiful place. I loved the architecture. I loved the old oak trees. I had a summer job that summer at Atomics International, which in those days was part of North American Aviation.

A diversion. I had organized that summer job as an undergraduate in order to visit my girlfriend in California. Remember I told you about my girlfriend? Somewhere along the line, my—we should go back to the undergraduate—my undergraduate summer experiences were very important in my life. The end of my freshman year, I worked in a steel mill. They still had steel mills in Brooklyn and on Long Island in those days. That showed me what real labor was about. Boy!

And I didn't want to do that! But I got to know the people, and I worked shifts. They rotated the shifts, so every week it was eight to four, four to midnight, midnight and the graveyard shift. What an experience! I told you about how the second year was the job going around Brooklyn identifying buildings that could be fallout shelters in the event of a nuclear bomb attack The third year, however, I managed through some friend of my girlfriend, who was now in California—she had a friend who worked at Atomics International as a science writer. They got me to apply, and Atomics International accepted me. I worked that summer, my junior year and then after my senior year, at Atomics International. I started learning about reactors, by the way, because they had what they called space nuclear application reactors, or SNAP reactors, in other words reactors that were in space to provide power for satellites. I learned a lot about that. Back to your question now. Repeat it one more time.

ZIERLER: Your early impressions. I was curious specifically if—your interest in nuclear engineering, maybe as an alternative energy source—when you got to Los Angeles, what was the smog issue like, and were you thinking about alternatives to fossil fuels?

CONN: Absolutely. In fact, I had never seen air of such poor quality, even in New York. It was terrible. A Caltech chemical engineer, Sheldon Friedlander, is the source of understanding the smog and that understanding was used to clean the air up. So, kudos, Caltech! I met Friedlander when UCLA stole him from Caltech to enhance their chemical engineering department, and he moved there just a year or two before I shifted from Wisconsin to UCLA in 1980. Sheldon was a lot of the brains, and the students he had, behind what caused smog, and what should you do about it. So, yes. The answer was clearly there were air pollution problems. In the wintertime, they still used smudge pots in the orange groves east of campus. It made smog with the temperature inversion. You often would go months without seeing the mountains. You looked to Mount Wilson and there was no Mount Wilson. There was no mountain, period. It was not like today. It's absolutely remarkable the change in the 55, 60 years since I was a student there.

The Miraculous Curriculum of Nuclear Engineering

ZIERLER: You mentioned there was no formal program in nuclear engineering. Did you cobble together your own curriculum? How did that work?

CONN: Caltech had the idea behind a curriculum. This is the portion of Caltech's education that I found the most miraculous. That is that they were prepared to have a very small number of students and teach the classes anyway. They didn't care if there were only three to five students. They would teach the course. They had this course at the first-year graduate level, Introduction to Nuclear Reactors. The textbook was written by two JPL people, Meghreblian and Holmes. I believe Harold Lurie, who was leading the nuclear effort within the Engineering Sciences, in Thomas Hall, he was my advisor, and I believe he taught that course. They had just hired a guy named Jerry Shapiro from Michigan that I mentioned. Jerry was actually my advisor, not Harold. Jim Duderstadt had Harold, and I had Jerry. Jerry was an experimentalist. That's another story about how I came to work on theory when I was assigned an advisor who was an experimentalist.

I got to work in Jerry's lab, and I helped him out there first year. But they had people to teach the courses, they had a curriculum, and I took three quarters of nuclear engineering. The second year, they had an idea of what the curriculum should be, but they didn't have the people to teach the course. This is where Caltech became totally singular. There were only three students—Jim Duderstadt, me, and somebody else who dropped out. They hired Tony Leonard, then at Rand and much later in the mechanical engineering, fluid mechanics group at Caltech, but at the time Tony was a PhD from Stanford in nuclear engineering. He had been an undergraduate at Caltech. He went to Stanford for graduate work, worked with Joel Ferziger at Stanford, another Michigan guy who went into nuclear engineering. Now, he was at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica. He really wanted to be at Caltech, but he needed to get an offer.

He wasn't, at that time, a faculty member. Years later, Caltech saw the brilliance in him and hired him into the Mechanical Engineering Department. He was an expert in neutron transport theory. Neutron transport, how neutrons transport in materials, is fundamental to how a nuclear reactor works. This is very mathematical. There were a lot of theorems and proofs and special cases and all sorts of things, special versions of equations that would describe the transport of neutrons in materials. Tony Leonard was an expert. Nobody else at Caltech could teach this. Nobody else knew it, at all. Noel Corngold knew it, but Noel wasn't there when I was in my second year. . He came at the end of my second year, which is when I shifted. So, they taught first the Introduction to Nuclear Reactors. Very rigorous. Then neutron transport theory, and I love it just as much.

I loved it. Lots of math. Lots of physics, At least the physical sciences were needed. No chemical engineering required. [laughs] It was great. I took five courses, as I had as an undergraduate, my first year. I took four technical courses and then you were required to we had to pass an exam in a scientific language. I passed in French and in German. that got me past the language requirement. I took History of Science in my first year from one of your colleagues, way, way back, which was the one liberal arts type of course—you would describe it—that I did take at Caltech. My first year was really loaded. I took the first year graduate physics courses. I took Introduction to Quantum Mechanics. I took the Introduction to Electricity and Magnetism. I had nuclear reactor theory. I had something—oh, I had Applied Mechanics 125. I remember the number to this day – taught by Lester Lees.

Lees used von Kármán's book, something and von Kármán. I had two physics courses, a nuclear engineering course, a math course, and a history of science course. it was fabulous. I just loved it. I loved doing the work. I loved the subject matter. The Caltech teachers were terrific. Mathews (in physics) taught the Introduction to Quantum Mechanics in the Physics Department. Bob Leighton was involved to some degree in all of that. In fact the course was from Bob Leighton's book, Introduction to Modern Physics, if I remember correctly. All this is a long time ago, but I think those are accurate with respect to the titles. So, I got taught by terrific people of very high repute. It was just thrilling. It was scary-thrilling, but it was thrilling.

ZIERLER: Did you interact with Richard Feynman at all?

CONN: Yes. In my third year. He would periodically teach the last most advance course in quantum mechanics, not the first-year graduate course in quantum mechanics that was based on the three red books and his introduction at the freshman and the sophomore level. By the way, they proved even too much even for Caltech freshmen. But they were extraordinary resources for intuition building and for expanding your—whatever you were learning in quantum mechanics, read the little red books and you'll have a deeper understanding [laughs]. Because his intuition—Feynman's—was incredible. His explanatory skills were just remarkable. So, I did a little supplementary stuff and that kind of reading when I was taking the course from Mathews my first year. Then, in the third year, Feynman himself taught the last course, the graduate course in quantum mechanics, the last one. You took one at the freshman level. Now, it's probably taught at the senior level. Then, you took this course that Feynman taught. I took that.

Wow! Wow. You want to talk about the experience? Because that's how I met Feynman. I also went to things like the Christmas parties where he would dress up as Santa Claus. He was an actor, and he liked to act and things. There was a woman graduate student who is now an astronomer at UC Irvine, but at that time was considered a child prodigy. She had finished at UCLA at maybe 19 and came to Caltech and was parallel to me – a first-year student when I was a first-year grad student. That's another story I could tell you. I'm trying to remember her name. Ah, Virginia Trimble. In any case, do you want to talk more about the first year and its experiences, or do you want to jump to Feynman, which gets to be the third year?

ZIERLER: We'll come back to Feynman. I was just curious how early in your curriculum.

CONN: Oh, here's how I found him Feynman. It's not in the curriculum; it's going to be the Physics Department seminars every week. There weren't seminars that I was interested in, in Engineering. Because we had such a small program in nuclear engineering there was no seminar program in that area. The closest thing was the seminar program in the Physics Department. I would go religiously to that, all the years I was there, to the Physics Department colloquia. Of course Feynman would sit down front. He would ask questions. He was a character. He was just a character. So, you could not not know Feynman, from a distance.

That's how I first ran into all the great names in high-energy physics in those days—Feynman and Gell-Mann and Frautschi and this one and that one. The electricity and magnetism course I took was taught by—I think his name was Felix Boehm—B-O-E-H-M—and he was an experimentalist.

Not a very good teacher, but—and he was from Switzerland, if I remember correctly. In any case, they were all there. Mössbauer had just discovered the Mössbauer effect at Caltech, as a postdoc. Then, they tried to keep him immediately as a full professor because he won the Nobel Prize very quickly. [laughs] But he did his work and made the discovery as a postdoc at Caltech. All these people were on campus. Some of the astronomers would come from time to time. I remembered Jesse Greenstein from his guest lecture at Pratt so I always had an interest and from time to time would go to those. Mainly it was the Physics Department. That's how I got to know what face went with Gell-Mann, what face went with Feynman, what face went with this one, what face went with that one. It was all from afar, but I knew.

The Transformative Arrival of Noel Corngold

ZIERLER: What was the process like in the first year in determining who your advisor would be? When Corngold arrived in your second year, did that change your considerations at all?

CONN: Absolutely. Completely transformative. Both Jim and I bless Caltech for hiring Noel Corngold. Your current dean, or the prior dean of Engineering, said, "All the work I've done doesn't match Noel Corngold having you and Jim as graduate students. What you guys have gone on to do, basically none of my students have ever done that, despite they're being fabulous." Noel arriving in many ways was—

ZIERLER: Where did he come from? Where was Noel before?

CONN: He was at Brookhaven National Laboratory. He had done his work with Ramsey, the Nobel Prize winning physicist at Harvard. He finished in the mid 1950s, and he took a job at Brookhaven, which was building in those days the accelerator at Brookhaven. He got interested in nuclear reactors and neutron transport theory while there and became an eminent theorist in that area, proved a couple of theorems that were at the time remarkable, as well as surprising. Nobody thought the theorem he proved was even a theorem. When Caltech hired him, he might have been the best person working in the field of neutron transport, which was, as I said to you, the most fundamental thing you needed to know about how you design a nuclear reactor core to make the nuclear reactor work best.

It's not about how you cool it, and it's not about what structure or materials you use. It's not about anything like that. It's how do I put the thing together, so it becomes critical and is safe. If you don't know various ways of describing how the neutrons move around in matter, then you don't know nuclear engineering. Noel knew—this was pretty fundamental and that was his strength. He didn't come until the end of my second year, as I said. You asked me, how did I get assigned an advisor? Well, I had an NSF fellowship, so I didn't need a TA-ship. I never did a TA. So, I didn't get assigned to somebody to be that person's teaching assistant or anything of that sort. I got assigned to somebody to be an advisor. But what I worked on wasn't automatically prescribed by who I was asked to work with or who guided me on what courses should I take and things like that. Jerry Shapiro was the person I got assigned to.

As I said, Jerry was relatively new there. But he was working on an experiment that I ended up doing my thesis on. Right behind Thomas Hall, there used to be an area where they had a little substation, and they had a little room that you could shield. In that room, he had a little accelerator, what's called a Cockcroft-Walton accelerator. He would accelerate deuterium, and he would hit a target that was tritiated, that had tritium in it. The deuterium would fuse with the tritium, so that's the basic reaction of fusion energy, and it would make 14 MeV neutrons. Then, you would build something around it, a square of blocks of lead or a bunch of blocks of iron, steel. Graphite, which was an important moderator. You'd get a bunch of graphite bricks, and you'd put them around this source of neutrons.

Then, you measured at the edge what was the rate at which the neutrons leaked out? They're born in the center, and they transport and scatter and so on; what was the rate at which they leaked from the block? To some degree, what was the energy spectrum that they had when they were leaving the block? Could you use all of that to figure out what was happening within the block? You might have some detectors within the block, reading out to the outside. That was a pretty fundamental experiment, because if graphite was going to be used, as it is used, as a moderator in a reactor—or water, or anything else, such as liquid sodium (though we never used this, but liquid sodium was used to call fast breeder reactors.) —How did the neutrons transport in those materials, and how are you going to test that you got the right probabilities of the neutron interacting with whatever nucleus you're interested in? Those things are called cross-sections, the probability that a neutron will hit any nucleus and either be scattered or be absorbed. Those are the basic things.

If it was scattered, how was it scattered? Because that predicts where it's going to go. This is by the way identical to how you have to model a nuclear weapon. Neutron transport is just so fundamental. Anyway, you want to know, how do I accurately describe this? Do I have the right probabilities and right cross sections? This was a benchmark type of experiment. What that means is an experiment that you do that's about as simple as you can think of, so you have a prayer of actually modeling it. It's not filled with multiple different types of materials. A single material in a single shape, pulse goes off in the middle, what happens. You could predict that, and then that would become a test of these big codes that were used to design nuclear reactors or design nuclear weapons.

How do you test that you've got the right numbers, the right probabilities? This was a way you could do it. At the time, it was an important fundamental experiment in nuclear engineering. Jerry was working on that. I found the idea—of course I did my thesis on it, so I'm just repeating myself from all I learned back there, but at the time I started working with him I didn't know anything about this thing. He explained it to me, and I'm going, "Okay." What do I know? [laughs]

I helped him out my first year. He was my advisor. I did some work in his laboratory. I learned about this machine, and I learned about these experiments. But that was it. It wasn't that I was going to do a thesis with Jerry necessarily. What turned me on to what I actually wanted to do was the second year when Tony Leonard taught this advanced course in neutron transport theory. That's at the bleeding edge of math. It's singular integral equations. It's complex variables up the gazoo. It's really significant training in advanced mathematics just to do the physics of this stuff. That's where I said, boy, if Tony were here [laughs] I'd work with him—but he was just an adjunct who come over and teach this course. I think that describes it. Harold—I never figured out what Harold's scientific interest was, but he knew nuclear engineering. Jim Duderstadt had him as the advisor and he got the same kind of advice—"Take this course. Take that course." So Jim and I took most of these courses together. I think the freshman year we probably took all the same courses! Because the advice was straightforward. And there were.

ZIERLER: How did the nuclear engineering program or curricula demarcate between theory and experiment? What did that look like?

CONN: As I say, the experimental program had no experiments. Jerry Shapiro bringing this pulse neutron experiment or facility to Caltech was the experimental facility, and the experiments you could do if you wanted to do an experiment. Theory—they were just putting this together at Caltech. They were stringing baling wire. There was no theorist there. They would bring in what they needed to teach us and figure out how to actually make a curriculum. The hiring of Noel Corngold was to fill out three or four faculty who knew what the hell was really going on in this area, could both teach the courses but also do fabulous research in this subject. By the way, they did the same thing with plasma physics in the Electrical Engineering and Applied Physics program. Roy Gould was there from the beginning and a phenomenal guy. Very fundamental plasma physics. Echoes—plasma echoes—was what he became famous for, and discovering this idea of echoes.

Everybody in those days—plasmas above the atmosphere was of great interest. There was Roy Gould in plasma physics, which was supposed to have something to do with fusion energy. It was Jerry using an accelerator and fusion reactions to make neutrons to fill this out. There was Harold, who was doing I don't quite know what. Then, Noel came. Ultimately, Noel spent a lot of time with Roy. Roy was an experimentalist. Then, somewhere along the line they hired Paul Bellan in Applied Physics, and he basically was the legacy guy after Roy Gould, doing plasma physics at Caltech. I don't think they've hired anybody young after that, so basically over the 50 years since I was a student or 60 years, whatever the count is—yeah, I started when I was 21 in 1964. I was still 21. So, it was 60 years ago. It's a long time. I think Caltech made the decision that it couldn't stay at the forefront of this field. Eventually they just let it glide away. Paul Bellan is the last of the faculty from that group that would even touch the surface of fusion energy issues, would touch the surface of nuclear fission and nuclear power issues.

ZIERLER: What did you do between your first and second year? What did you do over that summer?

CONN: I think I again went out to Atomics International for a summer job, but it's not distinctive to me. I think that's what I did—worked on SNAP reactors. After that I don't think I took a summer job.

ZIERLER: Did that help you refine—?

CONN: And I'm not sure I did that. I may have just worked in the lab with Jerry. I had enough money. I didn't need to have a summer job then.

ZIERLER: You were not thinking about a career in industry? You were fully in on an academic path?

CONN: That's another interesting question. Remember where I've come from. Nobody has ever gone to college. Nobody knows how any of this works. I'll tell you a story about not knowing what tenure is when I went to Wisconsin. I didn't understand what tenure was. That had a consequence, which was serendipitously great for me, but I had no idea about tenure. You're talking to a person who didn't go to Caltech with an understanding of what is it to be a professor. I didn't know anybody who had been a real professor! Nobody in my family, nobody within 20,000 miles of me as far as I could tell, did anything like this! I saw the people at Pratt, but they were very different from the people—the engineering people—from the people I was meeting at Caltech. This was another world! So, yeah! Every graduate student, all you know is—the faculty. You want to be like the faculty! Like I kid says, I want to be like Joey over there. Later you find out, maybe I do want to teach. Maybe I really want to go to industry. Maybe I'm not good enough to go into academic life. That's not an easy path no matter what you want to do or try to do. So at the start, I was really in the dark about a career path.

I had many friends who wanted to be an academic but didn't get an offer that would make sense and ended up going into industry. Then they ended up liking industry and staying and doing their whole careers in industry. When I went to Caltech, I wasn't thinking about what I would do when I finished. That came later. What drove me to become an academic was the love of research. As an undergraduate, I didn't have a lot of experience at doing research, real research. So, that didn't come until I got to Caltech. That proved to be formative to what I felt I wanted to do. What did I really love? I really loved research. And I found that I really loved the areas that I was working in. And I found I was good at it. Those three discoveries were all made at Caltech, so by the time I finished, I knew I wanted to [laughs] be an academic. But not when I arrived.

ZIERLER: By the end of your second year, with Corngold in place, did you have a good idea ultimately what your thesis research would be?

CONN: As I said—and that's where there's several serendipities here. A later story about my career and getting tenure will be [laughs] a serendipitous thing. Noel arrived at the end of my sophomore year, that summer of—let's see, 1964-1965, 1965-1966—so in the summer of 1966, Noel arrives. He shows up in September, and he's the answer to our dreams! We had taken all these courses in neutron transport theory. Both Jim and I wanted to do a thesis in this general area. We had an experimental guy doing pulse neutron experiments. Noel had just proven a fundamental theorem about how the neutrons in those pulse neutron experiments would behave. The theorem was totally unexpected. That is, at some point if you make the system too small, the neutrons stop leaking out with an exponential decay. The theory was, if I've got a ball of water a foot in diameter, and set off the neutrons in the middle of the water sphere, those neutrons would ultimately scatter against the hydrogen and oxygen, give up their energy to the water, leak out mostly as thermal room temperature neutrons, or whatever the temperature of the water is, and they'll have a Maxwellian distribution in energy, and they'll have a temperature, and the intensity of the pulse will decay in an exponential fashion.

He proved that if you made the mass small enough—there was a critical size below which the neutron leakage was not exponential. It had to do with at some point you just don't make enough collisions before you leave, so there's streaming. Rather than lots of collisions and leaving as a thermal spectrum, it now leaves as a hard spectrum with a lot of high energy neutrons still there, because they can just get out of the system more easily. Anyway, nobody thought about it. He was able to show this mathematically, establish this theorem. That was the place to go and work!

Now maybe the most fundamental thing had been discovered by Noel, but then there were puzzles. Jim did one thesis on one puzzle, and I did a thesis on another puzzle, which was a profound puzzle. Jim worked on the idea -- suppose I had a continuous pulse of neutrons. Instead of a pulse I had a steady state source of neutrons. Just run the Cockcroft-Walton accelerator steadily into a target and make neutrons continuously instead of in a pulse. Then, put an absorber around it that would absorb the neutrons to a certain degree, and in other places wouldn't absorb them at all. Then, rotate that absorber in front of the source, and you could make a wave of neutrons. The intensity would have a wave character to it. If that wave goes into a material, how does it decay, and what does the output look like at the far end of—you generate a wave of neutron intensity; how does it propagate through the material? Jim did that.

And I did the puzzle of—Noel's theorem didn't seem to hold true in materials that had a polycrystalline nature, a crystal nature. So, in water, perfect, but not in graphite and not in beryllium. In beryllium, the neutrons just seemed to leak out exponentially way beyond what the theorem predicted was the smallest size - it was supposed to be non-exponential, but it stayed exponential. Why was that? And so on. That was a fundamental problem, because it doesn't fit the theory. In any problem in physics—Sorry, I'm going to need to get a glass of water—

ZIERLER: Sure.

CONN: In any problem of this kind, you may make a discovery and there may be a theorem you think is supposed to work a certain way, but there's going to be a hell of a lot to learn when you discover that there are certain things that don't follow the theorem. Either something is wrong with the mathematics, or something is going on in the physics that you hadn't anticipated and don't understand. One of those two things, or both, can turn out to be true as you ultimately come up with why the thing is doing what it's doing instead of what you expected it to do. That was a pretty profound puzzle. It took more mathematics to work that problem out than even Noel had done in proving his original theorem. That was a really hard problem, because discontinuities were involved. That's a story for another day. It has to do with how do neutrons scatter from crystals. We can go back to that.

ZIERLER: Why don't you break for a glass of—?

CONN: That's how we both chose thesis problems. We had an advisor. He knew these areas. We knew that there was a lot of new knowledge to be gotten from these areas. There was great interest in the community in these experiments. That's how we fell into it.

ZIERLER: Why don't we break for a glass of water?

CONN: Be right back.

[break]

ZIERLER: Once you had all of this worked out, how self-directed were you for your thesis? How much were you able to come up with on your own? When did you need to go to your advisor and work out these questions?

CONN: I think that's one of the things about Caltech that I would say is important. You get to do it on your own. Graduate education is about learning how to develop taste in research problems that you're choosing to work on. The only way you get to do that is to choose a problem and then mostly try to do it yourself but have a guide. Noel was my guide. Without him I would not have been able to get to the endgame, as far as I can tell. Every now and then, he would have an insightful suggestion. We would meet for an hour once a week. That was the frequency of oversight, if I can put it that way. In other words, we'd meet a week—"What did I do? How did it go? How does that sound? Here's what I'm stuck on." Et cetera, et cetera. I'll give you a mathematical example of something where—I don't remember exactly how the insight came about, but the trick to solving my problem in a mathematical sense was based on complex variable theory.

In complex variables, there are things called poles. Regge theory was very popular in the 1960s in particle physics, and people were working on it in the Physics Department. Each of those poles was a particle, some kind of fundamental particle, associated with their energy. In mathematics, this is called the spectrum of the operator. You have a differential equation, let's say, and you create a form of the differential equation where an operator operates on the function. Then, that operator, depending on its character, can have a spectrum. It can have discrete points and poles. It can have branch cuts. It can have all manner of complexity if it's a complex variable problem -- it can have all manner of structure in the complex plane. That was widely used in high-energy physics. As I said, Regge poles were pretty profound, but they were basically the same thing that I was doing, only this was a different equation that I was working on. Rather than the Schrödinger equation, this was an equation for the transport of particles - neutrons.

It's a Boltzmann-like equation. There was a single pole. That was the exponential decay constant Sometimes there were two poles. But then as the system got smaller you could watch the pole—the singularity—move in the complex plane. At some point, I discovered that—that's called the point spectrum—there was a continuous region of the complex plane where it was singular. If you have to do these equations, you have to figure out the residue from complex variable theory. All this is coming back! [laughs] So you had to know how to integrate around a pole in the complex plane and avoid these branch cuts, or get these poles to work? In explaining what I told you was the thesis of neutrons in crystals, for a while I had the answer and didn't recognize it. I learned a deep issue there, which was that what I was doing for the part I couldn't figure out was to push it away – ignore it. I buried it. I went and worked on some other piece of the problem and some other piece. I would tell Noel about this.

Eventually, the physics was in that part that at first I couldn't understand, and I had to deal with it. What I learned from that—and Noel helped me there. He was very good at the mathematics. But the lesson of research was that when you find something that you can't explain, that's where the honey is. The honeypot is there. Go there. Don't run from it. Go to it. If you're an experimentalist—well, the first thing you have to do is, that honeypot better not be an artifact. It is a calibration error in your instruments, or whatever. So, you work hard to be sure that the discovery is truly a discovery and not some artifact. Then, once you've got it, you've got it! And it will be your Nobel Prize if it's profound enough. It will be just a great contribution if it's not Nobel Prize worthy. Most science discoveries are not Nobel Prize-worthy.

But the whole science system moves along an enormous front that is inching forward, inching forward, inching forward. Every now and then, to stick with that metaphor, somebody will discover something so profound that it's like a jet coming out of that web, and then you've got to go down that jet, and the jet becomes integrated into this base of knowledge of the web as a whole. Now, another thing has to go puncture the web, and then the web has to grow an understanding of that and incorporate that "jet of knowledge" back into the body of knowledge. The whole web is moving forward slowly, and then these punctuated things occur, and it moves forward a lot, and then it doesn't move much, but it moves. The work that most people do moves the frontier forward, but not with this big punctuation. That's what science is.

Neutron Transport and Embracing the Unknowns

ZIERLER: Not seeing this initially, as you narrated it to me, what's the takeaway? Is it wisdom in science? Is it knowing when to ask your advisor? What was the learning process from this?

CONN: I just told you that by burying the critical piece of the solution to the problem, I learned, don't bury what you don't understand. Confront it. If you have a student and they come up with this kind of thing, you say, "Go figure it out. Why not do this?" I'll give you an example. I had a graduate student in the mid 1970s at Wisconsin. We were trying to model, with fluid equations, the behavior of a plasma in a tokamak device. He wrote out these equations, and there were finite difference methods to do so. He was running the equations and coming back and saying, "I can't get a stable answer. The thing seems to diverge." He's running them on the computer, and he can't solve the problem. How are you doing the finite difference? Well, I'm doing it—it's called explicit. I'm doing it on an explicit grid. Well, there's another way to do it called implicit grid creation. Why don't you try that? That's often much more stable.

The kid saw it—Wayne Houlberg—he did that, solved the problem. He had a beautiful fluid model for describing plasmas. Went to Oak Ridge and spent his whole career at Oak Ridge using that program, and improvements thereof, to model the plasmas in tokamaks. But his puzzle was, at the beginning, how do I solve the equation in a stable way? I was my Noel, right? I said, "Why don't you think about this?" I don't remember what Noel said to me [laughs] to get through the problem. All I know is we were meeting once a week, he knew the problem, and he had to have told me something that said, okay—and it had to do with this funny thing of branch cuts in complex variable theory. I had to go to a guy in structures. Just to give you an example of how you outreach—these equations were—sometimes these singularities I'm talking about that were the poles in the complex plane - the equation I was ultimately trying to solve is what people call a singular integral equation.

Caltech had just hired a famous guy, Sternberg, in applied mechanics from Brown. He brought three faculty members with him. Caltech just stole the whole group and ensconced them in Thomas Hall. The greatness transferred from Brown to Caltech overnight. He had a grad student who had been an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins working with one of the guys in applied mechanics, structural mechanics. They used singular integral equations. Now this is another grad student mind you. This is a wonderful story. We were talking about his problem and my problem. I told him, "I seem to have this kind of an equation. It's got these poles, and it has got these singularities." He said, "Wow, we have that same thing in applied mechanics, and there's this book by a Russian guy from Georgia called Muskhelishvili—Singular Integral Equations." I spent more time with that goddamn book [laughs]—

ZIERLER: [laughs]

CONN: But I learned how to solve singular integral equations. And the source didn't come from Noel; it came from another graduate student. In fact that was probably the most important thing I found, and I got it from another student. So, be around Caltech. There's always a bright person who might have a suggestion that was really terrific. Anyway, leave it that Noel and I met once a week, and I eventually was able to solve the problem, and I learned a tremendous amount of mathematics. I learned the physics. I developed an intuition. I can visualize how neutrons transport in materials to this day. It's a lovely thing. I love to do it. I can think this thing through. That comes with experience.

A certain amount of wisdom certainly comes with age. In my Ramo NAE Award speech, I said to my colleagues, describing my career—the last thing I was the president of a foundation. I said, that's the sort of thing you should do later in your career when a certain amount of wisdom supplements the experience and expertise that you've developed over your lifetime of work. If you want to call Always look under the cover where the problem is buried" a bit of wisdom, fine. But it was a lesson learned in graduate school about how to do research and where to focus your attention that served me well throughout my career.

ZIERLER: Was this the summit that you had to climb before you felt ready to defend the dissertation?

CONN: Well, no. I had to solve the problem, or I had to at least explain it in physical terms. What was the problem? What was observed was that—he didn't have beryllium because it was a difficult material to handle, but other people had done experiments in beryllium, and what they found was that the decay—they'd do a pulse of neutrons and they'd say, how does it decay at the outside of the block? I mentioned to you, it's supposed to be exponential. Noel's theorem said when the block gets too small, it should become non-exponential and decay differently. They would do these experiments in blocks of beryllium, and they would make them smaller and smaller, and it would still look like an exponential decay. That's what I was trying to explain—what was it about beryllium that was different from water? It's the crystalline structure. When neutrons thermalize, they—all particles have a wave and a particle character, right?

But when neutrons get slow, they can—they have a wavelength associated with their energy that can actually match the spacing in a crystal. If that happens, that's like get Bragg scattering, which was discovered by Bragg in the 1920s, I think. In any case, what would happen is that instead of the probability of interaction as a function of energy being a smooth curve or whatever, it was—going up like this, the falling, then going up again, the falling—as the neutron energy we'd get lower? A cross section might get higher. But in a crystal, it would go like this. It would start up and then it would drop, and then it would start up, and it would take a big drop, and it would start up, and take a big drop. Those starting up and taking the big drop—the height of the peak was when the neutron wavelength exactly matched the spacing, or a multiple of the spacing, so higher harmonics -- of the spacing of the crystalline atoms in beryllium versus the wavelength of the neutron.

What would happen is in those deep drops, the neutrons had very low interaction probability, and they could just leak out in particular ways. I'm going to get lost here, but my point is that it was those neutrons that were leaking out from those traps below the Bragg peaks that explained why the behavior at the edge—integrated behavior of the neutrons leaking out of the pile behaved as they did. That was the new contribution. Noel and I wrote two papers about it, one more general proving the theorem and doing all the complex variable theory and branch cuts and branch regions and so on. The other one was a really clever thing that Noel knew, and I think he actually suggested. That is, if you have an integral equation, it will be — I've got to do this this way, but you know what an integral is, right?

ZIERLER: Yeah.

CONN: I don't know your background.

ZIERLER: I do.

CONN: You'll have an integral, and there's the kernel in this equation called F of x, and x prime. Then, there will be a function of x, x', y, dx'. F of x prime is let's say the distribution along x' of whatever the function is. The kernel— F(x x')— is if you're at a given place x', how do you get to the other place x, and what happens in between? It's like a transfer function. If you write an approximation to the kernel—F of x, x-prime—as K(x)and G(y), it's much easier than F(x,x'). Now the sum of functions of x and times functions of x' is separable. You do a sum over them. If you do enough of this, you can get an accurate approximation, you hope, of the actual kernel, F(x,x'). But when you write it as separable, suddenly you have inside the integral a function of x, a function of x', and the distribution function f of x'. The function of x comes out. You can do the integral over the x' part of the kernel times the function of x', and that allows you to solve the problem analytically.

That was a big contribution. That was a mathematical sort of trick to solving integral equations. I'm pretty sure Noel knew that trick. Anyway, I certainly knew the trick. The second paper was about how to apply this trick and then get better insights into what the integral equation was actually telling you about the transport of neutrons in materials.

ZIERLER: Where was computation in all of this? Did you use Fortran?

CONN: Yes. I then had a set of equations, some of which I couldn't solve analytically, and I would try to solve them numerically. Caltech had just gotten, if I remember, the IBM 7090. The fully parallel machines of the late 1960s, the IBM 360, they didn't come in until the late 1960s. I think in the 1950s and the early 1960s, Caltech had IBM machines—the 704, various incarnations of better machines. They had a 7090. I had equations that I needed to solve, and I would punch out all the damn cards into a box, a deck of cards, take it over to the computer center in—Franklin Hall, was it? Just on the other side of—I can't remember the street names, but I visualize on the campus exactly where the building is. It was the building where those people who did computing, like Franklin was the guy who taught me computer science in graduate school, were housed. His textbook was at that point in mimeograph form. We learned about computer science from him. That was great. The computer center was located in the same building. So, I would take these stacks of cards dutifully over. For the first ten times, the thing would come back with an error because I had made a mistake in my punch card ability.

It's like typing, and every time you make a mistake you're in trouble, and then you've got to go find your mistakes. You go through line by line, through the code, to see where the mistake is until you finally figure out all the mistakes, and then the damn thing runs! It put me off computing. While I understood the computer and I worked on Monte Carlo methods later, and did Monte Carlo calculations using a code, and worked on estimators that were applied when doing problems with the Monte Carlo method such as neutron transport, I found that the process of trying to get the code right, and then not making mistakes—it was just goddamn frustrating. [laughs] I tended to favor—can I solve the damn thing analytically? That was where I'd get my joy. So, I did a good deal of computational physics, solving physics problems by using computers in my first years, and even at Caltech, but I didn't like it. It had to do with the drudgery of writing code and typing up punch cards yourself. I found it drudgery. Other people loved to write code, and they became the computer scientists.

ZIERLER: [laughs] I want to zoom out. As we go from the mid 1960s to the later 1960s, as the Vietnam War was ramping up, did you become political? Did you see connecting points between your research and science policy and American foreign relations? Were you thinking along those lines at all?

CONN: Not the first two things about science policy and so on, but absolutely I was—I mean, I marched on Washington after the bombing in Cambodia. My wife at the time and I drove from Brookhaven to Washington, D.C. God knows where we stayed; we had very little money. But we stayed at some hotel, and we were on the Mall, marching against the Vietnam War. So, yeah, I had strong antiwar feelings. Now, I didn't get drafted. I graduated undergraduate school, and you get a deferment, but then I went to graduate school, and so my deferment continued. Then, I had two children. That basically kept me out. They didn't draft anybody over 25 and a half, and I was exactly 25 and a half when I graduated. I turned 25 on December 1 and I graduated in May, six months later. For all those reasons, mainly the children, I was never drafted. But I was in ROTC, what we called ROTC in those days, R-O-T-C, and I had a bad experience. I didn't like the control that the military required.

I definitely did not like to be told what to do and how to do it, and that there was no other way to do it. I did it my first two years at Pratt because it was like no harm, no foul. I don't know why I did it, but I did it. But at the end of the second year, I remember going in and saying I didn't want to continue, and the sergeant threatened me, that, "if you don't do it"—this and that—I'll get you drafted - and I reported the sergeant. I was so offended by the level of trickery that they were attempting to get me to stay in the military, because once you do your third and fourth year, you owe them service as a second lieutenant. That it turned me off the military. So, a combination of that experience—that was in 1962, so before Vietnam became Vietnam as we think about it—I was sort of anti-military. I did know that I had trouble with the domino theory. The prevailing theory at the time was if Vietnam falls, all the rest of Southeast Asia falls.

Of course it didn't happen. But we were in Vietnam ostensibly to prevent the domino theory from becoming a reality. I always had issues with whether all those countries were going to fall in the same way, and all of them were going to have the same idea, and so on and so forth. So, I wasn't in favor of the War. By the time we got to 1968 and the bombings—I arrived at the University of Wisconsin in August of 1970, about three weeks after the bombing of the Army Math Research Center at the University of Wisconsin campus, where a physics graduate student was killed. That was a turning point in student rebellion—when somebody died—between Kent State and the bombing at Wisconsin, the whole movement changed in 1970. I think people realized, wait, this might be a step too far, in how we are protesting.

But the March on Washington in early 1970 was peaceful. So, I participated in that. I didn't connect "the War" with nuclear weapons. We weren't going to use nuclear weapons in Vietnam. Nuclear weapons were to prevent the use of nuclear weapons. That was the strategy. Once you let the genie out of the bottle, once you know how to make a nuclear weapon, and you've made them and you've tested them, and you've got them and somebody else has them, then the purpose of having them is so that the other person doesn't use them on you, and you don't use them on the other person. Mutually assured destruction, right? So I didn't connect that whole area with why I was against the war in Vietnam. I was against the war in Vietnam because it seemed like colonialism, and it seemed like an artificial explanation for why we there, that all the countries were going to become communist.

ZIERLER: Let's go back now and develop the narrative that gets you from the experiment, working out the equations, and actually defending the thesis. When did you feel you were ready? When was the project something that you were ready to defend?

CONN: I think that was pretty clear in my mind. I needed to resolve this conundrum of the scattering in beryllium or in polycrystalline material. The title of the thesis was The Theory of Pulse Neutron Experiments in Polycrystalline Materials. When I got that, then it was, so work out what the smallest size is before the decay becomes non-exponential, work out this particular thing, calculate this and that. That's where the computing came in. When I had the theoretical explanation and some computational results that were consistent with the theory, I was ready. I spent probably from January of 1968 to March writing the thesis. I defended it somewhere in May or June or something like that. Before the end of the spring quarter of 1968. I also, by the way, had in mind going to Italy on an NSF postdoc. I went back to Pasadena City College for the last quarter of the 1967-1968 academic year and took Italian 101. [laughs] At PCC! It was great.

ZIERLER: That's great. Bob, who was on your thesis committee besides Noel?

CONN: There was Noel. There was Harold Lurie. I believe there was Jerry Shapiro. There was Hans Liepmann. And Joel Franklin from the Computer Science program. So, you had a great aerodynamicist, a great computer scientist, and three people who were nuclear energy related. In those days, there were no written exams. So, the other exam that of course I remember so well is the qualifying oral, which in those days you typically took at the end of your second year, when you were pretty much finished with your coursework. But that's another story. Don't forget it because it's an interesting one. On the thesis problem, I had those people on my thesis committee. At that point—between the time you take your oral exam—I've always said I knew more science, mathematics, engineering, and everything else on the day I took my oral exams as I would ever know for the rest of my life. Because you have to know a lot of stuff [laughs]. You don't know where the questions are coming from. So, you get smart in just about everything you possibly can. Then, you let it go, because there's a lot of stuff you don't need for the direction you might be going. By the time you get to the endgame, if you don't know what you have done dead cold, there's something wrong. So that was not a fearful or worrisome exam, the thesis defense so to speak. They could ask me anything and I felt comfortable, and I could explain it.

ZIERLER: Did you get to know Liepmann well? What was he like?

CONN: He had of course this wonderful German accent that was just delicious. I more got to know his students. Because a student he had, from India, he was so smart, he and Liepmann dreamed up some problem for his thesis, and he solved it so quickly that he had to solve a second problem in order for the two of them to constitute his thesis! [laughs] There were these famous people over in the Guggenheim building—Liepmann, Lester Lees. Lester Lees taught the Applied Mechanics 125, the first introductory graduate level mathematics course. That was an experience. So, I didn't know Liepmann well. The only time I really heard him speak was either at a seminar or when he asked me questions—I can't remember what—during my thesis defense.

ZIERLER: I've come to appreciate there's two kinds of defenses. One is the student really has become the expert and they're almost like giving a seminar. The other is, you're just trying to get out of there alive as you sit before these giants. Which one were you closer to, would you say?

CONN: For my final thesis I was closer to the former, and for the qualifying exam it was absolutely the latter!

ZIERLER: [laughs]

CONN: That is, the qualifying exam is not about what you know. It's about how you react when you don't know something. What happened in the qualifier that was a real lesson for me, and I used it in the qualifying exams that were orals in my career—they've shifted so much to written exams days to make it easy on the faculty; I think it's a mistake. But what I learned from the Caltech oral exam is that they would come in and they'd ask me a question—somebody would ask a question. "How would you do a-b-c given"—whatever. I would start answering them. If it was clear that I knew how to answer this, and I'd get a few minutes into demonstrating that I was going to get there and I knew what the hell I was talking about, they'd say, "Okay. Thank you. Good enough. Next question." What they were looking for was, where did you get stuck? Then how did you think when you were stuck? Again, I can't remember a specific individual question, either a question I knew cold or a question where I might have gotten a bit stuck, but whatever I did when I got stuck, they felt was good enough in terms of, "Well, I think I'd go about it like this and I think I would do this, but I'm not sure about this"—on whatever you were doing. "I'm not sure how to solve this equation but I could figure it out if you gave me enough time." Whatever. It was, I want to know what you don't know, so I can figure out how you think.

I didn't realize that going in. I learned that coming out. That was a revelation. I really was impressed with that idea, that once you know it you know it, I believe you know it, don't take up the whole two hours or whatever telling me what you deeply know. Tell me how you would think about a problem where you're not so sure of yourself. That was a powerful lesson coming out of the oral exam.

ZIERLER: On the problem that you did deeply know, what was it? What was your contribution at that point? What had you found?

CONN: You mean when I was doing my oral exam, not my final thesis? You know what it was for my final thesis.

ZIERLER: No, but in thinking back, for your final thesis, looking back what do you see as your contribution? What was the significance of what you found?

CONN: To explain the non-exponential behavior of a pulse of neutrons leaking out of materials in order that they could be properly modeled. What it meant was that you had a model—you needed the cross section, the probability of interactions of neutrons, very precisely. You needed to know where every Bragg peak was. If you didn't have that data right, you would get a very spurious answer. It was a way of checking the cross sections associated with the scattering of neutrons in beryllium, and beryllium was a widely used material to moderate neutrons, particularly in space. Space nuclear reactors used beryllium. It applied to other polycrystalline materials such as graphite. That was the contribution.

A Continental Interlude

ZIERLER: I want to round out today's conversation—you mentioned not having any professors in your family, not even knowing what tenure was when you got to Wisconsin. When you were wrapping up at Caltech, what advice did you get about going on the market immediately, going for a postdoc? What were your options? Who told you what to do?

CONN: Noel was my sherpa guide, without question, Noel Corngold, more than anybody at Caltech. He was my advisor. He knew me dead cold. He knew what I was capable of. He encouraged me to go into academia. He felt I was that good. Fine. I was thinking about doing things in applied physics like maybe moving into the theory of liquids, and why are liquids the way they are. There was as group at Livermore who was doing that work, and they were using computer simulations and Monte Carlo. Okay, that sounded interesting—I didn't want to go into the weapons business. That's how Livermore attracts its people. They need these other programs that are deeply interesting and curious, and people go there, and then some subset of the people end on the weapons side of the house. Anyway, I wanted to go there. I interviewed there. I did some interviewing for academic positions.

But I decided that I had never been out of the United States, and I wanted to travel. I wanted to see what it was like to live in a different country, live in a different culture, live where the language wasn't English, whatever. I decided during my final year to apply for an NSF postdoctoral fellowship. I was awarded that fellowship. I had to decide on where to go. This is interesting. I can't remember his name, but there was a terrific guy in neutron transport theory who was working in Poland, in Warsaw. One day I came home to my family, and I said, "Well, there's two places we can think about. There's a place in Italy, in Northern Italy, that has a group that's doing a lot of work on pulse neutron experiments, and I could continue doing things there and probably begin to explore some new areas, but I'd have at least something I knew I could do with a group of people in physics and engineering that I could get a lot out of. They were working at a EURATOM laboratory on Lago Maggiore in Italy, called Ispra. The little town was Ispra—I-S-P-R-A. The other one was Warsaw. I started talking to my wife at the time, and she said—she never cursed, never once, but she looked at me like, "What kind of an imbecile are you?"

ZIERLER: [laughs]

CONN: [laughs] You have the choice to go behind the Iron Curtain, where the weather is horrible, God knows what we're going to get stuck with, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and we've got two young children—two and four—versus going to Italy where you know what it is, you love the culture, you come from an Italian background. She was Italian American. Both her parents were Italian. I was half Italian. "What the hell are you thinking?" And—yeah, okay, you're right, you're right. So, we ended up going to Italy. So I had decided to do this. So, when I did some interviewing, such as at Livermore,—they were taken by me. By the way, in those days—I don't know if I've told you this story—Edward Teller would interview everybody who was going to be interviewed for the scientific staff. So, he interviewed me. I spent an hour with Edward Teller at the blackboard.

ZIERLER: This is before you committed to the postdoc in Italy.

CONN: No, no, I had committed to the postdoc in Italy but what was I going to do when I came home?

ZIERLER: Ah, so you wanted something to come back to.

CONN: I wanted to explore some opportunities that I could come back to, once I finished the time in Europe. This is the transition story that we can make—think about what you haven't asked me about in my Caltech experience, and then this is the transition story. How do I transition to becoming an academic? The front end of that story was that I was encouraged to be an academic by Noel, but I said I wanted to go get this life experience. I had the NSF postdoc. I chose a place to go, which was this place in Europe, but I was interviewing so that I would have someplace to maybe come back to. I interviewed at Livermore at a few other places. That caused me to be interviewed, in addition to whomever I got interviewed with, by Teller himself! Which was an amazing experience. I can tell you that story. Then, I go do the postdoc, and basically that works out great. But in 1969, there was a deep recession, and I'm stuck in Europe. I get in touch with Livermore and—well, the budget has been cut, and the positions that they had had open are no longer available. What do I do?

ZIERLER: If I may, going to Italy is a perfect place to pick up next time, so why don't we round out today—tell me that experience of meeting Teller and what it was like to be interviewed by him.

CONN: We were in some office. I don't think it was his office. I think it was an office that had a blackboard. We went into that office. He asked me what I did for my thesis, and I told him. He said, "Why is that important?" First question. "Why is that an important problem?" Do you have taste in choosing research problems? Why is that important? I tried to explain. Then, he said, "Why was that?"—about the non-exponential decays and the crystal stuff. He literally got up to the blackboard, and we drew the cross section, which varies as one over the velocity. It looks like this from your direction. This is low energy; this is high energy. Here's thermal in the middle—0.025 electron volts. Below a certain level, the cross section goes like one over v, and just rises as the neutron wavelength increases and fills the whole material because its energy is so low.

Then, all of a sudden, as you start coming down, there's a critical energy where the cross section jumps. That's the Bragg peak. That's the first time that as a neutron energy is increasing, the wavelength of the neutron is decreasing. At that point it just matches up with the interatomic spacing of the crystal. All of a sudden there's like a resonance, and the probability of interacting goes way high. Then, as you move to higher energy it starts to fall like one over v again, until you hit the next—the second harmonic of that first resonance, and then you get a bump. Then, it comes down, one over v, and then boom, up again, until eventually the neutron energy goes to wherever it's going out into the epithermal. We drew that kind of a picture on the blackboard. The cross section is higher at the Bragg peaks, so that makes a lot more scattering. Then, the neutrons get trapped there in the troughs, because they're scattering is low and they're not being absorbed, so they can't leak out, blah blah blah. We had a good conversation. I'll tell you the man was—amazing!

He—he—he probably knows about beryllium and graphite and everything else going back to the War—all these materials he used in weapons to some degree. He knows about nuclear reactors. He knows about fission. He knows about fusion. So, he knows all this damn stuff. And he just got up there like a great chemist—he was a chemist, truly, by training—and just kind of—dug in. Until he was satisfied he understood the physics and chemistry, and he understood—in this case mainly just physics—and he knew why the problem was important. If he had those two things, that was it. That impressed the hell out of me. When we get to talking about the transition and then Wisconsin, and maybe UCLA, I meet up again with Edward Teller in 1981, 1982 at UCLA. Now, instead of being the student interviewing for a job, I'm his host, picking him up at a defense contractor in Marina del Ray, driving him to campus. I was his host for the seminar or campus lecture that he was going to give. Another real story of character and how to handle upset and how to handle protest.

ZIERLER: We'll get to that. Bob, were you nervous to meet Teller? Was he overbearing?

CONN: I didn't know so much about all those people in those days. To be honest, I don't think I knew at that point the Teller-Oppenheimer feud and the 1954 hearings and all of that stuff. I knew him as one of these giants. That was the intimidation. But as soon as he got to, why is your problem important, he came onto my territory. As soon as he came onto my territory, I think my comfort level went up. It was like defending my thesis at Caltech. I knew my stuff, and I felt I could do this with him. But he asked very basic questions, so I had to be really on my toes to work it, but I think I was exhilarated by the end of it, not intimidated. I certainly started with deep respect for what he had contributed scientifically. He was a famous name. That just puts you in awe. I didn't know enough to think badly of him, which some people obviously did, because of the Oppenheimer thing, not because of his science of any kind. So, yeah, I went in with some trepidation. What's it like to meet a giant? But I had met some giants at Caltech, and they were pretty good, and I could at least have a conversation with them. I came out of it feeling good. Livermore said, "We'll make you an offer when you're ready to come back." That led to a problem a year later.

ZIERLER: I began our conversation today referencing the Oppenheimer movie. I'll end with that. I don't know if you saw The Oppenheimer movie—

CONN: I have.

ZIERLER: Was Nolan's treatment of Teller fair? Was that the Teller that you more or less knew?

CONN: Yes. It was very fair. Teller was shown to be brilliant. He was shown to be obstreperous. He was shown to be stubborn. But purposeful. His answer to the question at the end in the hearing that they had in that room off to the side, that was all fixed by Strauss, this phrase about—would you trust him with the nation's secrets?—and he says before that—you've seen the film, right?

ZIERLER: Yeah.

CONN: So before he makes this famous ambiguous statement, he says, "I've never known him to do anything that would cause me to question his loyalty to the United States." An absolute statement. Then, they say something about, would you trust him in some circumstance or another, a hypothetical? And Teller said, "Well, he's basically a very complicated person, and I wish I knew his motivations well so I could trust him more." "So I could trust him more." Meaning, I'm not sure I can trust him, because I don't understand him. I don't know what drives the man. That is the fissure between the greats of the nuclear weapons program, in physics particularly. A bunch sided with Oppenheimer, and many sided, more hawkish, with Teller. The Hungarians—there's the Hungarian—they call them Martians, the four Martians—there's a book, you can read it—and one of the Martians is von Kármán at Caltech. The three others are Eugene Wigner, Johnny von Neumann, and Edward Teller.

That one country would produce those four people at the same time was unbelievable. But they saw Germany in the 1930s, and they saw communism in real life, so they were all avidly supportive of Teller, avidly supportive of developing nuclear weapons—Von Neumann, Wigner, Teller. So, there was a cadre—the community was truly split between those who felt Teller threw Oppenheimer under the bus, and those who thought —Teller's assessment was justifiable. Again, Teller spoke his truth to power. That was his real feeling. The problem with the clearance of Oppenheimer was the problem of Strauss, not Teller. Teller was an actor in this because he was the most famous person who said something that could lead the group to come to the negative conclusion. They were going to come to the negative conclusion no matter what, because Strauss had constructed it. So, the answer was by construction. Sometimes you create a problem where the answer is by construction. Like here are all these blocks, and there's only way to build it, but when you build it, you've got the answer, and there is in fact another way to build it. Strauss built the case against Oppenheimer, by construction. The outcome was inevitable.

ZIERLER: Bob, on that note, we'll pick up next time—the Italy! We'll take the story from there.

CONN: [laughs]

[End of Recording]

ZIERLER: This is David Zierler, Director of the Caltech Heritage Project. It is Friday, December 8, 2023. It is my great pleasure to be back once again with Professor Robert Conn. Bob, as always, it is wonderful to be with you, it's great to see you, and it's great to see that you're feeling well.

CONN: Thank you very much, David. It has been a trial these last few weeks, but I am feeling indeed very good at the moment.

ZIERLER: We left off last time—you had the good sense, the good family decision to take the special opportunity to become a postdoctoral fellow in Italy. First, tell me about how the NSF supports postdocs. What opportunities did the National Science Foundation give you at this point?

CONN: Well, remember the time. It was the 1960s. The National Science Foundation had instituted both graduate student fellowship programs to enable a cadre of scientists to get graduate education—this is the Vannevar Bush report, Science: The Endless Frontier. The NSF gets to set all this up. In the late 1950s, it starts giving out fellowships to encourage Americans to go to graduate school, produce a workforce in science. By the time I'm ready go in the mid 1960s, this effort is at its peak. At Caltech, I had an NSF fellowship. Interestingly, they were only for three years. So, what I did is I did my first two years on an NSF fellowship, and in my second year at Caltech, I applied to the Atomic Energy Commission. And they gave me a fellowship for two years, for the third and fourth years. Because I couldn't finish in three, but I was confident I'd finish in four. Very few people finished in three. So, it was not just the NSF but other agencies who were really promoting going to graduate school, getting PhDs, and becoming part of the scientific workforce the country needed.

So, I was very lucky. My timing from that point of view couldn't have been more perfect. Postdocs—well, they recognized that another big feature—and remember that I think in the 1950s, and even 1960s, when they were doing programs of this kind, they remembered the 1920s. They remembered how important it was for Americans to go abroad, for Americans to have additional training, to go to places that might be ahead of the United States. Now, that wasn't actually true in the 1960s because the War had devastated Germany and so on, but nonetheless they had these postdoctoral programs, and they were remarkable! Europe was still recovering from the War in 1968. I had $10,000 from the National Science Foundation to be a postdoctoral fellow wherever I wanted. I chose this place in Northern Italy which did nuclear energy research and physics. It was the Nuclear Laboratory of EURATOM in northern Italy, so it was named EURATOM Nucleare Laboratorio di Ispra. Ispra was a small town on the eastern shore of Lago Maggiore, the biggest of the glacial lakes in Northern Italy. Spectacular scenery. And I'd never been out of the country. The NSF not only provided me with an opportunity to do additional scientific work but to experience the larger world out there.

Frankly, I'm kind of an ambitious guy. I think if I didn't want to go to Europe and see the world and have the experience, I would have applied directly for faculty positions. I wouldn't have done a postdoc. But I said, you've never been out of the country. Let's go. It was an adventure. It worked out wonderfully. We spent a year in Europe. Again, I had a wife and two young children, two and four at the time. It was a remarkable experience. We bought a Volkswagen station wagon, not the bus but what we used to call the square back. We picked it up in Germany. We traveled not to Italy but to Wolfsburg, Germany. We flew to Frankfurt, somehow got ourselves to Wolfsburg and picked up this car. We put 25,000 miles on that car in one year. That's a separate story, but I'll tell it to you because it goes to the state of Europe at the time, and the state of science in Europe at the time, and of nationalist interests versus European interests at the time. In any case, there was a group there doing theoretical nuclear physics and neutron transport work.

I participated and continued down the stretch of work that I had been doing with Noel Corngold. That is, an interest in what we'll call pulse neutron experiments. There was a fellow there who had written a Monte Carlo program to do neutron transport in a variety of materials. I learned to use that code, and I learned about Monte Carlo techniques to model what I was doing theoretically and compare the theory to computational results as well as to experiments. Sure enough, it worked out very nicely. I did some other work that I was keenly interested in, in physics.

But the social story might even be more important than just what I did technically. This is a European nuclear energy laboratory. The scientists at the laboratory—I learned an Italian word, sciopero. What is sciopero? Sciopero means strike. But not the laborers striking; the scientists would periodically go on strike because they felt that the program which Europe had given to this European laboratory was of secondary importance compared to the big issues of developing nuclear power at the time.

Why? France was developing its own nuclear energy system and that was proprietary, so they didn't need or want some help from this European laboratory in Ispra. And so on it went. There were national interests within the European community, so European laboratories had difficulty at that time finding their mission and making it a meaningful one. They were almost like an afterthought. Lots of people went to these labs. European salaries were paid, and this was still the War. I'll remind you in those days each country had its own currency and all that. The exchange rate for a mark to a dollar was four marks to a dollar, German marks. My wife and I with the two children could stay at a bed and breakfast in Germany for 32 marks. The first phrase I learned in German was, "Haben Sie ein Zimmer mit drei Betten?" "Do you have a room with three beds?" For the kids—and that's eight dollars! For eight dollars, we could stay a night—and have breakfast! 1968! I mean, it's 15—it's 20 years after the War, roughly speaking, and still—so it tells you—that experience alone was worth the entire trip. To feel the devastation of war.

ZIERLER: Twenty-five years after the War, you still felt it.

CONN: Yes. That's what I was getting at. 1945 to 1965, 1968—23 years. Yeah, I was there in 1968, 1969. By the way, they were just on the verge of turning the corner. Twenty-five years after the War, the exchange rates were what I described to you. Italy, cheap as hell. We came home with money. We had $10,000 for a family of four for a year abroad. We put 25,000 miles on the car. Why? First of all, we wanted to see Europe. Every time the Italian scientific staff at the laboratory would declare a strike—

ZIERLER: [laughs]

CONN: —over the program, so you couldn't go to work, we'd pile ourselves into the car and we would go, wherever we needed to go! We covered Germany and Austria. We covered Greece. We went to the South of Italy. Yugoslavia, remember, and Albania—communist countries. We went down to the South of Italy. On one trip we did Sicily and so on. Another trip we took the boat from Bari to Corfu, which is an island in Greece, went off to Greece, saw the Parthenon, Delphi, the whole bit. Now, you've got to drive back to Lago Maggiore. How are you going to drive back? You're in Greece. What's north of you? Yugoslavia and Albania. Turns out Yugoslavia will allow you through. We had this German, red VW square back, shiny, new. We drove through the mountains to get around Albania and then up the western coast of Yugoslavia. We stayed one night camping in the southern mountains of Yugoslavia. We camped.

The way we traveled was my wife with the two children would sleep in the back of the Volkswagen, and I would put up a little tent and sleep in a tent. [laughs] We did this in some small town in the middle of southern Yugoslavia. Minarets. It was the first time I had seen anything Muslim in my life. There was no Muslim community in the United States. You didn't know anything about Islam. This is the 1960s. Suddenly, here's all this Muslim religion. Women with their burkas seemed very strange. We had to buy some bread for breakfast one morning; the bakery place would open this much. A slot, like this. You'd stand there and they would give you loaves of bread through the slot, and you would hand them what money you had. While I did that, all the children in the small town gathered around the car and were touching it. My wife and children were a bit frightened. But all they wanted to do was see this amazing thing called a new vehicle, a new car, bright red. Who are these people? Where did they come from? We in many ways were saying the same thing—"Who are these people? Where did they come from?"

It was an example of the kind of experience that occurred again and again, where there was a cultural awareness, a cultural opening. Suddenly there were people I knew nothing about, who spoke languages I knew nothing about, had histories that I knew nothing about. We left that mountain town and drove on down to the west coast of Yugoslavia in the south, to Dubrovnik. Dubrovnik is a quintessential western European city. It's like Venice or something. It does not look like Yugoslavia anymore. So, the amount of variability within Yugoslavia was just palpable. Then, we drove north. This is a great trip to recount. We drove north from Dubrovnik—you go this way. Think of Yugoslavia and then you go up to Trieste and then you have to go across to Italy, Northern Italy, and west to Milan. But you've got to go up the Adriatic coast.

So, we ended up somewhere in Croatia, which was part of Yugoslavia at the same. They weren't separate countries. And our car broke down. I don't know what happened to it. We found a mechanic, and the guy fixed the car, and I didn't have dinars—D-I-N-A-R-S—which was the currency of Yugoslavia at the time. I said to the guy, "Thank you so much. I will come back with the money to pay you." He says, "Fine. I'll be here." And literally we drove to a place where we could do a currency exchange, I got the dinars needed, went back and paid the man. Can you imagine that today?

ZIERLER: No. [laughs]

CONN: Unbelievable! We had a similar experience on that trip in Greece, where we took a side trip from Athens up to Delphi. The Oracle of Delphi, right? On the way back, as we were getting ready to leave, we stopped in a small town, Greek town, and there's people with blankets out, hand sewn bedspreads and things like that. They were beautiful! So we stopped. Again, things are dirt cheap. By the way, the Greeks had had a coup, so it was now a military dictatorship. I remember giving a ride to an old woman who was going from one place to another, and was near where I was, and we took her. She would say hello and spoke a little English but nothing about the—you couldn't speak anything about the politics. In any case, we stop, we agree on three blankets—one for my mother-in-law, one for my mother, and one for ourselves. What do we do with these things? We're not going to put them in the back of the Volkswagen and then figure out how to ship them to the United States.

So, we say to the people, "Can you ship?" Oh, yes, we can ship them for you, and we will." This leads to a funny story about coffee. So, we paid them. They had me write my initials on the back of one of the things we bought so that when it arrived, we would know that it was the thing I actually bought. They could have stiffed us anyway, right? What would I ever know? But everything arrived, in boxes. We shipped it to my mother-in-law and everything arrived, no problem.

To celebrate, they have a coffee, and you sit around, and they make coffee. I never drank coffee in college, so I learned to drink coffee in Italy. They made fabulous espresso, cappuccino—cappucho—this one, that one. So, suddenly, they make what looks like a caffè. You know, the small demitasse cup with dark coffee—okay. So, we're drinking, and suddenly I get to the bottom of the cup, and I go like this, and I lift it to my lips, and all the grinds come in my mouth. I'm shocked! I don't know what to do! I have to get a napkin out, try to spit out [laughs] some of it.

Why did I do that? Well, in Italy, the grinds don't appear in the caffè. It's clear, and you drink it right to the bottom, and the bottom is always the best because there's sugar left down at the bottom. Whereas here, the bitter part is what's left at the bottom, and you never tip your cup up, in that way! [laughs] Another cultural distinction. But there were all of these almost tribal ways of doing things—buying something and you made a friend of the person you bought it from. They made you coffee. You sat and did whatever communication you could do. They may never see you again, but it was about friendship, and it was about being a good person. Being good to strangers. Being good to strangers who were very different from you. My kids picked up that lesson. It was obvious to me. This kind of thing repeated itself time and again throughout our travels. We spent time in Spain. We saw Alhambra.

I saw a bullfight. It would sound crude today. Anybody would say, "Animal cruelty." But this was 1969, and this was a Spanish tradition of hundreds of years. Hemingway wrote about it. We all knew about it. Going and seeing this thing was an event in and of itself. And, by the way, as Hemingway wrote, the British followed the bullfighting season. So, at the hotel where we stayed, there were all these Brits, speaking English. After the bullfight, everybody goes to the hotel and they have a big meal, and a lot of interactions with each other. A remarkable cultural experience. This was in Spain. And seeing Alhambra. I learned that Alhambra was built by North Africans. There's no water in North Africa. So, when you looked at the architecture, there are all these pools of water in the center of a building, with all the arabesque designs and so on.

But what was the water about? Water; it's gold! And we're going to look at it! Every day! Inside our house! Because we're in Spain, where they've got rain. [laughs] So seeing the Moroccan design, the North African designs of architecture, that added a lot. I was very interested in architecture from my undergraduate days where my colleagues, many were architect students. So, everything I thought I might gain by a year in Europe, multiply by five. The experience of cultural growth, of artistic growth. We dragged our kids through every damn museum [laughs] in Paris, in Venice, in Vienna, here and there. Went to see where Freud practiced. It was a year that opened me to the world.

ZIERLER: Let's move on the technical side of things. What was the mission of this nuclear research program in Italy?

CONN: The purpose was to help with the development of nuclear power, peaceful nuclear power. They had a nuclear reactor there which was an experimental device, which they did experiments on to learn how to better design a nuclear reactor. They had theoretical programs such as in the transport of neutrons in materials, which was my interest, which was fundamental to designing nuclear reactors. How do the neutrons move around? How do you make a critical assembly? What happens if you put it together this way versus that way? What if you use this material versus that material? These were all still pregnant questions in those days, meaning foundational early questions. Their job was to try to advance those different fields. The difficulty that they had, and why they would strike, is that there were really two kinds of reactors that emerged, mainly in the United States, and mainly from the submarine program, Admiral Rickover.

One was called pressurized water reactors. They were pioneered by Westinghouse, Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory in those days. The other was a boiling water reactor which was developed mainly by General Electric. They were the two competing reactor types. People bought them from GE, and they got boiling water reactors. They're called BWRs. In any case, France was developing pressurized water reactors, which they did. They also developed them for their own submarine fleet, independently of us. The question was, what kind of a reactor were you going to build?

In those days there was also great interest in breeder reactors. Let me just explain what a breeder reactor is. When you build a nuclear power reactor, you use either natural uranium in which case you have to use a different coolant like deuterated water, which the Canadians did because they didn't have isotope separation, so they used natural uranium and D2O, deuterated water. Deuterium has a smaller probability of capturing a neutron than does hydrogen. That difference is everything. It allows you to use natural uranium. But it's not the most efficient thing, and we of course had isotope separation from the War.

We separated isotopes of uranium and enriched it to 93 percent, U-235 for use in weapons. For a nuclear power reactor, you need about two and a half percent enrichment. You don't need weapons grade uranium. The uranium they used in the bomb in Japan was highly enriched U-235, so uranium, 93 percent, U-235. Natural uranium is less than one percent U-235. It's mostly U-238. When you build a BWR or PWR and you use two and a half percent uranium, you use up more uranium than you make. You do make plutonium, because you have U-238 in the fuel. Just a slight amount of nuclear physics—when a neutron—a fast neutron particularly—hits U-238, it can allow 238 to fission. But mostly what 238 does is capture the neutron and make neptunium which decays to plutonium-239.

Plutonium-239 turns out to be fissionable. So, in a nuclear reactor, you're not just burning U-235; you're making plutonium but not enough to make up for the burning of U-235. While we were using up the 235, if you thought about the very long run—well, if we just relied on uranium, where would the 235 come from? Eventually we would kind of run out, or people would think you might run out. But the properties of plutonium are different enough—if you build a nuclear power reactor and powered it with plutonium instead of uranium, you will get more plutonium produced than you were using up. That was called breeding. Now, you had fuel forever. So long as you had U-238, which was the primary source and which is the dominant natural ore of uranium—tens of thousands of years, then you don't even think about it. So, the other thing that was happening at the time was interest in fast breeder reactors.

They were called fast because the spectrum of neutrons that you need in order to do breeding is more energetic than it is in a regular power reactor. A regular power reactor, think of it as a thermal machine. It runs at some temperature. You cool it. The fuel is at some temperature. The neutrons in the device thermalize to become in equilibrium with the temperature of the materials. Okay. It's room temperature plus a few hundred degrees, right? But we call it thermal. Whereas when you want to do a fast breeder reactor, you want to design it so the spectrum is what we would call harder—H-A-R-D-E-R—meaning more energetic. Why? Because the more energetic, you get more fissions from the energetic neutrons with respect to the uranium-plutonium ratios and so on and so forth. When you do all the analysis, that's a better way to operate such a device to maximize the breeding ratio – the breeding of plutonium. The idea was, can I make the breeding ratio high enough that I literally have a breeder? The plan of course was, you would make such reactors, you would take the fuel out of them, you would put it through a reprocessing plant. It's easy to separate the plutonium from the uranium; that's just chemistry. You don't have to enrich the plutonium.

So, you take the plutonium, you can reformulate it into new fuel. It's hot, because it's radioactive, but the idea was you could do it. And you make new fuel, put it in fuel rods, recycle it back into the nuclear reactor, and you go on forever. In my day, that was a big deal. Germany in particular had a very interesting program in fast breeder reactors. The people at Ispra wanted to work on things like that. Sometimes they weren't allowed to, hence the scioperos and strikes. But their purpose was to somehow support this enterprise within Europe to develop practical nuclear energy. That was their mission. And they just weren't happy that the mission given to the laboratory didn't seem to be focused on the central questions of the time. That is, what type of nuclear reactor would you develop? Which one would be best? Which one is quickest to commercialize? And how would we ensure a fuel supply for the long run?

ZIERLER: Was there any military component to this work? Were there any Cold War overtones to civilian nuclear energy in Italy at this time?

CONN: No. None that I could determine. The answer is no. First of all, Italy itself was quite—they lost the War. [laughs] So they were quite limited. They weren't thinking about nuclear weapons or anything of that sort. And nuclear weapons were being thought about primarily by the victors of the War. The victors were France, Britain, and the United States at a minimum, and the Soviet Union too. There were all the others—you know, like Australia. But Australia wasn't—they were going to provide the uranium ore [laughs], not build reactors. They had the mining. The Brits of course developed a nuclear weapon right away. The French would be damned if they didn't have a nuclear weapon. But those programs were all national, all classified. A multinational laboratory was anathema to the idea of weaponry. That is, the countries wanted to own the weaponry, and they were not prepared to share it with anybody else. So, it was a question of nationalism versus common good. They were willing to work together for the common good—the iron and steel thing, and what led to the EU today—but not on weapons.

ZIERLER: What aspects of your graduate research coming from Caltech were relevant in Italy?

CONN: Oh, all the work that I had done in both my thesis work on neutron transport theory, which was what it was really all about—now I could think about these fast breeder reactors. I could learn about these other options and how they worked and why they worked the way they did, and what were their problems. I began to explore where were the new directions in nuclear energy research? By the late 1960s, right around the time I was doing my thesis and finishing my work, nuclear power was becoming commercial. The first commercial reactors were in the mid to late 1960s. Both Westinghouse and GE were building them. Now, the question became after I finished—while these issues were so exotic and wonderful—applied physics, technical issues, neutrons transporting around—we kind of knew how to build a nuclear reactor, at least those kinds.

The question was, is there a future in looking at different kinds of nuclear reactors? Could they replace the ones that we had, or would they? I was interested in that. I didn't do research on it, but I learned about the fast breeder while I was there. The people who were focused on that were in Germany, in Karlsruhe. Anyway, I could take all the education I had and the technical training and sort of apply it to continue a research direction, so there would be productivity. But I'm also thinking in the back of my mind, "Where are the big next problems?" I had a plan, but I didn't quite know what to do with it. That didn't emerge until I ended up in Wisconsin in the early 1970s.

ZIERLER: Did this experience make you more bullish that civilian nuclear energy would be a viable contributor to the overall energy consumption needs of the global population?

CONN: I don't think it made me more bullish. I went into the field because I was bullish. I went into the field because I was an environmentalist! [laughs] In other words, I'm living in L.A. I can't see the damn mountains for ten months out of the year. Smog is a giant problem. Where is it coming from? Burning fossil fuels. Burning coal and oil to make electricity. Here, nuclear, was something clean. It was the solution to your dreams. You needed very little mining. The amount of fuel needed was trivial. You could take the radioactive waste and pile it 30 feet high on a tennis court, and that was what you were needing to look after for the long run. We weren't talking about stadiums or trains full of coal. We were talking about what I just described. So, it had all the characteristics—small waste, no air pollution, basically energy forever. I didn't know about climate change at the time, so that was not really a factor, but I knew about air quality. Burning coal—for goodness sake, the sulfur fogs of London were still in everybody's mind, right? Those were in the 1950s when people were burning coal. For me, it was like an ideal. I'm an idealist. I'm going to try to help civilization develop a source of energy which is benign, whose side issues are very manageable by comparison to the side issues of every other way of making energy. So, I was an enthusiast. I didn't get more enthusiastic; I was enthusiastic, and those are the reasons why.

ZIERLER: A question about the international political situation. 1968, 1969, this is the height of the Vietnam War, the height of anti-Vietnam protests on American campuses. In Europe, there was a lot of student protest as well. Did you experience that, or how did that change your perception of the United States and the world, being in Europe at this point?

CONN: That's a very interesting question. I was not at or close to any campus or university, so I don't recall seeing, for example, protests against the War, despite all the travel that we did. What was clearer, however, was on the one hand the admiration that the Europeans had for the Americans. After all, we did help them win the War. But also, Europe was still in the throes of socialism. They were still in the throes of what kind of governmental system and social system should I have. That influenced me more than antiwar protests in Europe. I did find a certain amount of anti-Americanism and ugly-Americanism. You know, "The ugly American." The uneducated, the crude guy arriving in plaid shorts and whatever. Now, I didn't wear plaid shorts, but you get the idea. You get the imagery, right?

I felt, for example, for the first time—because I hadn't been out of the United States—that despite everything that we had achieved and despite all of the help we provided with the Marshall Plan and everything else, Europeans showed a cultural superiority that I didn't really appreciate. They looked down on America, from a cultural point of view—crude, this and that, loud. You pick the nasty descriptors. I ran into that. The French [laughs]—I remember going into a hotel in France, in Paris, and wanting to ask for a room. I had taken French in high school, and I had passed my exam in French for the PhD at Caltech. I tried in my best broken French to ask for a room. The person on the other side of the counter looked at me and said, "Speak English!"

He didn't say, "Welcome. Look, I speak some English. Why don't we just speak English? It'll be much easier for us." He sorts of spit in my eye. That attitude struck me. And I never forgot it. The idea that somehow cultural history in Europe made Europe superior to the United States was a feeling that was clear, and I came home with it. In other words, I knew as much as I grew my horizons, I didn't accept that judgment about America and Americans. I certainly didn't feel myself to be either undereducated or have some lack of cultural affinity, and I was growing my cultural interests at the time. They had this holier-than-thou view when it came to cultural elements.

On the other hand, they enjoyed Americans. They found them intriguing. They liked to practice their English. It was a wonderful year in the sense of wonderful meaning the amount of human expansion that I got [laughs] by spending that year, I never grew as much culturally again in my life. That was exponential. Because everything was new, and everything was different, and you were absorbing all of this all at once. After that, the absorption became slower. I visited Europe many times. I got to go to dinner at people's houses. All of that just added to the overall view of being an international person. But my core—my core—was from that exponential growth in that year. Not scientific growth; cultural growth.

Brookhaven and the Theory of Liquids

ZIERLER: At some point you have to think about coming back home. Did you have the appointment at Brookhaven wrapped up before you went to Italy?

CONN: Oh, no.

ZIERLER: Did you defer for a year, or you had to work that out while you were in Italy?

CONN: No, no, this was a disaster. Before I left for Europe, I was very interested in the theory of liquids. There was a group at Livermore—and I told you about the interview at Livermore with Edward Teller and so on. I had gone to Livermore to interview with this group. I found the work really interesting. This wasn't an academic job, but I found the research really interesting. They had said to me, "When you're ready to come back just let us know. We'll make you an offer." There was a very severe recession in 1969. So, I'm in Europe, this recession hits, I get in contact with Livermore, and the answer is, "The positions disappeared. There have been budget cuts." So I had to figure out what the hell to do and how to find a job, and I'm in Europe! You can't interview for academic jobs. I didn't want to stay another year. I might have been able to stay another year, but I didn't want to.

This was part of my speech—my—what do you call it when you give a eulogy—the eulogy for Noel. I kept saying, what to do? I get in this circumstance; what to do? Call Noel. That became the mantra. What to do? Call Noel. So, I called Noel, or I got in touch with Noel somehow. Who knows how I did it in those days without email [laughs] and so on, and expensive international calls. Anyway, I got in touch with Noel and said, in essence, "I'm stuck here. The place I thought I might go for a job has disappeared. I need to get back to the States. What do you suggest?" And he called the head of the group that he had been part of at Brookhaven. The fellow's name was Jack Chernick, and he asked Jack if he could provide a fellowship. So, here comes another postdoctoral fellowship, only this one was through the Atomic Energy Commission.

But rather than giving it directly to a person, they gave it to the laboratories for the labs to hire postdocs, to bring them into the field. Jack had this postdoc slot which he offered me but he said—this was Brookhaven—other laboratories were working in many other parts of the nuclear power business, and Brookhaven was not. It was really a high-energy physics laboratory, but they had a nuclear power component which Noel came from. He said to me—"But, you have to do something that might be related to fast breeder reactors." That's the topic. You can't do light water reactors, and you can't do thermal things. Fast breeders. "Okay!" [laughs] So I accepted, and we flew ourselves back to Long Island. We lived in Yaphank. Yaphank is famous for the 1918 Jimmy Cagney [singing] Yankee Doodle Dandy! [ends singing] Da-da-da-da-da!

Turned out it was a German enclave, and they were not fully behind the United States during the War [laughs]. In any case, we rented a house, and I spent a year there. That was an adventure in research. That's where I really began to spread my wings from a subject matter point of view. We lived there and I can tell you whatever you'd like to know about what I did while I was there. But from that base, I was able to find out about who was looking for faculty members in nuclear engineering and what have you and organize an interview or two or three. At the end of the year, somewhere in the spring of that year – spring of 1970 - I ended up accepting a visiting associate professorship at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. The year after the NSF year was a transition year, trying to find some job that might be permanent and that I liked.

ZIERLER: Were you engaged in fundamental research at all in Brookhaven?

CONN: Very much so. That's where the wings really expanded. I told you I had an interest in the theory of liquids. One of the things that matters—this is how some practical problem in science or applied science can lead you to very fundamental research. I told you about a fast breeder. I didn't tell you how you cool the fast breeder. You don't use water. That would thermalize the spectrum of neutrons too much and it wouldn't breed. You need something heavier so that when the neutron hits the nucleus of that atom, it doesn't lose as much energy as it does if it hits hydrogen. The material of choice is sodium. Fast breeder reactors were designed to be cooled with liquid sodium, and it's a liquid metal. The liquid metal runs through the core, picks up the heat just like it was water, but now the heat exchanger is a liquid metal on one side and a boiler on the other side, water.

You had to have a secondary, because if there were ever a leak of liquid metal into the water, that could be explosive. So, there was what was called the primary, which was the heat comes out in the liquid metal, it goes and makes very hot water in a heat exchanger, and that hot water goes to the steam generator to drive a turbine. But the hot water from the primary goes to a secondary, another heat exchanger, which is water to water, and then that makes the steam to drive the turbine and that's how you make the electricity.

Now to, what was the issue? Well, what would happen in a reactor if there were a hotspot and a bubble? Like the sodium started boiling, or you got a void in the liquid metal. What would happen? That was a safety question. Suppose you had an accident, and the temperature got hot and then suddenly you got a void. If you have a void, there's nothing in the middle of the void. There's just sodium vapor, very low density compared to liquid metal.

So, neutrons that are flying around have certain probability to interact with the sodium metal, but that's very dense so the probability is high. But if a neutron goes through a section of the fluid that is actually vapor, it hardly interacts at all, so it streams. That causes it not to stay part of the proper energy distribution of neutrons that you want in the reactor to make the reactor work properly. That could make, in fact, the spectrum of the neutrons harder, even more energetic than they should be, and maybe that would lead to a positive feedback of the reactivity of the reactor, and suddenly it would run away. This seemed a very basic problem. The question that I asked was, well, if a little bubble within liquid metal were to develop, how quickly would it collapse? What would keep it bubbling or not bubbling? That turned out to be a fascinating problem. What you needed to know was, what is the probability that an atom, say it's in the gas phase so it's at thermal temperatures of whatever the temperature of the material is, strikes a liquid surface? What's the probability that it sticks? What's the probability that it bounces off?

Let me give you an example of water. It turns out with water, when you make a bubble and you have steam inside, when the hydrogen in the water molecule strikes the liquid surface of water, it sticks less than ten percent of the time. Why? Because the molecule is likely misoriented relative to the orientation of the molecule at the surface and it doesn't hinge, so to speak. It doesn't bond. It bounces off. So, it takes many bounces of a water molecule in the gas phase striking a hot water surface to actually stick and condense. So, it affects the condensation rate.

Okay. What's the probability in liquid metal—if it's a gaseous metal sodium atom—striking a surface? In hindsight, when I learned enough of the physics, I realized the probability is one, basically. Because it's a sodium atom, there's no mismatch of any kind, atomic or molecularly with the surface, so it just gets absorbed. But it was an interesting question. How would you go about analyzing that question?

I developed using Feynman diagrams to create a quantum theory of atom-surface interactions, which a year later I published in Journal of Physical Review—"Theory of Atom-Surface Interactions." Quantum theory. So, I had to really learn about Feynman diagrams, which when I had learned about them from Feynman, I didn't understand at all! [laughs] Because he was so clear, and then you went home and you were functionally illiterate, and you couldn't make it really work. You worked hard at. Well, okay, why? But now I really had to say, how do these things work? How do you use it computationally? And so on. That was very fundamental physics. Here was this problem derived from a very practical question. How does a bubble in sodium in the gas phase condense back and get reabsorbed in the liquid? I said, I've got to know how atoms interact with surfaces, and I developed a more general theory.

That was a powerful theory. I learned all sorts of physics that I didn't know. So, suddenly I began to expand my horizons. From neutron transport and nuclear physics and all the things that I had been doing, suddenly I was doing atomic physics. Suddenly I was doing surface physics. Suddenly I was doing something important in fluid mechanics. And I was doing things mathematically that I had never done before, like using Feynman diagrammatic techniques, but now not applied to high-energy physics and fundamental particle physics, but applying it to what appears to be a relatively mundane topic: how does an atom interact with a surface, and how do you describe that quantum mechanically? That was very broadening.

I also did another problem, and I learned an extraordinary lesson in science. It turned out this problem was a hot problem at the time, not just in nuclear reactors, but it turned out in the theory of liquids, the theory of surface physics. People were making all kinds of models about how atoms interacted with surfaces. And I made a model. It was beautiful, David! Technically, it was beautiful – it was sweet!.

It was like the neutron transport model problems that I did, where you assumed all the neutrons had the same energy instead of a distribution of energies. That let you simplify the problem, and you could still get insight into what would be happening. So, I made this problem of and atom approaching a surface. I put a wall, and I said, let me let the atoms near the surface be a connection of springs. So, there's a spring, and then an atom, and a spring connecting that atom to the next atom, and a spring connecting that atom, and so on, and on you go. Now, that's the surface—let's say there's ten of them with the last one attached to a fixed surface – the inside. That's a model of the surface of the material. It's bonded to the surface. It's not evaporating.

Now, an atom comes along from the vapor phase. Just imagine it's coming along and it's starting to approach the end of this collection of springs. As it approaches the free end of this string, there's a potential of interaction. It's called a Lennard-Jones potential, but don't worry about this.

But there's a potential function that you get the force from that governs how the atom will approach this other atom, which is bonded to the atoms behind it. The question is—this was going to be the model of sticking—does it condense and stick, or does it bounce off? Turned out I formulated this problem analytically with the equations, and with the model potential I could get an analytic solution. An analytic solution is a closed-form mathematical solution! I had an exact solution. It was thrilling! I go to write this up, and of course as you do in research, you read the journals in the areas that you're working in. I basically had the manuscript written and was preparing it for publication when a journal in surface physics arrives in the library, and I open it up, and there is an article in which the problem I just told you about was solved analytically. Simultaneously with me, somebody else who was very well known in this field at the time—I was nobody—but this person was very distinguished in this business, and he had imagined this problem similarly to mine, and he had solved it.

Because it was solvable. If you formulated it a certain way, it was solvable. So, I took the paper, cried, put it in the desk drawer, never to see the light of day. And the lesson was, you know, if the problem is important enough, you're not the only one working on it, and you could get scooped. And I was scooped. It taught me also always work on more than one problem. The lesson was, the reality of academic life is, you'd better publish. Hopefully you publish really good stuff, but you'd better publish. If something happened and you had to take six months' worth of work and stick it in the top of a drawer, that's one less publication. When you're a young person and you're trying to build a reputation and build a CV, one out of eight is a lot! [laughs] It's not one out of 300.

Later in your career it doesn't make any difference, but at the beginning, ones and twos are big numbers relative to eight and ten, because you don't have a publication list of 35. I always learned to work on more than one problem at a time. I found it interesting. It was also clarifying. I would work on problems in chemical physics and plasma physics. I would work on problems in neutron transport, et cetera. So, I'd always have something to publish. I tried to have good taste in the choice of the problem so that they would be important, but the probability that you were going to get scooped and suddenly find yourself with a fallow year, that was an insurance policy against that happening. If I didn't know that—I think if I had just gone ahead and done what one would normally did and didn't consciously think about that, I'd have been fine anyway, because I didn't ever get scooped again as far as I know. [laughs] But it was a lesson.

ZIERLER: Was your time at Brookhaven, the research you were doing there, did you feel connected to any other national laboratories?

CONN: Not really. They were pretty isolated. I got connected with the other groups within the lab. There was a postdoc there who had gotten his PhD—I think he went on to be a faculty member at Maryland—and he was a physics PhD. Remember I was applied physics. He was a real physics PhD. And he knew Feynman diagrams. It turned out I could talk to him about that mathematical approach to the problem I was taking, and it was a great help.

I went to seminars. T.D. Lee was at the height of his powers at Columbia, parity violation in the 1950s. He was big, and the accelerator at Brookhaven was very important. I remember his giving a seminar, and it was about the improvement of our understanding of small asymmetries in nature. He put up a picture of the Mona Lisa, and he said, notice that her smile is askew. It's natural. This had to do with all of the—this was the years of the 1950s and 1960s, and all symmetry—symmetry and symmetry breaking that were central elements in particle physics at the time. I remember that lecture. [laughs] Or at least I remember the Mona Lisa example. So, it was a vibrant place, but I think that except for going to the annual meeting of the American Nuclear Society, where I presented some work and the lab paid for my ability to go to that meeting, and then the travel to places for job interviews, I didn't really travel much so I had very little interaction with people from other laboratories.

ZIERLER: You emphasized how important the Brookhaven experience was in terms of defining yourself as a scientist. Did it influence the kinds of faculty jobs that you wanted to apply for, that you thought you were qualified for?

CONN: I was fundamentally wanting to be in what was then a nuclear engineering program. There were many places at that point that had nuclear engineering departments or nuclear engineering programs, and they were hiring in that area. That was what I was looking towards. I wasn't looking for a position in a physics department or a chemistry department, despite having those interests. I was resigned that I am an applied physicist and engineer; I'm not a basic scientist in the same sense as a physicist might describe themselves as a basic scientist. I was driven by problems. Solving problems. I don't just mean solving a technical problem. The technical problem derived from something like a nuclear reactor or something that was working. In other words, it was derived from an application.

Nuclear Engineering on the Faculty at Wisconsin

ZIERLER: We'll round out our conversation today with you going on the job market and ultimately how you landed in Wisconsin. You already mentioned, there were programs in nuclear engineering. At this time, the late 1960s, early 1970s, was this really a burgeoning field in academia?

CONN: Oh yes, absolutely. Yes. The job market and the faculty were growing in the departments. I can't remember every place I interviewed. I interviewed at UC Santa Barbara. I had interviewed at Berkeley. I don't know if I re-interviewed at Berkeley. I interviewed in Wisconsin. Maybe one or two other places. The place in Wisconsin had a nuclear engineering department. They had a department chairman, Max Carbon. There's an ironic story here about carbon and graphite. I got an offer to go and visit Madison in January of 1970. I was in a postdoc 1969-1970. I remember my wife and I flying there. In those days there was no direct flight, so I flew New York from LaGuardia to Milwaukee, and then Milwaukee on to Madison. We got to Madison, and the terminal was not a full terminal. No jetways. That is, it's a smallish town—250,000 people—they didn't have gangways.

So, you got off the plane and you walked down the steps. January. Wisconsin. Clear sky. If you know anything about weather, you know the temperature is at least zero, maybe minus five, and the wind is blowing. Because the sky is clear. We walked down—the wind hit our face—I gotta tell you [laughs]—I thought I was struck—somebody slapped me in the face! We gets off. They put us up at the best hotel in town. It has a view out the window. I look out the window; I see—and my wife at the time [laughs]—the naiveness of this is just stunning—and I say to her—look, I see this gigantic expanse of snow. I mean, miles, this way and that. And seemingly, you know, like this. I say, "Look, Gloria, how beautiful it is." She didn't use foul language or anything, but she said, "Basically, you idiot, it's a frozen lake!"

ZIERLER: [laughs]

CONN: It was Lake Mendota, one of the four glacial lakes that surround Madison. Anyway! Despite the weather, the interview seemed to go very well. The reason I went there was largely money. Now, I'll go back to—I didn't come from much. I had an offer from Santa Barbara for an assistant professorship, which was normal I guess. I think it paid $9,000 a year in 1969, 1970, so before inflation. I think it was $9,000 and change—$9,400 for nine months. Wisconsin offered me a visiting associate professor title. The visiting meant it didn't have tenure. I didn't know that. I didn't even know what tenure was. What I knew was, they were offering me $13,500. That's almost 50 percent more. What's the choice?

ZIERLER: It's also a lot less expensive in Madison than it is in Santa Barbara.

CONN: The cost of living wasn't—California was not expensive at that time. California did not become expensive until the late 1970s. Housing in California was cheap, and you could live in California when I was a graduate student, whether it was Pasadena or any other place. It was not like the East Coast. It was inexpensive. It became expensive in the late 1970s and stayed expensive ever since. But in my day, it was not expensive. So, it wasn't a cost-of-living issue. It was, it's more money. I didn't know what I was going to do with the money, but it had to be better than less money!

ZIERLER: How could you not know that this was a visiting, non-permanent position?

CONN: I knew it was not permanent, but I didn't think I was going to be hired into a permanent position. Meaning an assistant professor slot is not a permanent—it's not a permanent position but it's not tenure.

ZIERLER: It's a track to a—

CONN: You still have to go up for tenure, right?

ZIERLER: But it's a track to a permanent position.

CONN: It's a track to a permanent thing—well, I guess they told me that it is also a track to a permanent thing. Believe me, I was so naïve, David, at this point, and I'm full of myself because I'm pretty good—I didn't give a crap what they told me. I was going to do fine. So long as they let me do what I wanted to do, I was very confident I would do well. So, okay, everything comes up, they make this offer to me, and I want to accept it. I get a call from the department chairman, Max Carbon. He says, "By the way, we were hoping that you would be interested in working on fusion technology." What? What is you talking about? We have a program here in plasma physics and we're starting a program in the technology of how to do fusion energy, and we would hope that you would be interested in that. I said, "Wait, I thought you were hiring me as a faculty member, and a faculty member is supposed to choose the problems that they're supposed to work on, and you're trusting that, and so on." It was disturbing to me that he was telling me what I might want to work on.

That was not for Bob Conn; don't tell me what to do. So, what to do? Again, back to my eulogy for Noel. What to do? Call Noel. So, I called Noel. I said, look, it seems to be a great job. It's a good department. I've got all these interesting things I want to do. I've got quantum-surface interactions. I've got this. I've got that going. I've got all these ideas of what I want to pursue, and they're wanting me to do something else. I wasn't even judging what else it was, like interesting/not interesting. I was just saying, "I've got my plan, and if I execute that plan I'm going to succeed." So, what are they doing?

And Noel said to me, "Bob, listen." First of all, after I told him I had a call from Max Carbon - Noel started to call him Mr. Graphite. He said, "Well, listen. Mr. Graphite is just doing his job. That's what they're interested in." And here was the advice of a lifetime—the advice of a lifetime—"Bob, when you go to any place that's new, and you're going to be with new colleagues and so on, you'll have all your ideas but find out what they're doing. Find out what they're interested in. And think about whether or not you might be able to help a few of them on what they're doing." In essence, be a colleague, but be a colleague more than just talking to your colleagues. Actually see if you can help them figure out the problem that they were working on. Don't worry too much. It'll probably be interesting. You'll be able to control what you do anyway. But it's a good idea to find out what your colleagues are doing and see where there might be overlapping interests that you might be able to contribute. My whole life was built on that advice. Scientific life. And when I went there, sure enough, I did my thing—that was no problem—but I got interested in fusion energy. That's how I got into fusion energy. I didn't do anything in fusion at Caltech. And I didn't take Roy Gould's plasma physics course.

ZIERLER: I was going to ask. So, you didn't have Roy Gould?

CONN: I didn't take that. No! He was there and I knew about him, and I think my colleague Jim Duderstadt might have taken it, but I didn't. I mentioned this at Noel's eulogy, that I end up working, because of this story, I end up working in fusion energy. I said, "And Caltech had a great plasma physicist in Roy Gould." Roy's daughter was in the audience. Afterwards, she and her husband came up and thanked me for mentioning her father.

ZIERLER: Wow. [laughs]

CONN: It was very touching. Very touching. Long story short—and we can finish with tenure, and that's a good spot to stop. So, I get to Wisconsin, I accept the position. We arrive. They've arranged for me to have two-bedroom townhouse in faculty housing. They had faculty housing that they had built in the 1940s and 1950s, very nice. We had our own little townhouse connected to others. Good friends of ours who had the townhouse at the end, two down from us, pull up in a red VW square back. So, now there's two of us with red square back Volkswagens. He's in the Geography Department. I end up with a bouquet of flowers on the door the day I drive up. For the rest of my life [laughs] he always said, "We drove up and tried to find a key. You drove up to a bouquet of flowers!" [laughs] In any case, we did that. I'll tell you about the 1970s next time.

To finish the story about visiting associate professor, what I didn't realize, or at least I don't remember consciously absorbing it, because I would have worried like crazy—they had to decide about tenure in two years. So, I had my first year, and then in the second year, they were going to have to put me up for tenure. So, I would have a record based on Caltech, my two years of postdoc, and basically whatever I could do in a year and a half.

ZIERLER: Was that how it was done back then or was that even considered a fast clock?

CONN: No, it was deliberate. They did it to get me. And man was that a fast clock. Normally takes six years to tenure as an Assistant Prof.

ZIERLER: I see.

CONN: They offered me this, and I think they made a judgment. They looked at my papers, they looked at the reference letters. I don't know this for a fact, but it's got to be good. And they made a judgment, "We could probably get this guy tenure now." So let us make this offer for more money, but don't push tenure, because he's only two years out of school. We'll be fine, and he'll be fine. We'll let him do his thing, and if it goes as it has been going, we're going to be fine!

But I don't know this, right? I just went off lickety-split and went off and started to find out what colleagues were doing. Well, there was one guy, Wes Foell, who had something called a lead slowing down time spectrometer. We could pick up with that story next time. I knew exactly how to do the theory of that spectrometer. It's a neutron spectrometer, so it makes a neutron spectrum with a certain distribution of energy that changes over time.

Think of a Gaussian, that the average energy has a value, and as time goes on the energy value point gets lower and lower and lower as the neutrons thermalize and leak out. How would you analyze that problem? What was the motivation for this thing? You could put a spent fuel rod from a nuclear reactor and you could figure out how much U-238 was inside, how much U-235 was inside, how much plutonium-238 and plutonium-239 was inside. From a safety point of view, you would have an inventory, when you took—hey, good morning. My other half just got up, so we'll go have tea together in a moment. Back to the story, this was going to be very important for nuclear reactor safeguards. That was what it was called at the time. How are we going to safeguard the nuclear materials at a reactor site? This was going to be one technique that might be used to determine, what was the inventory of fissile material onsite at a reactor?

My colleague knew this. He had built the experiment, but he needed a partner, so I became his partner. Then, the next group was doing the very first thinking about how you would design a fusion energy reactor. What would it look like? Why would it look like it would look? What materials might you use? It was a group project! Okay, well, I think I could learn the plasma physics, and I know how to do neutron transport—in a fusion machine, neutrons are produced. Tritium is one of the fuel elements, deuterium and tritium. Tritium is radioactive, twelve-and-a-half-year half-life. So, you have to breed tritium, kind of like a breeder reactor with plutonium It is a breeder reactor. So, you have to figure out how to design the neutron energy system around the plasma core so that it would stop the neutrons but also—and you extract the heat—but also you breed tritium, more tritium than you consume. Take the tritium out and recycle it and the machine keeps going. I know how to do those calculations. That's neutron transport theory. And I went over to the Theoretical Chemistry Institute. It had a great name in the history of theoretical chemistry, Joe Hirschfelder. There's a famous book—Hirschfelder, Curtiss, and Bird, Theory of Liquids and Gases. Older people like this.

I met a guy who was a postdoc there, Hersch Rabitz, who after his first year went on to become a professor of Chemistry at Princeton. We started collaborating on atom-molecule scattering. So, I was doing scattering theory. I had done it for surfaces. Now, if I have a gas and I fire an atom at it, how does it scatter, and why does it scatter the way it scatters, and what does it tell you about the properties of the molecule that it's hitting? That was a pretty fundamental problem. I decided to work on that. I decided to work on the lead spectrometer; that was the neutron stuff. And I decided to work on fusion energy. Sort of the rest is history.

Of course I got tenure. We wouldn't be here otherwise [laughs]. So, I think I was—that was 197/73 —I think I was 30, and I was an associate professor, and three years later I was a full professor. Two years after that, I had an endowed chair. That was one hell of a decade, from 1970 to 1980! That's a good place to stop.

ZIERLER: We'll pick up next time. We'll delve more into the research, the research that you continued, the value of fission research as you jumped into fusion. We'll take the story from there, Bob.

CONN: Why did I move, is the key question.

ZIERLER: From Wisconsin, you mean?

CONN: No, no. Why did I find moving into fusion energy a good thing to do? That had to do with what were the basic problems remaining in fission reactor design. They were safeguards and safety. That I found less interesting, not as fundamental. We can pick up there.

[End of Recording]

ZIERLER: This is David Zierler, Director of the Caltech Heritage Project. It is Wednesday, December 20, 2023. It is my great pleasure to be back with Professor Robert Conn. Bob, as always, it's wonderful to be with you. Thanks again for joining me. And Happy Holidays!

CONN: Happy Holidays to you, David, absolutely.

ZIERLER: We started in with the very unorthodox story of how you achieved tenure at Wisconsin. Let me ask a broader question, a retrospective question, now that you're on the senior side of your academic career. This being the early 1970s, you were a young assistant faculty member at the time, to what extent was your appointment and your lack of knowledge about exactly what you were getting yourself into with regard to tenure—what aspects of that really represented your own personal naivete, and what aspects represented the fact that this was a very different time in academia and people might not have been so formalized with these kinds of appointments and distinctions?

CONN: I think it's more the former and not the latter. That is, this was a unique approach—I never heard of this as a technique, and I haven't seen it used in all the 50 years that I've been involved in academic life, including being a dean and hiring all kinds of people. It was a—a trick. I don't have the right language for it. It's not a ruse; it's something that they were totally legally allowed to do. But I was never an assistant professor. Never an assistant. I was a visiting associate professor followed by becoming an associate professor. I think what it said is the following. On the one hand, I did not know—literally did not know-the rules of the road when it came to academic life. I had nobody to talk to about it other than Noel. I don't think I ever asked him about tenure. What I knew was I had to do well at research.

Now, that doesn't mean that I didn't think teaching didn't matter and that being a good faculty member all around wasn't important, but it was very obvious to me in just looking at the academic world, that everything was—in AAU type universities, the top research universities of the country—about research. It wasn't about the California State college system, where okay, you do a little research, that's nice, but you teach five courses. Teaching is the dominant function. In the circumstances I wanted to be in, and was true at Caltech, research was the dominant function, and the teaching came along with the research. I would actually argue that the teaching followed the research. Look at Caltech's own programs at the undergraduate level and how much effort they make to engage the undergraduates in research activities of the faculty, and this person affiliated with this lab or that lab. Work with graduate students. Learn all of that, right?

The whole system is built around the research enterprise of this university. That I knew. I was an ambitious fellow and a pretty smart fellow, and I could figure out straightforwardly what mattered most - make sure you do good research and publish it. That will be what will get you through. It's a little bit like taking any job and saying, if I'm going to get to that level, what do I have to do? Then you do the best you can to do those things, and you hope you've been right in your assessment of what you have to do.

That is, you didn't pick a pathway off to the left [laughs] that got you lost in the forest, but you had a pretty good idea of what the path was to that next point of success. That I had. So, I was focused on my research. I had already published by the time I arrived at Wisconsin four papers in independent journals, and they were good ones. I published more by the time—I don't know how many I had—six, seven papers—by the time I went up for tenure, but I didn't have twenty.

I think I felt like if I did that work, things would just take care of themselves, and I don't have time to worry over whether or not this is going to be successful. I can do this. I just have to do the damn research. That was my attitude—just do the research. The surprise that I told you about, and did not know, was that I was limited to two years by this Visiting title. And if they didn't promote me at the end of the second year, I kind of would have been out—I don't know what would have happened. Maybe they would have given me an assistant professor appointment, or maybe they would have done something else. If they were to do that, they would have had to cut my salary. It would have been a nightmare.

There are a number of things you do in leadership that are important. Having a clear vision. Expressing that vision so people can understand it and get on board. Recognizing opportunity when it comes and seizing the day. That "seize the day" idea was always there for me. I knew what I had to do to seize the day. So, while I wasn't sure about when the tenure decision was supposed to really come up, I was going to get that research done, and it was going to more than carry the day. That's how I had to believe. I operated from that point of view. And it worked! And there were other opportunities throughout my career where that same bet-the-farm mentality, with good knowledge that you could win, that you could win the farm, occurred.

So, you weren't entering something that was totally impossible. It might be difficult, but you could do it if you did it right. I often throughout my career looked at what I call seize-the-day moments, opportunities that come up where a bunch of dots just connect suddenly. And you see it, and you go for it. You say to yourself, "If I do this, in this circumstance, with these forces at play, the following outcome could occur." If you read the story of my time as dean of engineering at UC San Diego, the first story you'll see discussed is Bioengineering at UC San Diego in the early 1990s. The seize-the-day opportunity was a very simple one, and I could see it instantaneously. There was a big foundation, of $700 million in endowment, called the Whitaker Foundation. Have you heard of them?

ZIERLER: No.

CONN: You know why? They went out of business in 2006! Why did they go out of business in 2006? Well, they were a giant foundation at the time, and going into the 1990s, their board made a decision that when the last person who actually knew the founder, U.A. Whitaker—he was the founder of AMP Corporation in the 1940s, and that was the fortune—when the last person who really knew Whitaker would likely pass, they were going to close the foundation. To do that, they had to spend down the corpus. So, here I am, and they make a site visit to San Diego. We had won one of the development awards. They were big supporters of bioengineering. They had chosen that as their focus area. This award was two and a half million dollars spread over a few years, and we won two of them. Pretty good! We had five million bucks spread over three, four, five years. Very, very nice.

They were coming for a site visit, and I was to have a conversation with the president, a man named Peter Katona. He tells us and the leaders of the Bioengineering program, particularly a guy named Shu Chien, who was a giant in the business at that time, this story of they're going to spend down their corpus. After he left, I turned to Shu and said, "There's no way they can spend down that corpus without wholly new programs that spend five to ten times what they're spending per program on what they're doing." And we needed to build a building. Everybody then—the early 1990s when bioengineering departments were being set up – they all needed buildings. We needed a building. They weren't everywhere, but they would end up everywhere. I could tell that everyone was going to need buildings. If we needed a building, Hopkins was going to need a building, and Penn was going to need a building, and this one, and that one.

So, we had this idea, and this is the "seize the moment" point. The next time they're out, we're going to sit down with them and talk to them about the idea that they need a new program. If they want to spend all that money down over a decade, they can't do it spending it at two and a half million dollars per shot. They have to spend $20 million per shot, ten times that. How are you going to do that? Build infrastructure for bioengineering!

Sure enough, they came back—you'll read it. We proposed this idea to them. They listened. This was a site visit at UC San Diego around 1995-96. They went back home to Pennsylvania. They let us know later that the board had discussed it and they thought it was a great idea, and they wanted to start a program like that. Then, they said to us, "But of course we can't just give you the building. You'll need to compete." Of course we did. They did a call for proposals, and there were probably ten proposals, maybe more.

There were two winners, Hopkins and UC San Diego. But like I said in my acceptance speech for the NAE Founders Award talking about this, that idea had national impact. Because I knew that it wasn't just our need; it was everybody else's need. The country needed buildings for bioengineering across all the major campuses. By proposing this, we of course won, so we got our building. Brick and mortar. But everybody else got a building too. That's the rising tides raises all the boats. You seize the opportunity, and you see the bigger picture.

Often in those circumstances, you not only benefit but a whole community around the country might benefit. That's the quintessential example of seeing the dots, knowing what was needed, knowing what was needed by the field, putting everything together, connecting all the dots, and getting it from an idea to a program to a reality. We built the first building—$26 million in the end. We got$18 million from Whitaker, and $8 million from another foundation, the Powell Foundation, and I talked the campus into putting up some as well.

So, we had close to $35 million and we built the first privately funded building ever built on the general campus of UC San Diego. Everything earlier had been built by bond issues by the state, except in the med school.

There was an example—national impact. Enormous infrastructure for bioengineering, a subject whose time had come. Where did it start? Little old Shu Chien and me going, "What do we need?" The asking, "by the way, is that what everybody else needs? Will that allow them to spend all their money down? Let's go to them with a program." Thinking like that was prototypical. It's vision. It's seizing the day. Act when the iron is hot type of thing. You win more than you lose by doing that. Sometimes it doesn't work, but most of the time, if you see it clearly, and the other side actually wants or needs what you want to propose, the need and the proposal tend to come into alignment, and you make a big impact.

ZIERLER: Let's go back to the narrative. We've touched on it briefly, but because of how important it is, it bears going into in more detail. The Fusion Technology Institute at Wisconsin, could you even begin to think about that before you had the permanence of tenure, or did that really only gets started afterwards?

CONN: It got started early. I was still in my second year—1970-1971, 1971-1972—We published, as a group out of Wisconsin, the first of what became called a "fusion reactor system study" in 1972, trying to look at what a fusion reactor would look like. It was led by more senior faculty than me at the time. It wasn't great. It was sort of the first stab at doing something like this. And it was before the 1973 oil crisis. So, here is now seize-the-day opportunity number one.

I had gone to Wisconsin. I told you that I didn't want to work at fusion, and Dr. Carbon had said, "We have this fusion program that we want to do. Would you be interested in working with it?" I went to Noel, and I said, "Noel, they're telling me what to do. I'm a young faculty member. Aren't I allowed to do—?" I told you the story of Noel saying, "Bob, when you go, find out what your colleagues are interested in. Do some work with them. You'll be amazed at the outcome. You'll help them, and they'll let you do anything you want to do, because you're so good, and you're helping them, so why would they not let you do anything else you wanted to do?"

That philosophy became my philosophy throughout my career. Anyway, there we were in 1972. We had done this as a group, so many faculty. The senior faculty members, Harold Forsen and Charlie Maynard, who were senior full professors at the time, they were the lead authors of this very first publication. Then, the 1973 oil crisis hit. Now, the country went, "We need energy freedom. We're going to throw money at everything to try to reach energy independence." Fusion, among many other things, went from a smallish program at the Atomic Energy Commission to a much more substantial one, trying to establish that you could get a burning fusion plasma and demonstrate that you could use that as the core for moving ahead with fusion power itself.

The consequence of that was that we had done this little bit of work on what a fusion reactor might look like, and now it became clear that if we were going to make the case in the country and to the government about fusion energy being long term viable, we really did need to know what might a fusion reactor actually look like, and what were all the engineering and technological problems, in addition to the plasma physics issues, that needed to be solved. Nobody knew. Nobody had a handle on the whole system. People knew you needed to do this feature or that feature. But it was mostly related to plasma physics. Princeton was the dominant laboratory at that time, the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab. All they did was physics, and they ran their experiments. It was largely true at the other laboratories, at Los Alamos and at Livermore—physics.

But here was the chance to say, "Engineering." So, as I've said a lot in the last months, with Jerry Kulcinski, my close colleague (he was an all-American football player at Wisconsin and a chemical engineer, we set out to study this systems problem in depth.

As side bar on Jerry. As an undergrad, Big Ten football. Played two ways, right? Offense, defense in those days—1961, 1962. And he was a chemical engineer. God knows how he did it! He went on to get his PhD with Bob Bird at Wisconsin, and they had the top chemical engineering program in the country at that time. He wanted to be a faculty member. The people in nuclear engineering, which is what he was interested in, said, "Go somewhere else for a few years, because you're Wisconsin through and through. Make your name, and you'll come back." So I was there, and Jerry did some wonderful work out of Pacific Northwest Labs on simulating radiation damage in materials using accelerators, the primary knock-on, the simulated primary knock-on.

The upshot is we hired him back to Wisconsin in 1972, 1973, and he became my partner. As I said in my speech, we were perfectly complementary in skills and knowledge. I knew from physics out to neutron transport theory and the engineering of systems, and he had a chemical engineering and materials science background. Jerry didn't know plasma physics from a hole in the ground, but he knew materials science, he knew nuclear engineering, he knew all of the materials issues, he knew radiation damage. The two of us were like two peas making a big pod. We ended up leading this kind of work over the next seven years, probably ten different fusion reactor system studies. What would a tokamak look like if we actually made it into a reactor? We did a sequence of those studies, where each time we changed the design, learned something and came up with a more optimized version each time we redid it.

From Fission to Fusion

ZIERLER: What were the options for the tokamak? How different was one design from the next?

CONN: Just as an example, the first one was relatively conservative. We said, if we built a tokamak, what would the structural material be? 316 stainless steel. That's the material we use. We know it's radiation resistant from its use as the fuel rod cladding in nuclear power reactors. What was the coolant going to be? Well, liquid lithium. Why liquid lithium, or liquid metal? Because we needed to breed tritium. We knew if you used lithium, the high-energy neutrons hitting lithium would produce more than one triton per neutron produced, so you could get breeding that you could recover the tritium from. That was going to be the primary coolant. That was going to be the breeding material. How do you build the magnets to surround this thing? The magnets are superconducting. How far away from the chamber producing the fusion power does it have to be? Well, that's where the neutronics comes in.

What's the mean-free path for a neutron to collide in a material of solid density, whether it's solid or liquid? Well, for a 14 MeV neutron, it's about ten centimeters. That's two and a half inches. That much, before a first collision. How many of those are you going to need before you can actually say there's very little 14 MeV neutron left? At least ten. So, that's 25 centimeters. Probably you need even more. Then, you need a shield behind that. Because I've got a superconducting magnet operating at essentially zero degrees Kelvin. Can't have any heat input to that component, right? [laughs] So, you lay out the layering of the system and you realize where the magnet has to be—what were we going to build this big magnet out of? What was the conductor? Well, it turned out to be niobium titanium because that was the easiest to use. But there were other conductors that could get you to higher field. Niobium-3 tin.

Do we want a higher field? Do we want a lower field? What we learned in the first design was, if you use niobium titanium and you use the knowledge we had, the system was gargantuan. It would end up being way too large to be economic. So, it looked right. If you didn't have a ruler next to it, it looked like something that was really well designed. The problem was the ruler was small and the size was very big, like five meters across a vacuum vessel. Too big, and therefore too much material, probably way too expensive. Then, we learned, well, all right, how are we going to make it smaller? Well, we can make it smaller by doing this with the plasma. Instead of a round plasma, we'll make it an elongated plasma.

That plasma can get to higher pressure. We can make the major radius smaller. We can do this; we can do that. Through a series of four or five iterations, we ended up with something called NUWMAK by the late 1970s, which was actually quite a compact device. It used niobium-3 tin. It was higher magnetic field. It sort of was the direction that the today's private companies like the spinout from MIT today, are trying—but they're going to use High Temperature Superconductors, which weren't discovered until the mid – 1980's. —

to gives you an example of all the system things you have to think about, niobium titanium is the conductor that is used in MRI magnets at the hospital. They only run at two tesla or less A tesla is 10,000 gauss. We could run these things at two tesla or three tesla. For fusion, we need to run them at seven or eight, even ten tesla.

That's a hell of a lot of magnetic field. The forces go like the square of the field times the volume, so they have a magnet like this—the stress on the structure goes like the square of the magnetic field times the volume contained inside the magnet. Those are hellishly large stresses. Today, the guys that spun out at MIT, they're building high-temperature superconductors operating at 35 degrees absolute, not 3 degrees absolute, and they're making 20 tesla at the coil. Twenty. When we did our very first designs in the 1970s, we had eight tesla. Remember I said things go like the square of the field. That's two and a half times more field than we were thinking about in 1975, 1976. Two and a half squared is a big reduction in volume. As you go up in field, you can reduce the volume of the device. All these tradeoffs, David, were unexplored at the time and that was what we did first.

I mentioned liquid lithium as the breeder. Well, there are many other ways you could design it. We could put lithium oxide inside fuel rods and cool them from the outside like you might a fission reactor, and the lithium oxide would absorb the neutrons and breed the tritium, but it would be a solid breeder. It would look like a piece of uranium fuel inside a fuel rod instead of a liquid metal. To cool it, it could be water, it could be helium gas. So, you can go through all these combinations of structure and materials. Do we have to stick to steel? What about low-radioactivation materials? Could we use molybdenum? Could we use titanium? You're just exploring almost the periodic table, in a sensible manner, just to see what combination of things might give you a more optimum system. You had to worry about long-term radioactivity. In fusion, radioactivity depends on what you build it out of. It's not intrinsic to the nuclear process of fusion.

But the neutrons induce radioactivity. So, how much radioactivity are you're going to get, what is the average half-life of all this,- it depends on what you choose to build it out of. You are what you eat, you know? [laughs] That kind of thing.

All those studies were done from 1973 on through 1980. We did not only tokamaks as an idea and we looked at magnetic mirrors as another magnetic confinement approach to fusion. We were the very first people to look at laser fusion as a source of power, in 1975. Laser fusion was only put there as an unclassified idea in 1971. Here we were four years later jumping in - well, if it could work, how would you build it? What would you build it from? How would you repair it? What is the rep rate for shooting targets? How would you capture the energy? How would you do this? How would you do that?

When you now summed across the 1970s, what we had really done is invented the field of fusion engineering. How do you go about building a blanket? How do you go about building a shield? How do you go about building the supercomputing magnets? What are the choices you have for cooling? What are the choices you have for structures and breeding? How do you extract the tritium? How do you recycle the tritium? What does the power cycle look like? It's a big systems problem. Simon Ramo would be proud that I won his award this year, because the ICBM was a gigantic systems problem. He and Woolridge at TRW—RW at the time—they got asked to do it for ballistic missiles what we were doing in the 1970s for fusion. "Look at the thing as a complete system and tell me how you're going to make it work."

ZIERLER: Is laser fusion still in the mix of available possible fusion sources?

CONN: Oh, yes, absolutely. In fact they've had a recent breakthrough that's of first-order magnitude, absolutely. It had been a very long row to hoe. To give you an example of the scale of change, when we first started looking at laser fusion in the early 1970s, people thought that you would be able to make a pellet of deuterium and tritium—you could compress it with the lasers and cause it to fuse, and the total energy on target from the lasers would be about ten kilojoules. So, think of a laser, a ruby laser or whatever your favorite laser is—it turns out it ultimately—we didn't realize it at the time, but it has to be very short wavelength. So, neodymium-doped glass turns out to be the choice at one micron, and then your frequency doubled twice to get down to about 0.25-micron wavelength. You need short wavelength to penetrate and get absorbed properly in the capsule of the fuel and drive the fuel in. We know that today but not back then.

Think of it, David, as you have an orange—no classified stuff here—you have an orange. You uniformly illuminate it with a force like you're trying to put your hands around a ball, and uniformly squeeze and squeeze and squeeze it. You have to squeeze it to a thousand times the original density. Impossible with your hands. You could get maybe three times. As you go like this with your hand on a rubber ball, the little errors you're going to make—the Spaulding ball that you're going to press on, with the air in the middle, it will make a bubble in a place where you can't get your hand quite right. That's called an instability. This is a very, very hard problem, but people thought it was doable with ten kilojoules on target. Fast forward 50 years. What has just happened?

Instead of ten kilojoules on target, it's a hundred-plus, two-hundred-plus times that amount of energy on target, roughly speaking, two megajoules on target instead of ten kilojoules. The light is not from a ruby laser but neodymium-doped lasers where the light is frequency triple, so you get very short wavelength on target. And the capsules are not bare deuterium and tritium balls. They are in fact—and this is unclassified—they're like little cylinders made of a heavy metal like gold. Think of a hollow cylinder—really, really small, tiny, of order a few centimeters in size, and inside you suspend on a thread a hollow, frozen, DT pellet, very much smaller. The lasers come in from either side of the cylinder of gold—that's called the Holhraum. That word used to be classified; it's not anymore. The lasers come in from two sides. They heat the gold. They don't hit the target.

The gold gets so hot it starts to radiate. They can get to thousands of degrees, tens of thousands of degrees. That re-radiation is at very small wavelengths, almost like X-rays. It's the X-rays that hit the target, and because the hohlraum is uniform, the target gets hit uniformly. That's the solution to the instability problem of trying to squeeze at such deep density and not have an instability form. The instability is called the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability. The result is that last December, a year ago, they finally did an experiment in which more fusion energy came out of the pellet than was put into the target. That's called gain. The gains had always been less than one. Suddenly, it was 1.5—2.5 fusion energy out per unit of laser energy hitting the target. The laser is completely inefficient, so there's not break even on a total energy sense—this laser is half a percent efficient and can be shot twice a day.

You need something 15 percent efficient that's going to run at 10 hertz for a reactor. So, big difference from what is going to what will be needed for a practical machine. But, David, the fundamental achievement was they got propagating burn. Ignition and propagating burn. Again, think of the ball, and it has been shrunk down now to maybe a hundredth to a thousandth of its original size. It's super dense. And it has been compressed very rapidly. So, there's a shockwave propagating through this little piece of pellet. The shockwave is symmetric and going towards the center. What happens? When it hits the center, there's no place for it to go! So it collapses and makes heat. That heat raises the temperature of the deuterium and tritium at that point to above ten kilovolts temperature, and the DT starts to fuse. When the DT fuses, it makes a neutron. Well, the neutron flies out. But it also makes an alpha particle at three and a half million volts. The alpha particle is doubly charged. It can't get out. But it can propagate.

Think of this thing as a hot little ignited center—and it's an orange—and the rest of it is cold. But now this alpha particle, which carries a lot of the heat, actually reaches out past the hot little core and heats up the surrounding material. That gets hot, that starts to burn, that gets to ten kilovolts, that produces more alpha particles, they have a range larger than the little size of the zone that's burning, and the burn propagates. So, you get a propagating burn wave. Fusion burn wave. It burns through the fuel. The fuel burn-up in a real device might be as much as 20 percent. Here it might only have been five percent. But this propagating burn is the physics—it's nirvana. That's the physics that we have been attempting to achieve for 50 years. So, kudos! Right? It is a seminal achievement—it's across the Rubicon. You have crossed to the other side.

You now know that you can get yields out of targets, not just 1.5 or two or 2.5, but a hundred. You can suddenly produce a hundred times the energy on target. That's a lot of gain. With that, you can make up for a bunch of inefficiencies on the back end, and still get net energy out, and still maybe make power, and so on. So, it's a hard, hard game, because you have to—ultimately, if you want to make 100 megawatts, you've got to do some of these things ten times a second in the chamber. You've got to capture the neutrons. You've got to capture the heat of the explosion. You have to have a chamber. You have to have an energy conversion system. You have to build it out of something. What are you going to build it out of?

You go through all those iterations we went through in the 1970s. But is it impossible? No, it's not. You can't say it's impossible. You can now say the physics is good enough. I don't think we fully understand all the physics that goes on, because they use hydrodynamic codes for all of this, and there are kinetic effects and neutron transport effects and alpha particle transport effects. It's a big, big thing to model. But it's a great test for the nuclear weapon codes. So, two things and then we'll switch or stop, or you'll ask another question. The two important things about this are the nuclear weapons people will be able to flex their muscles with respect to their codes and have greater confidence that what they predict is likely right. That's important for stockpile stewardship. Is the stockpile going to work? If we ever had to use it, would it work as designed?

The other thing is that it is inspiring some people to think, now, how might I convert this into something that might make actual energy? It's a giant challenge, actually many challenges. I was always very negative about laser fusion because they could not get break-even. They didn't really understand in my mind the physics of what they were trying to get done. The codes had a lot of free parameters in them, so I could get any answer. And the codes were not heavily predictive. They would run the code to say, "This is what this pellet is going to do," and then it wouldn't. What was wrong? Something was wrong with the codes. The codes were always being tinkered with. But the experimental result, you can't argue. That's the status of laser fusion.

We should stay in the 1970s, we didn't understand the physics of either laser fusion targets or magnetically confined plasmas, but I will tell you I'm writing a nomination for membership in the National Academy of Engineering for a person, George Tynan, who over 25 years, with extraordinarily careful experiments not unlike the kind that Paul Bellan does at Caltech—really fundamental stuff—but what George has gotten that Paul didn't is he finally has evolved both experimentally and theoretically a complete theory of the turbulence that occurs in hot magnetically confined fusion plasmas. He, from the first principles now, can explain the heat and mass transport that occurs in a hot, say, tokamak plasma. It turns out it also applies in a hot stellarator plasma. So, we have the fundamental knowledge of heat and mass transport—this is like mechanical engineering, fluid mechanics—we have the fundamental knowledge of heat and mass transport in this extraordinarily complex medium called the ten-kilovolt plasma, a burning plasma, and can predict how the heat and the mass transport will make it out of the plasma, how to control it, how to make it go faster or slower.

And we have understanding inside about why the system works as it does. So, I am equally confident in magnetic fusion today. Although no machine is at the moment built exactly to get the parameters needed, if they ever did build this one in Europe called ITER and make it work as designed, it will get ignition and burn. Absolutely zero—lack of probability—no probability it won't. The probability it won't is that the machine fails in some way, not if they made the machine run as it's designed and there's something we didn't know about the physics that's going to cause it to fail. There's a real fundamental difference. I think the machines that are being built by some of the private companies today, like the ones spun out from MIT, they're going to build a 20-tesla magnet—so therefore small, compact—tokamak. And they're going to put deuterium-tritium in that baby, and I will have great confidence—if the machine works, they'll get ignition and burn.

The issue is willing the machine work as designed. Nobody has ever built a 20-tesla machine with these sorts of coils and this type of superconductor, and on and on it goes. Fusion is one of those great across-the-board challenges. It challenges you on every front. The basic physics front. The basic engineering front. All fields of engineering, from stress and mechanics and structural mechanics to fluid flow and heat transfer, and energy conversion, and nuclear physics, and nuclear engineering, and breeding materials. If you're interested in science, it's a dream. [laughs] Pick the area that you find most interesting and try to make it all work out. So, that was 1970s. Going back to the 1970s, that was when I, with Jerry Kulcinski and our team, at least too the first look at every one of those alternatives. They findings are applicable to this day and the results have stood up over time.

ZIERLER: Your visiting professorship or appointment at Argonne, was that because Argonne was doing leading work in fusion research?

CONN: They weren't doing leading work in fusion research. They had started, like many of the labs—and we had started in the program at Wisconsin—they were starting a program in fusion engineering. I knew the fellow who was in charge of the program, Bill Stacey. He's now at Georgia Tech and retired. I just heard from him by email the other day. They did a lot on how to do the neutron transport analysis and what would happen with the 14 MeV neutrons in a fusion device. That was something from my thesis that I knew dead cold, and I was very interested in. There were new techniques, variational techniques in mathematics that were coming up that could allow you to look at systems in particular ways. I just took a summer. Argonne was close to Madison, a few hours car drive, so we rented a house and spent three months at the lab, just to get away and do something with different people. That was in 1972, so I think it was the year I got tenure. It was to just broaden my horizons a little bit and work with some different people and learn from them and contribute to them. That was what I did at Argonne in 1972.

Scaling Fusion Energy Research

ZIERLER: When the Fusion Technology Institute got started, administratively, who at Wisconsin-Madison really supported this effort? How high up did you have to go to gain the support you needed?

CONN: That's an interesting question, because it developed much more organically. So, we didn't have to go and ask anybody as far as I knew. This was almost but not entirely housed in the Department of Nuclear Engineering. Today it's called the Department of Applied Physics and Nuclear Engineering. So, a little bit like the Department of Applied Physics at Caltech. Most of the faculty we needed were in that group, so we sort of self-declared this directorship, this institute. It's called—to this day it still operates there—it's called the Fusion Technology Institute. Jerry Kulcinski and I became the co-leaders in 1973. We led it until I left. We were supposed to rotate who was the number one seat and number two seat, so you didn't have to argue too much about things, but it turned out I sort of sat in the number one seat for about five or six years. Jerry and I were—he was very generous. He didn't feel the need to step in this way or that way. I give him credit for that.

We basically pulled it together. Where did the money come from? We got university commitments by, for example, teaching relief. Jerry and I, for a few years, got relief from teaching. That meant that the Department had to put up the money to find other people to teach what we would have otherwise taught. That gave us the time to provide total focused leadership of this new initiative. The bulk of the money came from grants from the Department of Energy. Jerry and I must have made forty trips in the decade of the 1970s. Fly to Washington, propose some program, they considered it, they decide to support it, we get $400,000. When we did the laser fusion part, the DOE was only doing magnetic fusion at that point, but a guy who we knew at the DOE had moved from the Department of Energy to the newly formed Electric Power Research Institute in Palo Alto, EPRI.

He was interested in supporting some work in fusion, and we—Jerry and I—went out to visit him in Palo Alto, and said, "Nobody has looked at laser fusion. We think we can do that. We have just hired a guy who knows how to do the simulations, the hydrodynamics of the pellet. We've got people who know lasers. We've got people who know this. You saw all that we have been doing on the magnetic fusion side." He gave us a million dollars over two and a half years, to carry out two different studies of the use of laser fusion and the possibilities thereof. So, we undertook that. It was really grant supported. The University provided the space. It did provide some administrative leave and relief from certain other duties. But we built ourselves by our bootstraps, by which I meant we went and got the grants. From those grants we went and got bigger grants. From those grants we went and got other grants from other funding agencies. And it became kind of a large institute funded by multiple sources. We brought industry in for the very first time. We had people on assignment from Westinghouse and McDonnell Douglas.

They sent us two senior people from the Westinghouse power division to work with us on—to learn about fusion. This was going to be the company learning about fusion. Meanwhile we got the benefit of all of their knowledge. McDonnell Douglas sent more than three people. That was wonderful because what is McDonnell Douglas doing? Well, they know about jet engines, and they know about rockets, and they know about reentry vehicles. What's the connection to a reentry vehicle? Well, the surface heat load on a reentry vehicle is extraordinary. You know that we don't try to get rid of that heat when a satellite comes back from the atmosphere; we let it burn up. But we let it burn up in a very controlled way. The materials that we use as the heat shield are graphite, which doesn't turn liquid but sublimes.

So, you can run it at 2,000 degrees, 2,200 degrees, and it'll just sublime away. The sublimation carries the heat, until you eventually get to the lower atmosphere and things slow down, and then you're fine, and you've got a third of your shield left [laughs] when it's all over, but you're safe. Those guys knew about all that stuff. Graphite, it turned out, was an important material to be using infusion, because at the edge of a fusion plasma, the heat flux leaving the plasma can be quite extraordinary,. Heat and mass are leaving the plasma. Making more energy than not, so it's ignited and sustained, but that doesn't mean heat doesn't leak out. It does. What do you do with it? You have to capture it. How do you design components to capture that level of heat? It's kind of like putting your hand in front of a solar flare. What are you going to do?

Your hand is going to burn. You'd better do something else. Using these materials were really imaginative. It ended up, for about a generation, most new machines ended up being designed with graphite components. The edge components, the walls had graphite panels. In other words, the technology from space ended up inside the vacuum chambers of magnetic fusion confinement experiments. That all started with us at Wisconsin, partnering with McDonnell Douglas and saying—and nobody believed it could be done, David. When I first went to do this, we had a guy—his name was Don Kerst, grand old man of physics and accelerator physics. He invented the betatron in the early ‘40s, back in the days when people were inventing accelerators like the cyclotron at Berkeley. Well, he invented something called the betratron and he was very famous for it.

Then, he invented something for controlling plasmas which he was famous for. Now, he was at Wisconsin. He said to me, "Connie"—he couldn't remember my first name so he called me Connie—"Connie, you can't use graphite inside a vacuum! Graphite, it's like a filament in a light bulb. It just outgasses. All it does is outgas. There's no way you can keep the vacuum, putting graphite inside the vacuum vessel." "Don, you can outgas the material. We did experiments to show"—and we even had graphite cloth that was woven. Graphite, woven. You can make a necktie out of it. It would leave a stain, but you could make a tie. We could outgas it and show that it could be completely outgassed and will not be a source of impurities from outgassing in the vacuum vessel, even at a base pressure of 10-7 or 10-8. So, there were lots of, "No, no, no, no, no", ---, until it became "Yes." That was an interesting experience in life. You had to stick to your guns. You had to keep saying, "Look, the data says you can do it. The data says you can do it."

And here's a story. Around 1975, Princeton—we had converted the fusion program in the United States in the late 1960s to tokamaks from stellarators after the success of the T-3 tokamak in the Soviet Union. That's the famous story I think we may have talked about, where the British sent somebody over with a laser, and they did Thomson scattering on the plasma and confirmed what the Russians claimed, which was that the temperature was 300 electron volts, far beyond anything that had been achieved by a stellarator or anything else. So, we converted our stellarator into a tokamak. It was called the ST. But that was a small device, so in the early 1970s they got approval to build PLT, Princeton Large Torus. Maybe its plasma radius was 50 centimeters, something like that. Major radius maybe 1.5 meters. I'll never forget it, Wolfgang Stodiek was in charge of the experiment, a German. His German accent was very much like Donald Duck in German. It was amazingly funny. He didn't mean it to be funny; it just was naturally [laughs] joyous to listen to them. I loved talking with him just to listen, with my ear, to what he said and how he said it.

He put tungsten as the limiter in the PLT. A limiter—you have a vacuum vessel, but you can't have the plasma just hit the vacuum vessel; it's just made of thin stainless steel. So, you put in something called a limiter that limits the first place the plasma hits any material. It's inside the vacuum chamber or radius. So, it needs to be able to take high heat flows. Tungsten is a good material for that purpose. Very high melting temperature, good heat transfer properties. They started the experiments, and they would get tungsten impurities knocked off the limiter, and the tungsten would end up in the center of the plasma.

Now, I don't know how much physics you know—tungsten is a heavy metal, so it has a lot of electrons around the nucleus. And if you get tungsten into the middle of a plasma, all it wants to do is radiate like crazy. Because you can't strip all the electrons away, it bounces up from bound state to excited state, bound state to excited state, radiates much, much more rapidly than if the tungsten was fully stripped and all you had was bremsstrahlung. The upshot is they couldn't get the temperature above 50 electron volts.

"Graphite, Wolfgang! Graphite!" A year and a half later, they swapped out the tungsten limiter for a graphite limiter. Graphite is atomic number six. Graphite gets into the plasma, six electrons are easily stripped off, doesn't radiate much.

No problem. They fire it up, shot in, neutral beams, - particles of neutral beams to go across the magnetic field without deflection - they hit the plasma and ionize. It's a high-energy beam—100 kilovolt, 200 kilovolt beam. The beam energy slows down, heats the plasma. Nirvana! They get Ten-kilovolt ion temperature in the middle of PLT. World record! It took three years. And the key was not, okay, we've got good neutral beams, and we've got good this, we've got good that. The key was taking out the tungsten and putting in the graphite limiter. That came from reactor design. That came from the aerospace industry. It took a lot of work to get people to appreciate that something unconventional could be done and that it might be very helpful. Persistence, my man. Persistence.

An Early Lesson on Fossil Fuel Dependence

ZIERLER: To zoom out, as the Institute was gaining momentum, as it was gaining more partners across the United States, you mentioned the Arab oil embargo. That prompts me to ask, the broader motivations in the 1970s for fusion research—what aspects of it were really geared toward energy independence and getting us off of foreign fossil fuels. And you recalled your concern over smog when you were at Caltech and this being a clean energy source. I wonder if you could put those two motivations together in helping to understand how all of this enthusiasm came together.

CONN: Basically, in the early 1970s, with the 1973 oil crisis, it was all hands-on deck. Let's explore everything. To me, the quickest overall solution was to do two things—enhance the amount of nuclear power. Not fusion. We knew how to do nuclear energy. Do a lot more of it. Two, try to electrify as much as you could, away from fossil fuels. One way we're going to get away from fossil fuels is don't use them to make electricity. That was for the nuclear power plant. The other question was, over the long run, could you come up with other ways of—the electric vehicle was still not being thought of—the combination in the long run, at least in , the systems sense of electric vehicles, was non-fossil-based power production – That was what you needed. We didn't think so much about the climate problem, but the formula for the solution of one is the formula for the solution of the other.

Had we stuck to our guns and not let Three Mile Island throw us for such a loop, we would have a much more comprehensive nuclear power infrastructure with 50 or 70 percent of our electricity coming from nuclear power today, instead of 18 percent. Think of what a difference that would have made – it's a crime that we did what we did back in 1980.

And now electric cars come, and batteries improve, solar improves, and so on, but now you've got the power infrastructure with a clean source of power, to power the electrification of the rest of the economy. I saw that in the 1960s and 1970s. You didn't have to be a genius to see that. That was where we were headed. So, to me, we knew how to do nuclear power; do it! And fusion could come later. Fusion had two possibilities, so I was confident that fusion would have a role to play. I told you I went into fusion in part because in the early 1970s, nuclear power was mostly developed.

The issues that people were doing by way of research at least at universities were all related to nuclear accidents and safety. Okay, that's an important subject, but it's like a negative—what could go wrong and then analyze what could go wrong—whereas with fusion there were still fundamental physics and engineering issues still to be resolved. That just seemed to me to be, from a research point of view, much more exciting. That's why I went down that route.

But I didn't go down that route thinking fusion is going to replace fission. And there is separate thing that fusion can do, which is—and we studied this in the 1970s—called a hybrid reactor. A hybrid reactor is one in which you build a fusion machine, it generates a lot of 14 MeV neutrons—and I keep saying—so fusion is energy—neutron rich and energy poor. It produces about four times as many neutrons per joule of energy as fission. Fission is neutron poor and energy rich. 200 MeV per fusion, and two and a half neutrons, so 80 MeV per neutron. Fusion is like five times less efficient on a per-neutron basis in producing energy. It has all these neutrons, so why not use those neutrons to produce fissionable material. You don't then need a fission breeder reactor with liquid metal cooling and so on. What you do is you put U-238 or thorium-232 into a fusion blanket. The neutrons hit it and make uranium-233 in the case of thorium or plutonium-239 in that case of U-238. You extract the 233, burn it in a light water reactor. Or, if you want, put in your U-238, make plutonium 239, extract the plutonium, burn it in the fission reactor. So, the fission reactor does not have to be a breeder. And there's something called the support ratio. If I build a thousand-megawatt fusion plant, how many thousand-megawatt fission plants can it support by way of complete fuel cycle? And it's like five to one.

So, you need one fusion plant to produce the fuel along with the recycling of the fuel that's in the existing plants in order to support five running nuclear power reactors forever. That was a pretty attractive idea. It does require recycling of nuclear fuel. It does require all that infrastructure. That's not easy to do. We did it for many years in Richland. That's how we get the plutonium for our weapons.

Nonetheless, in an engineering sense and in a principle sense—this was my 1980s discussion with Edward Teller—that is the best and highest use of both technologies. In other words, you're using both technologies for what they do best. You're not trying to push fission into a breeding situation, which is hard to do, and you're not trying to push fusion to just be a power reactor stand alone. You make a hybrid system, and they all support one another. That would be a closed end, long term, fission reactor solution to power. If you had that, as the French had at some point—70 percent of your power comes from nuclear power—you don't import a lot of oil and gas to make power.

Munich and the Boundary Layer of Plasma

ZIERLER: Tell me about your time at the Max Planck Institute in Munich. How was that important for you to get a European perspective on fusion energy?

CONN: Two stories hit me right away. First of all, I went there because I was very interested in the plasma boundary layer. Boundary layer science in fluid mechanics and things like that, it's always important. You talk to anybody, and they talk to you about the boundary layer in fluids. What's the boundary condition at the edge? When water is flowing in a pipe, what is the boundary layer at the point where the liquid is in contact with the wall of the tube? In this case, we had this flowing plasma on the edge, and it interacts with these materials. I described to you something called the limiter. There are other kinds of ways of doing it called diverters. That's a whole other topic. But eventually the plasma—the hot edge plasma, not the core—the central core is much hotter—but the edge is still a few hundred volts, and that's a lot. And it's energetic.

How do I capture that heat that is leaking out of the plasma? I can't throw it away; I've got to capture it and make sure that I turn some of it into energy. So, the interactions of plasmas with surfaces were a fascinating problem to me. I told you about being at Brookhaven and having done the problem with the balls on the spring and figuring out whether something would stick. I had an approach to solve it analytically, only to discover that another person had done it ahead of me and published it, and I took all my papers and put it into a drawer never to be seen again. [laughs] But that was an atom surface interaction problem. So, I had an intrinsic interest in this problem. Don't ask me why but I did. And they were very good at the Max Planck Institute in this area.

They had several experimental machines. One of the things that they did was to study this problem of plasma-surface interactions. That was what I went there to do. I learned a lot and I discovered two things. One is a joke and the other is deep philosophy. The joke is when I returned to Madison, I gave a seminar on what I had been doing over the summer. I had started by saying, "I have discovered this summer the first independent quark, unbound independent quark. We've been looking for this since Murray [Gell-Mann] predicted quarks. They're not supposed to exist alone, not by themselves. They've always got to be tied together. But here I found an independent quark! I put up a slide and it had in the middle a yogurt container labeled "Quark." It turns out in Germany, the brand for yogurt is Quark, the word "Quark."

ZIERLER: [laughs]

CONN: So I found the first independent stand-alone quark.

ZIERLER: [laughs]

CONN: But more importantly—and this was the difference between Europe and the United States—they were studying a machine called the stellarator. They also had a tokamak, but they were studying a machine called the stellarator, which had originally been invented in the United States by Spitzer. That was the machine that was at Princeton in 1968 that got converted into the tokamak when the tokamak proved its mettle. The stellarator was a very complex technical device. It has coils. You have to look, David. Instead of a coil like this, just a simple D-shaped coil that goes around the tokamak chamber, and there are many as you go around the machine—in the stellarator, all the coils are different. I make one like this, I make another one like that—these things had shapes that looked like that. They curled around and so on. They made a very twisted magnetic field.

They were very complicated to make. I couldn't imagine how you would make a fusion reactor and build those kinds of complicated coils. So, it seemed to me that the stellarator was not nearly as straightforward a device to make power as the tokamak was. There was a man there, a senior guy named Gunther Grieger, older than I was, who ran that program. I am now 35 or so in 1977, still young. I had a conversation with him one day. He says to me as I asked some questions – you're a practical American—"Why are you doing this? You're wasting all this money. There's no way this kind of a device is going to end up being capable of competing with the tokamak. And it's going to be very, very more difficult to make it into anything practical from a reactor point of view. Why is Europe still funding the stellarator?" We had stopped everything in the U.S.

He said to me, "It's cultural." At first I said, "It's cultural? What do you mean?"

He basically said, "In Europe, we fund a lot of things viewing it as cultural activity, the way you'd support music or the way you'd support other things in the arts. If somebody has an interesting idea, it doesn't automatically have to have a practical outcome for it to get support. You don't have to show the practicality per se." With the Americans, we're always very practical. Can you turn this into that? Can you make it something? It dawned on me that they do a tremendous number of science things because it's part of what a culture should do. Part of what a culture should do. They don't necessarily ask, "What does it mean for the economy? What does it mean for this or that?" They are willing to put money into things that for cultural reasons their people want to support and want to study. This was so different from the American approach that if I learned anything that summer—forget the physics—this was that takeaway.

That was the difference between Europe in those days and the United States in those days. We were very much the practical people, not the idealistic ones. And we certainly didn't do things because it seemed like the culturally right thing to do. Everything needed deep justification. We had the Proxmire Golden Goose Awards. That idea in Europe is an oxymoron. Their cultural mindset makes the idea of a Proxmire or Golden Goose Award unthinkable—they wouldn't even think it! They wouldn't think it up! Whereas in America, everybody has got a critique of why you do what you're doing and why it's useless, and you shouldn't be getting the money you're getting. It was a cultural eye opener.

ZIERLER: We'll round out today's discussion with the transition at the end of the 1970s from Wisconsin to UCLA. Let's just stay with the Institute. How strong was it by the time you were thinking about making the move? Was it strong enough to stand on its own two feet without your directorship?

CONN: Oh yes, oh yes. Remember, I said at the beginning, I had a partner all the way through in Jerry Kulcinski. Jerry and I in the 1970s. Jerry is just a terrific engineer, first rate leader, football player, knows how to be a team player. Jerry is a natural leader. So, the leadership was not in question. To this day, Jerry leads it. He took over and led it for the rest of the time after I left. He led it for 30 years or more. It has been an extremely successful technology institute in fusion, and it still operates to this day. So, no, I didn't have any worries about it collapsing behind me. I had gotten a little—this is personal—at that time first of all, it was the beginning of my realizing that I do suffer depression. In the late 1970s, it was starting to feel like I might be repeating myself. I wasn't getting as excited as I had been about the new things that we were thinking about doing.

Whatever the reasons—dark winters, long winters—I found myself—quiet, at home. I faked it pretty well at work, but something was amiss. We had been in California. My wife liked California. We all wanted to be in California. So, I started to think about moving. Thinking about transitions, I've just written about it in the paper I sent you—what drives you to change? And I describe it in the front of the story I wrote you, what drove that change. What drove this change was, I just wasn't feeling as energized. I was suffering depression but didn't define it and diagnose it at the time, but in retrospect it was clear. And I thought the way out of all that was to change, to move. So, I began thinking about returning to the West Coast. Around 1975, 1976, 1977, when the fusion program was booming and we were the leading people in the fusion reactor business, so to speak, I developed a consultantship with TRW in California, over in Redondo Beach. (That's Thompson, Ramo and Woolridge, the latter two Caltechers.)

One of the people who organized that consultantship was a faculty member at UCLA, Burt Fried, who also had a consultancy going back to the early days of TRW. He knew Si Ramo very well and so on and so forth. I had begun, starting around 1977, to fly out to L.A. and do consulting on fusion energy things. They had a fusion program at TRW, too. I began consulting with them. Around 1978, 1979, they asked whether or not I might want to think about moving to the West Coast and to UCLA. They had seen me working up front and close, not just that they knew my work by my papers and all, but they actually saw what was happening if I came out and did some consulting. I began to think hard about that. It was really hard. This is 1979, 1980. Inflation is going through the roof. Do you remember 18 percent prime interest rates?

ZIERLER: My parents do. I've heard all about it from them.

CONN: Yeah, Volcker in 1981, 1982, 1983. That all began in 1977, 1978 with the inflation. Anyway, eventually UCLA invited me out in I think the spring of 1979. Again, how does Bob Conn do things? You don't give one seminar. I'm really smart. I think - You all need to know how smart I am, how good a guy you're going to get by hiring me; I am giving two seminars. One is going to be about fusion reactors and fusion reactor design, and the other is going to be about chemical scattering theory and show that I could interact with the Chemistry Department, and I could interact with this department and that department—anyway. I go out. I give my seminars. They're excited. They want to make me an offer. They ask me, "What nine-month salary would you accept to come?" I said, "Well"—I can't remember where I was exactly in Wisconsin at that time but remember this is before inflation came and raised all the faculty salaries.

I said, "Look, I can't come for less than about $35,000 a year, academic year salary." Again, naïve. I had no idea that the UC system has a step system. Do you know that? There are steps. Assistant Professor 2, Assistant Professor 3, Assistant Professor 4. Each has a salary level, two years per step. Then, you get promoted to Associate—Associate 1, 2, 3. You get promoted to Full Professor—step 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. That's what they had at the time.

$35,000 went with Professor step five. What happens in the UC system, throughout the system including Berkeley, once you got to Professor step four, you now had to show extraordinary achievement to go to step five and six. So, I ended up not only high on the step ladder—I was basically at the top of at UCLA—but I was also above that level where you had to be extraordinary! Just to get to step five. So, it's a little bit like back to the story about tenure, but I'm going to do it. I had no idea about what it would take for them to give me $35K for nine months.

Here I say, "I want to come but this is what I need. I'm going to do it." They got letters and they did everything and sure enough, they offered me step five, Full Professor. That's about as high as you could get! I'm 37, 38? There's only one step left to go! [laughs] Then it's called above-scale. Now, they have nine steps instead of just six. But they did it for me. They got good enough letters to justify step 5 Full Professor at UCLA, which was like an endowed chair professor equivalent. Like happens 12 years later, when UCLA asked me what we can do to keep you, what can we do to keep you—Wisconsin did the same. "We'll do this. What if I made you that? What if I made you this?" But my mind was made up. I wanted to go back to the West Coast. I had gotten an offer that I couldn't refuse. They had met my requirements, so to speak.

In 1979, I agreed, and I ended up moving and began at UCLA on January 1 of 1980.

We could talk about the 12 years or so that I was at UCLA. It was quite an interesting run, and my career changes a lot. It's during that time that I get much more involved on the national policy scene, start becoming chair of DOE committees and National Academy committees and things of this sort. I got elected to the Academy of Engineering in 1987, so right in the middle of my time at UCLA. I had to move my entire program from—not the entire program—I moved a good portion of the Fusion Technology and Engineering Design program from Wisconsin to UCLA. It was a loss to Wisconsin but not a debilitating one. I moved many people who wanted to come with me to California. It was a very large research group transfer. Say like when David Baltimore came from Rockefeller to Caltech with his research—what did he move?

ZIERLER: The whole operation.

CONN: And how did he move it? And how do you manage all of that while you're going to be doing moving? How do you make sure the grants all move, and the people move, and you don't lose too much inefficiency in the process of moving? That move was a truly major move. It was a $5-million-a-year research enterprise, roughly speaking. Maybe it was three at that time. That begins my experience with moving research -- I learned how to move. I learned how to get everything done. Just fast-forwarding for your perspective, when it's time to move to San Diego, they came and asked me if I would move my program to UCLA to UC San Diego, because a company—SAIC—had won the contract to house the ITER program, and they wanted a big program in fusion engineering at the University, because they didn't have one. So, would I move? My answer was, "No, I've already done this once. I'm not going to repeat myself." How did I end up going down to San Diego? That's for another time. All right?

UCLA and Returning to California

ZIERLER: Last question for today. In light of the fact that you did move so much of the operation with you to UCLA, in light of everything that you built at Wisconsin, did you join the faculty at UCLA assuming that you wanted to keep up connections at Wisconsin, that there was a partnership to maintain or nurture, or was it really you brought everything with you where you could just continue this more or less on your own at UCLA?

CONN: It was the latter. I didn't intend to be partnering long distance with Wisconsin. I moved essential pieces to be able to have a program that the Department of Energy would continue to support. I worked all that out with the DOE. In other words, they had to want to support what I wanted to do. They realized this was de facto moving money from one academic institution to another. They tended to follow the PI (principal investigator). There was plenty of money still left behind at Wisconsin. Not everybody in Wisconsin moved but enough moved that I had coverage. Then, I rebuilt the holes in my program. In other words, the things where I might have had coverage and where I had holes. I had to figure out how to handle all my graduate students finished at Wisconsin. I had to figure out what new directions we'd be going in.

I actually did things like I made a lecture tour the first year and a half after I was at UCLA. I'd visit MIT, give a talk; visit this place, give a talk; Berkeley, give a talk—mostly to recruit postdocs. Letting people know, there's a there at UCLA, and if you're keen and want to come to work at one of the really strong programs in the country, there are openings. I hired some extraordinary people as the result of that kind of recruitment tour, where I wasn't trying to move to MIT, but I wanted people at MIT to be more aware of what the opportunities were at UCLA, particularly the graduate students and those who were finishing their PhDs. That was the way I filled the holes. Plus we decided to go in some new directions with new programs, and that meant I needed new people. That was the beginning of my doing experimental programs. I did not do experimental programs in Wisconsin. But I started one in 1982 at UCLA, and it has been going 40 years. [laughs]

ZIERLER: Wow. Bob, that's a great place to pick up for next time when you join the faculty at UCLA and all the new opportunities this offers.

[End of Recording]

ZIERLER: This is David Zierler, Director of the Caltech Heritage Project. It is Tuesday, January 9, 2024. It is my great pleasure to be back with Professor Robert Conn. Bob, as always, wonderful to be with you, Happy New Year, and it's wonderful to see that you are doing so well.

CONN: Thank you very much, David, and I'm glad your lemon tree is on the mend!

ZIERLER: That's right! [laughs] Bob, we're going to pick up at a very pivotal point both in your personal life and your career, the state of mind that you were in and thinking of places to go beyond Wisconsin, joining the faculty at UCLA, what this meant for you personally, what it meant for your career. Let's start first on the institutional side. What did you know reputationally about UCLA? Coming all the way from Wisconsin, having spent time of course previously at Caltech, where did UCLA loom in your mind in terms of being a leader in the fields of nuclear engineering and nuclear physics?

CONN: In nuclear engineering, UCLA was a real leader. They had smartly, the way I think Caltech in the 1960s recruited Noel Corngold, in the early 1970s, recruited first a new dean, and then a star in nuclear engineering. First, the new dean. Chauncey had been the president and CEO of Atomics International, which was a division of North American Aviation. That was still an independent company and major aerospace company in Southern California. What they were doing at Atomics International was making satellites. They were also creating the sources of energy to power the satellites. Many of the sources of energy to power the satellites were driven by radioactive isotopes like plutonium-238. They were mixing space research and satellites with nuclear energy. Not nuclear power in the sense of a power plant making electricity but being able to have a long-term source of power for a satellite.

Chauncey Starr was hired by UCLA to be dean of Engineering in 1971, 1972. I had just started at Wisconsin. He wanted to build up nuclear engineering. They had it but it wasn't great. What he wanted to do was make it great. He hired a guy named David Okrent from Argonne National Laboratory. David was simply a brilliant person.

ZIERLER: Did you know him from Argonne?

CONN: Did I know him from Argonne? I knew of him at Argonne. He worked on fast breeder reactors. This was not the kind of plant that we built. We were building light water reactors, just nuclear power. The idea of the breeder was to build a device that would breed its own fuel. You weren't limited by the amount of U-235 you could mine out of natural uranium, and you didn't have to enrich it. But you needed plutonium. And you needed—okay, we've discussed this. David was an expert in breeders, and also now an expert in nuclear reactor safety. He could dream up things about nuclear reactor safety and circumstances to analyze that were—insightful beyond the pale. He served on a famous committee called the Reactor Safety Advisory Committee, something like that, to the AEC. So, he was serving on the safety committee of the Atomic Energy Commission. He was of very high academic reputation.

Even though he was at a national laboratory, his research was quite profound, mainly again, as I said, on fast breeders. Starr brought David as the senior person to pull together some very good people who were then on the faculty. Another Caltech graduate, George Apostolakis, also a student of Noel's, became famous in reactor safety. He was on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, developed Boolean algebra style techniques for assessing the risk of nuclear power accidents. So, by the time I was ready to come, David had already been there eight years. George was blossoming. Bill Kastenberg was blossoming. They had a strong enterprise in nuclear power reactor safety. So, I knew the people, and I knew them well.

ZIERLER: If I could ask more broadly thinking about nuclear safety, in the early 1980s, where is Three Mile Island in all of this? How important is that in thinking about when nuclear disasters can happen and what role academic nuclear engineering can play in preventing another kind of disaster like that?

CONN: Three Mile Island was 1979, which is the year before I joined the faculty at UCLA. Nuclear reactor safety was always top of mind. Three Mile Island, we built nuclear reactors in the United States with containment vessels—big concrete things. Like if you go down the coast at San Onofre, you see the domes. Those are containment vessels. Really Three Mile Island was an economic problem, but from a true safety point of view and in terms of any exposures and so on, relatively benign. But psychologically, it was enormous. And sociologically. Maybe more sociologically is the better word than psychologically. There were people worried about nuclear power being a source of expertise to build a nuclear weapon. It's no different than what we're worry about with Iran today. And North Korea and others.

That you could have a failed economy, like North Korea, but you could develop a nuclear weapon if that's where you decided to put your resources, is sort of astonishing, but it's a fact. There were a whole variety of groups that were somewhat opposed to nuclear energy in the US on the grounds that if you have a nuclear power industry, you have a danger of nuclear weapons. They coupled the two. Even though you can't make a nuclear weapon designed as a nuclear reactor. They're not compatible.

When Three Mile Island hit, those who were on the left, particularly on the left from a political point of view, saw it as the opportunity to stop nuclear power development in the United States. And they did. So, we haven't had more accidents of any kind, and still 18 to 20 percent of our electricity is coming from nuclear power reactors today, but we haven't built one in decades. In fact, we've lost, I believe, the expertise to build them. You even see today the Navy advertising on television for young people to come and join the Nuclear Navy and build the reactors that are going to be in the submarines and aircraft carriers. They have a manpower shortage, a staffing shortage.

There is not enough nuclear energy and nuclear power expertise left in the country to go about building nuclear reactors. Now, Bill Gates is trying to fund one. They just cancelled one of them because of cost overruns. We'll see what happens. But your question was—I was planning to join UCLA in 1980, essentially in parallel with what went on at Three Mile Island. It didn't influence my decision to go to UCLA because UCLA wanted to attract me to build a program in fusion energy. If anything, Three Mile Island accident meant more money was going to go to alternatives to nuclear power such as fusion. So, the opportunity was—opportunistic—was fine. It was maybe even enhanced—unfortunately enhanced—I don't mean that I wanted it enhanced. I just mean the way the political system was working at the time, more money would now go to fusion energy out of concern over fission.

So, it was an opportunity for UCLA, and it was an opportunity for me to build a big program there. They were strong, as I said, in nuclear power reactors and particularly in the techniques associated with analyzing reactors from a safety point of view by creating many of the techniques that are still used today to assess safety. So, I was going to a strong group. I looked at UCLA at that point as stronger than Caltech. Caltech was like the Marine Corps—a few good people. But they decided—Caltech did—that after Noel, they really weren't going to invest in nuclear energy. Noel himself shifted from nuclear physics and nuclear energy things—students like me and Jim Duderstadt and George Apostolakis—he went off into statistical mechanics and plasma physics and did things with Roy Gould and Paul Bellan and so on. So, Caltech just made an executive decision not to stay with nuclear engineering as a discipline. But UCLA wanted to build that discipline. It was, to me, if I wanted to get back to the West Coast and particularly the L.A. area, it had the best program, and it was where I wanted to go.

ZIERLER: On the personal level, coming back to Southern California, was that really the change that you needed? Did that at least help, when you came to the realization that you were dealing with depression?

CONN: No. I began to suffer the depression in the late 1970s, probably beginning around 1977, 1978. By 1979 I was depressed, and I knew it. And there was nothing you could do about it. There were no drugs to treat depression. It was, "Lay down on the couch and talk to somebody." I didn't have the money to lay down on the couch and pay somebody to talk to. It was really hard. I had two young children and was married. Each time I did something, if I got a new thing to focus on, it would take my mind off the depression. I could focus on the new thing I had to get done. So, I began to focus on moving to California. My wife's family is from there. We decided we're going to do this. There was nothing Wisconsin could do to keep me, because we wanted to get back to Southern California. I got an offer I couldn't refuse from UCLA. It was really quite stunning. It was at the height of the inflation difficulties. Buying a house in Westwood was a nightmare.

I sold a lovely house on a third of an acre property for about $110,000 and I bought a townhouse in Westwood for $180,000 [laughs], 50 or 60 percent more - for a townhouse! It was hard. What helped personally was, okay, we've got a project—a family project—and I've got a professional project. I've got to move a whole team from Wisconsin to UCLA. It's a four- or five-million-dollar research enterprise. And I've got to move my family from Wisconsin to L.A., and we've got to get settled in and get the kids in school. It's a project! I'm good at projects! If I could focus on those projects, I could put my personal difficulties kind of in the background. But it didn't go away, and in quiet moments it was still very difficult. It peaked in 1982, which is just two years after I got back to California. Despite the sunshine, which is supposed to be good for depression—when it's clinical, sunshine be damned. It just wasn't enough. I spent 1980 and 1981 and 1982 moving 20 people and the whole research enterprise and getting the entire research enterprise up and running at UCLA within a couple of years.

I could focus on that, and it helped. I did things like I made up a lecture tour to go around and give seminars at MIT, Berkeley, and other strong places, because I needed postdocs, and I wanted to attract graduate students to come and work at UCLA. The way to do that is to go around—and people wanted to give talks; that wasn't a problem—so I could easily do it. I went on a tour of the country for 18 months, giving talks about the research we were doing in nuclear power, fusion energy, fusion reactors. Indeed, I captured a guy from Berkeley, and I captured somebody else from MIT. It added fresh thinking to the research group. All of that went well. The Department of Energy supported the transition. I really didn't have a hiccup in my research grants. Externally, it looked great. Everything was going smoothly from a research point of view. Personally, it wasn't. I would spend very dark weekends, quiet, very quiet.

In 1982, in December, I ended up absentmindedly crossing a street and not being focused, and I got hit by a car. I spent three to five weeks in the hospital and having four surgeries. I ended up coming home with an external fixture on my leg to try to keep the length of my leg proper, but I had broken through my left—the left—shinbone clear through You took an X-ray. The shin bone was here, the bone was there, and there's this space of about an inch and a half and there's no bone. I mean, terrible. They put pins in above and below the break, and a brace to hold the leg length so it didn't shorten as it healed. The hopes was that the bone would grow together, but the length would be maintained, so you didn't end up with a short leg. It worked. Amazingly, it worked. I have photographs of that time. I cannot look at them. They're so disturbing. I was in such a terrible physical condition. Yet, during that time, I wrote the first article on fusion energy for Scientific American. It was published in May of 1983.

What happens when you—what I learned --- is that it doesn't solve your depression, but when you have a bad incident and you now have to fight to get forward and to recover, whether it's from an accident or doing the change for your family to get from Madison to L.A.—it didn't matter—it drove the endorphins and somehow you get driven to focus on getting better if you can, or getting the job done. The personal circumstance was physically recovering from this extraordinary event. I broke everything. I broke my shoulder. I broke my jaw. I lost teeth. I had damaged the ulnar nerve that I couldn't feel parts of my left arm and hand for months, and nine months for the ulnar nerve in my left hand. I still have a slap when I walk from my left foot not being able to softly come down heal to toe. When I walk, it smacks. I can't control it. That's from the accident 40 plus years ago.

If you ask personally, it was a dark time. I got through the move to LA and that went well, and I got through the recovery and that went well. That was when I first decided to see a psychiatrist.

Mental Health Openness Then and Now

ZIERLER: Over 40 years ago the culture, the stigma around mental health obviously was much different then than it is today. Were you forthcoming with your colleagues? Were you open and comfortable about what you were going through?

CONN: No.

ZIERLER: Because of the culture? Because it was a stigma?

CONN: Yeah, and also I was embarrassed. I felt less a person. "Why can't I deal with this? Why is this so goddamn hard?" You beat yourself up. My colleagues were amazed when I shared some of these things with them. Like I have a good connection with a guy named Bill Kastenberg who is about three years older than me. I knew him at UCLA – he was a colleague. He used to come over to Caltech when we were doing nuclear energy seminars between UCLA and Caltech. I had known Bill from the middle 1960s. He's a very open guy. I've shared some of this now with him. He's a personal good friend. He said, "I had no idea, Bob. No idea."

But I knew my situation. I remember an incident flying to Washington, a DOE meeting, and walking—I took a plane, you always get there late. You take a midday plane, you get there late, with the three-hour time change, seven, eight, nine at night. I'm walking through the airport, and there's a fellow I know who was also in the fusion business. He saw me, looked at me and said, "Bob, what's wrong? You look terrible." I was alone, walking on my own, and my face was just—like it was mortified. And he could tell. "What's wrong?"

But that's because I didn't know anybody I knew who also suffered from depression. So you hid it. It wasn't until I started getting some psychological help and got towards the late 1980s and early 1990s that I was able to grow past it. It never went away.

It never goes away. But it lessens and it becomes a shadow that you know is present. You have an awareness of it. But it doesn't drive you as when you are in the state of depression.

The famous author who wrote Sophie's Choice suffered depression and wrote about it. William Styron. He wrote a 200-page book on it. Small book, is what I'm getting at. Not Sophie's Choice. But it's a big deal, and it's hard to deal with it. He wrote that in the late 1980s and early 1990s and it was an eye opener for a lot of people. You asked, "Did you tell people?" Well, he didn't tell anybody either! But then he was an author, and he could write about it in a way that I think was very helpful to people who suffer depression, and to have to deal with it in the way one dealt with it in the 1970s and 1980s and so on. The 1980s were a giant transition for me. From the late 1970s to the late 1980s was a decade of real, hard, dark time.

ZIERLER: Going to a psychologist, how crucial do you think that was ultimately for you turning a corner?

CONN: He was a psychiatrist. There's a big difference.

ZIERLER: Of course.

CONN: Psychiatrists can also prescribe drugs. Xanax had just come on the market. It was the only drug available. But it helped! I don't take Xanax today. I take some other things [laughs] that are new and improved, and it's very—it's 40 years later. The drugs did help. They did calm you. They were about anxiety, and a lot of my depression was associated with anxiety. I began seeing a psychiatrist. We talked a lot. At one point he said to me—I remember this distinctly—"Bob, we could go on like this"—in the Freudian or Jungian or whatever the hell he practiced at the time—"We could go on like this for a decade or more." You know, Mel Brooks and that sort of stuff. "Or you can take a pill." [pause] I'll tell you, to this day, there was a—you need a pill? That was a black eye. In other words, A, you're not supposed to suffer depression—it's your fault—and B, if you do suffer depression and you take medication, you must be weak. Something is wrong with you.

That was the mindset of the 1970s and 1980s. Nonetheless, you take the Xanax, and you feel relaxed, and the tension goes away, and you feel more normal. And you are more normal. I never found that it dulled me in any bad way. If I knew I had to be sharp I would avoid taking it. But it helped a lot to deal with—see, what happens is it's like an instability in math and engineering. Once the ball starts rolling down the hill, it wants to keep picking up speed. What you have to do is catch the ball before it gets too far down the hill and try and stop it and push it back up to the top. That's what these drugs allowed you to be able to do. It would keep you from spiraling into a dark hole and keep you level. It would give you a release. It would settle your body. The anxiety would disappear. If you took it for a few days, you'd have a few days of real relief from feeling anxious, whatever the hell it was, driving you. That was the beginning of coming to a better place. But I wouldn't call that a good base to a better place; I'd call that going from a damn dark spot to something much more livable.

ZIERLER: The obvious question is, shortly after you joined the faculty at UCLA, this is a time of incredible academic productivity for you. You're writing important papers. You're institute building. You're doing all of this wonderful work as a collaborator with your colleagues. Was Xanax a career saver as much as it was a life saver?

CONN: Probably. Probably. As you say, I'm a builder. In 1985 I got all my colleagues at UCLA, a very disparate group who argued among themselves, to form an Institute for Plasma and Fusion Research. We got, in those days, a lot of money—$300,000 a year to run it – from the Chancellor. From Chuck Young This is the mid 1980s. That's like getting a million and a half, two million today, from the campus, to run an institute. So, yeah, all of that continued. I think, as I say, I was always able to focus on work. In fact work was my out, was my release. I would work during the week and then on a Friday, the darkness would begin to set in. I knew the weekend was going to be terrible. I would be extremely quiet, didn't want to talk to anybody. Then, on Sunday evening, my whole body would change. Ah! Tomorrow I get up and I go to work!

While I was at work, I would be more normal, if I could put it that way. There was this cycle, almost with a weekly periodicity, where the weekends were black and during the week was brighter. That's what led to the productivity. I would look forward to Sunday night and Monday morning, because now I could put my energy and my focus into whatever the hell it was that I was doing, and the rest of the stuff would drift to the background for a while.

It was very hard on my wife at the time, and I think difficult on my children, though I did my best to not let them see too much of that. By the late 1980s, with the help of Xanax, being able to come a little bit more to the grips of why I was anxious part of the anxiety was just standard "faker" syndrome. "Are you kidding? I'm this person? No! I'm a fake! They're going to discover that this work I did, or the this or that, it really wasn't that good. It really wasn't this. It really wasn't that. Somehow I'm holding everybody at bay." [laughs] By the late 1980s, my self-awareness, about the work anyway, I think helped me become more normalized, and I realized it was good stuff and I shouldn't feel like I was a faker in having achieved it. I should enjoy a little bit. It was that which allowed me to make the transition to leadership of the school at UC San Diego, because now I had enough self-confidence and I did not see myself as a faux person, as a faker. I had real skill, and I was able now to think about how to apply that to really build something that went from, as I said, from 44 in the rankings to 11 in nine years. That's amazing, right?

To Build a Fusion Reactor

ZIERLER: Let's move directly now to the research. In the transition from Wisconsin to UCLA, what was seamless, what did you simply continue working on because that's what you found most interesting and most important, and what was brand new just by virtue of being in a new place, having new colleagues, particularly all these luminaries that you were joining at UCLA?

CONN: I think that I became well known for integrated system design of what might be a fusion power reactor. If you could make the plasma work, and if you could do this, and if you could do that, what would a device look like that made power? And what did you need to know in order to make that device work? You could analyze everything. The neutrons interact—coming out of the plasma, interacting with the surrounding materials—it would damage those materials. So, what was the radiation damage to the materials? You needed to be able to breed tritium. How were you going to do that? On and on and on. You needed a magnet on the outside, and that was at three degrees absolute. It was the universe's largest temperature gradient. I would have 100 million to a billion degrees in the center of the chamber, and I'd have absolute zero a meter and a half away. Pretty amazing that we can do that. But we can! But how thick does it have to be? What materials do you build? All of that was unknown at the time.

We knew the physics of it, we knew how to analyze it, but we had to say, "Is this better than that? What if I choose this for the coolant versus that for the coolant? What if I build it out of this versus that?" On and on and on. The choices are myriad. So, the fusion reactor design studies continued. Wisconsin continued to do their work in this area, but the DOE was willing to support me to build a new program in this area, which is a continuation, a mathematical and analytic continuation. I moved from one place to another, but the function was continuous, and I was able to keep it going. Those studies were valuable, because it guided what the government should support, and it guided the individual research activities going on in fusion engineering by identifying the major problems and indicating the environment in which materials would have to work, or the radioactivity that would be induced, or whatever the other issues would be. Other people would then go and work on those specific issues. It's one thing to look at the system in a systems sense. It's another thing to go in and study exactly what happens in particular circumstances – what does the radiation damage do? How do the properties change? When do they change? How long can you go? Is there an incubation period? Buh, buh, buh, buh, buh.

It was guidance to everyone who was working on the technology of fusion energy. We knew what we had to do in plasma physics, so that was kind of going along on its own. That had been going on for decades. But the technological side of fusion energy was not anything that went on for decades. It was really created in the 1970s. The DOE wanted that to continue as the sort of uber guide to what the important problems in technology were to be worked on. I continued that. I hired my postdoc from Berkeley, the guy who came down from my tour. Farrokh Najmabadi was a PhD at Berkeley in nuclear engineering, and he had worked in plasma physics, so he knew plasma physics cold. I got him to come down and over the next four or five years, I transitioned the leadership to him.

So, I was there, sherpa guide, and I understood it from an intuitive point of view, and I knew everything that was going on, but I could now devote myself to new things. That was what you really asked. So, on the one hand, there was this major area that continued, and continued into the 1990s, and I brought it down to UC San Diego. I hired Farrokh on the faculty at UCSD and he ran that until the end of the 2000s. It was a very long problem. These were so fundamental, these programs, that they had longevity of 30, 40 years. They went on for very long periods of time. Because they were important. People weren't just supporting me because they liked me. I was a depressive! I wasn't somebody everybody liked! [laughs] So there had to be something to the material itself and the subject matter. But I wanted to do something different. I didn't want to keep doing that.

What I knew and what I loved was plasma physics. I loved physics. I think I told you about working on surface physics when I was at Brookhaven and solving a problem, beautiful analytic solution mathematically, and then having somebody publish it just as I was ready to submit it to a journal. But I understood surfaces. I had published a quantum theory of atom-surface interactions in Physical Review. So, the interface of the plasma with the surrounding materials in the chamber was something that's pretty fundamental for fusion. I picked that area to focus on.

Around 1982, 1983, right around the time I had my accident, a colleague in the EE Department at UCLA had a certain kind of source to make plasma. He was interested in plasma thrusters for the little rockets in satellites, so that you could move a satellite a little bit here, a little bit there. They're called plasma thrusters. I realized that I could build a chamber and use this source—it's lanthanum hexaboride. It turns they have very low work function, so you can heat it to like 1,600 degrees C and it emits electrons like crazy.

Those electrons, you just put anything at the other end and the potential is here, the electrons are leaving, and then when they go down here they bounce back. You get a negative potential buildup, and you get a well, a potential barrier at the source and a potential barrier at the other end, and it's called a reflex arc discharge. It ionizes the gas in between—the electrons do—and they get hot, about the temperature of the boundary layer of plasma in a fusion device. Hot.

Suddenly I had a plasma, it has ions in it, the ions were not hot. But if I were to put a voltage on a target plate at one end, I could suck the ions into it at any energy I wanted. That would be like the ions hitting the surface in a fusion device. This became PISCES, the Plasma Interaction with Surfaces and Components Experimental Facility. I like naming things. That facility existed until two years ago in one form or another. It was started in 1982, 1983. In 1993, 1994, I moved the whole thing down to UCSD. They built me a five-megawatt substation to power the laboratory. It was part of the startup package to move to UC San Diego.

The program—I transitioned that to another faculty member who was a former student of mine from UCLA in the late 1980s. He had gone off and done wonderful things. We hired him back on the faculty in UC San Diego in 1997, 1998. Then, I handed this program off to him. He, to this day, runs it. He also did other things on his own the way I started new things at UCLA. The answer to your question is, I built an experimental program, and I am a theorist. How do you do that? You find great people. The graduate student who had done his thesis with Ted Forrester, the fellow in ECE who the lanthanum hexaboride thing had done, he became available. He had just finished his PhD. I said, "Do you want to come and build this machine with me? You can build the machine for me, because I'm not going to be much help!" [laughs] "But I know what we want to do, and you know how to build this sucker. So, let's build it!"

We built it out of the classic baling wire and things laying around. I borrowed magnets from one faculty colleague. I got the vacuum chamber from another one. I got a guy at DOE, Greg Haas—bless his heart—who took a chance. I said, "Greg, I can build this machine for a couple hundred thousand dollars. If it works the way we hope it will work, it will become a simulator of plasma-surface interactions in fusion devices, something we badly need as a program." I said, "But I can't prove it. I think I have to prove it by building it and showing you. And that will take some money." My reputation was good enough at that point that he bet on me. This was a case where I didn't have to go get a foundation to give me money and take a higher risk. The DOE guy himself was willing to take the risk. Boy, did it pay off. That program proved to be very important.

The other program was an international one. I have described that yet. This was about, how are you going to extract the gas that comes out of the plasma? When fusion occurs, deuterium and tritium make helium. They also make the neutron. But the neutron goes away. It goes into the blanket area. You've got to stop it, and you've got to breed tritium with it. But it's neutral, so it just leaves. But the alpha particle, at three and a half million volts, is doubly charged and slows down in the plasma. It leaks out at some rate and builds up in the chamber,—it's helium, right? The ionized helium plus the fuel, hydrogen, is leaking out slowly at the edge. You have to pump it out. How do you pump it out? Well, not easily, it turns out. We used to build these machines with something called a limiter. It was like the reentry vehicle nose cone. You come in and you've got this surface that ablates. We don't try to remove the heat coming into the atmosphere [laughs]. We let it ablate. All the energy is taken up in the ablation. Mostly it's carbon fiber. The fiber ablates, the heat is carried away with the part that's ablating, and so long as you don't ablate the whole damn thing and get into the capsule, you land in the ocean and you're perfectly fine.

Here with fusion, we have to do something analogous. We have to capture this energy that is escaping, very high energy destiny at the edge of the plasma, and we have to turn it into gas and pump it out. We have to collect the tritium, collect the deuterium, and collect the helium. We thought of something called a pump limiter. This was a device that would sit at the edge inside the vacuum vessel. It would have slots on either end. As plasma would escape, A lot of the heat would hit the front of the limiter, like the back of my hand—but some of it would escape further out. Then, there was a channel further out, and the plasma would flow into the channel, neutralize inside—we'd pump it like crazy—and so we could pump the gas out. That was an interesting idea. We wanted to test it. We proposed a program to the Department of Energy, and we found a collaborator, I think at one of these international meetings. There was a machine in Germany called TEXTOR, at one of the German national laboratories.

They were looking for international collaborative projects. So, I talked with them. I had a friend of mine in the University in Nagoya in Japan, and another person in Belgium. We put together an international team—all while I'm depressed—we put together an international program involving the United States, Japan, Germany, and Belgium, to build and operate a pump limiter device, characterize it, learn all about it, in this TEXTOR tokamak which had been built by Germany at one of its national laboratories.

That became a big experimental program where I sent students over there. They did their PhD doing experiments on it. We built it. The Japanese built the limiter itself. The Belgians did the RF heating. The Americans did the diagnostics. We did whatever we did. It proved to be a very valuable program. It had a sequel. We did a pump limiter that was a simple device and then we did a belt limiter, where we built a graphite belt that went all around the outside of the device but inside the vacuum chamber. It's a belt on the outside. Imagine the vacuum chamber was in the torus. On the outside you have a belt of material, carbon, about this wide that goes all the way around the machine. Everything that leaks out leans on that belt limiter.

That gives you a lot of area, so the heat flux can be handled. It was a pump limiter so that you could pump out the gases during the discharge. We built that. That ended up being a ten-year experimental program that ran from about 1983, 1984 into the early 1990s, and was very successful at what it was aimed at doing.

The big shift in coming to UCLA was that I added experiments to the panoply of the research activities that I was doing. And for the first time from scratch, I founded an institute. Which wasn't really what I did in Wisconsin. At Wisconsin, we already had a group that wanted to have an institute. It would have happened with me, I'm sure. It would have formed an institute anyway. I happened to become a director with my colleague, and we co-directed it. Whereas at UCLA, the landscape was sort of a green field. Nobody wanted an institute or thought it was needed. They didn't think about it. I had to convince everybody that this would be good and why would it be good, and so on and so forth. Eventually everybody came around. So, I had some persuasive powers.

That was where I began to really realize I had all these leadership characteristics. I could build a program. I could get people to work with me. I could—right? Because I had 20, 30 people working in the research program. If you're not good, they don't stay. You had to learn to lead them all. You had to make sure they had enough room to grow. They had enough room to be recognized for the work that they did. It was always a tension. How much credit goes to Bob Conn? How much credit goes to the other people?

When I came to UC San Diego—I think I may have told you this story—one of the faculty members knew a research staff guy in my group at UCLA who did not come down with me. He was actually working with another faculty member, whom I had hired, Mohamed Abdou, in 1982, 1983, just to expand our program in fusion engineering. I couldn't do it alone. The UCSD faculty member calls this guy up and says, "What's it like to work with Bob Conn?" [laughs]

Apparently his answer was, "Well, look at it this way. Bob Conn always wins. But you always win too." In other words, the credit gets spread around, and he's a good guy to work with. That was the message. But I always won! [laughs] That was an interesting phrasing. In any case, all of that—I'll call it talent—emerged. You had to know the technical work to lead, because you had to figure out where you were going. Otherwise any road will take you there, right? You had to figure out what was important and then focus on those things that you felt were most important, and then build a program to allow you to do more than you could do on your own. That's what I ended up always doing. That became a characteristic style of how I did things. Therefore a lot more was delegated. A lot more was done on an everyday basis by others. So long as we spread the credit around—and various people were lead authors on this, that, and the other thing—it sort of worked.

That was the 1980s, both institution building and adding experimental activities. Now, there was one other thing that happened in the 1980s. I founded a company. The entrepreneur side of building, expanding, to how do you start a company. What would we do? This source that I told you we developed for plasma-surface interactions research, one of the important things in manufacturing is the etching and deposition of materials on surfaces. If you think about how a computer chip is made, you take a big wafer like this and you basically deposit films on it and etch films from it. You etch lines that are circuit lines within the films. You passivate portions of the surface so that the chemistry is limited to the lines where you want to make a circuit. That's very sophisticated but in principle that's how you make chips, to this day. In those days the feature size on a chip was one micron, even larger than a micron.

Today, it's less than ten nanometers. A micron is 1000 nanometers, something like that. They start measuring in nanometers because otherwise you'd be sub-centimeter, sub-micron. Sub-micron became measured in nanometers. A micron is 1000 nanometers if I remember correctly. In any case, this source we had was very intense, and we realized what we could do with it was could sputter materials from surfaces to make thin films. Weave the plasma, focus it on a material, sputter the material, the material would come out, and it could be deposited on surfaces, and you could make a film. We had the idea that we could coat eyeglasses, for example—we could densify the coating on eyeglasses so that it would have a higher index of refraction, so it would make for a better sunglass.

Long story short, I had a friend on the faculty in Materials Science at UCLA—he introduced me to people from the Germany company Leybold-Heraeus which made vacuum pumps, but it also made all kinds of equipment such as depositing thin films on plastics for food packaging — I don't know if you know how you keep potato chips fresh. Any idea?

You put a thin metal coating on the plastic, and it makes it nonporous, so you can't get air inside. If you ever look on the inside, it's kind of silvery. That's the coating on the plastic. Somebody has got to machines to make all that plastic have those coatings, so your potato chips are fresh, and everything else that is packaged in that way. So, they built machines to create the packaging for all foods and all manner of stuff. They were interested in anything that could help deposit a good coating on a film.

I showed them my machine. They were not physicists, and I will tell you that I think they were more impressed by the brightness, just the pink glowing—it looks like a sword, a light sword—chwoo! They look through a port and they see this intense plasma. That's gotta be neat. We could do something with that. I worked out a contract with them for a million bucks.

My graduate student working with me and the guy I hired to build the machine—remember I told you about the postdoc that I took—the three of us founded a company, Plasma and Materials Technologies, Inc. The way it got started was I got this contract from Leybold-Heraeus to develop this source, but now it would be a line source so we could bombard a target and then that target would deposit materials across a wide film, like a plastic sheet. That was the objective. Ultimately they used it, as I said, to densify the coatings on eyeglasses. Makes better, highly anti reflective coatings. Why was that important? Because in Europe, if you bought glasses like you've got on—do you have anti-reflective coatings on your glasses?

ZIERLER: No.

CONN: Why not?

ZIERLER: I don't think it was ever recommended to me.

CONN: It wasn't recommended to you because it costs a friggin' fortune!

ZIERLER: [laughs]

CONN: In Germany, even in the 1980s, in Europe the healthcare coverage is way better. , When you went to get glasses, they covered the cost of anti-reflective coatings on your lenses. Because it was better for night driving. It was better for everything. They viewed it as a public health issue, and they paid for it. So, in Europe there was a big market. Nobody in Europe in the 1980s had glasses without anti-reflective coatings, because they were covered by healthcare.

Anyway, that was the market. Then, an interesting thing happened. We wrote a license to Leybold with a royalty base, so they would have the rights to use that technology and build machines with it. They were going to be the manufacturer, not us. Greg Campbell and I and my postdoc who started the company but the postdoc fellow really want to join the company. So, we ended up doing a 40/40/20 ownership split at the beginning. Greg and I basically owned equal amounts. I think he owned 41 and I owned 40 percent.

Dan Goebel, who was the postdoc—research staff guy who I hired to build the source—he had 19 percent. Why 19 percent? If you own less than 20 percent of a company, you don't have any liabilities as a shareholder. He didn't want any liability if something went wrong. We said, "Fine." He really didn't work at the company, but Greg Campbell really did --he wanted to work in industry. Three years later—okay, this thing has kind of worked out, but now we're running the company on a few million dollars a year in revenue. Greg came to me and said, "I want to build a real company! This is not a real company. This is like a lifestyle company. For you, it gives you whatever you want, $100K a year, $200K a year, whatever number you want. It's lifestyle. But I want to build a company." We realized we couldn't build a company based on the technology we had licensed to Leybold.

We asked ourselves, what else do we know? This is interesting—it was a spinout from UCLA based on technology in my lab. UCLA just let us have the license. But in the end we succeeded as a company not based on the original technology. It's a very common thing that happens with startup companies. In our case, we were faced with having to find a new technology that was going to be distinctive in the marketplace and do something that nobody in the marketplace could do. We knew plasma physics. I mentioned to you that at the time in the late 1980s, Intel was making its chips—they were still using basic chemistry. The feature size was like a micron. Suddenly they had to go to sub-micron feature size. The smaller the feature size on the chip, the harder it is to dig a trench. Do you know anything about a chip? Tell me what comes to your mind when I say "It's a chip. What's on it?"

ZIERLER: I think of Intel and microelectronics and high-powered computing.

CONN: Right, but the microelectronics means I've got wires. I carry currents. And I do things—the chip is actually very complicated. It has dielectrics, insulators. It has conductors. It has passivation. It has this, it has that. And at very small feature sizes. So, the wires are really small. The current that is carried—think of it as a wire—it's carried in a small trench that is dug into silicon. If the feature size is 0.7 microns—that's this width—but the depth of the trench may go way down. It may go many more times than 0.7 microns. It may go several microns down. How do you deposit—you have to deposit copper or a conductor into the trench—right?—in that trench. How do you dig the trench? When the feature size was large like a micron, you could just use chemistry. It would just sort of eat away and you'd get roughly something that worked, and you'd fill it with what you needed to fill it with, and that was how they made the chips. But when you go sub-micron, you can't use that kind of approach because what it does—the etching, it's isotropic. So, when you do etching just with a light plasma discharge at say one tenth an atmosphere, there's enough etching gas hitting the side walls so it will eat into the side walls of the trench.

So, instead of the trench looking like this, it will be bowed. Then, you fill it up; you've got a short. Doesn't work. So, what you needed was two things. They were running the devices, the etching and deposition devices at that time, at around one torr. 760 torr is one atmosphere. So, with a torr. What they needed was to go much lower pressure to avoid the chemicals running into each other in the trench, which they do at higher pressure. And you needed to just etch the bottom of the trench. I want to dig a trench. I want the shovel just to go to the bottom of the trench and dig the trench out. I don't want to be touching the side walls. I want them to be vertical. How do you do that? You put a voltage on the silicon wafer. What happens is if you can create a uniform plasma over the top of it and the density is low—not a torr but a millitorr—so a thousand times lower pressure—that's fusion. That's plasma physics. Then the etching ions get sucked to the bottom straight down and just etch the bottom – they dig the trench.

The earlier etching machines are called a gas discharge. Very different. It is dominated by collisions of the electrons and ions with neutral gas. Now, it's plasma. The neutral gas doesn't matter that much. So, you put your chemicals in. You make a source, which we invented. It ionizes the gas. You put a voltage on the trench. Say it's chlorine that's going to be your etcher—the chlorine is now ionized. It's Cl-minus. You put negative voltages. What happens is the ion goes right to the bottom of the trench. It doesn't hit the side wall. It just flies through that little discharge surface. It's called the Debye length. It goes to the bottom, and it eats away at the bottom. Then, it comes out at as gas, so it doesn't do any more etching. That's how you dig a trench where you don't bow the side walls. We knew about sources that we thought had the possibility of doing that. We thought up an idea for—it's called the helicon source.

The helicon source is based on an RF wave. It had been studied but nobody thought it could work in its simplest incarnation – it's fundamental mode. There were modes, like harmonics. You know, like Fourier transform or Fourier sine wave, cosine. There's an m equals zero mode, m equal one, m equal two. These are the mode numbers. Nobody thought that it could work with what we call mode number zero, which is just a seemingly uniform thing, but this wave had a twist. That's where the helicon name comes from. It turned out we built a helicon source with m equals zero antenna, and it worked. So, we patented it. We had three or four patents—in fact I discovered the other day—I thought I only had three patents, but I had four. Or five. We patented these sources in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It became the basis for a semiconductor equipment company that would be etching and deposition devices called cluster tools. We ended up making a business plan to develop this source and build the equipment that would then etch or deposit films on, in those days, six-inch wafers, silicon wafers. But they were going to eight-inch, and we've got eight-inch wafers from IBM.

We showed that with this source, we could get it to be extraordinarily uniform across the entire surface of an eight-inch wafer. So, everything you were doing would be the same no matter where you were on the wafer. That was crucial. Nobody in those days had a good idea how to do that. We figured out at least a way of doing it, patented it.

We were able first to do a seed round of financing. Then, I got money for an A round. Greg and I were the main players now. We got a wonderful guy, Brad Jones, at Brentwood Capital, just in Westwood—the headquarters were close to UCLA He funded an A round. When we got around to the B round, he brought in St. Paul Venture Capital, from the insurance company. The venture capitalists really were helpful, because they're all wanting to work together, and they don't want to fund it by themselves. They want to spread the risk just in case things go south. So, he brought in somebody to do the B round and give us a step up in valuation. Brad did his pro rata, which means he retained his ownership by putting in whatever amount of money he needed to keep his ownership at the level it had been in the A round. Some of us got diluted, like the founders, but we had a lot of shares, because we bought our shares at—peanuts, compared to a $5 million or $10 million valuation.

I think we put up $50,000 to get the company started. [laughs] So we had shares that we got at very low price —you could dilute us for a long time, and we'd still have a lot of ownership. So, it went like that. We had a C round and then we had a mezzanine round. We went public in 1995. all this was also while I was at UCLA. That was the 1980s into the early 1990s. In addition to founding the Institute for Plasma and Fusion Research in 1985 at UCLA, we spun out the company in 1986, 1987. By 1990 we were getting venture capital backing for it, and we ended up succeeding with a public company and it went public on Nasdaq with an IPO in 1995. At that point I had come down to UCSD—the company had grown to way over 100 people and I stepped away to come to UCSD to be the dean of the School of Engineering. I had been the CTO and chairman up until about two years before going public. That was the second adventure [laughs] of the 1980s, early 1990s. Or Third adventure.

Foray into Business as a Spinoff from Science

ZIERLER: At UCLA, what was the culture of entrepreneurialism? Was this a common practice? Were you wading into new territory?

CONN: No. What I've been writing about now with Enterprise Partners has the history of venture capital in it. By the middle 1980s, there were many more VC firms than there were in the 1970s, but there weren't so many spinouts from universities, at least not in technology at UCLA. Though UCLA did spin out Amgen. There were some startups in computing and this and that, but it wasn't so common. It became much more common in the late 1980s and early 1990s, especially out of Stanford and MIT. Starting a company by spinning it out was not common at UCLA at the time, mostly because before 1980, you couldn't find any money to do it, unless you funded it yourself or you found a wealthy person who was willing to back you. There were no more—as I write -- there were no more than 30 venture capital firms in the whole country in 1980. By 1990 there were 650. What happened? I describe what happened in my writing, and I've described it earlier in a paper going back to 2021.

In any case, spinning a company out, it was hard to get financing in those days. We were one of the first spinouts from UCLA that got venture capital backing. We didn't go after venture capital backing until about 1988, 1989. Already that decade, venture capital was beginning to both scale up and mature. What do I mean by mature? If you're going to build a company, you need the very high-risk capital to get it off the ground. You need growth capital if it's starting to be successful. Those growth capital dollars come in at higher valuation. You want to keep raising money at higher and higher valuations, otherwise you're diluting the early investors. So, you need an ecosystem of firms investing in the A rounds. Other firms decided, "We don't want to take the risk of the A rounds. We'll let somebody else take the risk out and we'll pay for it. We'll put in the money in the B round and the step-up valuation is still going to give us plenty of head room if the company goes public or gets bought, and we'll still make plenty of money." Then there's the C rounders and the mezzanine rounders and so on and so forth.

I learned all of that by building my company with Greg Campbell. Greg wanted to be the CEO, and I said, "Fine." So he ran the company. The first two, three years, we didn't know how to get out of our own way, but we learned how to run a company because we had this contract from Leybold that was flowing money in. We'd make mistakes but we had some ballast to be able to fix the mistakes. By the time it came around to raising VC money—and maybe we raised that round as late as 1989—Greg was now four years into it. He was ambitious. He was very smart. He learned about the business. And we could do it. So, the 1980s had these three elements, at minimum three elements professionally.

I had continued to do the fusion reactor studies and provide the guiding mileposts for the development of the technology of fusion energy. I had the experimental programs to understand the interactions of plasmas with surfaces, particularly for fusion energy devices. Then, I did the Plasma Institute. Then a company. So, okay, four things.

Build an institute that brings 15 academic colleagues with shared interests together. Form a Resnick Institute type of thing. The last thing was to build PMT, the company. All of that went on from 1980 to 1990. As I said, the IPO was in 1995 so that was 15 years after returning to California. I stayed at UCLA from 1980 to the end of 1993. All of those four things took place in that 12-, 13-year period.

ZIERLER: Did you see PMT and your academic work as a two-way street? In other words, what you were doing in the lab at the institute, was that relevant at all for the company? And were there innovations in the company that you could bring back to UCLA?

CONN: Obviously the company got started with the technology that was developed while I was at UCLA, and UCLA gave us the right to take it out and form a company and use it. They didn't want a license. I don't think they believed in it. And they didn't know so much about all of this stuff in those days. They just said, "Go ahead. You can go do it." But the technology that we ended up inventing, that was inspired to some degree by a colleague, Frank Chen at UCLA, who knew about these helicon sources. He had taken a sabbatical with a guy in Australia who had done some very fundamental work. But they had come back with the idea that you can't make a helicon wave work at m=0 mode, the fundamental mode. If m equals the mode number, we did m equal to zero. M equals zero is just uniform like this. M equal one is like this. M equal two is like this. And so on. They thought it wasn't doable. But we knew about the source and thought we could try something. We had a guy from Japan, Shoji Toruru, one of the most creative people, another postdoc in my group.

By the way, postdocs contributed a lot. From Dan Goebel, my postdoc in the early 1980's, we got the lanthanum hexaboride source going. With Shoji, we had this idea at the company that we could do the m equals zero source and he did some work that said it might work. We did not take that back to UCLA and use it in the lab.

How that came back to academia was with George Tynan, whom I told you was my student. That's another story. He went to do postdocs somewhere after finishing in 1992, and then he went to work at PMT in 1994, after I left. He went there for three or four years, say 1994 to 1997. He was at PMT when I hired him to be on the faculty at UC San Diego. He knew about the helicon sources, because he worked at the company.

When he came down to UC San Diego, he built a system like the one I had built with the lanthanum hexaboride source, but now the source was this RF source, a helicon source he had brought from PMT. So that's how the source got back to academia.

That proved to be a phenomenal source of plasma for the study of turbulence. George Tynan ended up running that damn thing for 20 years. He has done extraordinarily profound fundamental work on the nature of turbulence. Paul Bellan and Roy Gould would be tickled to see what he has done and to understand how to get it. Meaning they'd be pleased and admiring.

He has produced the understanding at the fundamental level of how heat and particles leave a hot plasma such as in a tokamak or a stellarator. He did it with this small device, with the helicon source, just like we built. It turned out that source had an enormous academic impact, but not by me. But by my student, who had worked at the company and then came to academia and built a source like it to do the work that he did on plasma turbulence. That was an amazing run of 12 or 13 years.

As I said, on the personal side, by the time I started getting to the late 1980s, life—I was brighter, psychologically brighter. I knew that I could lead, and when the opportunity at UC San Diego and when the opportunity came up at UC San Diego from Dick Atkinson to build a school of Engineering, I was ready. It's funny, if you read the front end of the story of From a Good Base to a Better Place, you read about how I came to come to UC San Diego.

It wasn't because somebody recruited me from UC San Diego. It was because of ITER, the giant international fusion program. I was a member of the technical advisory committee, another thing—that was in 1989. I was the American representative to the main technical advisory committee for that project. There was a Japanese person, a British person representing Europe, and a Russian person.

Where was I headed? Oh! ITER starts with the Gorbachev-Reagan summit in Reykjavik in 1985. By 1989, they have formed the project. They put together a technical advisory group. By the early 1990s, they want to build it, and they need a headquarters, and there are four countries involved. So, they decide to do an international competition to house the headquarters for the ITER design team. A guy at SAIC, a big defense contractor headquartered in San Diego at the time, Tom Dillon, whom I knew because his group participated in some of the reactor design studies that my group led, he asked to see me at UCLA in 1992, September.

What he came up to ask me was, would I consider moving my program to UC San Diego? That they had won this competition. First they won to be the U.S. entrant, and then the U.S. entrant won the competition with Japan, Russia, and Europe to be the headquarters. Now, they're going to build a headquarters in La Jolla. But they don't have any strength in fusion engineering. They've got some basic plasma physics would did work like that of Paul Bellan and Roy Gould at Caltech, but not hot plasma physics. Nice, good, wonderful people, but not fusion! [laughs] It's not fusion. And we need fusion engineering. The university partnering with SAIC made the proposal stronger, but they had no strength in fusion engineering. He came to ask me, would I move my program? I said, "Tom, I've already moved my program once. I don't want to repeat myself. Thank you for the—but no."

He said, "Would you at least talk to the chancellor?"—whom I did not know at the time—Dick Atkinson, who subsequently became president of UC. The story is told at the front end of the writing. He says, "Would you at least be willing to meet him and talk with him?" I thought, "Sure. What's to be lost? I'm not going to change my mind, but this is the chancellor of a major UC campus." I knew UC San Diego. It had wonderful people. "Okay." But I said to him, with some arrogance I've got international travel. I've got this, I've got that. But maybe when I get back, we could try to find a date in November." This was in September that he and I met. I didn't know at the time; he came to talk to me unsolicited by the campus. The campus had no idea he did this. He was betting I would come.

So, when I said I might be willing to meet with the chancellor, he went back and talked to Dick Atkinson and explained the situation and explained the opportunity. I had said to him at the time—by the way, the answer is not just to move the program, but they're searching for a dean. I might have an interest in that. If the chancellor were open to discussing that, well, maybe "no" could be turned to "yes."

Recently, Dick Atkinson, Tom Dillon and I had lunch, about two or three months ago. We were recounting this story, and a piece came up that I didn't know, which was that Tom came back from the meeting at UCLA and told Dick Atkinson about this and told him why he wanted me to come and who I was and what my reputation was and all that stuff. And he apparently told him that I might be more interested to come if the deanship were open or that the chancellor was interested in the deanship, to which Dick Atkinson apparently said, "Why the hell would he be interested in that?"

The answer was, I'm a builder. I could see in my bones what was possible. Anyhow, I come down in November and I meet Dick, and we have dinner. We have a long discussion, but the idea of dean doesn't come up. At the end of it, I say the same thing. "Dick, thank you very much for the dinner. I've really enjoyed talking but — I'm not going to repeat myself. And so the answer is still "no." And then he said, "Well, what if I could make you dean?" As I wrote, I could feel the energy rise inside. Aha! This guy wants to build a great place. I know how to build a great place. Wow! I can do this. But, you know, that's in my head. We're not exchanging anything about that. The rest of the story, I've written about; we can talk about it if you like next time. But the upshot is we met again, and he said, "Okay."

He wrote on a piece of paper, he wrote $3 million, and he put it on the top drawer of his desk in his office. He said, "If you come as dean, that's available to you. Nobody will know about it. You just ask my CFO, and it's there until you use it up." Well, that was a lot of money in 1993. It's like somebody getting six, eight million dollars to just start up today. So, I said, "Okay, I'm interested." He said, "But I can't just do this. [laughs] I have to do a national search. I have to do this. So, right after the first of the year, I'll put out an ad. I'm going to run it just for a month. We're going to close it a month later. You need to apply. Anybody else who wants could apply. And your job is to become one of the three finalists." That's what happened. I applied, got asked to come down to campus. I thought I had a very good campus interview. Da-da-da-da-da. And I got an offer. Which was not for enough money.

So, the offer was great, everything was good, but the total salary for 11 months was less than my academic year salary plus summer at UCLA. So, I would have to take a pay cut to do this. I called up Tom Dillon and said, "Look, the offer is great. There's only one problem. It's really thin on the salary side." Those were very tough times. In 1991, 1992, 1993, UC went through a massive budget cut. It was the end of the Cold War. Southern California got killed, and UC got killed, and UCLA got killed, and everybody else. We actually took a ten percent salary reduction in 1991, 1992. Upshot was Tom says, "Let me—give me a few days." He comes back and says, "We'll offer you a consulting agreement and we'll give you stock options in SAIC." Whoa! Those stock options, when I cashed them in in 2002, end up being worth over a million dollars.

So he provided a consulting agreement which filled in the balance of the cash flow. So, I was able through Tom Dillon and SAIC—this is how companies can help universities—have a consulting agreement that provided me with the financial resources I needed. They never asked anything of me. "Go run the school." That was good enough. You're bringing now your whole five-million-dollar program. That's as big as our ITER program. Good, no problem, bring that down here! We're all happy! So they never asked for much by way of doing anything specific for them, but they got their money's worth, and we both won. Again it's a case of Bob Conn always wins, but you win too. In this case, Tom won, and I won too. It was a great experience in being recruited. It had so many features to it, like private conversations with the chancellor that nobody knows about. I'm writing about it today because it's 30 years later. Everybody is retired. Tom Dillon is retired. I write about what he did and so on. I can say all this now because it's rear-view mirror sufficiently that writing about it is okay.

People are actually happy and encouraging me to write. Dick Atkinson encouraged me to write this. That kind of covers the 14 years from 1980 to the end of 1993. I transition from UCLA—I accept in June of 2003, and I need to stay at UCLA for the fall quarter, organize the transition, get the research grants moved again, get the people to move, as many as I possibly could, make sure everybody was happy. I had to deal with all of my UCLA students to make sure they could finish up properly at UCLA and not have to move to UC San Diego. Some of them did come down to work on the thesis at UC San Diego—we gave them space—but they were UCLA students, and they got their PhDs from UCLA. All of that had to be worked out. The machine, the big experiment that I moved, with the five-megawatt substation and the big lab, that took a year and a half to move. That was a big deal.

Because we needed to keep it productive at UCLA and then move it, we actually built a second machine so that while we were building the second machine the original machine was running at UCLA. Then, when we needed to move, and this new machine was up and running, we moved the old machine down and then we had two machines running. That was quite an 18-month period. The full transition was more than 18 months.

Then, I started transitioning the research program to others. I realized that to run a school, I did not believe I could divide myself and keep a major research program going. I knew that I had to put all my energy into building the school. I continued to make sure the research program was healthy, but that was because of my reputation. As time went on, I stopped going to the lab. I stopped going to the reactor studies research meetings, and so on. All of it got handed off to other people.

ZIERLER: Is that to say that that aspect of the transition to UC San Diego was easy for you? You didn't feel like you were foreclosing additional possibilities by leaving the field to some degree?

CONN: I think at that point I was 52, and I had been at the bench, so to speak, if I count grad school, since I started at 21—I had been at the bench 30 years. I felt like I had done what I could do, research-wise. And it was fun. Research was fun. But I didn't see myself making a new major breakthrough. So, it wasn't hard. I decided I'm going to do this thing, leading the School, and when I'm done with this, we'll see. When you start something like this, opportunities also come along. I think I had two different offers to be a provost during the time I was dean. I didn't accept either one, but I could have and would have moved before finishing the job at UC San Diego. That's what most people do. They're provost at some place, and then, what's the next step? President. That was one pathway forward.

In the end, I didn't want to be a department chair, and I didn't want to be a provost. I wanted to lead. Deans lead. Presidents lead. Provosts operate, chairs operate. I skipped over being chair, I skipped over being provost, and I didn't become president of anything, except my company, until I joined the Kavli Foundation.

The venture capital opportunity that arose at the end of my term was unexpected. Yet, it was the one that felt best, most exciting to do. When you're starting and you make these decisions about giving up this and giving up that—I was willing to take the risk that I'd be fine. I had become self-confident again. I had lots of the anxieties behind me, and I felt I could do lots of things and was confident that I could. This is why the parallel life story is interesting relative to the work story. Because in 2008, with the stock market crash and everything was going to hell in a hand basket, I get let go as a managing partner. There were only three of us left. We started with six partners, and we ended up three of us in the trenches trying to hold the thing together. Then, the two decided that one is dispensable. Now, I've got to go find something, and on top of needing to go find something, I've got a physical disability of my back and could hardly sit. That's what makes the interregnum so difficult. And I'm not a kid. I'm 65, 66. That was an unexpected, very hard period, but here we are.

The Retrospective Future of Scalable Fusion

ZIERLER: One last question to wrap up for today—in surveying your tenure at UCLA, these 12 or 13 years, to go back to this long joke about fusion energy always being 40 years into the future, did fusion energy by the time you accepted the position at UC San Diego—did it feel more achievable? If there's an element of ego involved here, did the field feel well enough mature that it didn't necessarily need your direct involvement anymore?

CONN: When I left UCLA and went down to UC San Diego, I remained chair of the Department of Energy's Fusion Energy Advisory Committee, the basic advisory committee to that portion of the Department of Energy's program. I did that until 1998 or something like that. My sense of fusion in those days was ITER was very large and very far away. The Department of Energy in the mid to late 1990s decided that it was going to go back to plasma physics and the DOE was not going to expand its program to move more rapidly towards technology and an energy source. That actually made it easier for me to say, "I did my bit. Time to move on." Because the government was saying, "We're going back to basic plasma physics. We don't think we can afford to develop fusion energy. We'll put our money into ITER, and what we do domestically will be more physics-based." I was chair of the committee that advised on that transition, but it was a necessary transition, and the Department wanted it. We just tried to guide them to do it in the best possible way, but we couldn't dissuade them from doing it. There's a difference.

That made it easier for me to hand off. The experiments, as I implied, continued. The reactor studies continued until 2008, 2009. They sort of stopped when Farrokh Najmabadi retired, originally my postdoc thirty years earlier, and now a professor at UC San Diego, retired then. So, I think the issue of stepping away from the technical work in the late 1990's, early 2000's -- I just felt I had done my bit. Fusion was still far off, and another ten years of me at the bench wasn't going to bring it any closer.

That calculus was clear to me at the time. Now, it's very interesting that now, fast forward 20 years—2002 to 2022, 2023—and it looks very different. Again, suddenly there's enormous interest in fusion engineering, the technology of fusion energy, and very new ideas about how to make fusion work. I'm excited by those. Had they been around 20 years ago, I might have made a different decision! Today, people are talking about building 20-tesla magnets out of high-temperature superconducting materials.

Twenty or thirty years ago, those were brittle things that were only being played with in a laboratory. Even though they were discovered and the Nobel Prize in the middle or late 1980s, they were not close to anything practical. Today, you can get a high-temperature superconductor that looks like a piece of—the conductor itself looks like a piece of fettuccine, and you can hold it like this and wiggle it, and it will go like that. It won't break. It's not brittle. It's ductile. So, there have been some tremendous technological advances in the 30 years since the mid 1990s. We're approaching 2025, so that will be 30 years total. Things are looking brighter in my view, and I've changed my view of the outlook about fusion because of it. That's an ironic thing about fusion? [laughs] Maybe it's more possible.

ZIERLER: That's right, there you go. Bob, that's a great place to pick up for next time. We'll learn what happens for you at UC San Diego, what this means for your career as a leader, where nuclear fusion goes. And obviously here now it's really time to think about this unique opportunity. You see yourself as a builder; what a unique opportunity for you to put that into action at UC San Diego. We'll take the story from there.

[End of Recording]

ZIERLER: This is David Zierler, Director of the Caltech Heritage Project. It's Wednesday, February 14, 2024. It's my great pleasure, at long last, to be back with Professor Robert Conn. Bob, as always, it's wonderful to be with you. Great to see you.

CONN: Well, thank you very much, David. And by the way, it happens to be Valentine's day, so you and your wife have a great day today. [Laugh] We're planning to go to dinner tomorrow night because tonight's impossible. [Laugh]

ZIERLER: Of course. Us, too. Great minds. I want to start today, chronologically we're in the early 1990s, the transition from UCLA to UC San Diego. I want to start, first, when you made the move to UC San Diego, did you retain your position as chair of the Fusion Energy Advisory Committee in D.C. at the Department of Energy?

CONN: I did. I did. That's a story in and of itself, so we can cover it now, or we can come back to then. How did the transition happen? What were the interactions about the job? It's a fascinating story.

ZIERLER: Yeah, so let's go into that now. Let's go into how you became chair of FEAC.

CONN: Okay. Well, I was chair because I'd been chair. And I'd been, off and on, chair of many Fusion Energy Advisory Committees. In the 1980s, it was called FEAC, Fusion Energy Advisory Committee. Every major division within the Science Directorate of the Department of Energy, which has got a $7 billion a year budget, has an advisory committee. Like, there's one for high-energy physics, there's one for basic energy science, for this and that. And so, I had both served on that committee, and did, if I remember, two stints as chair. In the middle to late 80s, I got asked to be the chair, and I had been a member of that committee for quite a while. And it was the primary committee that advised the Department of Energy on its fusion energy program. What it's doing, what changes should be made–and they would bring questions to us, and we would address them. And 1993, ‘94, that period turned out to be a very crucial period.

Exactly as I was thinking to move to UC San Diego and making all those arrangements, a very large change occurred in the fusion energy program of the United States. And I was chair of the primary advisory committee at the time, FEAC. The essence of it was that, after the 1994 elections, when Newt Gingrich and the Republican Party took over, there were big budget cuts. And actually, Clinton himself was trying to get the budget under control. I don't know if you realize this, but the last president to balance a budget was Bill Clinton in 2000. He had eliminated enough spending that revenue and spending matched in the fiscal year 2000. But that began, that began a downward trend–there was a certain agreement between the two parties with respect to cutting some features of government spending. All right, so the big change that occurred–and I stayed chair through this whole period of transition, which was another, roughly speaking, three years.

And after this occurred, and it had to be ‘95 just from the calendar, the Department of Energy decided to refocus the major fusion energy program, and they made the decision that the probability of fusion energy contributing to the nearer term was not high, and that we should focus the program back to more physics and less about energy and engineering of a fusion reactor. That was a big transition, and symbolically, that was reflected in the change of the title Advisory Committee. And so, it went from FEAC, Fusion Energy Advisory Committee, to FESAC, Fusion Energy Sciences Advisory Committee. And it was emblematic of shifting away from a program driving towards a goal of producing fusion energy at whatever period of time to more of a science program. That was a traumatic time for the fusion energy program, and it was the first time in roughly 15 years that the target of achieving near-term demonstration of fusion energy was taken off the table.

Now, part of this was, as we've discussed, in 1985, at the Reagan-Gorbachev summit in Reykjavik, one of the very positive things to come out of it, among other things, was a program called ITER. That stands for International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor. And we, and the Soviet Union, and the EU, of which Britain was still a part at the time, and Japan, were the four major players. The argument was, we will maintain our commitment to ITER, that's an international commitment, but that was now going to take up a good portion of the budget, and the budget was somewhat reduced at first. It recovered later. And so, the program was refocused mainly on plasma physics experiments and away from reactors and engineering. Now, we did continue in my research program area, although I handed it off in the 90s to other faculty we had hired. That would be part of the story at the school. But the reactor studies programs, continuing to try to understand what the fundamental engineering difficulties are to building a fusion reactor, that did continue. It was turned into a single national program. It had been multiple programs.

They consolidated it, reduced the budget. But my program was put in charge of the national program. First at UCLA, and then at UC San Diego, we were the program leaders of that now-national program, and it had–I don't know how many what is I'm saying -- but it had the labs and other universities, and we parsed out the work, and it worked out great. And that's how fusion engineering and fusion power reactor design was sustained over the decade after the change to focus most of the money, certainly the experimental money, on plasma physics experiments. So, I chaired the committee and got us through that transition, and about 1997, given my commitment to being dean of the school of engineering – and I had served for a fairly long time now, I agreed to help the transition but step back from leadership.

So in summary, they asked me in 1994 to stay another three or four years to make sure the program came out the other end well, that's a kudo to myself, and I shouldn't say it. They had confidence that if I were the chair, they would get a good outcome at the other end, given the circumstances and given what they had to do to repurpose the program to meet the new objective, now, more focused on the science and less focused on technology, engineering, and the goal of producing fusion energy in a reasonable amount of time. So, that was the story of FEAC to FESAC, and I think had it not happened, I would've stepped away earlier, given the commitment to my focus on building the School of Engineering at UC San Diego that, as the story will unfold, was truly a full-time job. And you'd be kidding yourself if you said, "I can do that, and do my research program, and do this, and do that." It's a decision that technical people have trouble making.

ZIERLER: Before we get to the transition itself, I want to ask, given Washington's commitment to ITER, how did it balance those priorities with the domestic fusion energy program, what was going on at the national labs?

CONN: In the domestic program, the United States had certain responsibilities with respect to the design of ITER and then to the delivery of the various components. The way it would work is, somebody would have to deliver the superconducting magnets, and that might be, say, Europe or Japan. And somebody would have to deliver the heating system, somebody would have to deliver the vacuum vessel. And this is inefficient. And that's part of the reason that ITER is costing as much as it is and taking as long as it is. But nonetheless, we had assigned to the United States the delivery of a set of components that were central to the machine working, right? And the labs–mainly the lab, and in some cases, the universities, depending on the problem–turned toward those problems. So, they may have been doing other things for the longer term, now they were going to focus whatever they were going to do on the engineering -- on how to build the components that we were responsible for delivering to the ITER program, and there were the Gantt charts, and schedules, and all of that. [Laugh]

So, that's how we met our commitment. Now, the balance of the rest of the budget was parsed out towards experimental activities, there was always a plasma theory program that was funded at the labs and at universities. But the monies weren't as large as they used to be. And at some point down the road, even a program that had been there from the very beginnings in the late 60s and early 70s, programs at Princeton, where the magnetic fusion energy program really began with Lyman Spitzer, and at MIT was a very early player in this fusion energy, fusion engineering program, and MIT was one of the earliest to have an academic program in that area. So were we in Wisconsin. And so, MIT had built a device called Alcator, and it was a very important experiment in the 1970s, and it established a certain kind of scaling law, which when you have a scaling law, it means you don't understand. It means you have empirical data; the data suggest that–it's like, how fast is the heat loss from a plasma? Well, it depends on a few factors. One of them is the density of the plasma.

And Alcator had discovered that at high magnetic fields, as they increase the density of the plasma, the confinement of energy got better. It looked like it got better linearly with the density. That's so counterintuitive because you think the denser it is, the more collisions there are. The more collisions there are, the faster stuff would leak out and diffuse. So, that was a big discovery, and MIT was responsible for it. Eventually, there were sequels to the experiment of the 70s. It was called Alcator A, then Alcator C, then Alcator C mod, for modified, and this went on for 30 or 40 years.

But within the last decade, the experimental program I'm talking about at MIT was canceled. And that's because it's expensive. And so, what happened is that there were casualties to the budget not growing, the cost of things goes up over time, and eventually, some things got squeezed out in order to ensure that we could meet our commitments to ITER and to the national program. And so, there has been a tension in the United States because things are getting canceled in order to meet the needs of the ITER project, but I think they've reached an equilibrium as far as I can tell now, in terms of the national program, and it's reasonably balance, and they have good leadership at the moment at the Department of Energy, and so we'll see how it goes.

ZIERLER: Let's move on to UC San Diego. By the early 1990s, were you putting out feelers, were you thinking about a research life or a career beyond UCLA?

CONN: So, that's a mixed question. Was I putting out feelers? Absolutely not. But was I privately and personally thinking about what was my next step? Yes. So, by the late 1980s and early 1990s, I began to feel that I was a bit repeating myself. We had done reactor studies and fusion engineering and created the field. "Okay, I don't want to do one more study of a fusion reactor with this variant or that variant." I was keen on our experimental program that I had gotten going at UCLA, and I moved that experimental activity to UC San Diego, and that program proved one of the most productive experimental activities in the whole fusion program. It was begun in 1982. It celebrated its 40th anniversary a year and a half ago. It's still going strong. And in fact, they're going to build a new machine, modeled after the early ones we built, to do big-time studies of how plasmas interact with the first wall of a fusion device, and that machine is going to get built at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

But the way you make the plasma, that will be the responsibility of UC San Diego. And that source is one that my student and I invented in the late 80s. And we used that source, the helicon source, to build our company. It was not a high-power source. You didn't need high power. What you needed was uniformity across the wafer as the wafer size was growing from six inches to eight inches, to 12 inches, right? That was the late 80s and early 90s. And we invented a way of doing that that was pretty spectacular. And the company that I built based on it with my student was successful enough to have had an initial public offering. You've got to have something to have an IPO on NASDAQ.

Okay, so, that invention turns into the source 25 years later of a big experiment targeting ITER to find out what happens when plasma of high power interacts with materials. And the reason they're building it at Oak Ridge is, they want to understand if they do deuterium and tritium–tritium's radioactive–how you recover the tritium that hits and embeds in the wall?

How much gets embedded? How much comes out? How do you get out what does become embedded? Otherwise, the inventory just goes up, and you have a buildup of radioactive tritium. So, that's an open question. It's a deep one in materials science and interaction of plasmas with materials. And this machine is going to get built over the next five years and have another decade. So, 15 years from now, there'll be PISCES X, Y, Z. PISCES was the name of the experimental machines, and we called it the PISCES Lab. We didn't call it the Conn Lab. In biology, they'd call it the Baltimore Lab, named after the lead person. We never did that. We think not to do that in physics and engineering. So, it was called the PISCES Lab named after the device that we had created to first begin to study this very crucial issue in fusion engineering of how plasmas interact with the surfaces and components of what you're going to build a machine out of.

Doing Something New at UC San Diego

ZIERLER: Overall, obviously, you wanted to move on. If there was a dean position open at UCLA, do you think you would've stayed?

CONN: So, was I looking for something new? I had done all these things, and I felt like I was ready to do something maybe in a leadership way. I had always led things and built things. I built institutes at UCLA, at Wisconsin. But I didn't have a targeted direction. I was just itching, right? I seem to have–seven-year itch or a ten-year itch. So, I seem to have a ten-year itch. Every ten years, I go to something else. And we were coming into 1990. I started in ‘70, I moved to UCLA in ‘80. By the late 80s, I was having my ten-year itch. Now, I was older, I was more mature, and I was thinking, "What could I do?" But I wasn't putting out feelers. You put out feelers by letting people whom you know in a direction you think you might like to go to keep you posted about opportunities that may be coming up and to think about you for such opportunities, perhaps suggest to people, "Well, you might want to talk to this guy, Bob Conn." I didn't do that.

So, the story is that I was, in a sense, prepared, and there's an old saying that luck favors the prepared mind. That's a very important thing. In almost everything, if you're ready, you can grab the brass ring. If you're not prepared, and the brass ring comes, it'll come and it'll go, and you won't even know you missed it. And that's the difference between a prepared and unprepared mind. That's a powerful–whatever we call those phrases. Luck favors the prepared mind. And my prepared mind was that I was itching for something that I felt would be exciting and where I could really make a difference. And I didn't have any interest to go to industry. My spinout company was still running, I was still involved with it. So, the next thing was not for me to go to some big company or do something like that.

And so, the story of how I got to San Diego. I was aware of the dean's position being open. In ‘92, ‘93, it was a division of engineering at the time at UC San Diego, and that person who was dean had served ten years and had wanted to step away. And so, UC San Diego had begun to do a search for a new dean of engineering. And I knew that. I knew that in 1992, that was when they started looking. But I really didn't do anything about it. And I will tell you, ten years earlier, when I was not ready, in 1982, when they made engineering a division, they did a search at UC San Diego, and I applied to the job and didn't get it. Didn't even get an invite to go down and talk to them. So, this is a story of how much difference a decade makes. Come 1990, a decade later, I get a visit from a fellow from a big defense contractor, SAIC, Science Applications International Corporation. It was founded in the late 1960s as a spinout from General Atomics in San Diego, and the leader of the leaders within that company was Bob Beyster.

And Bob was remarkable as a physicist, and he went off and developed this company. And at the time, in the early 1990's, it was a five-billion-dollar a year defense contractor. The linkage of the story is–I have to backtrack a little bit. Once ITER got going, a big project like that, they typically have advisory committees of one kind or another. And they decided they needed a technical advisory committee to advise the leadership and the countries. Technically, how was the project going? Well, that's a big deal. And each country nominated one person to be a member of this technical advisory committee. It was kind of a PAC. So, I became the United States representative on the PAC, and it was one person from the EU, one person from Japan, and one person from the Soviet Union. It was still the Soviet Union at the time.

And that was probably in ‘87, ‘88, and I continued with that. That's why I wrote these Scientific American articles with my three other colleagues, though mostly, I wrote it, about ITER, and that got published in Scientific American in 1992. I think it was the first article about this big project that was targeted at the public as opposed to a scientific article in a journal. So, where are you going to have the headquarters? How is this all going to work, ITER? In the late 80s, they kind of had things going in a little bit of a chaotic way, but they appointed an overall director, Paul Rebut from France, so from the EU. Paul pulled together an international team. They were operating–Paul was, at that time–I think it was still in France because the JET experiment of Europe, Joint European Torus, which he had led from the beginning but had stepped down to become the first director of ITER.

But right now, Paul Rebut, who was a phenomenal engineer–if you want to know why the French are so good at both physics and engineering, and particularly engineering, the people who go through Polytechnique, they are stunning, and Paul was one of those people. So, he was an engineer and designer par excellence, and he knew enough physics to figure the thing out. So, now, they've got the team coming together. They've got to get them all to one place so that they can actually work together. This is way before Zoom and the internet. [Laugh] Internet's just hardly coming into being, right? We had email, maybe. So, there was a competition for where to house the headquarters and bring the international team together. And each country ended up doing an internal call for proposals, so in the United States, there was a call for proposals for a location for the ITER design team internationally and for the proposal to at least be the one to manage the site. They weren't going to hire the people, that was being done by Paul Rebut. The technical team was being pulled together.

But what about everything else? And so, in the United States, SAIC, this company I mentioned, made a proposal to manage the headquarters, and they asked UC San Diego if they wouldn't be a partner in this. Now, I think it was because they're an industry, and a lot of the fusion program still was taking place at universities. MIT, Wisconsin, San Diego had physics, Berkeley, etc. And so, anyway, he partners with UC San Diego, and they win. First, they win to be the proposal from the United States, and then they submit it in the international competition for proposals now from four countries, and the United States wins. And so now we are going to host the international ITER design team. Big deal. And SAIC gets the contract. Where are they going to house it? Well, they're going to house it on the mesa just north of UC San Diego campus.

Basically, there are a lot of buildings built there for startup companies, and young companies, and what have you, and one of those buildings was perfect for housing the ITER design team. So, now, the guy who led that proposal was a senior vice president, and his name was Tom Dillon. And I'd known Tom from the 80s and fusion reactor design study. In fact, SAIC was one of those companies who later became part of the reactor studies when it went national, but we had relationships with them in the 80s. And so, this confluence of the United States winning the bid to host the international ITER design team, and SAIC being the lead company, and Tom, with UC San Diego as a partner. Once they won, Tom, to his everlasting credit, said, "How do I really engage UC San Diego? They don't have any strength in fusion engineering. They don't have anything. But it would be important that UC San Diego have a role in this and have some activities going on." And all UC San Diego had was basic plasma physics, which this team did not need except for one person, Marshall Rosenbluth. Now, Marshall was called the Pope of plasma physics for a very good reason.

And I won't go into Marshall, but I will tell you one Caltech-connected story. In the late 40s, people wanted to calculate the cross-section for beams of electrons colliding with each other. SLAC at Stanford is an electron beam accelerator where electron beams collide with electrons at super high energy, and then they make fundamental particles. And a bunch of Nobels came from that. That was in the 60s. So, a very fundamental question was, what is the cross-section, which is what they call the measure of the probability of, if I have two electrons hitting each other at a certain energy in the center of mass, how do they scatter? What happens if they hit each other and make other fundamental particles, whatever they may be? Which they do. Feynman had a graduate student who did that calculation in 1949. And Marshall did that calculation. And it turned out that the Feynman calculation was wrong, and Marshall Rosenbluth's calculation was right.

ZIERLER: What did Feynman miss?

CONN: I don't know. Because he had a student working on the problem, and somewhere in the math, they made some assumption or other such that the number that they got for the cross-section as a function of energy was incorrect. And Marshall got it right. So, what they did wrong is sort of less important than Feynman made a mistake. Now, we all make mistakes, and Feynman made his mistakes, too. And this was one of them. But it shows you the scale of the brain of Marshall Rosenbluth. I love the guy. He went, in 1951, totally committed to America's defense, went to Los Alamos, and he was the one who calculated what the yield would be from the first hydrogen bomb explosion. In the process of doing that, he actually, with his wife at the time, who was also a mathematician, invented the Monte Carlo method. Invented the Monte Carlo.

ZIERLER: There was no Monte Carlo before him?

CONN: Not before Marshall.

ZIERLER: Wow.

CONN: And it was in order to calculate neutron transport and what was going on in a nuclear weapon. So, it was all classified. And a lot of people credit Herman Kahn, the Hudson Institute guy, he was a futurist, with creating that idea, but actually, it was Marshall. Anyway, beside Marshall, who at that point, had come onto the faculty at UC San Diego, he did two different stints on the faculty, they didn't have any strength. And so, Tom Dillon knew where the strength was in fusion engineering in the country, and it was just up the road at UCLA. And so, he called me up sometime in the summer of ‘92 and asked if he could come up and see me. He had something he wanted to talk to me about. And I said sure.

In September of ‘92, he came up, and what he wanted to talk to me about was, "Look, we just won this headquarters. We've got this partnership with UC San Diego. But we don't have any strength in fusion engineering. And it would be a good thing for both the University and the project to have nearby people who knew about fusion reactors, knew about fusion engineering. You, Bob, you're the American representative on the technical advisory committee. You'd sit on top of this thing. Why don't you come to San Diego, move your program, and life will be great?"

And I said, "Tom, I've moved this program once, from Wisconsin to UCLA, ten years ago. I don't want to repeat this." And I had been thinking, "What is my next thing?" My next thing was not to repeat myself. So, I listened carefully, we had one full nice conversation, but in the end, I said, "Tom, no. The answer is no." And he said, "Well, I get it. But look, the chancellor's a terrific guy," however he phrased it. "His name is Dick Atkinson." I didn't know Dick at the time. He was chancellor of UC San Diego. "Why don't you come down and just have a conversation with him?" And I said, "Well, what's he going to do?" [Laugh] "I don't know. You should have a conversation." And I said, "Look, I'm in the UC system. A conversation with a chancellor can't be harmful. It might be interesting. They might have something up their sleeve, I don't know. Okay, I'll agree to have a meeting with the chancellor. But" I said, with some arrogance, [Laugh] "I got international travel, I got this, I got that." This is September. "I can't do it until November." "It's okay, we'll find a date."

And we did. And so, in November of that year, I went down to see Dick Atkinson. Now, I got reminded recently of another piece of this conversation that I had forgotten, and I was reminded of it in a reminiscence between Tom Dillon, myself, and Dick Atkinson at a lunch we had six months ago. And we were recounting the stories. And Tom said to me, "You said one other thing besides ‘no' in that conversation we had at UCLA in September of 1992. You said that you knew that UC San Diego was searching for a new dean and that I might be interested in that." That was new and different. So, I did tell him that, but I'd forgotten. He was the first person I said anything about this to. But it was maybe as an interesting opportunity, and that was why I agreed to have the first conversation.

So, "Okay." And I learned, but did not know it at the time, that Tom Dillon had not been sent to talk to me by UC San Diego. He did it on his own, betting on the come. And he then came back, and he made an appointment to see Dick Atkinson, they knew each other well, and told Dick about this meeting. And he told him–this is what he recounted at lunch six months ago, he told Dick that I wasn't interested in coming just to move my program.

It was the best program in the country, and it would be great if it was here at UC San Diego. But we're not going to get it. "But" he said, "Bob said he might have some interest in this deanship that you're searching for." He told Dick that. "And you know what Dick's reaction was? ‘Why the hell would he be interested in that? He's this big technical guy, why is he interested in something that's administrative in leadership?'" And he didn't know me, so he didn't know why I would have an interest.

Anyway, this is in the back of Dick's mind as part of this story, but I don't know that. So, I go down to have a dinner with him, and we have a long conversation about the campus and what his vision is for the campus, and this, and that, and the other thing. And about fusion and the role at San Diego. But he never mentions anything about the deanship. And so, we get to, let's call it, dessert, and at that point, he asks me to call him Dick, so I called him Dick.

"It's a wonderful campus, and I understand all this. But I've done this before. I've moved a big program. I don't want to do it again, so the answer is still no." And then he said to me, "Well, what about if I were to think about appointing you dean of the engineering division?" It was a division at the time. Okay, so, now, as I wrote in my notes, I could feel it in my bones. This was an opportunity. Why? Because I knew the faculty at UC San Diego in engineering. They were strong. They were Caltech-built. The founders of engineering at UC San Diego came from Caltech. Sol Penner, Bert Fung, people like that. Great people. So, they had set it up like engineering science in the 1960s. They went down there in 1964. And they weren't allowed to have a school of engineering or a division. Berkeley and UCLA told the state, "We produce enough." So, they didn't even make a division. They had two departments that were, like, applied electrophysics and applied engineering science, and that was all they were allowed to do. So, the engineering was very tightly tied to basic science.

Those are good genes, but they don't make a great school of engineering. And so, as I may have mentioned, in ‘93, they were ranked 44 in the United States. They weren't known. The people were known. They had a bunch of members of the National Academy. But as a program, they were the size of the Division of Engineering today at Caltech, 90 faculty. They weren't ranked like Caltech. They weren't even close. So, I knew–and this is why I said in my bones, I got excited. I knew that they had intrinsic strengths that, if properly utilized and built upon, could lead to making an enormous difference. I said to Atkinson, "Well, that might be interesting. We should discuss that more." He explained that he felt he had great science at UC San Diego at that point in biology, physics, chemistry. They were terrific. And they had Nobel Prize winners and all the rest. So, he had great science, and he knew that. But he also had engineering. It was not great, and he knew that, too.

And he had Stanford in mind. He had spent his academic career in the 50s and 60s at Stanford, and his vision of a great university is, it has great science, great engineering, great business, and great law. And then, everything else becomes great because of those four things. But that's what you needed. That's what he wanted. And he had great science but not great engineering, and he was trying to do these other things, too. So, I knew from that description that he'd be very supportive if we could work something out. Because what he wanted was a great school of engineering, and what I saw in the conversation was an opportunity to build a great school of engineering. That comes along rarely. And so, we concluded the dinner with, "Well, let's meet again and be more serious about this."

And so, we set up another visit in December of 1992, and I came down. This time, we met in his office. And without going through everything, he wrote a number, and it was, for you, $3 million. And that was a lot of money even then, right? It's probably like $6 or $10 million today. And he said, "If you come, this will be available to you. All you have to do is talk to my financial guy. It'll be known by you, me, and him. That's it." And he took this piece of paper, and he put it in his top drawer. Very effective. He's a cognitive scientist and a psychologist. He knows how to motivate. So, beautiful trick. I always remembered that.

He said, "Bob, I have to do a search. We had been doing a search, we closed it, didn't come up with anybody I wanted. We were going to appoint somebody internally. I'll reopen the search. I'll get an ad put here, there, and everywhere. It'll close in a month. Your job is to apply within that month and then make the list of the final three." Because he would ask for an unranked list of whoever the three finalists were. And so, I did. I did the formal application. They had a search committee. He appointed Bob Dynes, an eminent condensed-matter physicist, as chair. He had been many years at Bell Labs and had come to UC San Diego in the late 80s. Bob would go on to be both chancellor and then president of the University of California.

ZIERLER: Did you know Bob?

CONN: I did not know Bob. And he was chair of the physics department at that point, but he was doing condensed-matter physics at a very fundamental level, low-temperature physics, and I wasn't doing any of that, so I had no reason that I would actually know him. Didn't matter. When Dick wanted something done, and he wanted it to come out a certain way, he would appoint Bob. [Laugh] And so, I came down, and I met with the committee. I think I came down twice. They invited me for a second visit. I met everybody that's appropriate to visit, faculty, academic senate leadership, this, that, and the other thing. And there were a couple of other very strong candidates. And Dick had said to me, by the way, one other piece that's very important, "With your coming, we're going to turn it from a division of engineering to a school of engineering." I got approval for that. That was a big deal.

ZIERLER: Administratively, what does that mean, from a school to a division?

CONN: Except for Caltech, which calls everything divisions, the world does not use division for the name of major subject area schools. It's a law school, it's a business school, it's an engineering school. engineering can be an engineering college because they also have undergraduate activities. Law and business don't have undergraduate activities. So, if you have undergraduate and graduate activities, you can be called a college, where the college is your undergraduate element, then the graduate school is the graduate element, and you can use either word. That's an interesting point. They were going to call it a school of engineering. They had a school of medicine. Most places have schools of medicine. A few have a college of medicine. School means an academic unit at a large scale that encompasses many subject-matter specialties. You're not big enough at Caltech. Caltech's never been big enough to justify calling things schools. And it's so flat.

And people are working with people across all these lines at Caltech. You just use divisions so you can keep track of things and run the place. [Laugh] They don't have a school of medicine, they don't need a school of physics, a school of science. They just run the divisions. And that Caltech model was what San Diego borrowed. But when they got large, it really didn't work. Now, I'll tell you, to this day at San Diego, the social sciences are called the Division of Social Science, not school. The science is a Division of Physical Science, Division of Biological Sciences. They still are using the historic word division. The only place that school is in use on the general campus at UC San Diego is engineering. In the medical school, they use school. They have a School of Pharmacy, Medical School, and so on. So, this was symbolic to announce, "We're going to try to do something major in engineering."

ZIERLER: What do you think Dick's motivations were? Is he looking north? Is he looking to UCLA and Berkeley, and he wants to operate at that level?

CONN: He wants a great campus. He wants a great university. His job is to hire people, work with donors, and do all the things that a president or chancellor does so that San Diego is ranked with Berkeley and UCLA, ranked among the top 10, 15 universities in the United States. And it is today. It is. And it's the only campus other than Berkeley and LA that is ranked that high. Think about it. Not Santa Barbara, not Riverside, not Santa Cruz, not Irvine. It's a big three, small seven. And the big three are Berkeley, LA, and San Diego. So that happened, and he laid the groundwork for all of that. Engineering was a piece of the puzzle. If he was going to be a great university, he needed great engineering. As I said, he had great science, and he knew it. He didn't have great engineering, and he knew that, too, and he knew he needed it. So, this was his effort to create that element of greatness. He needed to do other things in other places for all the boats to rise, but you do it kind of element by element. And this was his effort to raise that boat.

ZIERLER: And you loved it. You wanted to do it. It was so attractive to you.

CONN: Yeah, I could see it. I had a vision from day one. I had a strategy, and I've written about it. I start the story by, "How many Academy members were there in San Diego and in LA, where I was? At UCLA, there were four and 125 faculty in engineering. At San Diego, there were eight and 90 faculty. So, they had twice as many Academy members, and more on a per faculty basis. If I were to come, I think it would go from eight to nine at San Diego. And UCLA's number would go down from four to three. So, with a smaller faculty, they would have twice the number of Academy members. It tells you something, right? So, the bones are good. But a lot of other things need correction. They don't walk like a duck, they don't talk like a duck, they don't look like a duck. They've got crazy names for their departments. So, nobody knows how to rank them. "What are they really doing? Who's doing what?"

Very hard for the outsiders to know. So, if the dean at Caltech gets asked to rank San Diego–which is what happens, this is how they come up with the ranking–they'll never put San Diego in the same boat as Berkeley or UCLA. Not the way they were organized, not the way they were seen in the world. But that, I could see how to fix. And I could fix it, in addition, by saying, "I'm going to need a lot of faculty. This is a UC campus. It serves the state. It needs to be big. It's not Caltech. 90 is too small." And Dick was fine with that. And when I left nine years later, we had 175 faculty from 90. So, the challenge was phenomenal, and I got an offer in May, I agreed in June. UCLA tried to keep me, and they couldn't. I actually had a problem with the salary because they couldn't offer me–my 12-month salary would be less that my academic year [??] salary at UCLA. Right?

So, I called up Tom before saying yes - Tom Dillon. The final piece of this story about how I came. And I said, "Tom, look, it's a terrific opportunity. They want me to come. I want to come. They've got problems with the board of regents and so on. The maximum they could offer me is this number. It's short by some other number." So, he said, "Well, let me think about it and let me get back to you." And within three or four days, he got back to me. "We'll hire you as a consultant at this amount per year, and we're going to give you stock options in SAIC in addition." And they really didn't demand a day a week. [Laugh] Basically, Tom was true to his word. He wanted UC San Diego to have a strong program in engineering, and if I came, I would bring the fusion program, which would solve the other problem that he wanted to solve, right? And so, everything got fixed by Tom Dillon. I don't even think the University realizes what a powerful university-industry partnership that turned out to be.

Because he did that, I came. Because I came, we ended up where we were. And if I didn't come, I don't think they would've gotten there. And if they'd hired anybody from inside, they would never have gotten there. So, it's very clear these kinds of opportunities that happen, they're the backstories nobody knows about that actually make the world go round in a lot of instances.

And so, Tom Dillon fixed the financial problem, and I said yes, and planned to move in ‘93, and did. I took the fall quarter of '93 at UCLA to prepare everything, personal move, and my groups move. They gave me a startup package, it had to be five-million-dollars. They had a five-megawatt substation built outside the place where my lab was going to go. Big investment on campus for a single laboratory. [Laugh] Things like that. So, as far as I was concerned, the campus did everything that it could, the vice chancellor for academic affairs, the provost was terrific, Marjorie Caserio, she was a chemist.

And so, I came, and I planned several things. I had moved my group. I was committed to moving my group and having a strong fusion energy engineering program at UC San Diego. Whether I stayed with it forever was not the point. I could make it, I could transfer something that was great, and then I could hire leadership for it. So, over the period of four years from ‘94 to ‘98, that's exactly what happened. We moved a five-million-dollar research program on a per annum basis, which was a very big research program at that time. It was probably the biggest research program in the school of engineering. [Laugh] And I had, like, 30 people. I had professional research people, not postdocs, and then I had postdocs, and then I had graduate students.

And we worked all that out. For the younger grad students, I said, "Look, either move to San Diego, and you can be with our group, or stay and find a different advisor." For the more senior ones, I had to stay their advisor, and I did. And I said, "But you come to San Diego, we'll have your stipend, you'll live there, but you'll get your PhD from UCLA. And I would go back and be the chair of the committee, and you can do that inter-campus-wise." So, the research program moved. Very importantly, in my mind, I spent the fall–must've made five visits to campus. I met all the chairs of the different departments. "Where are you? Where do you want to be? What are your needs? What would you like to be in five years?" Those sorts of questions.

ZIERLER: What commonalities were you getting in the responses?

CONN: Varied. So, they had a great bioengineering program built around a faculty member they brought from Caltech, Bert Fung. Bert Fung is called the father of biomechanics, and he is. And at the time, he was the only member here that was in all three branches of the National Academy - Engineering, Sciences, and Medicine. And he was just a stunning researcher. He started out in aerospace engineering at Caltech, so he was over with the Hans Liepmann crew in the Guggenheim Building. And Sol Penner, who was also there and was the combustion expert He came down to build the engineering sciences on the mechanical aerospace side of the game, and he hired Bert. So, they had people like that, and they had just hired a second fabulous guy named Shu Chien from Columbia. And Shu was a member of the Engineering Academy and Medicine Academy, not the Sciences Academy yet.

He was the chair, and he had organized – they were buried in a department called Applied Mechanics and Engineering Science shortened to AMES. And they had, inside it, bioengineering, chemical engineering, structural engineering, aerospace engineering, and mechanical engineering. They had five departments inside one rubric called AMES. Five mechanics and engineering sciences. Any wonder there was an issue? But they had already gotten faculty senate approval, and Shu Chien led the charge, to become a separate department of bioengineering.

And so, I met with Shu, and he told me his ambitions, and I looked into who the people were, and it was phenomenal. And so, the first decision I made, February of 1994, it was on my desk, approval for a new department of bioengineering, and I couldn't sign it fast enough. It was just absolutely what was needed.

ZIERLER: Was biotech already becoming a force in San Diego?

CONN: Yes, yes, yes. So, the biotech spinout came a lot from the med school. But remember that at San Diego, it's not like Caltech. You're not surrounded by any great nonprofit research institutions UC San Diego is great today, but it wasn't always great. But, it was surrounded by the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and the Scripps Research Institute, which actually predate the University. Salk is about the same age, and Scripps Research Institute predates the formation of the University. Tremendous strengths in the biological sciences. And that was why science was so strong at San Diego very early on, and to this day. And so, there were company spinouts. And the first major spinout occurred in the late 70s or early 80s, and it was a startup backed by Kleiner Perkins, and Brook Byers was the partner. And it got bought by Lilly for a big number. I can't remember the number, but it was a big number.

And it was the first big biotech win in San Diego. But what happened is, San Diego grew in biotech like Silicon Valley did in electronics and computing. It had extraordinary strength in the biological sciences. Not just the University. That was a prerequisite. But they were complemented by with two phenomenal research enterprises in Scripps and Salk. And so, it has been a powerhouse of investment, spinout, etc., going back to the mid-80s, early to mid-80s. So, that's been going on 40 years.

So, the school. What happened with the school? You asked me were there some who were primed and ready to go, and I said bioengineering was ready to go. The rest of that department–chemical engineering was weak. Structures and applied mechanics were very strong. Fluid mechanics was very strong. Combustion was very strong. So, mechanical, aero, structural, very strong. Chemical, weak. But they didn't want to split. They were the one of those who say, "Who's this new guy on the block who wants to cause us to change? We're not changing!" And I had to work almost four years, with patience, before I could get that divided up. And eventually, it divided up into three, which is a separate story.

I tell the following story that's pertinent here. Whenever a person moves to a new place, so is an outsider, and he's brought in to make change, and people know it, and he goes and meets every department, which I did–and I told them what my ideas were. "I want the school to be great, I want you to be great. You tell me two or three areas where you're going to be the best in the United States, we will hire a cluster of faculty, add to your current strength, and you will achieve your objective. I'm not telling you what to pick. I don't know enough. You tell me the two or three areas that we're going to focus on and be great." I knew that you didn't have to be great in everything. I also knew you didn't need to hire anybody to teach anything at the undergraduate level. Faculty are smart, they can teach it.

What are you going to be great at? Now, in mechanical and aero, they were great in fluid mechanics and combustion, they were great in engineering materials, applied mechanics, which was great at Caltech, too. And structural engineering was stunningly good, and they were focused on earthquake engineering. So, they had these areas that were pretty strong. "Let's double down and make sure the world sees, ‘You hired this person from that place? Whoa, look what happened at San Diego!'" I used to call it the wow factor. If we hire somebody, and MIT or Stanford go, "Wow, look what happened," that's a win. And that's how you do some of this stuff. So, the story I tell is, I had these ideas, I met with them, and the reactions were, some said, "I love it. How fast can I get on this train? How fast can I run behind you?" That's about a third of the effort.

Another third will say, "Well, sounds like a good story, but I'm not really sure. But I won't get in the way. I won't make trouble. I'll just watch and see what happens."

And then, there's a third who are saying, "Over my dead body." Now, if you're in industry, and you're in business, you end up getting rid of most of that third. And you can do it. But in the academic world, you can't do it. But it doesn't mean the psychology isn't very similar. And this fractionation occurs. Where my department appointment was, was engineering sciences. Applied Mechanics, Engineering Sciences, called AMES. They were the ones who were basically, "Over my dead body." The electrical engineering people were, "How fast can I run?" And the computer science said – we'll watch but not object. We had three departments at the time, that's it. Because they had so many other major areas buried inside one.

So, the computer science and engineering department said, "Well, we won't do anything to get in the way, but we're not sure of this story. We always did things differently than this guy is talking about, so we'll watch and see. We won't do harm, but we'll see." So, what did I do? I told everybody the same thing. "Tell me the three areas you're going to build on that are going to make you higher profile than you are today/ And it's nice to be known as a great place. There's nothing wrong with that. Caltech's never complaining. As far as I can tell, MIT doesn't complain. So, you tell me, I'll back you." That was the bargain.

And Electrical Engineering came to me right away. How fast can we run? Wireless communications was just emerging. There were two giant revolutions when I started as dean, just at the front end of both revolutions. One was the internet, and the other one was wireless communications. Simultaneous revolutions. Never happened before. And that was why the 90s were what they were, and why we got the great bubble, and all of that. So it was clear, if you aren't strong in wireless communication, you aren't going to be a great EE department down the road. And so, they picked wireless communications. Then, they picked one or two other areas, and I said, "Great, let's go. Here's how many faculty do we need. I'll provide them. Go search." And I also knew there were other areas in the EE department that were weak. Like, they wanted to do systems and control theory. That's an important subject matter in both mechanical and aerospace engineering, control systems. Also, in electrical engineering. They were weak in that area in electrical engineering, and I didn't think they could make themselves strong. So, I wouldn't do harm by hurting anybody, but we weren't going to build that program in that department. We ended up building it in the mechanical engineering group.

So here, I didn't do it in EE. I did it in AMES. I hired a leader, Bob Skelton from Purdue, who became a National Academy member, and who had great taste in people. He hired four other people. We put down five people within three years. And suddenly, controls and systems was a big element of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at UC San Diego, and everybody knew because they all knew the person I hired from Purdue, Bob Skelton. So, that was a technique.

You could go with that technique. A new area, you hire the leader, you let the leader use their tastes to fill in the rest of the team. Sometimes, you do it a little differently. But in any case, that was the model. The other thing I said that helped with the faculty, and I remarked about it to everybody throughout the period, was, at a great university in a great school, the faculty are everything. Now, that might sound like pandering to the faculty because you want their support. It's not. It's the truth. You hire a great faculty, you get a great reputation, the students want to go there. Students follow the faculty, not the other way around. So, if you're going to be great, as Caltech is great, and MIT is great–they're great because they've got great faculty. And then, they attract great students because they've got great faculty. [Laugh] And the great faculty do great things, and it's sort of a virtuous cycle. But you've got to get there. So, the faculty were number one.

And the second principle, which I think helped me a lot with the faculty and getting their support and getting over their worries, was, I had a story about–We have high respect for the variety of research styles that faculty can have. They can have small groups, medium-sized groups, large groups. They can have a little money, medium-sized money, a lot of money, doesn't matter.

What matters? The quality of the work that comes out, the impact it has, and as a result of those two things, the impact it has. If you have quality, and the quality leads to discoveries that make impact, and the impacts are recognized, that means they're important impacts. Otherwise, they wouldn't have real impacts. I said I don't care if you have $100,000 a year or $5 million a year. And from me, saying that, the faculty took great solace because there were many extraordinary people who just had NSF grants, maybe a few of them. NSF grants don't add up to a lot. $150,000 a year maybe, stuff like that. Then, there were people like me with $5 million a year, and there was everybody in between. What they knew is, I was saying I wouldn't promote myself unless the quality, impact, and recognition of my work was as good as those of the rest of the faculty who had quality, impact, and recognition. It wasn't about the money.

And that, I think, sent the big signal. There are many places where people with big dollars coming in, the university goes, "Big dollars. We care about big dollars," and they get special treatment. And the impact and quality of the work may be okay. I'm not saying it's bad. But it may not have the impact of somebody who makes a fundamental discovery that becomes a breakthrough, and a field changes. That's impact. So, those kinds of principles worked, and many, many other things. And over a period of two, three, four years, we set up a Center for Wireless Communication, we ultimately got an Institute for Bioengineering, and so on. And as we grew, opportunities came our way. Can I talk about two of them?

ZIERLER: Please.

CONN: Let me just pick three. Bioengineering, we knew it was great, but it needed to scale up. Then, I mentioned wireless communication. Qualcomm is a San Diego-headquartered company, and it was leading this revolution. "What are we going to do in that area?" We needed to focus there and made a big impact on the electrical engineering department. The third was computing because San Diego had the San Diego Supercomputer Center, funded by the National Science Foundation, but they weren't linking it very well with the computer science department. So, the computer science was good but not great. But we could work with CSE and the Computer Center to push the internet.

And finally, O had to break up AMES to make a great mechanical and aerospace engineering department and a great structural engineering department built around earthquake engineering. And if we did those things, we'd have five or six departments, all of whom could be ranked.

So, right at the beginning, I went to see Irwin Jacobs, who was the CEO of Qualcomm at the time, talked to him about my ideas. I asked him whether he thought a Center for Wireless Communications would be an important way to build the activity within the school. He agreed. I asked if he would help. He agreed. And what he did is, he called 15 CEOs and got them all together at UC San Diego, and we proposed forming a Center for Wireless Communications. The University had never had any significant industry support. They did in one area, magnetic recording research, computer memory. And IBM was a big supporter. Other than that, nothing. These people were going to pay $50,000 to $75,000 a year to be a member of a Center for Wireless Communications. And we hired a director and four or five faculty in that area. The director was Tony Acampora from Bell Labs, and we hired Larry Larson from Hughes Research who was great in analog.

A phone has an antenna. It sends out a wireless signal. It's a wave, right? It's analog. Even though everything else is digital, central elements of the technology are analog. So, we needed strength in analog chip design. We built that. And so it went. By picking a focus area–and in this model–saying, "What are the critical subjects I have to be great in within that focus area?" And then you hire in those areas, in this example all focused on wireless communications. And in the end, you get greatness. And that's what happened.

Bioengineering, we had very strong faculty. They were too small. There were only eight faculty in the department. "Okay, we're going to double it." How are we going to double it? "Well, tell me the other new focus area within bioengineering." They had biomechanics. They had the father of biomechanics. "What else are you going to do?" Well, tissue engineering came up. That was interesting. And they had other areas like using big computers to model both genetics and things like the heart, biomechanics of the heart. Long story short, for bioengineering, there was a foundation called the Whitaker Foundation. And they were the main supporters of bioengineering from the philanthropic community. And they had grants at Hopkins, and MIT, and this place, and that place. And we had grants. They had programs, and you could get a Whitaker Foundation Leadership Grant, and it would be $3 million over a few years. We had two of those leadership awards.

In ‘95, ‘96, they made a visit to a campus to review the program. And they had people from the original Whitaker family there, like the children of U. A. Whitaker, the founder of AMP Corp and then the Whitaker Foundation. AMP is no longer around, but it was a big electronics company for a long time.

So, they're all there, and as we're having this review, the president of the foundation, Peter Katona, makes the announcement that they've decided as a board that they are going to spend down their $700 million corpus, and they want to do it before the last person who actually knew the founder, U. A. Whitaker, was still alive. "We don't want people who didn't know the founder. So, in ten years, maximum 15, we're going to spend the corpus."

Great. I said, "There's no way in God's good heaven they're going to spend it with the programs they've got." So, when they leave, I get together with Shu Chien, and I say, "Shu, we need a building." And probably everybody else around the country who's forming bioengineering departments will need infrastructure. They'll never spend their money doing $3 million here and $3 million there, but they can spend $20 million here and $20 million there on buildings, on infrastructure. And we need a building!

So, why don't we write a white paper? Why don't you call them up, tell them we have this idea, we'd like to see if they would consider it? They said fine. He called. He knew everybody, Shu Chien did. He, with his colleagues, wrote a proposal to them that said, "Here's what the country needs to advance bioengineering." And it was an infrastructure proposal. And it said, "We all need this. And Whitaker could, on the one hand, generate all the infrastructure for bioengineering in the United States, and they would spend big chunks of money, so they would meet their objective of spending down their corpus." Literally, from May of '96 to September of ‘96 when wrote this white paper and we sent it in to them late that summer. They called back, they said they had a board meeting. They liked the white paper. They want to do it. This only happens in foundations. [Laugh] Where they can make a quick decision.

This family is on board. "Okay, this sounds great." And they said to us, "But of course, we can't just give you the grant. You're going to have to compete for it." We said fine. And they put out a call for proposal. We responded. So did everybody else in the country. And there were two winners. First two winners, Johns Hopkins and UC San Diego. Now, that said an enormous amount about leadership and quality here at UC San Diego. It wasn't MIT, it wasn't Stanford, it wasn't Chicago, and it wasn't Caltech. It was UC San Diego and Johns Hopkins. And we got–I think it was $18 million, and Hopkins got $17 million. And then, I went to another foundation that was based here in San Diego that does support Caltech, the Powell Foundation. You have endowed chairs named after Powell. They support engineering work at Stanford, USC, Caltech, and then because there's no private here in San Diego, they support UC San Diego.

So, I went to the Powell board. They had been big supporters of our earthquake engineering program, and I knew the board, and I knew the chair, and I said I would like to ask them for a meeting. And I said to them–well, let me back up. When we were going to make the proposal, I had gone to them and said, "It would really help us if we had a commitment from somebody else that we could call upon and say, ‘We got a commitment from these people. You'll be, Whitaker, the major donor, but we have another committed' and we ask them for whatever we ask them for." And the Powell people said yes.

And I think we only proposed $13 million to Whitaker. We were afraid. This was not grabbing the brass ring hard enough. Instead of telling them all we needed, the faculty were a little afraid. I would've asked them for anything. [Laugh] So, they asked for $13 million. But in the building that could be built for the money that we were asking for, we couldn't house all the faculty. They came back to us and said, "How much do you need to house all the faculty?"

And I said, "Between $28 and $35 million." They upped the ante to $18 million and Powell up its commitment from $2 million originally to $8 million. We now had $26 million from private sources. We found the other $9 million here and there from the campus, and we built the building named after Judge Focht at the recommendation of the Powell Foundation, and the building houses the Whitaker Institute for Bioengineering.

So, there's a story about how you build something. You have focus, you have need, and you have great people. And if you've got the great people and you have a great need, people will listen to you. And it's astonishing what can happen. So, that's the bioengineering story. And bioengineering at UC San Diego has now been ranked in the top five for 25, 30 years.

The other interesting story is endowing the school. I don't know if you know, UC San Diego's School of Engineering is called the Irwin and Joan Jacobs School of Engineering. And today, it has an endowment of about $125 million. That's nothing to sneeze at. The Division of Engineering at Caltech would love to have $125 to $250 million to name the division of engineering, but it doesn't.

How did that come about? Well, I remarked about Irwin Jacobs, and I remarked that I had gone to him about the Center for Wireless Communications. But the other thing I did when I went to see Irwin, even the first time, is, I told him my vision for the school. Not just wireless communication and not just the EE department, but I told him what I thought we could do and how we would go about doing it, which meant focus on particular areas and hire clusters of faculty to make an immediate impact, and hire senior people as well as junior people, and not just hire assistant professors and hope for the best. And he liked that. And somewhere along the way, we whispered into his ear, "Why don't you consider the possibility of endowing the school of engineering and naming it?"

And having a name is a big deal. You're the Jacobs School, and when you get to be really good, everybody knows it's the Jacobs School, or they know it's this school, or the Pritzker School, or whatever. So, of course, it's helpful. And the money is helpful. So, we planted this seed, and I think it was in late ‘97, so about almost four years after I arrived, there was a dinner at the chancellor's house–the chancellor at UC campuses gets a house, like the president at Caltech. And they host events, and dinners, and so on. And they hosted a dinner. And that night, they happened to sit Bob Dynes, who was chancellor at that point, and me in between Irwin. Joan Jacobs couldn't make whatever the event was. And it was a nice evening. It's a networking event, you get to talk to interesting people, there's always some topic. Great.

Somewhere through the evening, there was a lull, and Irwin turned to me and said, "Joan and I are ready." Ready! I knew what that meant. And I think Bob did, too. And I was really stunned. You could tell. It's emotional to this day. Because it's the first time anything like this has ever happened at UC San Diego. First private building. The bioengineering building was the first privately funded building on the general campus. Everything had been funded by the state up to that point, except for the med school. And now, here was coming an endowment. Nuts. So, I didn't say, "We'll think about it." [Laugh] I said, "We'll get back to you, and we'll work this out," something to that effect. And we did. In February of ‘98, I think, we signed an agreement, and they made an initial gift, which wasn't very large at the time, of $15 million. And we sold the school for $15 million.

Now, it says something about where the school was at that point. We couldn't ask for $100 million. Probably wouldn't be worth it. Everything's got a price. A funny story is, at the time, I asked Dick Atkinson what he thought the number was that we should ask for, and he said $15 million. Well, I didn't know any better, and nobody else had a different number. So, we thought to ask for $15 million, and Irwin and Joan agreed. Three years later, they added $110 million. This is now post-bubble. Qualcomm's gone through the roof. They're very wealthy. And he's committed to engineering. So, that original meeting that I had with him, "Irwin, could you help me set up a Center for Wireless Communication? Is it a good idea? Here's my vision of where we're going as a School." This is in ‘94. Leads to $125, $130 million in an endowment for the school. That throws off a lot of money every year for the dean and for hiring good people, filling in startup packages, all that sort of thing.

The 90s were full of events of that kind, and the school rose in rankings year over year over year. And I'll admit, I looked at the metrics that US News and World Report used, and in those days, they used what I'll call volumetric metrics. How much research money do you have? Not how much research money per faculty member. Absolute numbers. So, it favored the big places. I convinced US News and World Report in Washington that they should do both a big number and a per capita number, that that would be a fairer and more accurate way of measuring excellence at places. And they changed some of the metrics. They didn't give in to me, right? [Laugh] But one or two places, things got changed that were in our favor. And slowly, we rose. And we were 43 or 44 in 1993, the year before I arrived. And the year after I left in 2003, we were ranked 11. No school of engineering in the history of schools of engineering has ever done anything like it.

ZIERLER: You mentioned the numbers, going from 90 faculty to 175. Are there hiring bursts, or is this steady over those ten years?

CONN: This was pretty steady over the ten years. And the way it worked out is very interesting. So, initially, as part of my coming, Dick had set aside a number of new faculty slots for engineering. And the rest of the campus knew it, which created some friction. But for the first four years or so, we probably got to 135 faculty just based on, "We want to grow engineering, the campus is growing, and we're going to give you extra." But in 1998, Dick Atkinson did something remarkable. Gray Davis was governor at the time, and Gray Davis had been chief of staff to Jerry Brown in the early 80s when Dick first came out to be chancellor of UC San Diego, but he had been head of the National Science Foundation. And the Directorate of Engineering at NSF is Dick Atkinson's doing.

And Dick had a meeting with the governor and said, "Here are the things that we need by way of university-industry partnering to grow California's economy." This is ‘82, before Silicon Valley is really Silicon Valley. And the governor liked it. Guess who he put in charge to work out the details? Gray Davis. Fast forward 18 years. Dick goes to then-governor Davis and the legislature and says, "We want to increase the number of faculty in engineering over a five-year period at UC San Diego by 50% and increase the undergraduate student body proportionately" That stunned them. And all the campuses would get their fair share, and it would be allocated according to your size at the time. Okay, that's fine.

So, we had already grown, right? 135. So, I got another bunch of billets, another bunch of faculty slots over those five years, to continue the growth to 175. It should've grown to 190 to 200. What happened? When the money started coming to campus, we had a new vice chancellor for academic affairs at that point, and she decided to tax the monies coming through the UC office of the president for the campuses for this engineering initiative, she taxed it 30%. So, she took 30% of the faculty slots to give to the rest of the campus on the excuse that, well, the rest of the campus has to teach engineering students, too. Now, it was very explicit in the legislation. It's just for engineering. Cannot do anything else. Campuses will figure out how to handle the undergraduate growth. And that was a shot across my bow, and I understood that meant she was not going to be supportive of engineering.

And so, now, I had resources. 70% was still a big number. But there were tensions that grew from that. And those tensions ultimately led to my decision to step away four years later. But at that time, the billets came. Let's forget about the taxation. So, I had more faculty slots, so we could hire in clusters, we could use the same strategy, and we continued on that road. And that's how it got to the 175. So, the growth was, with some differences at the start, and maybe there's a year when it was a little slower than another year higher, but overall pretty much linear. We didn't do 50 and then none.

Over nine years, we hired 12 to 15 faculty a year, and we got there. But that's a large number. When I hired 10 or 15 faculty and I only had 100, that's a 15% change over the one year. So, the system has to be capable of absorbing such big adjustments. And then, you change it 15% year over year, this body of people and effort–it'd be shocking at the front end of it, but that's how we do it.

Anyway, it all went wonderfully. The school grew in size, reputation, quality, etc. And the thing I'm most proud of in terms of that experience is that to this day, you see San Diego's ranked between 10 and 12 in engineering. They never fell back to 20 or 30. It's very hard to get into the top ten, climb over Cornell, places like that, climb over this one, and that one. [Laugh] But we are in the top 15 in the country. And when I arrived, they were in the top 45. There's a gigantic difference. And they've sustained it. So, many of the things that we did lay the foundation for greatness. We not only achieved the greatness, but the foundations were strong. And my successor, whom I somewhat chose because I made him my associate dean the year before I was planning on stepping away, he got appointed, and he was very strong.

And he carried it forward ten years, and now, Al Pisano is the dean, and he's done a wonderful job. So, people come down here and think big now, especially when they come down and think about engineering. And as a public university, I think that's right. We cannot be Caltech. We cannot serve the state and serve the people of this state as a small, exclusive, highly productive–but nonetheless small school -- you're serving the state with graduates and you need scale. You need a lot more than Caltech can produce. So, the state is blessed. It has great publics; it has great privates. And the privates vary in scale, from USC at the large end, to Stanford at the medium end, to Caltech at the small end, and it has others in between. So, for me, that was an adventure in building not only a great school but something that the state of California absolutely deserved and needed.

ZIERLER: Just a few more questions to wrap up our conversation today. On the question of laying a foundation for the future, I wonder if you could speak to UC San Diego engineering, their leadership in nanoscience and nanotechnology, which, of course, mostly came after your tenure ended.

CONN: Yes. And I just had a lunch with the current chair of the department of nanoengineering. So, again, there's this strain at UC San Diego of wanting to use names that nobody else uses. Maybe in the hope of leading, but sometimes that's a fool's errand. In any case, I had spun out a structural engineering department. I agreed to name it structural engineering because building a complete civil engineering department just seemed a road too far. And they have a great structural engineering program, and they get, because of it, because of earthquake engineering, highly ranked. Just because they're so strong in that area. The other area that they needed was materials science. And we had strong people, but we weren't big enough. In my tenure of nine years, I had to focus on the big plays, so I did. AMES became Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering after separating out first bioengineering and then structural engineering. The next plays were more subtle, like nanoengineering.

And nano is a scale length, right? A billionth of a meter. So, what's the science at that scale? It's the science of atoms and molecules. That's what's at the nanometer scale. It's not fundamental particles.It's chemistry. Atoms and molecules. And every variant you can imagine. But at the scale of atoms and molecules, it's materials science. And so, the country decided to have a nanoscience initiative. It was the first grand challenge problem in 2001, 2002. The name got minted. Nobody called anything nanoscience before the government did. But they came up with this big initiative and said, "We need excellence in nanoscale science, so we're going to have a nanoscience initiative." And that's where the word nanoscience came from. They were going to have a materials science initiative because that could include both materials–that could include lots of other stuff. They wanted it, focused that, atoms, and molecules, and chips, right? All that's atoms and molecules.

So, when they formed this department in 2006 or 2007, nano was all the rage. And so, they decided, rather than setting up a department of chemical engineering or a department of materials science, which everybody understands what that looks like, talks like, quacks like, etc., they set up a department of nanoscience.

What have they done since then? I just learned they are changing the name, and I'm going to tell you an interesting story. They now have 25 full-time faculty and five teaching faculty. Of the 25-research faculty, 14 are chemical engineers. Not surprising. And they're fabulous. And there are a couple of new department chairs, one of them, the mechanical and aerospace engineering department, they emailed me, "Could we have lunch?" And then, my history at the school was circulated among all the faculty, and the chair of nanoscience read it. And he was taken by it.

And he asked if he could have lunch with me, which I did a week ago. Turns out, they want to change the name. They want to walk like a duck, talk like a duck, be like a duck. And 14 of the 25 are chemical engineering, so they decide–and this shows you the faculty and some naivete–"Okay, we're going to name it the department of nanoscience and chemical engineering. We're going to have nano first. And chemical engineering, the historic chemical engineering name it goes back 150 years, to the petroleum industry and all that stuff - we're going to put that second." So, I said to him, "I'm tickled that you're picking a good name. I did not know that you had 14 chemical engineers. I know how strong you guys are. That is a great choice you've made. You've just got the words backwards. It should be the department of chemical and nanoengineering."

Chemical will come first. It's alphabetical. Everybody knows what chemical is, they'll rank you properly. Everybody knows what nano is. You'll start getting an imprint from that, that's fine." And now he's literally going back to propose putting the name in a different order. And that sounds like, "Why are you paying attention to trivia of that kind?" Because it's not trivia. What you are, what you call yourself, how you walk, how you talk, how you act, that's who you are. And if you don't put the right name on it, not everybody's going to figure out who you are, why you are, etc.

By the way, Caltech is my counterexample and only they can get away with non-standard names. But you don't see it anywhere else. Only Caltech gets away with that game. I think it's wonderful that Caltech can play that game. And it's because you're so stunning. You've got more people in the Academy than anybody per capita, you've got more people who've won Nobel Prizes per capita than anybody. You've got more, more, more, on a per capita basis. That is, per unit of faculty, what's the performance? And it's outlandishly terrific. So, Caltech gets what it deserves. Because it's outstanding and terrific.

Most other places can't do this. And at a public university, you don't have that option. That's what I mentioned to you before. You cannot be Caltech. You cannot serve the people, and you cannot serve the state that's funding you, and created you, and so on, if you're small and tiny. You need to be at the scale the society needs you to be at. And 80%, 90% of the engineers in the country graduate from public universities because they're all big. They're not all coming out of MIT, and Stanford, and other places you might like to think about. There are a few who are very big, like Georgia Tech and Purdue.

But most are 200, 250 faculty, and that was the target for San Diego. That ultimately, it should be between 250 and 300 faculty. To put the two great places at the two coasts in comparison to each other, engineering at MIT has between 350 and 400 faculty, and you have at Caltech 90 or 100 in the division of engineering. So, MIT is three to four times your scale, and they graduate three or four times the number of students you graduate. [Laugh] But even MIT is singular. Short of Purdue and Georgia Tech, it's the largest private in the country when it comes to engineering. You're probably the smallest in the same category. And UC San Diego needs to be 250 to 300 faculty, walking, talking, and looking like the duck it should be. And I think they're there. I'm very proud of it.

ZIERLER: That's great. Last question for today, the smash success that was your deanship at UC San Diego. I assume it required sustained mental health on your part, but we haven't covered that. Was your depression well-controlled at this point?

CONN: It was better, yes. So, I was able to go through that whole period without falling into a dark hole. One of the things that I suffered from was, I had a little bit of a thin skin. And as I mentioned, when I thought something was done that was harmful, deliberate, I had a hard time letting it go. And so, I didn't do ten years. I deliberately chose to leave a year and a half before my full time would've been up. And it was partly because I felt at that point, I would have to swim upriver. This is a multi-decadal effort, a multi-dean effort, to sustain greatness over time. That was the new challenge. And you had to do it against all the forces that occur inside a big organization like a university, with all the agendas that people have. But when I started, I had an enormous commitment from the top. When I left, it wasn't so.

And my successor had to rebuild that. But because of all I had done and how hard I had pushed; I wasn't the person to repair that damage of 2001-2002. And I was hopefully stable enough mentally and mature enough to realize that. So, while it looked like I might have left in a huff, I didn't. I left at the right time. And I handled those pressures reasonably well. I didn't let them get to me and get me down.

So, thank you for asking that. I think I had said earlier to you that I'd had these periods, starting in the late 70s right through the 80s into the early 90s, it was really a hard period in my life. But I'd kind of gotten to a place where I felt I was ready for the challenge of UC San Diego and the leadership that would entail, and so on, and so forth. And I was right. I had gotten to a good enough place. Didn't mean I've never had dark moments, but not long dark periods. And there's a big difference. So, that helped a great deal.

And when I left, I got this interesting offer, the next chapter. Instead of going to some company and being–like SAIC, or General Atomics, or someplace, and being a senior vice president or even CEO -- along came the largest venture capital firm at the time in San Diego. And when I announced I should tell you the story about how the announcement came about. We could start there next time. But once it'd been announced, I had, in fact, been asked to be a senior vice president at SAIC, big defense contractor. And I could've just gone and done that. They'd made me an offer, and I was fine. But when the people from the venture capital world came knocking on my door, I'd been there. I was on the other side of the table when I built my company. And I knew the venture business, and I knew venture capitalists, and so on. And the way I told you I could feel in my bones this was exciting in talking with Dick and going and building the school of engineering, this VC opportunity felt much more exciting than going and being a corporate senior manager.

That's not me. And being a venture capitalist will turn out not to be me, either. Not that I won't succeed at it. I didn't succeed like Kleiner Perkins, but I did well enough. But not a home run, a double. But it seemed, at the time, really exciting. And in the end, I chose it because A, there are only six partners, so it's small and B, "You've got your own portfolio, go find great things, go figure out how to fund them, go help make them great." That all sounded like the kind of challenge I would love.

And to close, I had made, for the first time in my life, the decision not to lead. They had a leader, the senior partner who was the lead dog, so to speak. A lot of the VC funds that were raised were betting on their lead partner. Every firm has one. The other partners are there to do well. But the lead partner is there to make the firm great, and I didn't go there to challenge the person who was the lead partner. And the story I write about later, and have finished writing about, is the story of, "How did you go from a good place to a worse place? How did that happen, and why did it happen?" And that's the story of my venture experience. So, to be continued.

ZIERLER: We'll pick up next time. Professor Conn, for better or worse, becomes a venture capitalist. We'll go from there.

[End of Recording]

ZIERLER: This is David Zierler, Director of the Caltech Heritage Project. It is Monday, March 4, 2024. It is my great pleasure to be back once again with Professor Robert Conn. Bob, as always, wonderful to be with you, great to see you. Let's continue the conversation.

CONN: Okay. You start with the questions, David.

ZIERLER: We're going to start today with your venture into venture capital, as it were. Let's establish a bit of personal background, going all the way back to when you were a kid. Were you always interested in business and entrepreneurialism, or is this really an opportunity that comes about because of the circles that you're running in academically?

CONN: Well, it's maybe neither. It's maybe some hybrid of the two. I didn't know what I wanted to do in high school, and there was nobody in my family who had done anything that required even a high school education. So, there were no role models around. And the few I saw, like that fellow whom Pratt brought from the pharmaceutical industry, the head engineer for this pharmaceutical firm, a small one based out in Long Island. He retired wealthy, and he came to teach the design courses in my senior year. Well, he took us out to visit this drug company, and he took us to meet the president. And the president has got this ostentatious office, and he's got clearly a handmade white shirt on. The collar was very different from a collar you'd buy on a normal white shirt to wear to work. It just all looked to me over the top.

This was not what I wanted, and the people seemed to be from a different world. So, at that point, and I was 20, 21 at that point, I didn't have a positive view of people working in industry. And that was one of the experiences that gave it to me. On the other hand, by the time I'd finished college, I knew that academics was what I loved, and I loved physics, and I wasn't sure I yet loved engineering because chemical engineering wasn't that attractive to me, even though that was my major. And that's why at Caltech, I moved towards what today is called applied physics and then was called engineering science back in the mid-1960s. So, that was what I wanted to do. And then, when I got to Caltech, and did my work, and learned about research, and learned I could do this stuff, and the math, I found it fascinating, the academic track just attracted me. I had no interest in and never applied for a job in industry.

That transition came later. I had entrepreneurial tendencies, as we've talked about all through, founding an institute at Wisconsin, founding another institute at UCLA, building the School of Engineering. At UCLA, spinning a company out, gaining a venture capital backing for it, having it succeed adequately to have an IPO on NASDAQ. So, by the mid-80s, I was maturing in a number of ways, and one was realizing that making money wasn't the worst thing in the world. And we had a good idea, and I had somebody I could partner with to build a business, my student, Greg Campbell. And so, why not? I was open to it. And by the late 1980s, I was not only open to that, but I was much more open to leadership in the academic world, which led to the deanship at UC San Diego.

So, it was evolutionary, right? From very little interest, really, and certainly not wanting to work in business, to recognizing that I had startup genes and could get things going, and we had a very interesting challenge to build a business. And so, I had these transitions from being strictly interested in academic things, to building things within the academic world, to building something in the private world, to building a school, and now, the opportunity would come , in a sense, to go into venture capital and be on the other side of the table from the people who had supported Greg Campbell and me as we built our company up. That answers that question. In other words, it's a hybrid. It wasn't always one way or the other way.

ZIERLER: Did you look at this as leaving academia, as a sabbatical in the business world? How did you think about these things as you were going to step down as dean?

CONN: Well, the old saying in academia and in other areas is that luck favors the prepared mind. And another euphemism or phrase is, listen to yourself, and listen to your body, and listen to your emotional response to things. And what I found was that when I decided to step away from being an academic–and I really decided not just to step down as dean, but to step away from academic life. My intention was not to go back to technical work, but to perhaps find another leadership position somewhere. And this is where the industry versus entrepreneurism enters. I knew people in industry in San Diego. I didn't really want to move from there.

And the company that sought me out most strongly was SAIC Now, SAIC, as I think I've mentioned, was founded by a fellow named Bob Beyster. It was spun out of what was then General Atomics. Not the current version, but a very early version in the late 1960s. It was built in a very unusual way. That is, it was an employee-owned company. So, every employee got stock, from the lowest to the top. And they never sought outside financing, and it had fundamentally begun as a government contracting operation, and eventually, it became a giant defense contractor, but it had many other kinds of contracts. So, fast forward 30 years, it's a 35-year-old company in 2002, and it probably had revenues of $5 billion a year and growing steadily every year. The stock price was determined internally and would grow steadily every year. It was a financial incentive because in 1993, they were the ones who helped me cover the shortfall of the salary offer from UC San Diego to be dean.

One of their vice presidents at the time, Tom Dillon, I told you the story of how he came to see me, and that was the start of the thing. He offered me 10,000 shares in SAIC stock, that was quite a thing, and a consulting agreement, and it covered the gap. So, I knew them. They had helped me get to San Diego. And the fellow who was above Tom Dillon, Steve Rockwood, was the guy who was starting to recruit me once I announced I was stepping away. But I saw it more as a big bureaucracy. I went to their annual meeting. They invited me. And Steve invited me to the annual meeting, and I could see everybody looking at me. I was the odd person out. But I knew that all of them were thinking, "They're recruiting Bob Conn. [Laugh] And where is he going to fit? What slot is he going to fall into?" So on, and so forth. Bob Beyster was a fabulous leader, but he wasn't able to step away and enable a successor to step in.

So, SAIC had become famous for Bob saying to the latest great hire, "You'll be the heir apparent." And he hired an admiral to do that, and that didn't work, and he'd hired somebody before the admiral, and that didn't work. And now, it was sort of my turn. And that wasn't going to work. They were going to have to carry Bob away from the company, which is ultimately what sort of happened. The board finally had to say, when he was in his 80s, "Time for a change."

All right, so, I go over, I meet, we make an agreement that I would join, we discuss compensation, and stock options, and things like that. And in March of that year, 2002, after I'd made the announcement–Bill Stensrud and Drew Senyei were the two leading partners at a firm called Enterprise Partners Venture Capital, EPVC.

And that firm was the largest VC firm in San Diego at the time. It had almost $1.2 billion under management. It had been founded in 1985. And they had raised three funds between 1997 and 2001. So, from ‘85 to ‘97, they had Enterprise Fund 1,3 and 3, and I'll explain that. This is how venture capital works. So, they had three funds up until 1997, EP1, EP2, and EP3., . That took 12 years to do. Within four years in the late 90s, they raised three more funds, in EP 4 in‘97, EP5 in ‘99, and EP 6 in 2001. All were large funds. EP 6 was $360 million. Those were the bubble years, and I didn't know it at the time, but that would prove to be a disaster. And I'll go into that. So, at the time they came to talk to me, they needed another partner. The funds were so large, they needed another investing partner, and they were willing to bring me in as a managing director.

So, that's an full partner in a partnership. Now, it's not equal in compensation, tenure, or anything of that sort, but you're a managing director. You're not an assistant managing director. [Laugh] And it will be important for you to understand a little bit about how venture capital firms are structured. But suffice it to say here, in terms of the choice I made, they came to see me about the possibility of becoming a partner at their firm. And I said, "Well, I hadn't been thinking about that," but I kind of had a sense for it from my experience with my company. It was venture capital-backed, and I knew some VC people, particularly the ones who backed my company through four or five rounds of financing. And I knew what they did. I didn't know how they did it, but I knew what their role was, and I knew how they behaved with respect to the company, which is very important.

How's a venture capital person not only provide a company with money, but provide it with help they might not be able to otherwise get? Like senior management, like finding a CFO, like what happened with Google early on, when the two main VC backers, Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins, brought in Eric Schmidt. In that case, we're describing as adult supervision for Sergey Brin and Larry Page. But Schmidt was a very experienced CEO, and he was brought in to drive Google forward through a very rapid expansion. And eventually, eight or ten years later, he stepped away and became chairman, and Larry Page becomes CEO. That cycle is going to be important to the total story of what happens. But you bring sort of a network and rolodex to the business. So, I interviewed and met all the partners. At the time, I think there were five partners.

So, I came home excited. This was new, and it was something where I would be on my own. I would have to make this happen. There are only six partners total, but every one of them had a portfolio of companies. I would be the sixth, so I would have to develop a portfolio of investments. I would have to find what I wanted to invest in, convince the partners that it had good potential, and they would have to approve. And this happened no matter who the partner was. So, I came home quite excited, and my wife at the time, Anne, sort of listened to me and said, "You're a hell of a lot more excited about this than at SAIC." And that was an extraordinarily helpful observation. In other words, this was exciting to me. And the SAIC thing looked to me more like a drudge. Get into a big bureaucracy, and knock heads, and do whatever the hell is necessary to move along as vice president of this or a vice president of that.

And I would've gone in at a fairly senior, high vice president level. But it didn't attract me, and I think it goes back to the origin story in undergraduate school and the fact that a big company didn't impress me.

But doing something, which was entrepreneurial and on your own, that is exciting. And so, I decided yes. We worked out the arrangements. I went to see Steve Rockwood and explained that I was going to have to withdraw from consideration of joining SAIC. At that level, you tend to understand if somebody's made their mind up, you're not going to change it. So, he didn't make a big effort to change my mind. He asked me, "Have you thought everything through?" And I said, "Steve, I have, and this is the decision I've come to." So, he was gracious about it. And that July the 1st of 2002, I took leave of absence from the University with the intention of retiring in two years.

But they'll give you two-years leave of absence to go try something in business or whatever else you want to try. They're not paying you through that period. And that's what I ended up doing. So, that's how I came to make the decision to become a venture capitalist, to join a venture capital firm, and have the kind of responsibility that a partner in such a firm has. I learned later that, as I understood the structure of venture firms, there are managing directors, and then there are certain other kinds of partners, but they're not a managing director partner, and they have a different kind of role within a firm. And they have to earn getting up to being managing director. And I was able to come in as an independent entity. So, it was very attractive.

The one other thing that might be helpful, because the story requires understanding the structure of a venture capital firm, without going into a big lecture, fundamentally, venture capital firms are set up as, typically, limited liability corporations, LLC. And, in fact, each partner sets up his or her own LLC, and that LLC is part of the other umbrella LLC. Everything is limited liability. They're not set up as corporations, and that's a very important distinction. And there are tax laws that apply to carried interest that applies to venture capital that is very favorable. , The Democrats–people want to change, and they've never been able to change it. Why haven't they changed it? When some aspect of finance has the kind of impact on innovation, and economic growth, and can drive the transformation of the economy, you've got to balance the goods with the bads. And over time, it's stayed as it was, going back to the 1970s. So, the venture firm now has to raise funds to invest in the idea of startup companies of new, young companies. Well, who's going to give you money?

Well, post 1980, the prudent man rule that had governed investing for ages was suddenly changed under Jimmy Carter. And the subtle change was that if you were to manage your portfolio of companies, or a portfolio of types of assets–venture capital is what's called an asset class. It's the highest-risk asset class within large asset classes. The next level up might be private equity. The next level up might be hedge funds. And so on you go until you're at the corporate level with stocks and bonds. And so, depending on public stock companies, that's considered the lowest risk within this set of asset classes, and venture capital is the highest risk. So, that's the idea.

Why would you put your money in something that's the highest risk? Because you could get a Google. It's as simple as that. So, who are the people that VC's would go to–who are the sources of money? Pension Funds. University endowments. Caltech, interestingly, has a chief investment officer who doesn't believe in venture capital, so you don't have any portion of your endowment invested with venture capital firms. But almost everybody else does. And I'm talking Yale, and Stanford, and MIT, and Harvard. Okay, so, university endowments, pension funds, insurance companies, they've got an enormous amount of money, and they have to meet their fiduciary responsibilities with respect to investment policies and what have you, but meanwhile, they're holding the money.

You're paying your insurance premiums, and what are they doing? Well, every now and then, they pay out to the policy holders, but most of the time, they've got a big bolus of money that they should invest and grow. And so it goes. Also, wealthy people.

Before this change in the prudent man rule–and that change meant if an investment manager were to invest in an array of asset classes–stocks, bonds, hedge funds, private equity, venture capital, and they have an appropriate risk profile for the total portfolio, so they don't have 60% in venture capital, they have 10% or at most 15, they have 25 to 40% in private equity, they have so much in hedge funds, and stocks and bonds are between 30 and 40% of the total portfolio. So, 60% of the portfolio of most private university endowments are in these other three asset classes. 60%!

And they are called non-liquid. You can always sell a stock or a bond. But if you invest with a venture capital firm or private equity firm, their job is to go and invest that money, find good companies, either take them public when they become really great, or have somebody acquire them at a very high premium, like, ten times the money put in. And over time, you get on average, a high enough return from venture capital that it's worth the risk that you can't get the money back right away. You can't just sell your position in any of the VC firms that you've invested. So, VC firms are structured that they raise a fund from this variety of funders, and those funds used to be, in the early 80s, $50 million, $100 million was a big fund. By the time we were at the end of the 80s, they were $200 or $300 million. The funders are Limited Partners in a Fund.

And by the end of the 90s, VC funds were approaching $600, $700 million per fund. Today, they're north of billions. So, they gather all that money with the promise that over a period of three or four years, they will find all the investments that they believe have the potential to make a big return. Typically, this is anywhere from 10 to a maximum of 12, 14 companies. It's not 40. And the partners are now on the boards of these firms. They almost always, in each round of financing, like the first round, a venture capital firm tends not to do it by themselves. They find a partner firm, and they share the risk. So, if you're raising $10 million or $5 million, which is a typical first round, even in those days, you'd put up two and a half, and the partner firm would put up two and a half, and each firm would place a person on the board of directors of the company.

And then, it takes time to build a company if it's a startup. Like mine was a spinout from UCLA, and it had revenue of a million dollars a year at the time it was funded. But it had an idea that people thought it could be a multi-hundred-million-dollar company, and they could make a great return on their investment. So, that's what you're looking for. It's why, as an asset class, it's sought after, but it has to be balanced within the portfolio of an endowment at a university, let's say. So, we were one of those firms. And the firm typically finds the 12 to 14 companies per fund over a period of four years. So, over the period of three or four years, you're working to put the money to work in these companies. At that point, you have to make sure you have adequate reserves in that fund to fund those companies as later rounds come up. Otherwise, you could have your position, from an ownership point of view, diluted. And that means each round, after you first put your money in, there's an amount called a pro rata amount, which is, if the next round is valued higher than the first round, then there's a pro rata amount to keep your percentage ownership. And then, new money comes in at the new valuation level. The company in a later round might be valued at $20 million, then later the company's valued at $60 million. Every time it raises funds, you're hopefully raising the funds at a higher valuation. That means, at the end of about three years, you know you're going to fill fund one up with companies, so you go to the limited partners again–and I haven't said how a firm is structured–who have given you the money in the first place, and say you want to raise another fund. And you try to go to new funders, so you build a portfolio of funders for the VC firm.

So, that's how it works. And now, fund two might be larger than fund one, particularly if you've been successful with the fund, and the limited partners all like you, and they want you to do more of the good things you've been doing. And you go down the road four years later, step and repeat, you raise a third fund. Well, by the time you raise the third fund, it's 10 to 12 years from the very start of the first one. Most of those companies should have come to maturity and paid back good returns to the investors and to you. And so, then that first fund is sort of over with, but it's there in the ether. And now, when you raise the fourth fund, you're actively working funds two, three, and four. And then, when you raise the fifth one, you're actively working three, four, and five. So, that was the latter structure.

And the typical arrangement, from a financial point of view, was 80/20. So, you raise money from the insurance company, the universities, people who manage big pools of money for private investors. You raised all this money. They're entitled to 80% of the returns, and they're entitled to get at least 70% of the money back before the partners get anything. So, there's an incentive to return a lot of money, certainly 1X is just returning the money you got. What you'd like to have is a fund that returns 2X or 3X. You might have a 10X in the fund, but you've got to average over the returns of all of the 12 to 14 companies. Ultimately, what it leads to is an annualized return on investment of around 12%. In the stock market, you can only get six or seven percent on average over the years. Those extra five points are enormously important because it's compounded. And when you're compounding that extra 5% return on capital continuously over time, your returns go way up. They're goosed, so to speak. [Laugh]

And that's why you go and back VC firms, because they goose your returns, particularly the best ones. And so, they get 80% of the returns, and the partners get 20%. And the partners get a fee. So, a typical fee is 2 to 2.5% a year for the life of the fund. Well, that's a lot of money. And 2% of the size of the fund per year, so you can do the math. 2% of $400 million is $8 million per year to run the fund. You've got a lot of money. And that allows you to pay the partners, pay for the infrastructure, pay for the flights to your companies for board meetings, and so on.. It pays for everything. That's your working capital. And it pays the salaries of the partners, as I said. So, the boost to the partners comes–yes, the salary's pretty terrific -- but that's not why you're supposed to be there. You're supposed to be there for the returns.

And the best firms will actually do a 70/30 split with the limited partners --- firms like Sequoia Capital. They have been so successful, they can go to the limited partners and say, "You get 70% of the winnings, and we get 30." Others do 75/25, but nobody does less than 80/20.

And so, that's the structure of the business. You raise funds from these large pools of capital that are looking to boost their total returns on investment. You've got to be very good at it. And particularly with the venture funds, you're funding risky companies that are very young. They have an idea. It's got to be technically proved, but you still have to figure out how do you make it, how does it perform, do they develop barriers to entry down the road? All kinds of problems can occur over time. And so, this is the venture capital business in a nutshell.

ZIERLER: Let's take one step back. There's always work to be done, but was there anything that you left to your successor as dean of engineering at UC San Diego that you did not accomplish? Was there an important sort of transition discussion that you had with your successor about what you thought was most important going forward?

CONN: Well, the main thing was that I didn't think the growth curve was over. In other words, we had gone from the size of a faculty like at Caltech to twice the size of Caltech. But we're a big public university, and twice the size of Caltech was 180 faculty. I'm talking the school of engineering. So, you need to get to 250 faculty in a big public university to serve the public, serve the university, do what you're supposed to do. The School of Engineering at UC San Diego is now there, and it's actually moving towards having something close to 300 faculty. So, as I said at the end of the discussion about my time as dean, this was a multi-horse pull, a multi-person pull. And it was pretty clear that the next dean would have to try to continue what I had done and grow it more.

Maybe over a decade, grow it by net another 60 or 70 faculty, get to 240. And then, the next person might take it another net new 60 faculty, and you'd finally get to 300. But that's 30 years. And it's taken 30 years to do this. So, my successor now is the one who's transitioning to steady state. Al Pisano, my second successor. So, the advising conversations, first of all, the person who ended up succeeding me, I had chosen. I didn't have any hand in choosing my successor, but I had a hand in appointing the person I thought best internally to succeed me, and I made that person my associate dean, so the second in command, like a COO and a CEO. And indeed, when I left, he was the interim dean during the transition year, but he and I had worked so closely together, I didn't have to say much. After a search of a year, they appointment him my successor.

In other words, it wasn't somebody who came from the outside. Somebody who comes from the outside, interestingly, comes a year after you've left. Maybe they want to talk to you, maybe they don't. Right? Everybody's different. And so, it happened that my successor was my associate dean, so he understood where we were going, what we were doing, and why we were doing it. He had his own ideas over time about what to emphasize and how to grow. For example, they put in place a department of nanoengineering. Turned out it's a successful experiment but with no ranking. It developed into a wonderful department. They're absolutely fabulous. But nobody else developed a department of nanoengineering.

Whereas they thought they would be at the leading edge of the spear, they weren't. So, some things work out. Some don't. Now, this year, they are changing the name from the department of nanoengineering to the department of chemical and nanoengineering. Because more than half the faculty in that department turned out to be chemical engineers. Great. In other words, it was more like complex variables, in mathematics, and what is called analytic continuation. There's no branch cut, there's no pole, there's no singularity. It was a smooth transition from me to my successor, mainly because he had been with me two years prior to my leaving, and then he had been appointed my permanent successor.

ZIERLER: In becoming managing director, what could you draw on scientifically and academically that you saw as an asset in venture capital?

CONN: Well, a couple of things. One, I had a couple of lessons from building my own company from those who supported us. One fellow, his name was Mel Hodge, he was a very senior executive at Lockheed up in Palo Alto, but also a good board member for young companies. And he said, "There are three rules, Bob and Greg. Don't run out of money, don't run out of money, and don't run out of money." In other words, cash management is king. You get a round of funding, and you've got to make sure that it lasts you until the point of value creation, that you've achieved something in that period of time where you're spending that money so that you can now go out and raise more money at a higher valuation. That's the name of the game. So, that was one piece of sage advice. That was Mel Hodge.

The other was a partner at a very major firm, at the time called Brentwood Capital and later called Redwood Capital. His name was Brad Jones, and he was one of the smartest people you were going to meet. Brad was an undergraduate chemistry major at Harvard, even have a master's in chemistry. Then he went to Stanford Business School, and out of business school, got into the venture capital business. So, he had been in venture capital for a bit by the time he'd funded our company in 1989 or so, probably he been active for seven or eight years, and he'd had a bunch of successes.

So, he was young, but he had experience. He was also wise. And I remember him saying to me, "We don't invest in science projects." Okay? In other words, a company that's ready to become a technical success, engineering-wise– to do that, the science has to be known. If you've got a hole in the science, you cannot put together enough people to fix it. Particularly if it's not in the biomedical field. So, the science has to be settled, and it has to be an engineering requirement. How do you make it? How do you scale it? All the things that are associated with building a company. And it had to potentially be something that could be market differentiating, and maybe even market creating. Like, Google was not only market differentiating, but it was also market creating. It created the search market. Those were characteristics that you were supposed to look for, and I knew it. So, I knew a lot of science, but I knew a lot of engineering, too, and I was counting on my judgment to see what firms to back.

And I had enough time to work and find investments. It takes time to be able to have someone come to you, want you to participate. So, you have to meet other venture capitals, so when they find a company, they might ask you to partner with them. Later, when you get some success, you can ask them to partner with you. And that's exactly what happened. At the beginning, I got asked to partner with others. Later, others partnered with me. So, those, I think, were some of the lessons I learned from my time with my own company, and I brought that to the table in terms of hunting and fishing for potentially great new companies and finding the gemstone amongst all the startups around.

ZIERLER: What was the state of the so-called tech bubble that had burst around the turn of the century, and what was its impact on Enterprise Partners Venture Capital?

CONN: It was Big. It wasn't so obvious. I joined in June of 2002, and the bubble had collapsed in the middle to end of 2001. So, when I joined the firm, and this is important, the firm had been very successful. As I said, it was founded in 1985, it had a successful first fund that enabled it to raise a second fund. It had a successful second fund that enabled it to raise a third fund. And the third fund was a real home run. And one of the guys in that portfolio who led one of the companies in that portfolio was a fellow named Bill Stensrud. And he had been so successful with several companies that when they were about to raise the fourth fund in 1997, they asked him to be the new lead partner.

The rest of the partners decided to part way with the old lead partner, a guy in Irvine, and ask Bill Stensrud, who'd not been a venture capitalist but had been a startup CEO, and had been very, very effective, to be now the lead partner. In other words, "Come to the other side of the table and succeed in the same way you succeeded in leading your companies?" That sometimes works, but not always.

So, in ‘97, the partnership took on a different complexion. It raised a fourth fund that was larger than any of the first three, something like $225 million. And the partners were now Bill Stensrud, the other senior partner from the beginning and founding of the company, Jim Berglund, Drew Senyei, who had been an associate in the first fund, then became a partner in the second and the third, he was there in the fourth. And they had brought on, at that point, at least one other partner to do that. But in the bubble, everybody was raising new funds. And so, two years later, they raised another fund, so ‘97 was the fourth fund, ‘99 was the fifth fund, and 2001 was the sixth fund. And they were able, because of the success of the first three funds, and Bill Stensrud's bigger-than-life personality and success, to raise close to a billion dollars.

$225 million in Enterprise 4, $310 million in Enterprise 5, and $360 million in the fund I joined, Enterprise Partners 6. $360-million fund. So, you add them up, that's almost $900 million. And what I didn't know at the time was that this close packing in time could be a nightmare. But I'm getting to the end game.

So, had I been smart enough and experienced enough in the business, I should have and would have recognized that putting all that money to work was going to be heroic effort. And what I learned later is that during the bubble, you didn't need a business plan, you needed a story. You didn't need revenue to go public, you needed a story. And many companies went public based on a story of what they were going to do, but they didn't have good balance sheets, money in the bank, and all the rest. And so, when the bubble burst, it burst because many of these companies were, in fact, not viable companies, and they collapsed. When you have a market like that, where you're going from some level to three times that level–great times, you've got to say, "Hm. Flip. Invest in stuff, and get it out right away – flip it," because you don't know how long the bubble's going to last.

But when you're in the bubble, you're not sure you realize that. One of the comments Bill Stensrud made to me in ‘03 or ‘04 is that one of the errors that they made with their fourth fund of ‘97, and then fourth fund and the fifth fund, was that they didn't flip more of the companies. They still invested as if they were investing for long-term growth and turn the company out in four to seven years. No, you had to turn the company out in six months to a year. So, if you did that, you were successful in the bubble. But if you didn't do that, the fund ended up in trouble. And they didn't flip companies. You could say, "Gee, why wouldn't you want to build a company and get a good outcome?" And what I think I'm explaining is that, if you didn't flip the companies, you had too many companies now to husband, to work with, in order to try to make each of them as successful as possible.

There were too many companies in the portfolio for what you needed to do for all of them, and that proved to be how we ultimately went downward instead of upward. But all that was in front of me. At the time I went to the firm, they had just raised these three new funds, they had hardly put any money of the new fund, Enterprise 6, to work. It was $360 million. They raised it in mid to late 2001, so just before the bubble collapsed. And they hadn't invested much of it at all. I should also explain that each of these funds is a ten-year fund. You can get extensions, but they're typically ten years. Now, sometimes, you might have a few companies–if a company is still there and private in ten years, you're in trouble. Usually, in the old days, it was because you couldn't sell it, because the business model hadn't worked out.

So, you're better off either closing those companies down, or letting them go off on their own and trying to make it, if they thought they could, but get out of the business of trying to fund them.

So, each fund has got a ten-year horizon. So, the ‘97 fund was supposed to be not only fully invested by 2001, which would've been four years, but then you should be reaping the returns over the next four to six years. And that didn't work because the bubble burst at the four-year point of Enterprise 4. Enterprise 5 had put half the money that it should be investing to work, but in two years, the bubble burst, and now, they still had to find new companies, and husband the ones that they had. And in the sixth fund, we knew the bubble wasn't there, so we knew it was going to take us three, four years to get returns from those companies, and we did the best we could with those. But those were going to get funded from 2002 to 2006. That's very important.

Why? We did have exits during that time, but they had two funds that basically still had money, EP five and six. We made the mistake of sometimes co-founding companies from each fund in order to try to put the money to work. But that meant that you only got half the return. If you put $40 million into one fund and got $200 million out, that's $160 million. But if you put $20 million into each fund and got the same return, you split between the funds, so now, you've got to jump higher to try to get all the returns.

So, there we were in 2002. Bill Stensrud is the lead partner. We've got, at that point, five other partners, and I become the sixth. And the partners were only one partner in the biotech area, who was very good, Drew Senyei, and five partners in high tech. Bill Stensrud was telecom. And Bill brought in a senior vice president from Nortel, the Canadian company, to be another telecom partner. This is ‘99. Now, what you'll remember is that, by 2002, all the growth of the internet, the bandwidth and all that stuff, it broke. There was no problem with fiber, we had plenty of bandwidth. And telecom collapsed. A lot of the telecom businesses went from high growth to struggling. And they had all these mergers in the late 90s and 2000s. So, there were two telecom partners. A fourth partner, Tom Clancy, who did software of some kind. [Laugh] I never quite understood what Tom did. And a founding partner that I'm drawing a blank on at the moment. And myself, so I became the sixth. Oh, it was Jim Berglund. So, Jim Berglund was one of the founders of the firm, and Jim decided, at the end of the fifth fund, that he'd made enough money, and he didn't want to do it anymore.

So, he was no longer a partner in Enterprise 6. We were five partners in Enterprise 6. Jim was not there. But in Enterprise 5, there were also five partners because I was not there. So, I basically came in to replace Jim Berglund because Jim Berglund didn't want any longer to be actively investing in companies. Now, he came to the firm, he was at all our Monday-morning meetings and all that, and he took care of the companies that he had invested in and was the board member on those from Enterprise 4 and 5, but no more. And so, I became the sixth partner, but only five of us were focused on Enterprise 6. Jim was a jack of all trades.

I think he was a dentist by training, and he just had a very good instinct for companies that might be successful, and he had a good feel for how to find leaders of those companies that could really build and grow them. Bill Stensrud being the quintessential example.

So, that's the structure. We were six partners, one of them is not in the last fund, one of them is not in the fourth fund. So, there were three partners from the fourth fund, two who joined in the fifth fund, and then me who joined in the sixth fund, minus one, which gave us six total partners on an everyday basis, but five were the investing partners. Jim was no longer an investing partner.

ZIERLER: I'll flip the previous question around. Coming in from academia, what was your steepest learning curve? What were you simply not prepared for at all?

CONN: Well, I don't know that I knew much of what I'm telling you about the structure feel the firm. The big learning curves were, how does it actually really work? What's the role of the lead managing partner? We're supposedly all equal in terms of voting on whether or not a partner's presentation of a company they brought in is one we felt appropriate to back or not. And many VC firms will hear companies that are developing, but they're not sure. But there might be a pony in one of them. So, a partner will bring it to a firm to present, and collectively, they'll try to decide to do they think there's a pony in it. If they do, they'll say yes. But sometimes, on the questioning and looking at the markets, and this, that, and the other thing, the answer is no. So, not everybody passes the wickets.

What I had to think about was this. Get to work with my partners and learn what they really like on an everyday basis. That's not easy. Secondly, learn about what they're actually really doing. And it turned out, three of the partners, Naser, Tom, and Drew, really were trying to be venture people. But Bill had a different idea in mind. And this proved to be fatal in the long run. And yet, he was the lead.

Bill preferred to run companies than to be on the board, and be an investor, and to help the companies. He was on the board of companies, did invest in companies, but starting around 2003, he wanted to go become the CEO of one of his companies. They had trouble, and he was going to turn it around, he was going to fix it. And then, there was another one, and he was going to do the same thing.

And the upshot is that I'd learned pretty early that Bill was a true alpha male, in the definition that's been given for that, and a bigger-than-life personality. So, going up against Bill was not necessarily an easy game. On the other hand, Bill wasn't, in fact, leading, and I began to realize that. And one of the things that I decided–and I think maybe I might've decided something differently, but the circumstances didn't say that to me–I decided when I went to the firm not to be a leader. So, everything that I'd done before, I knew I was going in, and I'm going to lead. But here, there was a leader. I was going to be a cog in the wheel. But it's a big wheel with a big potential for returns, so that was enough. And as the firm began to get into some difficulties, we might've made different decisions, but I didn't choose to lead, and nobody else chose to step up to question what was going on. And that's part of the story of how the firm finally came to a bad end.

But again, that's six years down the road. And that's sort of the story I could tell. At the beginning, what I'm looking to do is really understand my partners, understand how they behave, how they listen, what drives them to decide in one direction or another. What is their real expertise and where might holes be in the firm? And I was brought in to be the sort of semiconductor and computer partner. And I wasn't an electrical engineer, and I wasn't a computer scientist. [Laugh] But I knew how to make chips. Which is different than being a chip designer, right? So, the other thing I had to really do is really try to get smart about the design of chips and what was needed in industry as the chip business was evolving and new companies were getting founded. NVIDIA, which is maybe the most valuable company now, was founded in 1993. When I joined, it was eight years old, right? It's had an enormous run.

Who invested in NVIDIA? They were really smart people. But that was a chip design company. It made graphics processing units, not a CPU. And in the 90s, when they came up with the GPU, everything was a CPU. Intel was at the top of the world. Right? So, if you were smart and recognized the transition that was going to come that would be requiring graphics processing units instead of central processing units–the computing wasn't going to be done centrally anymore. You needed to process specialized information, such as games. When computer games came in, that was another transformative thing. Computer games were bigger than the whole computer industry for a while. And what kind of chip do you put in a game machine? It's a visual game, it's a graphics game.

You use a GPU, not a CPU. So, the idea was, I had to get smart about things like that. And I will tell you, I didn't know all that in 2002, but it was something that I came to learn. The other thing I did know a lot about was computing. We had the San Diego Supercomputer Center at UC San Diego. I had done computing on large machines. But the last time I actually ran anything personally on a big machine was the IBM 360 days, which was a massive parallel processing machine. If you were going to think about a new computer, what was it going to look like? And Cray was big, and IBM was big, and they were the big makers of computers. And Apple was making Apples. [Laugh] It wasn't making big computers, it was the PC revolution, and that was important.

So, there was Dell, and there was Apple, and there were many other companies whose names are no longer in the lexicon, who were still around in the 80s and 90s. So, these transitions in computing is where I'm headed. I spent time understanding, why did the computing industry evolve in the way that it had, from the 7090 when I was a student at Caltech or the 7040, an early IBM machine, to finally in 1968, the IBM 360, the world leader of big computers? Massively parallel, process anything in parallel, do all the jobs at once. You didn't have to do them in series. That made a gigantic difference, and IBM was on top of the world. But I realized in 2000 already that was beginning to change, so that became an opportunity. But I had to spend time learning all of that. That took me a good year to 18 months.

In the meantime, what I was doing? – I had to do this, and I also had to get to know the people in the business. So, the issues I had in front of me were, what was I going to invest in, and how was I going to find it, and who would invest alongside me? And how might I get to invest alongside somebody I thought was a terrific VC, and I could ride the coattails and learn how to manipulate that maze and get through it to the other side, where you felt you were fully a venture capitalist, you knew what you were looking at, you had a cadre of people, and you could kind of stand on your own two feet? That doesn't happen on day one, and that was what I needed to go from there to some intermediate step, where I was maybe the junior partner in an investing club, but I got to invest, to maybe being the lead on a number of startup investments that I made.

ZIERLER: Today, of course, San Diego is a biotech hub. What was the state of play circa 2002?

CONN: It was very active in a number of areas. And Drew Senyei covered the biotech sector. What hadn't yet come that pass, where Drew and I could've done some things together, was genomics, and computational biology, and computer-designed drugs. As computing has become more and more parallel, it's had an enormous impact on the pharmaceutical industry. So, there were two parts to the biotech. One is biotech, which is instruments–Mory Gharib at your place, is an example of biotech guy, right? With the heart. The other is biopharmaceutical, pharma, drugs. Drug development is really different from what Mory did. And that's a different trick. The companies in the bio area develop very differently. A biotech company develops a product that can go to market, especially if you don't need to get through the FDA, it's not a drug. And many biotech instrumentations just go to market. So, they're more like high tech. And then, there's what comes out of UC San Diego, or Salk, or Caltech, or wherever, where it's a new synthesis technique, then suddenly you have a new target for heart disease, a new target for diabetes, a new idea of a drug that's targeting something that they think is at the cause level of the disease. And if you have that breakthrough, you could have a home-run drug, right? So, we invested in both, but Drew did most of that. So, I'm saying there was a path that we could have gone down. It was the early days of the genomics revolution. But Drew didn't know it, and I didn't choose to focus on it. I was focused more on semiconductors, chips, and computing itself. So, how much did we invest here in San Diego, in my area? Not much.

ZIERLER: Do you see that as a missed opportunity, passing over on genomics?

CONN: I think so. There's Illumina down here, that's the other kind of company, replication. And they turned out to be a tremendous hit, and they're the leader in their business, making sequencing machines. And I didn't know enough biology to know about that. I would've had to take a course. I never had biology, so while I had ideas of what is a gene, if you asked me, "What is a gene?" you're going to get a lousy definition. And so, I didn't have the expertise. So, I knew it was important, without question. And I knew designer drugs and computation in chemistry. That, I did know. Big scale up in computation in chemistry, reaction kinetics, and stuff like that. But we didn't go down that path.

ZIERLER: Now, you were no novice to either the fabrication or investing in semiconductors. What changed for you once you had this new position as managing director? What were you able to do in the semiconductor space?

CONN: Well, I got to know the people, so what I was able to do was understand some of the issues. For example, the transition that was occurring in computing–and I looked at a lot of computing companies–was going from mainframe computing to racks of PCs. Just think of a computer center today and the pictures that come to your mind. Tell me what you picture when you think about a computer center. What does it look like?

ZIERLER: Rows and rows of these huge boxes with wires and all of the lights flashing.

CONN: Right. And what's in each box? These are vertical boxes. What's in each box is what amounts to a specialized PC. They may have a GPU instead of a CPU, but they're racks, like another rack. And you just stack them up, and you connect them. So, what was true at that time, and I had an early success with this, was that when you have racks and racks and racks, , and wires, and wires, and wires, think of what it means for transferring information from one box to another? You have to go through a wire. There's a latency. The longer it takes you to get the information from one place to another place, the slower the whole business goes. So, what you want is the lowest possible latency for message passing in such a computer setup.

And that, I came to understand. And one of my earliest investments was a company called Pathscale in late 2003, and within three years, it got bought. It wasn't a home run. I think we made two and a half times the money we had invested and sold it for $20 or $30 million, not $300 million. But what was the company? It had a chip that lowered the latency for message passing in what was the emerging rack computer approach to high-performance computing. So, that's an example where if you want to build a computer in that way, it has its issues. And one of its issues, for example, is, make sure you have the lowest possible latency for processes that are going on that you possibly can, so it can go as fast as possible.

ZIERLER: This is all happening in the wake of 9/11 and the War on Terror. Is that an impact at all in the kinds of companies to invest in or how you're thinking about positioning the fund?

CONN: It didn't. Maybe it did for some. Where would the opportunities be? Security. Airport security, this security, that security. Detection. Detection of powders, detection of explosives, chemistry, all of those things. But I didn't find any opportunities that seemed compelling for startup company who could, say, make a measurement to 10X the accuracy of anything on the market that was going to be crucial to walk into an airport. And you had to think about how big the market was and what your pricing would be for your product. So, I don't know how big the market would be, say, in the security business. Every airport needs one. But the number of airports is not bazillions, it's hundreds to thousands.

So, they all buy three. Unless you're selling them big walkthrough machines, like GE is selling them, you can't make enough growth, enough capital. It doesn't grow into a big enough size. Now, I'm not saying there weren't some that did, but I didn't see any, and the customers in the security area were going to be companies, yes, indeed. They had to become more secure. But it was mainly going to be the government and the airports, and that's a big bureaucracy. So, selling into that isn't so easy. It's different from selling to the Department of Defense. Many companies developed to sell into the defense industry because it's got many, many, enormous budgets, and you could find a place to still build a billion-dollar company.

What's useful here is the nature of your question and how I'm answering. In other words, the judgment that would have to be made was, is the market big enough? Where are the opportunities? Where are the companies getting founded that were going to solve these problems, or are they going to get solved by the big guys? They get solved by the big guys, the little guy gets eaten up right away, or he gets bought. That's not bad, but it also limits your upside. So, you step back, those are the considerations for whether to invest or not in a company or in an area.

ZIERLER: What did you learn about face-to-face meetings? When was it important for you to do the traveling, and when would you expect the companies to come see you?

CONN: We had a partner meetings on Mondays. That was sacrosanct. So, unless something very unusual came up, all the partners were there on Monday, and Monday was when we did our business. That was when we reviewed the portfolios, we found where the problems were, , where this was, what's the status of that. Everybody got to know everything about each partner's portfolio companies. We also had to go over our own budgets to make sure we weren't going to run out of money for follow-on investments, and not be able to follow up in a later round of funding that a company might raise. We always had enough in reserve to be able to do what's called our pro rata amount to maintain our percentage ownership. And so, those were crucial meetings. There were two things that also happened at those meetings that were essentially the most important.

One was, companies that we already had in the portfolio that were coming up for another round always came in and made a presentation, similar to what they were going to make to a new investor to invest in the company for the latest round that they were raising the money for. And we'd listen to the pitch and maybe sharpen it up a little bit with the experience of the partners and believe in it or be a critic. And so, we had to make a judgment and help the company. It wasn't about beating them up, we had to decide about what role we were going to play. Are we going to put good money after bad, or is this good money after good money? That was the fundamental question all the time.

So, it didn't mean we'd have a different company each week, but we would have to bring the companies in, particularly as they were coming up to a fundraising round. Otherwise, the partners were responsible. We would travel the rest of the week if we had to travel, and we would report on the companies and how they were doing, and we didn't necessarily have to hear from the CEO of the company. That's a burden for them, they've got to fly in, and so on, and so forth. That's how it worked. So, the big things were hearing about ongoing companies, and then, of course, new investments. So, if you found something that was different and new, or you were excited by its story? Then why were you excited? Did you have leadership, did you have the technology in hand? What were the rocks in the road that you had to overcome so that that company could go from wherever it is to a better place? What was its potential, what was its market size? All that stuff. And those were always fascinating meetings, when you saw a de novo company brought into the partnership.

ZIERLER: What was the voting structure among the partners? Was it simply majority rule? Was it weighted in one way or another?

CONN: In the end, it was always sort of unanimous. I think the way it went was–and this is where we had a little difficulty, we would either all disagree, or all agree. We would all not want it, or all want it. But everybody had an equal vote. By the bylaws, every managing director's vote counted the same as every other managing director. In other words, the lead managing director, Bill Stensrud, didn't get two votes, like a special stock share. We didn't have a multiplier of voting, like your vote counts for two times what the vote of a regular partner is, so you can control voting without having as many shares are outstanding in the company. That kind of idea would be that some partner had more than one vote. We didn't have that.

On the other hand, if Bill had real issues with a company, he was the lead managing partner, and usually, we'd deferred to him. He had good reasons usually for why he was skeptical of what he was skeptical of, so in that sense, he played a kind of lead role, do we like it, do we not like it. I don't remember a case where I was the only one that didn't like something, and everybody else liked it, or vice versa.

The Dividends After Academic Success

ZIERLER: On a personal level, was the compensation such that your lifestyle changed?

CONN: Yes. Oh, yes. This goes to the history. When I started, I was making a couple hundred thousand dollars more than I had been making. That's not life changing. But by 2006, I was making a hell of a lot more than that as a salary, a million a year or something like that at that point. Well, when you have an income of a million a year, it's life-changing compared to $200,000, $400,000, even $500,000. You suddenly have so much excess capital, [Laugh] even with taxes and everything else. In 2005 and ‘06, we remodeled the house we were living in. I have a passion for contemporary art, I had enough excess capital to really exercise that joy. I began collecting in the 90s, when I didn't have a lot of excess capital. That was very good, by the way, because I had to learn what did I like, why did I like it, and can I afford it? And I had to be buying things–it was just like venture capital. I had to be investing in things where the artist did not have high prices at that point, they were not world-renowned (yet). That wasn't the game I could play. Just like venture capital, find somebody early on and see what happens. But the truth is, there, I wasn't investing in art for the returns. I just had excess capital, and I loved art. That's a very different motivation. But nonetheless, the excess was nice.

ZIERLER: What were some of the investing home runs that allowed for this major growth in your compensation over those first few years?

CONN: It didn't come from success in the companies, although I had some. It came from the beginnings of the difficulties of the partnership. So, what happened was, and this is really the story not of me but of the partnership, the telecom bubble had bust, and between Enterprise 4 and 5, Naser and Bill had invested in a lot of telecom companies. And they were really struggling. And I can't remember one that actually did well. So, by 2004, 2005, Tom Clancy was having trouble with software companies he had invested in, and I think he was the first partner where the partnership decided to part ways with him. So, now, we went from six partners to five investing partners, and then Naser left, and we were down to four investing partners.

Now, in 2002/2003, Bill had an idea that we had so much money under management that we should bring in a chief operating officer, not an investing partner. And we had enough money from fees and all that to do that. And we brought in a person whose name was Carl Eibl, and he had had a successful company as a CEO, but he was a lawyer. Not that that's bad–some good investors are lawyers. But the idea was, he was going to manage the firm and the money, and he was going to manage all of us, and we were going to go out there and do our hunting and fishing, finding the investments, and so on, and so forth, but he'd come along as a sidekick. And I don't mean that in a demeaning way, he was very smart and financially astute.

And so, for example, if we needed an extra board member to represent us on the board, we could have Carl do that. One of my failures was to invest in a company where I didn't have a partner in round A. That should not have been allowed by the partnership, but Carl turned out to like the CEO guy. He liked it, and he said he'd partner with me, and we'd be two members on the board instead of one, and then we'd bring in new money in the B round. That's another story. But he would have roles of that kind, and he was extraordinarily good when we were beginning to have exits. So, when a company, like the one I told you about, Pathscale, was up for acquisition, that's a good story. Pathscale, I invested in roughly 2003, and it was developing this low-latency interconnect chip.

And by 2005, we had the full CAD design of the chip, so you've got it all figured out, and now, you've got to go get the chip made, and you've got to test it. So, you've got to have the money to get TSMC or some foundry to make the chip to your design. And they're expensive because they're one-offs. You make a few chips, you don't make thousands, tens of millions, and so on, mass production. You're just making a few to see if it works. So, we did that, and it worked well. And this company, it was a semiconductor company in Orange County, ended up getting very interested. So, here's the story. It's a terrific one. So, I had become the leader on that board. And I got appointed as the board member to be the board member, along with the CEO and the CTO, to negotiate the deal. And I get asked to lead the negotiations to sell the company.

I brought Carl along, and I'll never forget this. We had a big, magnificent boardroom with a view of the beach in La Jolla and the ocean. The CEO comes down with four people. The CFO, his CTO, his head of chip manufacturing guy, and so on. And they're on one side of the table. And who's on the other side of the table? Me and Carl. And we're going back and forth about the price, and whatever happens, we might've spent an hour, and hour and a half, we took a break, we came back. And in the end, Carl, to his great credit, said the number, which is $60 or $80 million, that that's our minimum. They had a smaller number than that, and we said, "No," and we got up to walk out of our room to go back to our offices, wishing them a good day. Everybody else on the other side of the table got up to leave, and they started towards the door. And the CEO sat there. He didn't leave, he didn't get up, he didn't go out the door. And we got called back in, and we got the price. So, at some point, you have to have a walkaway number.

And we had it. Carl knew how to do this even better than I. He was the one who basically choreographed the dance. But I was the one who found the company, I was the one who got asked to be the board member representing us in this negotiation, and we sold the company. And we made 2.5X or 3X on the investment we made, so that was considered a good return. 10X is a home run, so it's a third of a home run. It's a single, maybe a double depending on how you're counting. But it was positive, right? And we're talking $8 million in, $25 million back, that's net. Pretty good money. So, that was a role that Carl played. Now, back to what was going on. So, Carl is brought in around 2003, maybe a year after I came. And he's playing this role. And Bill Stensrud's got a lot of management issues with his company, and Carl's very effective.

But by 2004, one of the partners, Tom, was having trouble, and we decided to part way with that partner. Carl took over his position on the board, and part of the issue that company was having was–do you know A&M Records? The A in A&M Records was, at that point, super wealthy and was the backer of this company. And the CEO was his family friend. And Carl went on this board, and I remember another story. So, the company was not doing well, and both Tom before him and Carl after him thought we should have a change of the CEO. That's not uncommon. Well, trying to deal with this billionaire, he had all the levers of power you could possibly imagine. And although Carl made his case, and this, that, and the other thing, it went the way the other guy wanted, not the way we wanted. So, sometimes you win, sometimes you don't. I'll tell you another story about that.

The story involves Bill Stensrud and Carl Icahn. Icahn is an iconic name in investing. I'll tell you that story later. Anyway, Carl kept playing this role. Tom left, so now, we're down a partner. A year, 18 months later, in 2005, ‘06, Naser leaves as a partner. Now were down two partners and that frees up more than $2 million a year that would have gone to their salaries. goes to salary and money. Now, we're not paying partners. You got the money; you can redistribute it to other partners.

In I think 2005, Naser's companies are not doing well. Naser Partovi was the guy from Nortel, and his companies were telecom companies, and they were not doing well. So, we all decided, "It's not working out." And we parted ways with Naser, but we put him in as the CEO of one of the portfolio companies and asked him to lead that company. It needed new leadership, he was years managing at Nortel, he could be the leader. Now, we're down to four partners. It's Carl, me, Drew, and Bill. And so we decide that every one of the partners now should get the same salary, $1 million a year. Pretty good, right?

And Carl's not an investing partner, though he gets paid the same, so there are three investing partners left. And this leads me almost naturally to the story about Bill and really sort of how this all came asunder, which is bigger than me. I'm in there until 2008, when the financial collapse occurs. But in the end of 2004 or 2005, Bill had decided to invest in a company called Muse, which was headquartered in New York. And after a little bit, he decided he needed to be the CEO. And he had made an enormous amount of money. So, he went and bought himself a place in New York and became the CEO of the company. So now, Bill's not on the West Coast anymore. And in one of these incidences, there he was interacting with another buyer who was the guy who made all his money with Ralph's grocery stores, a big LA investor, and eventually, there was also a telecom company that Bill had invested in, and also went in to be the CEO, and that's the one that brings in the story of Carl Icahn.

In the market, Icahn had a company. His firm was invested in a significant company that was in the same market. And Bill felt that that company either should buy his, or they should work together. And so, he went on a trip to meet Carl Icahn because Icahn's firm was the major investor in this other company. And he came back with stories. And the story that stuck in my mind was this. Icahn smokes cigars, and Bill smokes cigars. Imagine yourself in a smoke-filled room at a card-playing table. And they were playing cards. Icahn liked to test people by playing poker. $1,000 a chip was the way it worked. So, Bill played poker with Carl Icahn. He lost, but he was a good enough player Icahn didn't say at the end of the meeting, "You're out."

But over a period of time, just as happened with the guy from A&M Records, Bill ended up getting squeezed by the big investor, and we could no longer come up with the capital to keep the company Bill was on the board of going, and it collapsed. And roughly a year and a half later, this company, Muse, also came to a bad end. And Carl had gone in to help him with the management at that point. So, what was going on in those years was, Bill was going into these companies to try to run them. He wasn't really being a venture capitalist; he was being a hired CEO. He's supposed to hire somebody outside if he thinks the CEO's not doing the job, not be the CEO replacement himself. And yet, that's what he loved to do. So, I would argue that Bill Stensrud was not an actual venture capitalist, he was a natural CEO, so we had a misfit. And at the end of 2007, Bill actually left the firm. And Muse was failing and in 2007, Bill calls it quits and leaves the firm. So, going into 2008, there were just three of us, Carl, myself, and the biotech partner, Drew Senyei.

ZIERLER: We talked about home runs. We used some other baseball metaphors. What about some strikeouts?

CONN: So, there were a couple of strikeouts, and I hinted at one already. It was a semiconductor equipment company, and the leader was a guy who had founded a very famous company in the business called Applied Materials. They're the largest maker of semiconductor equipment, to make semiconductor equipment, that all the fabs buy. When you go to a fab, you look on the floor, where'd the machines come from? Well, they come from companies like Applied Materials. And he had been the founder of Applied Materials, and it got into trouble in the late 70s, and somebody else had come in as the CEO, which happens with companies. And he ended up having some personal troubles. But by the time I met him, it was early 2000s, and he was based in San Diego. And an idea had come up for a company that I had found, but it needed a new leader. And he didn't seem to have personal troubles.

And we thought this fellow, his name was Mike McNeilly, could be the CEO. Even though he was now in his late 50s, he knew the business. We brought him in, and it turned out that, well, straightforwardly, he was crooked. And we didn't know it. And so, the company went along looking like it was making some good progress, and all of a sudden, we noticed that there wasn't as much cash in the coffers as there needed to be, and he had hired some people and he just seemed to be treating them very arbitrarily, kind of like a bully. And in the end, that's the one that Carl and I were on the board of, and we only did one round, but we ended up shutting the company down and eating our losses, and we had put in close to $10 million, $5M from each of two funds. So, that was the biggest failure financially. I had another one that was right at the beginning of LEDs and flat panel displays, and they were going to do organic LEDs, which today are the best screens you can buy, super sharp.

Most importantly, contrast is unbeatable. The blacks are black, not gray or dark black. And that's what makes organic LEDs so stunning. But this was before there was anything on the market. And this company had come up with a chip that would allow an organic LED manufacturer to properly manage how each pixel worked. That seemed like a great bet because the flat panel market was coming. We already had flat panels on computer screens, but they were LCDs instead of LEDs. The LED was finally starting to make a big breakthrough. I thought that would be really wonderful. I got another VC firm who we had often partnered with to invest with us. I had three suitors to come in and co-invest with me in this company. I picked one, and that went along for a while. It had some contracts, it made some money back, but ultimately, it didn't make it. And so, those were two that didn't make it. I only had eight total. I can't remember exactly the number.

And I had another one that I should've said was the biggest success, which was a semiconductor equipment company, NeXT, which was the business I knew because my company was a semiconductor equipment company. And the founder was this was a guy whom I'd known from the mid-70s in plasma physics at the University of Wisconsin. We hired him, his name was Dick Post, as an experimental plasma physicist. He stayed with us, he went to MIT, and the kind of device for making fusion was called a mirror machine. Proved not to work, despite everybody's best scientific and technical efforts. And that program, the Department of Energy closed it down. And Dick then started a semiconductor equipment company to make measurements or something, and it was successful, ASTeX.

So, come early 2002, he founded another company called NeXT [?], and it did coating and plating to be able to put thin films on the chips that were needed. And he came to see me. He was in the process of raising a B round, I think. And I had to present it to the partnership. The market was pretty big. I finally got another VC firm to partner with me on this one as well. Semiconductor equipment in the 2000s was not necessarily the hot spot of venture capital investing. But this looked unique, and in 2004 or ‘05, we made the investment. I can't remember exactly when. And ultimately, after I left the company, and the market came back from the '08-'09 crash, they were able to sell it.

In 2011, it got bought for $250 million and returned something like 4X or 5X to the firm. So, there was an example where I kind of knew what I was doing, it was a big investment, I was able to get others to do it. We'd put in about $20 million and gotten roughly $80-90 million back.

I guess what I'm saying is that over a period of three years, I learned how to do the business, but I wasn't leading the firm. And in the end, the firm's main leader turned out to be not a venture capitalist but a CEO. And when he left in 2007, there were three of us left managing the remnants of the investments from funds ‘99 and 2001, right? Old-in-the-tooth funds. This sort of naturally goes into the end of the story. Let me ask you before the end of this story if there are any other questions you want to ask about this experience.

ZIERLER: Just a minor one. Tactically, when the two years had come up from your initial leave of absence from UC San Diego, what was your status at that point? Did you revert to emeritus? Did you have to cut ties?

CONN: No, no. You sort of automatically become emeritus. You don't get anything for that except the title. But when I started July 1 of 2002 at Enterprise Partners, I took two years' leave of absence, and I organized to retire from the University of California in 2004. There was a benefit. If you retire while employed, and leave of absence is considered still employed, you've got all your benefits into retirement, health benefits and so on. If you had a break in service and then took your retirement, you would get your retirement, but you'd have to pay your own health insurance and other things. There was a real financial incentive to retire rather than try to hang on in some funny way. And so, I just straight away retired. And that was the end of the academic career, so to speak. I got back to working with academics in the next phase after venture capital..

But here, the academic connections often helped me with developments at universities that faculty were developing, and we would get a spinout. I had a couple of those that were modestly successful. So, to bring this to closure, you see what's happened. We've gone from six partners, five investing partners, in 2002 when I joined the firm, to two investing partners and a partner who's a firm manager, who's not made his own investments. And we've got to raise another fund. Could we do it? Well, now, I'd need to lead. And Drew would have to bring somebody in from pharma. And I found two partners who were willing to talk to us about forming a four-member partnership and going out to raise money. That was the summer of 2008. And our firm was in bad straits, but we thought, "Look, we've got a history. We'll raise a $200 million fund, not $400 million or $600 million."

But we never were able. We didn't have enough time. Coming into 2008, we were down to three people in a foxhole. And my commitment to my partners was, the three of us would work off what we had remaining in companies and do our very best for our limited partners to get as much return from ours as we could. That was the plan. And we were about ready to try to create what's called a road show, [Laugh] to go around to the limited partners, and we knew the limited partners. Over the years, we would typically make two trips a year, one Midwest and West Coast, one to the East Coast, and make a visit to every limited partner and give them an update once a year. So, I visited Yale, and I visited the other places that were invested with us.

So, we had this plan. I had two possible well-known and successful partners who had left their firms for whatever reasons. We were sort of beginning to think about negotiating what was the structure of a new partnership and what would the road show look like in September 2008. We were, as a partnership, in a foxhole already. Other partnerships were healthy.

And then, boom, right? So, other partnerships had a lot of reserves. One of the difficulties we had was, we were now seven years into Enterprise 6 and nine years into Enterprise 5. We'd spent a lot of money, and we didn't have a lot in reserve for follow-on investment. What you needed in a time of a downturn like that was reserve funding. You go to every company and say, "Cut to the bare minimum. This is survival."

You've got to get to the other side of whatever this is. It's a valley. There will be another side. We don't know how long it will be. The only way you might get to the other side is minimize the spending. Make the capital you have go as far as you can. Some of that happened, but we didn't really have a lot of follow-on capital, so I remember having to take over the board position of one of Bill's companies, Calient, and we ended up getting diluted out. They did a new round of funding at a new and much lower price, and all of the earlier investors got wiped out. This was a company that Bill had invested in. It was a spinout from UC Santa Barbara. It was up in the Bay Area. It was five or six years old. I knew the founder, but it went asunder, mainly because we didn't have enough money to keep our pro rata within the financial needs that the company had, and another firm had just come in, and it had fresh capital.

So, we did what's called a down round, and that was the end of that. So, I think I've told you the story of – in the summer of that year (2008), I actually had a call from the Kavli Foundation about its president opening and said to them my partners and I were in the process of raising another fund, and "I'm committed to that. So, really, I'm not available. Thank you, but no thank you." And then, September hits.

And that summer–one of the many things VCs do is network. They're often meetings hosted by VC firms, or they'll be hosted by the San Diego venture community. Everybody put a little money in, and then they kind of organize gatherings of venture capitalists. We would go to meetings where people with new startups would present, and we'd all listen. If we were interested in something, we could follow up with it. And that was how, to some degree, you found new companies.

So, this was a gathering of VCs to play golf in Palm Springs in July. And my partners asked if I would go represent Enterprise Partners, and I said fine. And I drove out to Palm Springs, no problem. But I decided to go through the mountain, and I decided to take my wife's car because it would be fun. And it was a 330 BMW convertible. [Laugh] Clutch. Important part of the story. Anne was a great driver, and she loved driving a car, so she always had a clutch, not an automatic transmission. Okay, so I get to Palm Springs, everything goes fine. And now, the question was, do I come back by going over the mountains to Interstate 15, and then down 15 to the ones below the freeway to take me to Del Mar? Or do I drive around, go to Palm Springs the long way on Interstate 10 back over towards San Bernardino, and then work my way back down to the I-15 and come on back down?

Well, I decided it probably would be just as quick, but more fun, to drive through the mountains, zoom, zoom, zoom. Well, it turns out, going back, I had forgotten that the roads that came down were very steep. Coming down, it was no problem. You put it in second gear and just let it kind of go down. You're not constantly pushing on the clutch. But going up, the car would stop. You had to keep changing gears. First, second, third, down shift, up shift. And I kept pressing like this on the clutch. I made it home, but I noticed I had a pain in my back. And the pain in my back became debilitating. And in September, I actually had a procedure to put a pin between L4 and L5, and that really didn't work. And I was getting epidural shots in the middle of my lower spine, that wasn't working.

And I could hardly sit and stand. But I'd been away from the partnership three weeks or a month, recovering. And when I came back, it was October 2008. And the market had collapsed. And Drew and Carl decided without me that there wasn't going to be any new fund, and the two of them could take care of what was remaining in the portfolio. They didn't need the third partner, so I became the final victim. I won't call it a victim, the final person to leave the partnership.

And they never did raise another fund. They worked off the inventory of companies as best they could. Fund lasted until 2012 or ‘13, and then EPVC as a firm went out of business. So, for me, it was the first time I'd ever sort of lost a position in a firm. And that's a whole other story that we should spend next time on. Because it's a story of how, when you get into deep trouble, you lose your job, and you're infirm, and you're 65. What do you do? How do you get through that tunnel?

ZIERLER: So, Kavli was not in the bag already at this point?

CONN: Oh, absolutely not. This is October. We were going to raise a fund. We went into September with the whole plan to raise another fund. The market collapsed. A week or two after the market collapsed, I had to go in for this operation, so I was out a week or two. And when I came back, it was mid-October. Already, we were a month past the big collapse, and everything had collapsed. And with that collapse, my two partners decided they could do it and didn't need a third partner, we weren't going to raise another fund.

So, I'll end this by saying that certainly, aside personal depression and things of that sort, from a professional point of view, it was the darkest moment of my life. Suddenly, for a person who had worked all his life, had been successful all his life, I was suddenly the person let go, no future. They did give me a very generous separation package, one full year of salary, which was a million bucks, so I had money. It wasn't the money. At least for a while. But it was, what's the future? And you're debilitated physically. How the hell are you going to make this work? It was a black time.

ZIERLER: Well, we'll pick up on that next time, and I know that there's a happy ending to this, so we'll build towards that.

[End of Recording]

ZIERLER: This is David Zierler, Director of the Caltech Heritage Project. It's Tuesday, April 9, 2024. It is my great pleasure to be back, after way too long, with Professor Robert Conn. Bob, as always, it's wonderful to be with you. Great to see you.

CONN: Great to see you, David. I've enjoyed this immensely. Why don't we just get into it? [Laugh]

The Path to Leading the Kavli Foundation

ZIERLER: We left off last time at a real low moment in your career. Really, in your personal life as well. Trouble with job prospects, trouble with your health, not really knowing what would come next. By the time you got to thinking about next steps, I wonder if you can explain when the Kavli Foundation entered the picture for you.

CONN: Well, that's a very easy thing to answer, and I may have described some of it last time. December of 2008. So, the Kavli Foundation was in 2008, searching for a new president. Probably starting in late 2007, they had hired a search firm to look for a new president. The first president, David Auston, had, at that point, served four years and had indicated he didn't want to go past five. And so, they started the search almost a year before I met Fred with Fred to see about the job. The search firm had contacted me, the first contact about this, in July of 2008, when I got a call from them asking if I might be interested, exploring with me what was the Kavli Foundation, who was Fred Kavli. I didn't know much about Fred Kavli at that point, and I had not heard of the Foundation. While it had done good things, it was still very young.

And unless you were somehow tied in with an institution that had received one of their endowment gifts, like Caltech, you had no reason to be reading about it or hearing about it, and I was doing venture capital, not academics. So, they called me, and my partners and I, as I think I've explained, were intending to try to raise another fund. And at that point, I had decided that I should play a leadership role. And I had identified two new potential partners to join the three that were remaining at that point, and we actually were starting to negotiate the partnership agreement, and then we would go out and raise another fund. And so, obviously, that didn't happen because of the meltdown. But that was the first contact. And what I said to them was, "Well, thank you, but I am committed to my partners, and we're going to be raising another fund. The timing is just not right," in essence.

And then, the interregnum began with basically a firing. In October, there were only three of us partners remaining out of six who had started, plus a seventh who was a founder who wasn't involved in the latest fund, but he was involved in earlier funds, so he was still looking after some companies. And they decided there wasn't going to be another fund, and the two of them could take care of what was left of the portfolio, and they didn't need me. Okay, fine, so now, I had the interregnum I described. So, the meeting with Fred occurred at a meeting in Oakland of the President of the University of California. I and Fred had been, maybe for a decade, on the Advisory Committee on Science and Technology to the President of the University of California, and that had to do with science, and technology, and innovation, Silicon Valley, and biotech in San Diego, and this, that, and the other thing, right?

What should the policies be? Are there some issues here and there? What advice did we have for the president? And they held two meetings a year, and Fred and I typically were attendees. We got to know each other very mildly just over coffee at these meetings. So, at that meeting in December 2008 – and I've told this story, so I won't repeat it–we connected. I went there specifically to connect with him, asked after his process of searching for a president. They were still searching. He asked me if I might be interested. I said, "Well, circumstances have changed, and I might be. Let's talk." That was the real first meeting, and that led, two or three weeks later at most, to a meeting with the search committee of the board, with the search firm, at the Foundation's headquarters, which I've also described.

That obviously went well because on the drive home, I got a call from the search firm, "They want to make you an offer." And then, it took about two months to work out the particulars. I think I mentioned that Fred and I had begun to have the conversation about joining, and that means you have a negotiation about salary, about this, about that. And then, the phone went dead, so to speak, at the end of December. It went on for two, three weeks, and I didn't hear a word. And everything seemed to have been going well. I called the search firm and said, "What's happening?" "Oh, no, don't worry about it." "All right, fine." And it turned out that in late December that year, Fred had been diagnosed with a skin cancer that was serious, more than just the basal-cell simple stuff on your head that they treat and cut out - no problem.

So, he had had an operation to remove this and all the lymph nodes in the region, and he was laid up. Fred's very private. And this was a characteristic of Fred throughout his life, so you never really knew Fred. Nobody did. And nobody ever knew. He compartmentalized like few people I've met. And so, things didn't spill over, and he could stay very quiet about something, and very open, seemingly, about something else. So, he said nothing, and he never did say anything. I only learned later, after I got to work, and he had to put his leg up on the desk. And I said, "How are you doing, Fred?" And he said, "Well, I had this thing. And I have to keep my leg elevated so the lymph nodes drain." Anyway, that's how I, in effect, got the offer and had agreed to start April 1, and I was still debilitated.

And I described how I got through that debilitation and actually was capable of starting on April 1. [Laugh] But when I said yes, that was actually an open question. Physically, was I going to be able to do it? Mentally was no issue. But I had this back issue, and if it didn't straighten itself out, I would be in trouble. So, we got that resolved beginning in February, and I had given myself until April to get going. So, there we were, that was the start. And from a personal point of view, before actually beginning work, I met with him only, I think, twice, three times at most. Once in the first meeting in December, once at the board meeting, and maybe one more time as I was getting set up to join.

The Research Vision of Fred Kavli

ZIERLER: Did you talk to Fred ever about his foundational interests in science philanthropy, what motivated him to get involved in all of this extraordinary generosity?

CONN: Oh, yes. Oh, yes. And it's a wonderful story. So, Fred was actually trained as an engineer. A little bit like me, he had an orientation towards physics. He likes the fundamentals of physics. But he did engineering as a matter of getting a job and having a practical life. Nobody in his family had ever gone to college either, and when you're in that situation, and you think about going into something like a basic science, what is that about? How do you make a living? What do you do? And I think, like David Baltimore, I don't know if this is true of David, I don't know of the educational level of his parents, but they went a lot farther than my parents. So, they could give him a sense of what it might be. You could survive being a faculty member or a professor. But I had no background in that, and Fred didn't have any background like that in his family.

They were farmers. And so, he went to the university closest to his very small town. It wasn't even a town, it was, like, a little village. If it had 300 people, it was a lot. And he went to a place called Trondheim, which is on the West Coast, midway up in Norway on a fjord. And they have their national technical university there. Had a different name when he went to it, but that was what it was called now. And so, he got an engineering degree at NTNU, as it's called. He got his engineering degree. I actually don't even remember the major. Probably electrical engineering. And he wanted to come to America. In Norway at the time he was born, 1928, the eldest son got everything. It's like the eldest son, the king becomes the next king, that kind of thing. And they had a family farm in a small town called Eresfjord.

And so, the father made their life at the town. They were three kids, an older brother, himself, and sister. I think the sister was in the middle, and he was the youngest. So, the oldest son inherited the farm, and he was apparently extraordinarily creative, and Fred had an extraordinary admiration for him. During World War II, the two of them ended up making wood briquettes for fuel for automobiles during the War in Norway. He was a teenager. So, they were very entrepreneurial, very creative, mechanically gifted, and so on, and so forth. But Fred was going to have to make his own life. The farm was the older brother's. So, he went to the university, got an engineering degree, and before his father had gotten married in the 20s, maybe even as a teenager, I don't know, he'd traveled to San Francisco and worked as a stevedore on the docks of San Francisco for four or five years.

And so, when he came back and got married, he regaled the kids with stories of America. And so, Fred's idea was, "I'm going to go to San Francisco." And he finished up his studies around ‘54 or ‘55, something like that, and he couldn't get a visa to come to the US. He didn't have a job offer. So, he ended up going to Canada and working for Imperial Chemical Industries, the British chemical company, in Montreal. And with that job, he was able to get a visa to come to the United States, and a year later, he did. That was ‘55, ‘56. And he went to San Francisco. And he explored. You know the old Mark Twain adage that, "The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco"? Well, that applied, and he was coming from Norway. "Enough of the cold." [Laugh]

So, he made his way down to Southern California, and he liked the climate much, much better, and he got a job with one of the aerospace companies. And he became an expert in electrical sensors, pressure sensors, pressure inducers, all that stuff. And in ‘57 or ‘58, he had the idea with a friend–I think the colleague had actually done the invention -- of a new kind of sensor, but Fred helped him perfect it, and the two of them started a business. They literally put an ad in the LA Times. "Two engineers want to start a business. Looking for financial backing." Anyway, they got it off the ground, and a couple of years later, the partner left, or Fred bought the partner out and named the company Kavlico. Kavli is his name, Kavli Company. And that became the company that he sold in 2000 for something like $340 million. And so, that's a little bit of the origin story of Fred. He was intrinsically entrepreneurial.

He was private in his private life. He married a woman in the late 50s or early 60s. They adopted two children, one of whom turned out to be mentally limited in his capability and needed help. The other was a daughter who did fine. Never talked about them. Took care of them financially. I think he and the daughter were at odds, and the son was in a home in Santa Barbara. He and his wife divorced in the early 80s.But I guess I'm telling you the story leading up to how he got involved in science. He was an engineer, but he appreciated the science that was underpinning the engineering, and he always felt like that was maybe even more basic than the engineering.

So, as his life went along, even though at that point, he had been investing in Southern California real estate, when in the early 1980's he and his wife divorced, half of that went to his wife in the divorce, but he made sure he kept the company, Kavlico. In the separation, however they did it, he got Kavlico, and she got the real estate. And then, he just rebuilt the real estate business. So, come the 90s, he began to think about what he would want to do. And talking about compartmentalization, no one, of the people who I knew who felt that they were closest to Fred knew what his wealth was. They were off by a third.

So, he was very private about it, and as it turned out, there were some other things, but we learned in 2013 when he passed that he had something in excess of $600 million in total wealth, and it was divided roughly in three parts at that point. $200 million was the value of his real estate empire, which is mostly commercial real estate. $200 million was in the Foundation, that he had contributed. And the other $200 million was in his investments, stocks and bonds, and special managers of this kind and that kind, of which people knew almost nothing in terms of its total value.

So, that was Fred. When he got to the 1990s, he was approaching his 70s. He was born in ‘28. So, in ‘88, he turned 60, ‘98, he's going to turn 70. So, he began to think, "What do I do?" And I think he had decided, if he could, he would sell the company, and he began looking into, right away, philanthropy. And it's a fascinating story because he–for example, there's a playhouse in a city in the west end of the Cajon Valley, and he named it. He gave them a gift, and they named it the Fred Kavli theater. So, he had the idea of giving back in the 90s. I don't think he had done much philanthropy before that. But now, he began to talk seriously, and I'm told, and I saw this with Fred, he did a lot of diligence about almost anything that he was interested in. So, he really looked into, "How do I set up a foundation? What do I do this? How do I do that?" And that's how he met a number of the people who ended up on the board. A fellow named Doug Freeman had a business advising wealthy clients about how to manage their money and set up their foundations, do whatever they wanted to do with their money, and how to do it in the most tax advantageous way, and things of this sort. So, Fred explored all of that, how to set up a foundation, and he actually ended up with two foundations when he started. One was the Kavli Foundation as you know it today, but the other was what was called an operating institute. That's like Howard Hughes. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute is, in fact, not a foundation but an operating institute. It's an operating foundation.

And there, you have to spend the money, and you run it more like a business. But there are some tax advantages to that. And he originally set it up where he had both. He had the foundation, and he had this operating institute. Now, the operating institute proved to be not very functional, and apparently, the tax benefits came in the first couple of years, so after he had the tax benefits, they shut it down. [Laugh] And all that was left by 2003 or ‘04 was the Foundation. But he did what he needed to do to preserve his capital. And Fred was very careful about his money. So, on the one hand, he would buy a Rolls-Royce, but he would buy a 1965 Rolls-Royce, he wouldn't buy a 1995 or 2000 Rolls-Royce. He had a double lot for his home in Santa Barbara that was on a bluff overlooking the ocean, just spectacular.

So, some places, he splurged, and other places–the word doesn't get used today because it can be misunderstood, but the proper word for him is niggardly, which has nothing to do with the bad word. But it's the best descriptor of how he was with his money. So, he was always maximizing what was available in his mind to use for philanthropy – so a very good thing. And it's an interesting feature of how the tax system motivates people who get into philanthropy. They're getting into it to do good, but also to preserve their wealth, and let their wealth do good in the way that they want it to do good as opposed to the way the government will use it if you give it to the government through taxation. It is a very singular–the British do it, too. But nobody does it at the scale we do philanthropy in the United States.

And you could see in Fred's behavior and motivations these generalized characteristics about the role of philanthropy in the country and how wealthy people see it. So, in any case, that begins in the 90s, and then the question became what to focus on, which was your original question. How did he come to do science? So, I'm explaining, he wasn't a scientist, but he knew about science. And as he went through it, he did all kinds of diligence. As I said, he took courses in how to set up a foundation, he went to visit Stanford, he went to Caltech, he talked to the Caltech president, David Baltimore at the time, who organized for him to talk to various people. And he did this at a bunch of places. And he settled on the idea that basic science was the most important to focus on. That is, what is called sometimes, and it sounds effete, which is why I'm a little nervous to use it, curiosity-driven science.

And people who can just follow their curiosity, those suckers must have a special life. It's just too hifalutin for most people. And I understand that, coming from where I come from. But on the other hand, I'm me today, not me the kid. And so, that sort of science is, to me, the science that usually cracks the edges of knowledge first. I would say our good David Baltimore is a fundamental scientist. Now, he's actually a hybrid because the other kind of basic science that gets done is what's called use-inspired basic science. And there was a wonderful guy who, in the late 90s, came up with a kind of diagram about this. He called it Pasteur's quadrants. In the upper left is what he called the Bohr quadrant. The upper right, he called the Pasteur's quadrant.

And then, the lower right, he called the Edison quadrant, and the lower left, he called something about doing good. Of course, he didn't really have a good name for the lower left. And these four things became called Pasteur's quadrants. But the upper two were both about fundamental science, meaning you needed to discover new knowledge to make any progress, whether it was understanding the world in the sense of Bohr and Einstein, people who had no thought about what to do with the knowledge they may uncover and had no interest in it. And then, there were those who needed to solve a problem, and they didn't have the fundamental knowledge to do it. And the quintessential example used all the time is the transistor.

AT&T had become a monopoly at that point because it owned the telephone system, long distance, local. And so, the government made it a monopoly, gave it a monopoly right like a utility. It is a utility. And so, they could then spend a certain fraction, and they formed Bell Labs. So, when they looked at what was happening in the trend lines, there were two trends in the 1930s. One, if they didn't figure out how to place calls automatically–in those days, telephone operators were women- every woman in the country would be going like this at a switchboard. They invented automatic switching and eventually automatic dialing, so you didn't have to dial up the operator and say, "Operator, I need to reach Yellow 3344." So, they solved that problem, but that was more of an engineering problem, and they could solve that.

But the other was the power consumption of running the telephone network, and all you had were vacuum tubes. And this limitation of vacuum tubes applied to a lot of things, like how to calculate. If you built a calculator with tubes, A, the tubes had high power consumption, they were filaments, and B, they failed a lot, and reliability was very difficult. So, what to do? On that question, the head of the research program–who William Shockley was, the Nobel Prize winner for the transistor, professor later at Stanford, and a bigot. They basically spent five years going through the periodic table, knowing the properties that they would like. Well, it probably had to be a solid-state device, can't be filaments and so on. It probably had to have this characteristic and that characteristic. And people who knew, to some degree, electronic properties of materials, so, "Okay, I want to do this one, I want to do that one."

But then, what they discovered was that if they put certain materials, like silicon, and germanium, and others, if you put them away in a certain way, you could make something called the semiconductor. It wasn't a full conductor, and it wasn't a full resistor, it was a semi. They could've called it a semi-resistor, but what they were interested in was that it did carry a current. So, it's a conductor. And they discovered the fundamental semiconductor, and they won the Nobel Prize, Shockley, the guy who actually did the experimental work, Walter Brattain, and John Bardeen, who did the theory. And that was 1947, changed the world. Absolutely changed the world. But that was driven by a need. We needed to get rid of vacuum tubes. We needed to make a network that could operate with a million times less power consumption per unit of anything than it was in the 20s and 30s.

And eventually, in the 50s, you got transistor radios. [Laugh] The transistor ended up in everything. Mainly, it ended up in computers, and that became another revolution. So, Fred wanted to support science in the Bohr quadrant. He wanted to fund the fundamental knowledge that was going to lead to a better understanding of subject matter, and then the question became two fundamental questions. What to fund, and then, within what to fund, how to fund. [Laugh] Meaning if you don't have infinite money, you have to focus and make some choices. And so, that led him to say, "Well, all right. what are the choices?" And he actually didn't make those choices for a few years. The Foundation got started in 2000, and the first Kavli Institute, I think he supported in 2001 or ‘02. It was serendipity, opportunistic. UC Santa Barbara had the Institute for Theoretical Physics, which the NSF had founded and supported since the late 1970s.

And a great Nobel Prize-winning chemist, Walter Kohn, whose work UC San Diego in the 60s won him the Nobel Prize. . But he went to Santa Barbara, and he ended up becoming the director of this Institute for Theoretical Physics. And Bob Schrieffer, one of the three of Bardeen, Cooper, Schrieffer, theorists of superconductivity of ‘54, ‘55, he was there, and he became, for a while, also director. But Walter Kohn really made the place. And Walter stepped away somewhere mid-90s, late 90s at most. And Santa Barbara, to its credit, hired David Gross from Princeton. David Gross was the senior professor at Princeton and head of the troika, Wilczek and a third one, and they finished up the Standard Model of physics.

ZIERLER: Right, David Politzer, Caltech professor.

CONN: David Politzer, right. But David went into some other things after he finished his PhD, whereas Frank Wilczek went to MIT. He's terrific on his own and stayed deep in the fundamentals of physics, and David, of course, did, too. So, they hired David to be the new director, and they had five permanent faculty within this Institute. So, it was a wonderful place. Anyway, somewhere along the line, they decided that it would be nice to have an endowment for it. And David and Henry Yang, the chancellor, approached Fred, and they gave it away for nothing, frankly. The initial gift was $5 million. And they agreed, for $5 million, to name it the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics. They just put Kavli or K in front of the ITP.

Later, when the foundation decided everybody should get $7.5 million as their first installment of endowment gifts, like Caltech, and Yale, and so on, they gave an extra $2.5 million to Santa Barbara, too. But that was serendipitous. Somebody came along and offered you an ideal opportunity to support basic science, theoretical physics, sure. He could afford it. Later, in the two years since he had taken advantage of that opportunity, he and the board with advisors gave very serious thought to what subject matter they should actually support. And they decided on three areas. Neuroscience, so the basic science of the brain. Nanoscience, which was all the rage in those days. I think they would do something else today if they were thinking about what to do. But the word nanoscience had come onto the scene in the late 90s. The government had a major initiative in nanoscience, it was called the Grand Challenge problem.

I called it science at the scale of atoms and molecules, simple as that. But nano is a scale length. It's not like neuro, which is the brain. It means brain. And astro means astro, it means out there. Cosmology and astronomy, it's the sky. But nano is what happens at the scale of nanometers. Well, it's the scale of atoms and molecules, that's the best I can tell you. [Laugh] But it is pretty fundamental. Feynman was, of course, totally right that there's plenty of room at the bottom. And that initiative basically is what rediscovered Feynman's 1959 lecture about "there's plenty of room at the bottom". [Laugh] It had been lost to history for 30 years. Anyway, they picked nanoscience, and along with astrophysics, those became the major three areas.

We only did one other Theoretical Physics Institute. So, theoretical physics became the side note, and the dominant directions were going to be neuroscience, nanoscience, and astrophysics and cosmology. And that was a profound decision on the part of Fred and the board. So, I think it is an exemplar of how to be effective with your philanthropy. Think carefully, do a lot of diligence, consider what's important to you, consider why it's important to you, and then consider how to go about using your wealth to advance those things that are important to you, however you came to a decision about why they were important to you.

And in his case, Fred came to a decision that basic science was what's important because he loved science. I think it's as simple as that. He always was curious, he wanted to understand. Told stories about in Eresfjord, in the winter nights when they were clear, looking up. And you can't imagine the density of light in the sky when it's clear and there's no ground light around. And he would go sit on one of those mountaintops in Eresfjord and just look up. So, that's the long story. But I tell it the long way because it's really an extraordinary example of how to go about doing philanthropy.

The Three Great Science Challenges

ZIERLER: The Foundation's emphasis, the troika of nanoscience, neuroscience, and astrophysics and cosmology, was that set by the time you joined?

CONN: Yes. It was. It was an attraction. It was one of the things that attracted me. Again, I have the two big experiences of going from good to great, or as I describe it, from a good base to a better place, right? One was the Jacobs School of Engineering, and the other was the Kavli Foundation. And in both cases, I was the second person, not the first. And so, I could assess if the bones were good. And then, if that came out like, "Yeah, man, you could do something with these bones, and it isn't nearly what it could be," I'm the guy.

ZIERLER: How much interaction did you have with David Auston?

CONN: Some, mostly about transitions. I reviewed with him his assessment of the different Institutes that existed at the time and the different programs. I talked to him a little bit about Fred, he was somewhat circumspect about that. But some people take a job, and they want to get all the advice they possibly can, and particularly from a predecessor who's got the experience. Others, and this is me, the predecessor casts a big shadow, no matter who the hell they are. So, "You did your job, thank you very much, leave me alone. I will figure it out." I have always thought it was very important for me to get enough information from a predecessor to think about a strategy, but other than that, and getting generalized information, "Well, what's the situation at Cornell? What's the situation here and there?"–for example, I got there in April, and one of the first visits I made was to Cornell because their director had had a stroke.

He was a Nobel Prize winner, Bob Richardson, and Bob had a stroke. Everybody admired Bob. And he made some discovery about helium-3 and won the Nobel Prize for it. Revered guy, like at Caltech with some of your folks. But he'd suffered a stroke, but he was the director of the Institute. So, how do you handle it? You have somebody who's debilitated. Not, "I can't walk around, I can't get to my office." But you don't have any longer the kind of drive and clarity to lead, and yet, you're revered. How do you manage that situation? And David Auston wanted to come with me to Cornell. And I knew if he came with me–he loved Bob. His predisposition was, "You can't do anything. You just wait for Bob to leave." And that was not what I was going to do. So, I said, "Thank you, but no thank you."

And I went on my own. And after that, we didn't have a bad relationship, but I didn't develop a close relationship with David. "David, you did your job. Well, it's time for me to do mine." I don't know that that would be true at every position I might take, but the person who was running the School of Engineering at UC San Diego before I got there, to me, was an abject failure. Why do I say that? He was just a nice guy, who wouldn't rock any boat, who did everything that everybody wanted, put one foot in front of another. They went nowhere. Nothing changed from the time he became dean when it was made a division in 1982. It was basically and roughly the same place in 1992.

Some things happened, but when they happened, they happened almost serendipitously or by accident. Somebody came and said, "I want to do this with you." It wasn't that the dean was leading and going, "We've got to do this, we've got to do that. We're going to go here; we're going to go there." So, as I said, they were ranked 44, and for good reason. And yet, they had good bones. So, to me, there wasn't any value in talking to Lee Rudee. We were friendly, I was always nice to him, I engaged him whenever we did celebrations about the school. But advice?

ZIERLER: Now, the metaphor about assessing whether an organization has good bones, how did you go about that?

CONN: Well, I think I did it the same way. In the case of the University, it was, what did I think of the quality of the faculty? Who did they have? And what did I judge, and what did the community judge, their reputations to be? And when I looked at UC San Diego in the early 90s–I think I told you this sort of funny story. They had I think eight members of the National Academy, and they only had 90 faculty. I go there, the number goes from eight to nine, while it goes down from four to three at UCLA. Right? They had good bones. San Diego is where it is today because of the initial faculty appointments. That is absolutely the case. They decided to start as a graduate school. They decided to hire Nobel Prize winners in physics and chemistry and say, "Build a department. Hire the best possible people." And they did that in engineering. They brought Sol Penner from Caltech. Sol's fantastic in combustion.

He worked with Farrington Daniels at Wisconsin in the 40s, great physical chemist. Wrote the textbook on physical chemistry. It's how I got interested in physics, I read Daniels's Physical Chemistry. And that was more physics than it was chemistry to me. So, they said, "Sol, come, build engineering." Well, we're not allowed to build engineering. Well, I don't care because we have engineering science at Caltech. I've got my PhD in engineering science But why do I have the PhD in engineering science? Because Caltech and everybody else thought engineering science was the future of engineering. And they at UCSD weren't allowed to have engineering programs because of Berkeley and UCLA. They said, "We don't need more engineers." So, San Diego was trying to create a division of applied science, really, and they developed the mechanical sciences, fluid mechanics, applied mechanics, this and that, and the electrical and computer side, right?

So, they had two fundamental directions. APIS, department of Applied Physics and Information Science, and AMES, which was originally applied something or other, but it ended up being Applied Mechanics and Engineering Science. That was it. They brought a very senior guy, Henry Booker. And this story's worth telling, too, because it goes to how you build greatness. They brought Henry Booker from Cornell. Very senior. In those days, he had written the most papers ever about the solar wind and belts around the Earth, so space physics. So, between Sol Penner and Henry Booker, they went about hiring extraordinary people. And those two guys had taste. They knew who was good. One of the biggest hires in the early 60s, very early, from Caltech, was Bert Fung. And Bert went on to be the father of biomechanics. He ended up in all three branches of the National Academy. And Sol convinced him that he should come to San Diego and help him build this great new thing. And so, Caltech had a profound influence on the origins of engineering at UC San Diego.

Sol was still active at that point. Bert Fung was still there; he was already in two of the three Academies. [Laugh] He would go on to win the National Medal of Science. They had people of that quality. UCLA did have at that time Len Kleinrock. And Len was with Irwin Jacobs and Andy Viterbi in the early 1970's. Len sent the first internet message in 1969 between him and Stanford. So, Len was well-known. But San Diego had eight of these kinds of people. UCLA had four of them, one of whom was also a Caltech-er, Sheldon Friedlander, whom UCLA stole from Caltech. So, UCLA had homegrown a few. San Diego, through the hiring of Sol and Henry Booker. They brought in Irwin Jacobs, as an example of somebody they brought in the 60s to UC San Diego, and Bert Fung as an example of who they brought in the other area. And they brought other people, like Eric Reissner from MIT, who was the most famous guy in structural mechanics in the country at the time.

And he was retiring from MIT. "Fine, come. Eric, build structural engineering. Build structural mechanics." And you guys did the same thing in the mid-60s when I was a graduate student and you brought the guy from Brown, Sternberg. And you hired four of them from Brown, and they just sort of picked the group up, put them down at Caltech, and Caltech became great in applied mechanics. This is a specific example in academic life, but you look for things like that. You look for examples where they've done something that gives you the spark that you know you can build off. It's not just floundering around, people moving this way, and that way, and up and down. And there was a lot of that at San Diego, which was its fault. But they also had this core that was very high quality.

Okay, fast forward to Kavli. Well, what other areas might you have picked that were so foundational and fundamental? And the attraction for me at Kavli was, except for neuroscience, I was pretty deeply steeped in everything else. I'm pretty good at physics, and I've done plasma physics, which is cosmology in a bubble. [Laugh] But I knew plasma physics. I've been at Caltech, and I know what these guys did in astronomy and so on. So, that was, to me, a natural fit and a real intellectual attractor. Nanoscience, I really knew. I did nanoscience, and I founded a company based on nanoscience, and all that stuff. So, those areas, I felt like I could bring a lot to the table if I had a good staff. I would be able to make good judgments and really make it good to great. Neuroscience, I would have to learn, but it was fascinating, and I had a vice president who was a neuroscientist. The vice president for science didn't know anything about the other areas, but she knew neuroscience. She was a PhD in neuroscience. So, that felt good. And the Institutes, David and Fred, I think, for quality assurance purposes, basically said –"We're going to record this call for quality assurance purposes"–that is, they only picked the top universities. You could say they didn't give others a chance. Fair enough. But it was risk management.

So, they're at Yale, they're at MIT, they're at Columbia, they're at Caltech, they're at UC San Diego, they're at Stanford, and so on. Chicago in astronomy and astrophysics, can't go to a better place, other than Caltech. So, they chose places to lay these Institutes down where, as I would put it, it was unlikely that these places were not going to let anything they committed to go awry, that if something went bad, they would fix it. The probabilities were high. They don't tolerate failure, and they love success and quality. So, they were at great places. Let me leave it at that.

That was an attractor, right? And so, between the subject matter, the places where they were focused–and I didn't fully appreciate this at the time, but they had a singular feature that I emphasized over most other things, which was that they had this endowment style of philanthropy, where they were going to give away their corpus to you. Very rare.

"I would like to give you the money to do what I want you to do." That's direct funding. "I don't want to give you an endowment, and you spend 5% a year on what I want you to do." 95% is sitting in your investment account. I don't want to do that; I want that 95% to do other things. So, a natural inclination of anybody who is thinking about what to do is, by and large, avoid endowment and spend your money directly on what you think is going to make a difference, and that's what most philanthropists do. But there are some who are really brave and who are perhaps wealthy enough to tolerate giving away a large body of wealth, of which only 5% a year gets used. But there are many of them. People endow schools, like Schwartzman gave $350 million for the College of Computer and Information Science at MIT. Or Resnick at Caltech. They named the Center at Caltech in sustainability, $750 million. Other people did like the Broad Institute, but they gave $600 million for an endowment.

So, Fred didn't have that kind of money. What was really fascinating was that with much more limited resources, he chose, or the board seemed to have chosen this idea of endowing Institutes, and it was a great idea in the sense of how to be unique. And on the other hand, they didn't have enough money. $7.5 million for an opening gambit is nothing when you're talking about spending 5% of it. That's $350,000, $400,000 a year. I don't want to say that faculty put their nose up, but that's supposed to cover whole institutes? $400,000 a year to a faculty member, okay, that makes sense. But to ten faculty members? Doesn't make sense. And so, one of the things that I could see was absolutely necessary was to take that up to at least $200 million. And how to do that was going to be a challenge. But at least that would throw off a million a year to each place.

Now, you're not talking chump change. And I had founded two institutes in my career, and I knew what that kind of money meant. At UCLA, I got $300,000 a year in the mid-80s, which is like a million and a half today, and I had no restrictions on what to do with it as director. It was gold. So, I knew if we could do this program where we don't put constraints on what they use the money for, other than it can't pay faculty salaries, that was the only constraint, it can really make a difference. Because like you guys at Caltech, you needed instruments, and you couldn't get anybody to give you their money for them. You wanted to spend a million bucks to buy a new electron microscope of some kind or other. What did you do? My aim was, "Okay, as I've learned about the business, we're going to go not just $7.5 million to $20 million, then we're going to go to $30 million." Then they themselves can fund instruments that are expensive.

And then, we're going to let those endowments grow so eventually, these guys are going to have $2 million a year unrestricted money for the whole business. That's a lot of money and very much worth doing. So, the vision, the strategy that emerged for me was, here's this opportunity to take what was not really a workable model–they had not spent enough money. They wanted to make a splash, so they did ten Institutes at $7.5 million, and they announced a $75-million gift from the Kavli Foundation. Great, but it was parsed by ten, and it was not enough. So, on the one hand, it made a publicity splash that the board and Fred were interested in.

That lasted a year, not a lot. Right? And now, it was, how do you go from good bones, a good base, to a better place? And that was what I could see. You could hear in my description how I analyzed it. And I'm not saying that everything that I've just said, I thought about clearly on day one. But these were the features that went along with it. And I have to admit, I needed a job. So, on the one hand, there were all these features that I might've wanted to do if I didn't need a job. [Laugh] And on the other hand, here I was at this interregnum, with the economy at its lowest point since the ‘29 crash, and I'm floating around with what appeared to me to be, anyway, "What are we going to do?" And so, it was sort of necessity meets opportunity.

Expanding the Reach of Kavli

ZIERLER: Was the Kavli Foundation still in growth mode? All of the 20 Institutes that exist today around the world, were those 20 already set in place, or were you still building up to that number?

CONN: No, it was something like maybe 13. They had put in place the original ten, and then they put in place a few others, all with the same model. But we ended up with 20. So, I think I did seven new. The main thing I did was to grow the endowments at the Institutes so that the endowment model made sense. And that was the trick. Because we didn't have growing resources until Fred passed. So, we had a budget of $14 million a year when I joined. A combination of the payout from the $220-million endowment, and Fred, for things where he would get a tax deduction, would often make gifts in parallel with the Foundation. He'd supplement the gifts as personal gifts. And I used to describe the Foundation–I think I might've mentioned this in an earlier conversation–as a person with a pair of pants and two pockets. There's green money on the left and blue money on the right.

The green money is personal money, the blue money is the Foundation money. And I could take money out of each pocket in some proportion to pay the bills. And for commitments to Institutes like endowment, Fred would often put up 30% out of his pocket. He would supplement what the Foundation would pay. So, the Foundation was punching up by 30, 35%, so if it had a $200-million endowment, it more looked like a $300-million endowment just because of the personal spending of Fred. So, $15 million a year is 5% of $300 million. So, we had a de facto $300-million spending rate. 5% of $300 million. The actual endowment was more like $220 million, but that was supplemented, as I said, by what Fred put up. And that stayed that way for the first four years of my tenure. So, I had to, with the board and Fred, and there were already some inklings about how to do this, everybody was in concurrence that the $7.5 million was too low.

So, we came up with this matching fund approach, which was a little extensive for the institutions and pushed people, but for the most part, it worked, with one exception. And that plan was, "Well, now, we'll give you another $4 million if you'll raise $8 million. Now, our total will still have been $11.5 million, $7.5 million plus $4 million, so we'll still have given you the majority of the money, but two-to-one matching on this next portion. Get somebody to give you two bucks, and we'll match it with one." At Caltech, the director of the Kavli Institute is a $3-million endowed chair, and the donor put up only $1 million. And the Caltech president said, "I'll put up $1 million if you'll put up $1 million." And that's how we got to $3 million. So, we did match funds. And we were patient. We said, "We'll be patient."

But you can go to donors and say, "I've got a donor who will do this if you'll do that. And it's a big, important need for our campus," or whatever story you're going to make up. And that's what I did. Later, I modified it for a new institute, and we would make an initial $10-million gift and say, "We'll give you $10 million, and you raise $10 million," or "We'll give you $15 million, and you raise something else." Once I did the two-to-one and got them up to $20 million, then I did a one-to-one to get them to $30 million. "You raise $5 million; we'll match with $5 million." And that was how I went about with limited resources, getting them up to $20 million. And then, when we got Fred's largesse after he passed, I could do five more Institutes and do them in a different way. We started at $20 million, total and a one-to-one match. We didn't do $7.5 million. "You're going to get 20 million bucks, and here's how we're going to try to do it."

ZIERLER: So, it was Fred's passing that allowed for the five new Institutes to come on board?

CONN: Yeah.

ZIERLER: What was the selection criteria? How did you go about determining who would get the support?

CONN: Well, there's a whole story that we should cover, maybe in the next talk, about my time before Fred and after Fred. So, from 2009 until Fred passed in 2013, there was one modus operandi. From 2014 until I retired at the end of 2020, so another six years, it was a very different modus operandi. The constraints were different in these two phases of my tenure. During Fred's lifetime, Fred was the chief executive in addition to the chair of the board.

ZIERLER: He was the boss.

CONN: He was very clearly the boss. A person like me historically never worked well particularly if the boss had a heavy thumb. And Fred could have a heavy thumb at times, and that created issues. So, let me just say, until we got to 2014, we did do two new Institutes in 2011 and ‘12 that were fabulous. One was at Berkeley, and one was at the University of Tokyo. But then, we did more. And how did we do them? Let me get to that later, but to give you a taste, we had, in a separate part of our program, a science meetings activity and one particular meeting catalyzed President Obama's BRAIN Initiative in 2013. So, how did we get involved in the BRAIN Initiative? In 2009, ‘10, and ‘11, when I became president, the question to me was, "How does Kavli stay in the game when it can't spend much money?" It doesn't have enough money to start going to all the ones they gave $7.5 million and saying, "I want to do this new program with you at two-to-one matching."

We could do one or two because we wouldn't be paying out money right away, they'd have to raise money before we had to match the money. But you couldn't fully implement that because you didn't have enough money. And everything else was frozen. Our budgets were cut. Our endowment lost money like everybody else's endowment lost money, so the payout from the endowment dropped 30%. And so, I spent the first year thinking about, "What could we do, aside from Institutes, where we might make an outsized impact?" And the Foundation had done one or two science meetings–and this became the third leg of this strategic stool. So, there was the Kavli Institutes, the Kavli Prize, and then this program in catalyzing new science through meetings, if you were careful about selecting the topics of the meetings.

And we were good at selecting meetings programs. But when I got there, I said, "Meetings are cheap. Why don't we make a systematic program of holding meetings on central questions in science in the fields of our choosing? And let's just get people together and see what comes of that?" And to a degree that there was an outcome from a meeting, we could support the front end of it. That also wouldn't take a lot of money. And so, here was a way to stay relevant, to stay present in the scientific community in our fields, use your Institutes to help us organize these meetings, so that kept our relationship with our Institutes good, and maybe something good would come from these meetings.

And I think the biggest thing in the first 20 years of this century that came out of this effort at Kavli for science in the United States was the first Grand Challenge Problem of the 21st century, which was the BRAIN Initiative in 2013. So, this turned out to be a pretty good idea. It began with the style of meeting. We just took two of our fields, nanoscience and neuroscience, and asked, "What are the opportunities at the intersection of these two fields?" Now, we didn't just come up with that out of the blue sky. We would talk to Michael Roukes, or we would talk to out other leaders. They were making all these miniaturized nanoscience sensors. They could stick them in the brain. The other co-director at Caltech at the time, tall guy, his wife lives in Vermont, he's still on the EE faculty. Fantastic. And he was born abroad. He said, "I could implant this thing and wirelessly read out the data".

Now, mostly, the neuroscientist still put electrodes in the brain, and they measure it. Suppose you could put a micro thing in and put them all over the place, have them all simultaneously read out. Imagine the data you'd get. And over time. So, the nanoscientists were basically chomping at the bit to produce instruments for neuroscience. And the neuroscientists? They were so used to using the techniques they had that they couldn't imagine doing these other things. That came out at this meeting. And so, we could see the potential of technology transforming a scientific field. I guess that's the short of it. Whether we said that explicitly at the time, I can't promise, but that was the idea. And we held this meeting at the Kavli Royal Society International Center outside London. We had funded the Royal Society to rebuild a Georgian Mansion and use it as a meeting site.

We had, I think, 40 people. I went with my vice president, who had done the organizing, and at the end of that the meeting, we had a final session. And we invited George Church of Harvard. He's one of the most creative people alive, and he's a professor of chemistry and biology at Harvard. George is a wunderkind, one of the most imaginative people you could meet. And my vice president knew him from her time in Boston. She invited him to come. So, he was the outlier, neither a nanoscientist nor a neuroscientist.

And at the end of a couple of days, we had a meeting where the morning was devoted to, "What are the low-hanging fruit? What are some of the things that we could do right away that could make a difference, producing instrumentation for neuroscience?" And then, there was a follow-on session on blue sky ideas. And I went to the blue-sky session, and we deliberately asked George Church to chair that session. And George, bless his heart, said, "Well, we've been talking about all this instrumentation."

He didn't quite say it this way, but it makes for a nice story. "The Allen Institute is mapping all the neurons in the brain." Three billion neurons, whatever they are, they're going to know where everyone neuron is and how everyone connects to everyone else. But it's a static map. What if we could map the functioning brain where the neurons are all firing, and we see all the interconnections, and we see all the backup, and all the alternative pathways, and how the brain works in such a marvelous way? That would be amazing. "You think you could do that?" "Well, at the rate at which we're making improvements in sensors, we could probably do that. A decade, 15 years, something like that." "Okay." That became the idea we would take back to the final meeting of the big group, held in a slanted auditorium like a classroom, [Laugh] everybody's sitting there. George comes up, and he gives his report.

And he says this. And one of those neuroscientists from Salk and said, "You're absolutely out of your mind. There's no way that that can be done. The way we do it, da-da-da-da, there's no way." And Michael Roukes, bless his heart, from Caltech, stood up and said, "You're crazy. We can do this. We can make it work." And they were standing, arguing. And I had to intervene. "Michael, , take a deep breath. Let's sit down. Let's talk a little bit more. Let's see what might happen." But it showed you the depth of, on the one hand, the conservatism of the neuroscientists, and on the other hand, the maybe even more optimism than there should be on the part of the nanoscientists, to the point of shouting.

We had a dinner that night, and the people who kind of agreed with the idea that you could do this, we sat them at a table together. So, it included Michael Roukes, and it included George Church, and it included my vice president Miyoung Chun from the Foundation. It included Rob Greenspan from UC San Diego. It included Paul Alivisatos from Berkeley, the president at Chicago, great nanoscientist. Great chemist. And it included Michael Roukas of Caltech. So, we had these different capabilities at the table, all super smart people. And out of that came, "Well, maybe we could write a white paper about this. We don't need 40 people to sign on yet. Why don't we take this on–Kavli, would you support that? Would you provide us with some funds if we need funds to travel to meet whatever?" "Absolutely." And there were three foundations that cosponsored this meeting. We did it with the Allen Foundation and with the Gatsby Foundation in the UK, which was Lord Sainsbury of the famous Sainsbury grocery chain. So, the three of us had sponsored this meeting.

And I said to Allan Jones, who was president of the Allen Institute, and the woman who was there representing the Gatsby Foundation, "They've got this idea. Do you want to help support it? We're thinking of helping them out." "Oh, our program goes like this, and we can't do that." And the Gatsby person was so conservative, she said, "Oh, no, we could never fund something." I said, "Well, we'll do it."

And so, that turned out to be the catalyst for the BRAIN Initiative. One meeting, big arguments among great people, and willingness on the part of one of the three supporters to say, "I'll take a risk. I'll support you." And we did. And within three months, they had a white paper, and they wanted to go back to Washington and talk with the NSF and the NIH about it. We said, "We'll support you."

So, they went back. And I said to my vice president, I'll never forget this, because I had learned this in the 70s from my own learning how to get grants, particularly big grants. I said, "Go back, explain the idea, no problem. But listen very carefully. They're going to have all manner of doubts and all manner of questions. Let them speak. Do the best you can to answer them, but don't worry if you don't nail every answer. Just come out of the meeting with a second meeting. That's all you want. Just make sure that the outcome says, ‘We'll meet again in three months. We'll answer as many of your questions as we can.'" I call that the two-meeting theory of how to get grants.

Because when you go back the second time, they're thinking just as much as you're thinking, and they start to realize, "There's a pony in this." And maybe some of those ideas are ours, and they might adopt them as their own thought. You can't have a better outcome. If they think it's the thing to do, you just go, "Yes, sir," right? Don't worry about credit, just say yes. And so, they went back to a second meeting, and now, between the first meeting and the second meeting, they circulated the white paper and started getting other neuroscientists and nanoscientists to sign on. Not just those who had been at the meeting, but many of those whom we invited but couldn't come, people whom we knew were important, you name it. And it had 40 or 50 signers. So, they go back with the white paper and 40 or 50 signers, plus answers to whatever questions had come up, and within a month of that meeting in February of–2011, so February, March, April, May 2012, the NIH and the NSF bought it.

"This could be a big deal. We like it. We're going to start to take it over." Kavli said, "We'll support whatever you need to do to get the pieces together. If you need help, we'll support it." But really, they took the ball, and ran with it, and stayed close to the original writers and people. Meanwhile, the cadre of people signing on to support this idea grew. So, by the time the president made the announcement of the BRAIN Initiative in April of 2013, there were probably 250 signatures saying this was the way forward. Francis Collins, the NIH director, committed to it. France Cordova was head of NSF, and France supported it. Collins brought in two of his national institutes related to mental health and related to neuroscience, and both joined and took the lead. And Francis took it to the science advisor John Holdren at OSTP, a personal friend for 30 years.

We got together whatever the heck they needed to get together, and they took it to the president. And somehow, the president liked it. I don't know the details of that because that's not part I was involved in. But I can tell you this, to talk about the impact of the Kavli Foundation and this idea of meetings making a difference? When we went back to Washington for the announcement in April of 2013, we were in the East Room of the White House, packed with reporters. Francis Collins and the President of the United States. The president invited ten people to meet with him in a side room prior to going into the East Room. The only group with two people present was the Kavli Foundation, myself and my vice president for science programs. And then, there was Allen Jones from the Allen Institute, there was a person from HHMI who had gotten very interested although wasn't at the original meeting but wanted to support it

The others were the director of NSF, Francis Collins, Arati Prabhakar, the head of DARPA at the time, now the science advisor to the president. The president's ethics advisor was there because this was in neuroscience, who was, at that time, the president of the University of Pennsylvania. And President Obama. We got a nice photo, he said hello to each of us, we had a group photo, and he thanked us. And then, he went out and announced the first Grand Challenge Problem of the 21st century. And ten years later and $5 billion later, it's made an enormous difference in neuroscience. So, of everything I did in the 12 years, that had the biggest national impact, international impact. Because then, others developed BRAIN Initiatives in Europe and Japan. Everybody followed. From an acorn, a big oak had grown.

It was an acorn that grew out of a necessity that I felt we had to find a mechanism to stay relevant. And the way we might do that with modest funds was to organize meetings at the forefront of knowledge and see what came out of it. We didn't know what would come out of it, but it was worth doing. And no other meeting ever got the outcome this one got. This is, like, the home run of home runs. But we had other things that led to new initiatives that were important. And so, the meetings program became the third pillar.

And after the success of the BRAIN Initiative, I convinced the board we ought to build a conference center. We spent, I don't know, $13 million building a conference center next to the original LA headquarters. We bought the property next to us, and then we had a building built with the idea that meetings were going to be one of the pillars of what Kavli was known for, and it would be internationally recognized for that. So, to me, it was impact. Always impact. How do you make the biggest impact in whatever circumstance you find yourself in and with whatever resources you have.

ZIERLER: We'll pick up there next time. That's a great place, to think about post Fred's death and what that meant for your leadership of the Kavli Foundation from 2013 until 2020. All of our discussion today so far has really emphasized the institute building. What about the named professorships, Kavli Foundation's individual professorships? Was that something that you inherited or innovated?

CONN: No, and in fact, it wasn't much of an effort. They did an endowed chair at Harvard, endowed chair at Caltech, endowed chair at Irvine, maybe Santa Barbara. They did a few endowed chairs. Once we zeroed in on the Institutes as the major thing, we didn't really do more endowed chairs. So, endowed chairs were not part of the program during my tenure. I was not pushing endowed chairs, and we only did endowed chairs if we needed to, like the directorship of a Kavli Institute. "Okay, we'll help endow the directorship of the Kavli Institute because that's going to give resources to someone who will be the director as an inducement for a faculty member to become director. You'll have some free money to play with." The last thing I should talk to you about in the first five years was my relationship with Fred.

On the one hand, Fred was enthusiastic about my coming. On the other hand, he was much less enthusiastic about how I worked. I could not move to Oxnard. My wife at the time was a professor at UC San Diego. I never moved there permanently. So, I would take the train up in the morning from Solana Beach, arrive in Oxnard. I had an apartment that I got, I'd drop of things and go into work. I would always hold my staff meetings on Monday afternoons, I'd meet with Fred on Tuesdays. And often, I would leave at about 3 o'clock on a Thursdays to get home so that I'd have Friday, Saturday, and Sunday at home. I'd work, of course, on Friday. And Fred was very old fashioned. He had a 600-square-foot office. It's some gigantic office. All wood-paneled. He had a gigantic wood desk that he sat behind. If you ever wanted to see a power structure from the 1950s, this was it. Right? [Laugh] So, it was his style.

And he wanted people to be at the office all the time. And it was one of the things that was a bane of my predecessor. Fred would take Fridays off; he wouldn't come into the office. He would work from home at Santa Barbara. My assistant told me later, on Friday afternoon at 3 o'clock, he'd call up David to see if he was still there. So, that gives you a sense of what he felt was important and how he managed. So, that always was a source of tension.

And somewhere around mid-2011, I'm there maybe two years, I think he's worried that it might not be working out for some reason. And he did something you should never do, which is that he took my vice president for science programs, who was, by the way, Korean, she came from South Korea when she was 20 and has made quite a life for herself, but culturally, she's Korean. And he was very respectful of women. He hollered at men, that kind of thing, but not women.

He started to have her come in and ask her questions about me, and what I was doing, and whether it was this way or that way. So, he was checking up on me, and he put her in a really awkward position. I learned about this only after Fred's passing, but it explained a lot of what was going on at the time. And so, the one thing I want to share with you before we quit is, Fred got seriously ill in summer of 2012. And he managed to be somewhat functional until December, when he had to go in for this giant cancer operation, and he never recovered. He passed away 11 months later. But about a year before that, so that might have made it mid to late 2011, he asked the board to conduct a review of how things were going, which was really a review of me and my performance.

And he asked Tom Everhart, who's a former Caltech president, and Chuck Vest, the former MIT president, to oversee this review. And they hired a person from outside to go and talk with everybody, the Institute people, this person, that person, to write a report about how the Foundation was doing, but particularly about how Bob Conn was doing. And I understood this, and said to myself, "We'll see how it comes out." And it came out very good. There was only one negative comment. And where do you think that came from? UC San Diego. And why was there a negative comment? Because we started to do the two-to-one matching program, and in 2010, I came down to talk with the then provost at UC San Diego, the vice president for academic affairs, a biologist. And he said, "That's impossible. We can't do that." And don't forget, this is 2010. Everybody is really worried. I said, "Well, look, we'll be patient. And there's plenty of time. The economy's going to come back."

But he wanted me to just give him more money and even forgive some money that they were due to raise on something David had worked out with them. And he thought that I was obstinate and very unfair, and he said so to the reviewer, that, "He didn't do what I wanted." That was it out of a 25-page report. So, nothing ended up coming from it in terms of my position at the Foundation. But it's indicative of the tensions that I was dealing with for the four or five years that Fred was alive, and I was there. And they were underpinned by, one, he didn't approve of my style of work, despite the fact that I was totally committed. Anybody who knows me knows they get 150%. But he was very traditional.

And also, I learned later, hardly anybody lasted a long time with Fred because he was very hard on them. The same thing was true in his business. And in his business, before he sold the business about ten years earlier, he was so micromanaging the business, it was not doing well. And the board literally had to take him aside and say, "You can have the title, but you've got to hire a COO, and you've got to let him run it. Get out of the way." And the company blossomed in that model. But his tendency to micromanage was his failure. That was the bane of anyone working for him He could've had a billion-dollar company or a ten-billion-dollar company if he didn't want to micromanage so much.

ZIERLER: Did you know this about him? Did you not take it personally?

CONN: Well, I didn't know about it before I started. David had said to me, "Fred's so on and so forth." But I had to learn for myself. And I tried to come up with ways of assuaging it and managing it with Fred. And he knew things were going well, and he knew that the programs were going well. He didn't value my imaginative thinking as much. It's his foundation. "I know what I'm doing." "Okay, you want to think about that, you think about that. But I'm not so sure I care." So, in a way, the Foundation came to full blossom in spite of Fred, not because of him. Now, of course, it's because of Fred because it's his money, so you always go back to the source of the resources. But what you did with those resources was also a very important task. And I would have these ideas, and he wouldn't think they were really good, but to his credit, he would say, "Well, all right, go try it."

So long as it didn't exceed a half-million dollars, and we could afford it, and we could try it out, he was okay with it.

So, we had what I would call a working relationship that had edges to it. Right? There was no buddy-buddy about any of this, and from my point of view, I had to make sure I managed it and managed it as well as I could. And I did. So, that leads up to the end of that first phase, so to speak. I do two new Institutes, which are fun stories. Fred and I flew to Japan and met the prime minister. That was in 2011, 2012. And we set one up at Berkeley, and that was another fun venture, and we could talk a little bit about that. But once Fred got ill–there are two more stories here, really. One is, what happened from the point that Fred got ill until the point that Fred passed, and what happened in the year and a half that followed his passing? How did we come into this money? What changed?

The board is now responsible, and Fred is missing. Before, Fred is there, and the board is going to go along with anything that Fred pretty much wants. It's his money, and they'll advise him, they'll try to make it the best that it can be of what he wants, but they're not going to tell him he can't do it. After he's passed, the board has a fundamentally different function. And I don't know if you can guess why. When Fred's alive, when the donor is alive, and you get in trouble at the Foundation, the donor's always there to give you more money. He's always there to fix it. When there's no donor, you have your endowment, that's it. There's no safety net. Now, you have to manage the endowment differently and lots of other things differently because now, you're into capital preservation mode. You're trying to preserve spending capability. Nobody's giving you more money. And if you mismanage that, the Foundation goes down.

So, the responsibility of the board fundamentally shifted from, "If Fred wants to do this and it involves more money, that's okay. He's got the money, he'll put it in," to, "Whatever we do, we've got to make sure we do it within the confines of managing the corpus properly for the long-term future." Because the one thing he wanted was an ad infinitum foundation, a foundation forever. So, you had to manage all of that carefully. And we didn't come into all the money for four years. So, the story about what we did in those four years is a Bob Conn story. I convinced the board to bet on the future, despite the risk of managing the endowment and corpus, I said, "Look, we're going to have $600 million. That's going to be a $30- to $35-million annualized budget. Why don't we get a head start on it?" [Laugh]

So, the budget went from $14 million, to $18 million, to $24 million, to $28 million. And it was at the $28 million point that we actually got all the money. So, we ramped up ahead of time, betting on the foundation's future, and that made an enormous difference. Because suddenly, we could do new Institutes, we could take the Institutes we had from $20- to $30-million endowments. Everybody benefitted, and they benefitted earlier than they would've benefitted had we waited for all the money to come on board. So, that's a wholly different modus operandi and Fred would probably not have approved of it. [Laugh] But that was possible now with leadership, with good ideas about what to be doing with the money, and the willingness of the board to back it.

ZIERLER: I think that's a perfect place, we'll pick up next time with your leadership at the Kavli Foundation post Fred's death, what that meant for you, what that meant for the Foundation.

[End of Recording]

ZIERLER: This is David Zierler, Director of the Caltech Heritage Project. It's Tuesday, May 7, 2024. It's my great pleasure to be back once again with Professor Robert Conn. Bob, as always, wonderful to see you. Good morning.

CONN: Well, good morning, David. Wonderful to see you. And as I was saying before you hit the record button, wonderful to see you, but it is something of a sad day and a sad time.

The Legacy of Joan and Irwin Jacobs

ZIERLER: Bob, you shared with me sadly that Joan Jacobs had passed away. Let's talk about the Jacobs, their legacy, and how you got to know them. So, what was your first encounter with Joan and Irwin?

CONN: Well, when I came down to be the head of the school of engineering, it really was not like most people accepting a job as the head of a school. I know people who take these jobs, and mostly, it's a school that's been around a fairly long time. You're at Caltech, you're at Berkeley, you're going to head up the Division of Engineering at Caltech. Okay. It's got this distinguished history. Your job is to make sure you don't screw it up. It's not, "Well, I've got to build this, and I've got to build that, and there's this hole in the program and that hole in the program." That's not what the head of the division of engineering comes into the position thinking when they take a position. At Caltech, I know in particular, because I've known so many of the division leaders. They do it out of a sense of service to the institution. They do it because they know somebody's got to do it. And often, the person who does it is a leader. A real leader, intellectual leader, renowned in their own right.

Caltech is a place where nobody has to do anything except be great at research, pay attention to the students. But they do these other things because it's what the institution needs, and they believe in the institution. I believe in Caltech. Made my life. And I know why it's great, deeply.

But when I came to UC San Diego, it was very different. The school was not great. It had many holes. It had good bones, as I described when I talked about coming to San Diego. And those bones came from Caltech, by the way. Just saying. The chancellor at the time, Dick Atkinson, had said to me, "There's a couple you need to get to know, Irwin and Joan Jacobs." "Okay," and I found out who they were. Particularly, I found out who Irwin was, founder of Qualcomm. Qualcomm, in 1993, ‘94, was not the Qualcomm you know today. Nor was it the Qualcomm that became the Qualcomm of ‘98, ‘99, 2000 that just changed the world when it came to wireless communications. Knocked Intel off its perch. In the same way that NVIDIA is knocking others off their perch today in the AI business. Qualcomm had the Snapdragon and other chips in the 1990s. More than anybody, they enabled the wireless revolution, and I knew that. At the time I came, it's the only time I can pin down two technological revolutions overlapping at one point in history. The internet revolution and the wireless revolution. Those coalesced from the mid-1980s to 2005. The world changed. Literally, the world changed. And one of the companies that changed it was Qualcomm. So, I had a sense of this, even though most of what I'm describing was in front of me and in front of Qualcomm, not yet accomplished. And it's a major startup in town. San Diego is known as a biotech mecca, but it wasn't known for technology other than the defense industry. And Qualcomm has created the high-tech community that San Diego is now thought of.

So, how to meet them? Dick Atkinson told me, "You should meet them." That's his job. My job is to meet them, and get to know them, and "What do you have in mind?" Well, if you're a dean or a chancellor, you have in mind not only getting to know people, but look, this is reality, your job is to raise money. It's Tom Rosenbaum's job, David's before him, etc. It's their job to lead the fundraising for the institution. At San Diego, there had been no tradition of deans leading anything about fundraising, and there wasn't a hell of a lot of fundraising. So, in many ways, Dick saw me as a transformational figure. But I didn't know it at the time. I learned it, I figured it out. Immediately, Jacobs was going to create this transformation. So, I actually met Joan before I met Irwin, and I think I've told you that I have an interest in contemporary art and collect contemporary art.

And I was more avant garde and more risk-taking than the Jacobs, but they had an interest in it too. They had more money, and they collected what I would call safer things, meaning artists who were already established and well-known, you owned a this, and you owned a that. Eventually, they owned a Picasso, and they owned a this, and they owned a that. Me, I couldn't own a Picasso. [Laugh] All right, so the campus has something called a Stuart Collection. In my own view, it's probably the finest collection of outdoor contemporary sculptural art in the country. Remarkable. A vision that's unique and distinctive for UC San Diego. You can go to the Sculpture Center at UCLA, you'll see Rodin. But you come here, and you will see contemporary works by contemporary artists. And they keep collecting, so they've got a 40-year collection now.

And some of the early people are famous, but they weren't necessarily famous when they first did the work.

All right, so this group is called the Stuart Collection. They have a group of supporters, and they hold events from time to time. And I decided I'd go to one, A, because of my interest, but B, Joan Jacobs was on the board of that enterprise and very supportive of it. And so, we met. How did we meet? Well, you go to one of these things, and it's like a social event. You have a drink, and you walk around, and you meet this one, and you meet that one. And I knew who she was and what she looked like, and I went up and introduced myself. Turned out that she was from New York, too, from the city. I was from Brooklyn. We had something in common, we talked a little bit about that. We got to know each other.

How I met Irwin was really strictly professional. I knew about the revolution. I had assessed this. Not everybody knew what was happening in the early 90s. Venture capitalists probably knew; some others probably knew. But not everybody realized they were sitting in the middle of this explosive technological revolution. I was lucky, and I did. So, I said, "We've got to have a center for wireless communication." I looked at the EE department, and it was good, but there wasn't a single person in there having designed an analog chip. And a wireless phone is wireless, it's a radio. It's analog. Of course, the data processing internally is all digital, no issue. But you do have to send a signal to an antenna. We didn't have anybody in analog, just to give you an example of the hole in the sheet of paper. Some of it was dense with this very good stuff, and then there were these gaps. So, I went to see Irwin, I made an appointment, and that's how I met him. I went over to Qualcomm.

He was willing, of course, to meet with me. He cared enormously about the school. He had come originally to San Diego to be a professor at UC San Diego, so he had this academic strain in him that never left. And he also was very practical. He needs high-quality people. His CTO was his student at UC San Diego. UC San Diego got good students; he knew it. And so, he knew he wanted this cadre to grow up, and he'd hire them, Qualcomm would, but so would Motorola, and so would Sony, and so would Ericsson, and everybody else who was kind of coming to San Diego at the time. And so, I did talk to him about the center for wireless communications, but what I'm trying to get at is, the most important thing I ended up doing was telling him what my vision was. What did I think was going to happen over the next four or five years, and how was I going to go about doing this?

And I think one of the things that clicked with him–of course he wanted a center for wireless communication, so he was very likely to say yes to that. But that wasn't the thing that tipped the meeting. What tipped the meeting was describing to him the idea of hiring in clusters. "If we're going to be great in wireless communications, Irwin, I need your help to identify the three areas most important for us to hire in. And I'm going to hire five people, seven people. I'm going to put down a masterwork in this area. And we're going to be known because everybody's going to look and say, ‘Wow, look who went to San Diego.'" Great. That was my idea. And I was not only going to do this in wireless, but I was going to do it in a number of other areas. That was the strategy. The strategy was to hire in clusters, hire senior people, so hire a Carver Mead.

And not only do you get the Carver Mead, but you say to Carver Mead, "Hire the best people you can." It's like the 60s, when they did engineering science at Caltech, and they hired people like Noel Corngold and so on. Made my career. But that's what you do when you want to open a new area. Caltech did it in onesies and twosies because they're small. I could do it in threesies and fivesies. [Laugh], Per area. And Irwin liked that. He saw that as not just, "Oh, you're going to hire one person here or one person there." And I said to him, I think, certainly, I believed it, "You'll never get there hiring the one-offs, one person here, one person there. And you'll never get there hiring somebody to teach." That is, I've got a hole in the teaching curriculum. My idea was any faculty member could teach any undergraduate course. They're all very smart people. They may not want to do it, but that's different from can they do it. They can do it. So, don't waste your FTE, full-time equivalent faculty slots, on a teaching need.

You've got to focus on the research needs, and faculty can take care of the rest. He loved it. And that's how we met. And what went on through this period was, Joan was always very keen about their philanthropy. And they always collaborated. She deferred to Irwin when it came to philanthropy for engineering and technological, but when it came for the arts, it was Joan and Irwin Jacobs instead of Irwin and Joan Jacobs, right? And at the hospital, it was Irwin and Joan, Joan and Irwin, that kind of thing. So, when they gave me the Revelle Medal, which is like the Distinguished Alumni Award of Caltech, only this is for not just a faculty member or an alumnus. It's actually not for the alumnus. It's for somebody who's made a transformational difference to the development of the University of California here in San Diego, and it's named for the famous Roger Revelle. CO2, [Laugh] Scripps, and so on.

So, in 2018, they gave me that award for what I did for the campus. And they did a montage, they interviewed people, and they created a video. Wonderful video, it's on YouTube. And they interviewed Irwin and Joan in their living room. Took the picture, asked them the questions. And this is 2018, and I left in 2002, so 16 years after I left. And Joan said, "Bob had the vision, and we owe everything to Bob." Whoa. Whoa. So, she and I got along because she was more the arts person, and I was the arts person in my couple. [Laugh] So, she and I had that bond. And so, it's a terrible loss that she has just passed. She'd been ill for a couple of years now with a heart condition. And she took a fall about a week ago. And I'll tell you from having taken a few falls myself, and I'm only 81, she's 92. I think, but when you get older, it's the falls that get you. They got my father. In ‘85, he had a heart murmur, and he skipped a beat, and he fainted, and fell, and hit his head. And he practically died. And I couldn't pull the plug. My sister and my mother were ready to do that. He was in a critical care and mainly unconscious when I'd flown back east. And I just couldn't do it. And then, he was like Lazarus rising from the grave in biblical terms.

One day, just opened his eyes. Two days later, he was out of the critical care, and he came home. Never quite the same, but he got another six years. But it was the fall. And she took a fall last week and didn't make it. Everybody goes through this. It's life. At some point, you have a really tough patch. I had open-heart surgery in November. The last six months have been kind of a nightmare. My sister, 72, died suddenly in mid-December. Then, I had another operation because the first one didn't work. Two more. Finally, it seems to be working. But this is a near-death experience, and I've had that before in my life. 40 years ago, it was a terrible accident with a car crash. So, I know what that's like, and it gives you pause. And then, last week, somebody I've known, a cousin of my first wife, whom I got to know as a teenager, and I've known her all my life, she suddenly had a brain hemorrhage and died in less than 12 hours last week, and then Joan died last night. So, there's been a lot of death and near death over the past five, six months. It's been heart-rending. Very difficult.

ZIERLER: I hate to continue on the theme of morbidity, but where we're picking up from last time is with the death of Fred Kavli, what that meant for you, what that meant for the Foundation. My first question is, was Fred's death drawn out? Were you prepared for the moment when it happened?

CONN: Well, those are two questions. One is, were you prepared for the moment that it happened? And the answer is yes, because his death was not sudden. But was it something to really deal with? I've talked about Fred and the kind of person he was, and I absolutely must say, you integrate like we engineers and scientists–we know how to do calculus, and we know how to do integrate over time. You integrate over time with Fred as a great man. He will go down in history as having done something very special for humanity, and that is to leave his legacy and his wealth to the advancement of science. That's powerful. And he gets all the credit. Right? Doesn't mean he was an easy person. I'm sure John D. Rockefeller wasn't an easy person. [Laugh] But don't confuse that with recognizing what they've done and the value of what they've done. So, Fred got very ill, as I may have mentioned last time, in the summer of 2012. It wasn't obvious what was wrong, but he started coming in to work a bit less. And we were told he was sleeping a lot during the day at home in Santa Barbara.

We gave the Kavli Prize, that's a prize here. Every even year, we give the Kavli Prize. Still do. And that was only the third cycle, ‘08, ‘10, ‘12, so it was a big deal. And Fred obviously wanted to go. He always gave a major speech at the awards ceremony, which involved the King of Norway, King Harald. So, it was pomp and circumstance cubed. I think what he was trying to do was gather his strength to go. And he did go. I remember his needing to wear a kind of body brace through his midsection. But he attended every event with aplomb and had vigor in delivering his speech. It was a great speech. He gave a good talk, by the way. Fred gave a good talk. And he was a phrase maker. For English not being his first language, he was a phrase maker. Like the three areas of nano, neuro, and astro. The biggest, the smallest, the most complex. Nice, right? Nice imagery.

So, he gave that speech, and it was the last speech he gave in his life. And it was a wonderful speech. But when we got home, he started looking more jaundiced. The color was beginning to change. And by November, he was ready to say to everybody that he needed an operation. And so, he had that operation in December and never returned. In terms of his death, we saw it coming. He had not pancreatic cancer, but something equally virulent, and he'd had a big operation, and they thought he'd be home in two or three weeks, and he wasn't home for three or four months. That's how long he was at UCLA in the hospital. And he was obviously weakened. I never saw him again. He was very private. None of the board of directors but one saw him again. Tom Everhart, the former president of Caltech, was on the board because when he retired from Caltech, he decided to move with his wife to Santa Barbara, and that's where they still live. And so, he got to know everybody. Tom's a real connector, and he did well as president of Caltech. And in Santa Barbara, he got to know people.

And one of the people he got to know, of course, was Fred. So, Fred asked his advice right from the very get-go and I think what Tom did, as Fred got seriously ill, is he almost forced himself on Fred to go see him during this period, May, or June, or July of 2013. Fred was just a very proud person, and I think he was looking very frail and just didn't want anybody to see him. So, the only person who saw him was a Caltech-er, Tom Everhart. [Laugh] And he then passed in November 2013. So, we saw it coming, and I've told you in the past, what we didn't see coming was what he would leave. Everybody, even the people I thought were closest to him–like the person he selected to be his successor as chair of the board, Rock Hankin, his banker, --thought he'd leave another $200 million. The endowment in the Foundation at that point was a modest $215, $225 million. "Well, maybe we'll double that." We tripled it! And that was a big surprise, and it led to a real consideration that I had begun to talk with you about, "Well, now what? And now why? And now how?"

ZIERLER: Did that represent the sum total of Kavli's wealth, or did he give elsewhere?

CONN: It was essentially the sum total of his wealth. He had, over time, taken care of his family, but not with hundreds of millions, but with $2 to $5 million here, $2 to $5 million there. As I've mentioned, he had two adopted children. I had an uncle who, in the days that I was growing up–it was called mental retardation, they were just mentally slow. And my heart goes to anybody like that. I grew up with somebody like that. So, Fred provided for his adopted son who had that condition for the rest of his life. He was institutionalized. He needed that care. And then, he had a daughter. Half the wealth, in the divorce that he had in the early 80s, went to his ex-wife, so she was very wealthy, and she was also very close to the daughter. Fred, less so. So, I think he–I'm guessing–guessed that she would take care of the daughter. He made sure he took care of the son. And so, all of that was taken care of. He had nieces and nephews in Norway, did right by them. But none of that added up to more than a total of $15 or $20 million. And he left another $400 million. So, 5% may have gone to the family, and 95% of what he left went to this cause.

ZIERLER: Was there any discussion between you and Fred about successor? Was it assumed that you would take on the CEO role upon his passing?

CONN: I recall no discussion of that, by Fred or by the board. I told you the story of Fred having done the assessment in 2011, early 2012. So, okay, that was taken care of. He may have had his doubts. Left to his own devices, he might've fired me. But he wasn't left to his own devices. He got a report back. He respected the former presidents of Caltech and MIT who he had asked to do this. They came back and said, "You've got nothing to worry about," and Fred accepted it. So, the idea was, he did make very clear in his written things and other ways that Rock Hankin, his closest, longest-term person on the board and his financial advisor and banker for many years, was to be his successor as chair. And I think otherwise, they just assumed other things would remain stable and in place. We didn't have any discussions about changing the CEO, or changing the structure, or anything else.

Part of it was, Fred was so private that he didn't tell anybody what he was going to leave. Even the guess that he might double what we had was a guess. We could figure out the value of the real estate company, and we didn't know what else he had. Nobody did. So, he was very private, which meant that anybody thinking about planning, well, unless Fred tells you, you don't know. And he wasn't telling. The only thing we got was this letter, kind of a deathbed letter, called a precatory letter in legal terms, that he wrote probably in October 2013. He passed in November of 2013. And that expressed his wishes for the Foundation. And I've told you about this, so I can repeat it quickly just so for continuity. But the essence of the three things was, he wanted the Foundation to continue in perpetuity, he wanted the Foundation to be headquartered in Santa Barbara, and he had an idea that there should be no more than 20 Kavli Institutes. How he picked 20 and not 25, or some other number, I don't know.

But I think he had in mind the limited resources. That is, even though it's $600 million, throwing off $30 million a year, his thought was, "Focus on some number," and that was a reasonable idea. And he picked 20, and that was in his letter. And so on. There were things like that he had in mind. He had his family farm in Norway. He didn't want the Foundation involved in Norway. And yet, when he died, the Norwegian farm got left to the Foundation, and we had to figure out what to do with it. So, not everything was perfectly figured out. And he left a certain amount of money to take care of a birthplace and farm and had some ideas of what it's supposed to be, like a tourist place that people would go. Like a hunting lodge. And they would do scientific seminars there and so on. So, he laid out some of these things.

He didn't provide enough money for what was needed in Norway, but he provided more than enough money for what was needed at the scientific Foundation. So, we had this potpourri of things. Some very clear, some not too clear. Some with more than enough money, [Laugh] like twice as much, some with maybe not enough to actually do what he had in mind. And that was a whole other story that led to a real conflict with the family in Norway. I had to manage that after his death. We eventually worked something out, not to the family's liking, but to the liking of what Fred's intentions truly were. And that was not easy for me to manage.

The Kavli Foundation After Fred

ZIERLER: Let's now move to when you succeed Fred as CEO. I can imagine some competing impulses. On the one hand, you obviously want to honor and continue Fred's legacy, but on the other, he's a captain of industry. You're a scientist. You have different perspectives. What's the balance that you wanted to strike between continuity and making the Kavli what you wanted it to be?

CONN: Well, first of all, making the Kavli what I wanted it to be is too strong a way to phrase it. I respected the fundamental mission that Fred Kavli had set out for the Foundation. Support the science for the benefit of humanity. And I wasn't going to fiddle around with that. I liked it. I thought it was unique, particularly the focus on fundamental basic science, not on applications. For a captain of industry and a person who made his fortune with applications, and sensors, and engineering, and all that stuff, to say, "It's basic science that matters the most, and that's what I want my wealth to be used to promote and advanced," that's stunning. That's what gives me the admiration for Fred that I have. And I think I appreciate that as much as anybody because I'm a hybrid. I love basic science, and I've done it, but I've also focused most of my technical career on trying to make fusion energy work, which is the application of science to a social good. New energy source.

So, for somebody to come without the training in basic science, without the PhD and research experience, and so on, and so forth, but getting his undergraduate degree in engineering, and going out and starting a company, and doing all this, they've come around to the idea that it's basic science that matters, uber alles. That, to me, is why I loved the job. It's why I took it in the first place. That is noble.

So, that was not going to change. How was however a set of questions. How should we continue with that mission? So, in a way, I'm happy to say, that's more tactical and strategic. But I can think tactically. The strategic part was how to make it a foundation that was playing in the big leagues, as I've described to you. How can you make it a foundation that is known by its peers, regardless of their scale? It needs to be known by Rockefeller Foundation, the Moore Foundations, $10 billion, the Simons Foundation, the Sloan Foundation, the major players in the philanthropic world of support for science, and engineering, and technology. How can we make that happen?

That requires strategy, and I focused on that. So, the challenge to me, was what I just described. It wasn't about changing the mission. It could be about how to implement the mission. Those were things to consider. And so, it was a hybrid. On the one hand, the mission is sacrosanct. Not only because it's sacrosanct, but it should also be because he came up with it. I believed in it. So, there was absolutely total overlapping resonance. The resonance curve absolutely matched. [Laugh] I think that's the way I would put it.

The other thing that I've shared with you in past conversation about this transition was, when you have a transition like this–I, in a way, was lucky to have taken a job where the donor was alive. Not lucky that the donor passed. Nobody wants that, right? But if it happens, you have to figure out how to operate on the other side of that tragic event. That's a turning point in the history of any organization, when you have a leader, who is the leader, who made the place, made the company, that person suddenly steps away.

Now what? And the way you think about that, which I learned, along with our board, is, you go from knowing that there is additional wealth coming, so when you make decisions, you can say, "Well, if I overspend here, I'll probably be okay. Overspend there, I'll probably be okay. If I get Fred to agree to give some more personal money for this project, or this initiative, like a new Institute in the US, and he puts up half the money or a third of the money from his private pocket, doesn't take it out of the endowment, that's great." Now, there's no Fred. What you have is what you have. There ain't going to be no more. You have to preserve capital, because your mission is to exist in perpetuity, and that means you have to preserve spending power. And you have to preserve spending power in the face of federal law. And the law requires you to spend 5% a year of the corpus. So, you think about it, and I know you and I have talked about this, but I'm going to repeat it because it's so fundamental.

So few people understand. You have to earn the 5% you're required by law to spend, and then you have to earn, or try to earn, at least the inflation rate at the time. Right now, inflation's 3.5 or 4%. So, you have to earn 5% plus 3.5 or 4%. That means you've got to make 8.5 or 9% a year just to stay even. You're not growing your spending power if you earn 9% a year. Now, I challenge you, although not really, but I would challenge anybody to go and make 9% a year, year over year over year. It's very hard. It's why you have hedge funds, it's why you have private equity, it's why you have venture capital. Because stocks and bonds won't do it. Stocks and bonds won't do it. You can look at history, it's 7.5% in the stock market. It's less than that in the bond market. But you need nine percent, so what are you going to do? So, the two challenge: first, how do we invest the corpus, the $600 million, so that we earn 5% plus inflation or more, so that we might grow the endowment? It's doable, but it's hard. And so, that was the financial challenge.

And then, the programmatic challenge is–and you don't have any more money to make up for losses. So, if in some years, you don't make that return, you've got to dig into the corpus and that lowers the corpus, so the corpus starts going down. But this is supposed to be an in-perpetuity endowment. The corpus is supposed to stay at least at the spending rate or go up from there. As a result, you change the risk profile of what you choose to do. And preservation of capital becomes a primary concern of both the board and the investment committee of the foundation. And this is true of every foundation. It's not special to Kavli. The biggest to the smallest, that's their job. If the source of the money, the founder, wants the thing to exist in perpetuity, that's how you have to manage. and Not all founders do. Many say, "Once I'm gone, I want it spent down on the things that I say I'm interested in and spend all the money." And they really mean literally spend all the money.

But many are like Carnegie, who Fred's following in his footsteps, and so are so many others, who said, "If you die with any money, you die poor. Give it all away. Give it away as much as possible during your lifetime, and make sure you don't die with wealth that's just going to get frittered away." So, you take care of your family, which I said Fred did, and then you leave the rest, either to be spent down to do good, or to be preserved over time and spent at a certain rate per year to do good over time. That's philanthropy. And Carnegie left all his wealth in his foundations. To this day, the Carnegie Institution for Peace, the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, the Carnegie Corporation, the Carnegie this, European Carnegies, and so on. What a legacy, right? But he didn't die with a hell of a lot of personal wealth. Enough to maintain his estate in Scotland, but that's it.

Very noble way to think about what to do with wealth. And I think–this is now a much broader point about American society–I tend to be on the liberal side of the political ledger. My very liberal friends would say, "You shouldn't have that wealth. It should be taxed." And the implication is that the government knows better what to do with that money than the individual person who's got the wealth. In any individual case, you could establish that this might be true. The person's a whacko and spends money on what, objectively even, somebody would view as very unlikely to make any difference. But if you average–again, we're all good scientists–do the integral over all of the philanthropic enterprises taken as a whole, on average, what you get, and I've studied this deeply and written about it–you have copies of the papers–is an expansion at the margins of the scientific enterprise of the country, of the social justice enterprise of the country, of the aims at poverty and relieving poverty in the country, and so on. So personally, I think the system is about right on philanthropy. Where it's not right is on the huge gap in wealth distribution. But that's another topic.

In the end, it's always more than the government could do on its own. And it's often done differently than the government would do it. And on balance, you look at history, and I'm absolutely convinced that diversity of approach to solving society's problems and advancing knowledge is dramatically better than everything being done by the government. That's a very American point of view.

I understand Europe. I admire Europe. It operates totally differently. It's a democracy, but it's social democracy, it's not a capitalistic democracy in the same way we have been. And maybe the strain of individualism in the United States is too strong, and it's going to lead to our unraveling. We're living in a very dangerous period. Nonetheless, when I look at it as an objective person who knows how to integrate over data, the data says, on balance, it's better than the government being totally in charge. There's more risk-taking in the system, and that's good.

If you ask yourself, "Why has the United States had this leading economy for so long? Why did we win World War II?" We might've done better at World War I if we were really committed. We weren't. But when we were really committed in World War II, we did things that others couldn't do, and we beat the Germans at their game, and we did better than the Brits at their game, though they did wonderfully. The French did very little at the game to win. Their resistance was what was important, but the other pieces that were required to win as opposed to stalemate, like World War I - that came from the United States. And I'm convinced that pre-World War II, philanthropy supported all the science that went into developing what we developed during World War II. It didn't come from a goddamn vacuum. And then after the War, the government put all kinds of money into science and engineering.

Thank God for Vannevar Bush and his vision of how the country should pursue science, technology, engineering, education. Transformative. And we do have the greatest system of public and private universities in the world. Nobody can beat us. And why is that? Because all the privates, for the most part, were created by wealth. Caltech, a little exception. MIT, an exception. Stanford's no exception. University of Chicago's no exception. Johns Hopkins is no exception. The number of privates created by the wealth in the first gilded age is extraordinary. And what's happening today, just to finish the argument for the thesis, the wealth is again being recycled. I don't know if it's being recycled at the rate that it should. I don't even know what the optimum rate is. Some people don't do anything early in life, like Bill Gates, while he was running Microsoft, then suddenly, he's got $100 billion a year endowment, and he's spending $5 billion a year. My God, right? It's not ignorable.

So, you end up with a kind of system in which today, the wealthy are putting their wealth into creating major new schools within universities, major new initiatives within universities. So at Caltech, you have the Resnicks, $750 million gift. Transformative, right? You get these big gifts. MIT has a new school of computer and information science, a whole new enterprise. A billion dollars of philanthropic money. Where'd the money come from? Entirely philanthropy. Then at Stanford, John Doerr and his wife, the venture capitalist from Kleiner Perkins in the Valley, just gave over a billion dollars for the environment, climate, the future of the planet. They have a new school. So, they're not inventing new universities. We don't need them. They are enabling the futures of the universities we have.

The schools do need this new infrastructure. They do need these new visionary directions. And one of the wonders of the system, in my view - particularly Caltech is a great example, but all the great places, particularly the great places - these gifts sustain greatness over time. And they are given in areas where the choice of the area is collaborative between the donor and the receiver. So, Caltech wanted its program that the Resnick gift supports. That's where Caltech wanted to go for the future. They wouldn't have taken the money and gone and made rubber tires. They wanted this area. So did Stanford want its area. So did MIT in its area. And so on it goes at most of the major universities.

There are many gifts that are also given to other universities that are not in the AAU, the Association of American Universities - the 70 qualified-by-design research universities of the United States. There's a criteria for membership. And there are only about 70. But those 70 make all the difference for the economy and so on.

Everybody else is important, it's like any society, it stratifies a bit on its own. You don't try. It just happens. And what you need are programs where philanthropy gives back to take care of those who are less fortunate, to ensure that people can get an education and not have to go to Harvard to get a good one. On and on. The partnership between the recycling of wealth in the United States and the program on average that the government has had, which has been sensible for the most part, is very sane and doing historically what the United States is needs to have done. When you combine that with the recycling of the wealth, we have a system that is broader and more diverse than any place on Earth. And I've written about our challenge with China, so one last comment on the thesis here.

When I was a kid, the conflict was between capitalism and communism. And the two major players were the United States and Russia, the old Soviet Union. Today, the argument is between capitalism and capitalism. Democratic capitalism and autocratic capitalism. Autocratic capitalism is China, democratic capitalism remains the United States. That's the challenge for the coming century. How that will play out depends on the robustness of the economies of those two systems. and I'm betting that the robustness of the American system will prevail. What gives it robustness? Well, one, we don't over-regulate. Two, we don't surveil. We don't surveil the population in the same way that China surveils. You feel free to spread your view. If you were sitting in Shanghai, you would not. And that impacts how people think in the scientific realm.

Because if you have autocratic capitalism, there's a tremendous amount of determination of what goes on made from the top down. When you have a democratic capitalism, the determination of what goes on comes from the bottom up. Despite trickle-down economics and all that Republican bullshit about trickle down, in essence, the economy is a bottom-up economy. New things just get done. The government doesn't come in and say, "You can't start that company because I am worried about the students at Stanford being radicalized, so no Google." You're not allowed to do it. We don't have that type of system. We might be headed for it if Trump wins. But then, we'll lose the challenge with China. It's as simple as that in my mind.

So, it's not just about preserving democracy, it's about preserving the United States and those who think like we do, Western Europe, Southeast Asia, and so on. It's a big thesis topic, right? If you asked, "What's the difference between us and China?", it's that China, ultimately, because of this top-down approach, things won't bubble at the edges where crazy ideas will happen here, on average, much more than will happen there. And on average, that will strengthen our system more here than it will theirs. Is it guaranteed? No. We can see the threat today. But we've managed threats of this kind, Huey Long in the 1930s. Hopefully, we'll manage this.

ZIERLER: How much growth opportunity was there at Kavli when you took over as CEO? Were the 20 Institutes already in place, and was that a hard ceiling?

CONN: So, I never treated it as a hard ceiling. What I saw, as I explained earlier, before Fred died and we came out of the 2008, 2009, 2010 recession, what to do to make a difference? Well, we had some Institutes, we had the Kavli Prize. What was missing was, could we be a catalyzer of new directions in science? Reflect on that because that's not easy to think about. Could we be a catalyzer for new directions in science? And we thought we could. [Laugh] Chutzpah. We thought we could. And so, with my staff, we created a meetings program. The idea that we had was we would host meetings on subject matter at the intersections of different fields of science that we thought, when merged together, might lead to a whole new direction for science, or those sciences blended together would create a new field. And we did that, and that made a big difference in the period from 2010 to 2014.

By 2014, the economy had pretty much fully recovered, but we were at a very low-interest rate level. and if you could invest in the endowment style of management, you could get your five plus two because inflation was just two percent. So, you needed returns to be 7%. Not like today, 9%. The other thing we had to do, and this is where it became more radical, we had to ask, "Where should the Foundation be located?" We did have to think about Fred's admonition, "I'd like there to not be more than 20 Institutes." But we didn't have 20. I had put in place three new ones. There were maybe 14 or 15, so we had a gap – we had headroom. And it would be a while before we got to 20. So, that really wasn't much of an issue, and we didn't really have to change course for that. What we would have been almost three times the annual spending. And the question in my mind was, "When do we start spending it? And when we start spending it, how will we spend it?" And "Where should we be located?"

So, in 2014 and 2015, after Fred's passing, those were the issues that we focused on. We didn't change the budget that much, and that's because you don't get the money from the estate right away. So, we now knew how much money ultimately the Foundation would get, but it was in a trust, so it wasn't probate, but the estate had trustees and getting the money transferred to the foundation would take 3-4 years.

But nonetheless, it's astonishing how much energy and time goes into bringing a trust where the person has now died to closure and allow the trust to go to the beneficiaries. And what do the trustees of the trust do until all of that has been given back, and they can dissolve themselves? That takes years. And I was absolutely in the middle of that from day one until the end. We did it fast, in about three and a half years. But it took three and a half years before that money really rolled in. And we had two types of investments that we had to manage.

One was the real estate company that Fred had, which had a value of around $200 million, and there were Fred's private investments, which were another couple of hundred million dollars. How are those pieces of wealth going to be managed by the trustees of the trust until they're transferred over to the Foundation, when we could manage them? And we had to work with the trustees to say, "You know, you're not going to give away all than you've got. Could you give us a third rather early on? What about the real estate companies? When you sold the real estate pieces, could you give us the money?" so we could slowly, over time, build up the endowment beyond where it was, until it was all in.

The other thing I had in mind was - we do know the money's coming, and we thought the total would be about $650 million. And 5% of that is a little over $32 million a year. We were spending $14 or $15 million. So, we would ultimately have a budget of two and a half times the present budget.

When could we start doing raising the budget? When would we start increasing that budget, and how would we justify it? If you've learned anything over these interviews with me, you know I'm going to start early before I really have the money. I'm going to bet on the come, and I'm going to have a plan to make a difference. And so, these next few years, 2014, 2015, 2016, they were crucial to the determination of what to do, how to do it, and when to do it.

Now, I've already talked about how you manage the money. More conservatively. Preserve capital, you don't have Fred anymore. But what to do about where to locate it, what to do about how to increase the budget over time, while you don't necessarily have all the money yet, what new directions might you go in, what makes sense? These were the questions in those formative years immediately after Fred's passing. And they became clearer after about a year.

And so, let me maybe take a little time here and discuss - Where should the Foundation be located? Now, I've told this story before, but it's worth repeating with all of this context. Fred, as I said, lived in Santa Barbara, loved Santa Barbara. He wanted the Foundation's headquarters to be in Santa Barbara. My assessment of that was the worst idea in the world. There is no existence proof of a great foundation being located in Santa Barbara. Why were we going to be the first? You can't get to Santa Barbara. How are you going to be national or international if you can't get there? Hard. Not impossible, but hard. Where were all the foundations that were in the big league where you wanted to play? They were in New York, Chicago, LA, Boston, San Francisco. They weren't in places like Santa Barbara, or Norfolk, Virginia. Or you pick a place that's less prominent. So, where to locate was going to be a contentious issue. And then, how to spend up, and what to spend up it on, and when to start, that was going to be a contentious issue.

And those were the issues that I focused on in those two or three years right after Fred's passing. Now, I say I. We had a board, and this board was a very good board, had wonderful people on it. And I had a great chair in Rock Hankin, who took over from Fred. And so, all of this also meant working all this out with the board. I can't do anything on my own. On this level of issues–these are existential issues, right? Do you exist here, or do you exist there? Do you stay Throop Institute, or whatever Caltech was before it, or do you become Caltech? Do you have a Millikan, or don't you have a Millikan? These are the things that we were facing.

Were we going to think big? That's why they brought Millikan at Caltech. They brought him to make the place great. They brought a Nobel Prize winner from Chicago. "Make this place great." He hires Linus Pauling. My God, right? He has Morgan in biology. He's got Fowler in physics and a guy in thermodynamics. In other words, somebody with vision and with the imprimatur, the big cross-section, meaning a big reputation, to attract what is needed. That was why Millikan was brought to Caltech, in my view. They had great people earlier. They had Hale. But they didn't make Caltech. In my mind, it was Millikan who made Caltech. And that may be controversial.

ZIERLER: The history is the history.

CONN: But the history is the history, and I know about his views on eugenics. Fine, it's a mistake. But don't deny history. He was the honey that attracted the bees. And Hale and the astronomy folks did it in one field. Millikan did it across science, and that was also a very big difference. So, okay, in a much smaller way, [Laugh] we were faced with the same set of questions. I don't want to compare myself to Millikan. But the charge at Kavli was to think about, "Would you be a Millikan?" That is, could you think outside the box, could you think about things that nobody else could do that would allow you to be thought of as an MIT at a tenth the size, allow you to be thought of as Chicago at a tenth the size, allow you to be thought of as other great places, but a tenth their size, a hundredth of their size sometimes? That was Caltech's challenge.

My challenge was, I'm Caltech, I don't have scale and I'm not going to. How do I create greatness when you don't have scale? That's not easy. And it's the reason there isn't more than one Caltech, I might add, to my good alma mater, my good Caltech place for graduate work, really. That's what I wanted for Kavli. I haven't put it this way in the past, but the conversation with you brings this out. I wanted Kavli to be the Caltech of philanthropy.

Science and a Structural Shift in Washington

ZIERLER: When Trump was elected, and the concerns that started to bubble up in the scientific community about his policies, about his demeanor, about his views on international politics and the impact of this on science, did you feel well-positioned for Kavli to take a role in assessing the impact of this and what could be done about it?

CONN: I think the answer is no. I think that's the honest answer. When Trump came in, nobody knew what the hell was going to happen. And remember that in those days, Trumpism and MAGA-ism wasn't what it is today. So, the Republicans were still Republicans who would pass science bills. They loved science just as much as Democrats. And through the first Trump administration, he didn't give a shit about science. I don't think he knew how to spell the word. As far as science was concerned, if the Congress, which is where the money was appropriated, was appropriating the money appropriately, we were going to be fine. And science actually didn't get hurt during the Trump administration. But not because of Trump in any way. He had zero interest. And that allowed those who were interested to just do what they wanted, and he would sign the bill.

And so, those first four years of his presidency, while tumultuous in so many ways, with defense policy and obviously with January 6, they didn't have a major influence on the support for science in the country. I worry more today because there are more Republicans that have these belief systems where science is contrary to their belief systems, so science is not good. That's the worry today. That was not there in 2016 or 2018. The worries were different. So, we didn't really think a lot about it, and we worked with the Congress to move things along, and we didn't see anything happening at NIH that would cause us to take pause about neuroscience. The program that we catalyzed, which became the BRAIN Initiative of Obama, was not affected by the Trump Administration. He did not attack it. It kept growing. To this day, it's $700 million a year spent on that initiative, and it started out at $500 million or $450 million in 2014. So, there's been continuity in a lot of areas of funding for science.

I'm more worried today. If the circumstance were today 10 years ago, I might've thought about the problems quite differently. So, it was a change in the political question, but it didn't have a direct effect, or even an indirect effect at that point, on what we were to do and how we were to do it. I think that's a fair answer to your question. We were focused on, as I said, how to be a major foundation when we had this little budget. So, how to be a Caltech in a world where you're a tenth to a hundredth the size of others.

ZIERLER: Among the 20 Institutes, are there any that you felt particularly close to, either by your affiliation with the larger Institute, the host university, or because you had a particularly strong hand in its development?

CONN: Well, I knew the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics of Santa Barbara because it's kind of in my area, and I had gone to one of two things, I think, over the years of their programs. So, I knew Santa Barbara very well. I knew of Chicago, and I knew people there, but not well. I am an academic through and through. To me, one of the great parts of this job was just interacting with these wonderful institutions that already had Kavli Institutes. That was just going to be fun. In places that I had no reason to think I'd be impactful because of my field – like, Yale in neuroscience - they never had a program of plasma physics, fusion, energy, not much engineering. I never had much to do with Yale. Suddenly, there's a Neuroscience Institute at Yale, and I've got to go to Yale. What could be more fun?

I knew the plasma physics, fusion, and engineering program very well at Columbia. ButI didn't know the rest of the university, and they had a Neuroscience Institute at Columbia. Again, get to go to New York. What could be bad about that? MIT, I knew well, so that was easy. And they had a big program in my field, always did. So, I knew everybody. I knew a lot of the physics department and engineering school people at MIT. So, it was a mixture.

Some places, I knew the place well, but they didn't have a program in my area. Some places, I knew the place by reputation, but they didn't have anything in my area, didn't know anything about them. Yale's that example. Sometimes, it was an MIT, and so on. The European ones, I knew the program at Cambridge but not the people at Cambridge. So, that was another example of – they were like the University of Chicago to me. I knew they had a wonderful history involving Fred Hoyle at Cambridge and Willie Fowler at Caltech. Hoyle would come to Caltech all the time, work with Willie Fowler. Even in the years I was a student, they were on campus together, scheming, and thinking, and whatever they were doing.

Fowler and Tombrello has the Lemonade and Orange-aid series of reports on nuclear cross sections needed to compute the burning rates in stars. Tom was the experimentalist who would measure all the cross-sections of the nuclear reactions that Fowler and company needed to do their burn calculations of how stars burn and evolve.

So, I knew things like that, I knew of, but didn't visit for that reason. I visited Oxford because that was where fusion was done, right next to Oxford. Wasn't part of Oxford, but the big Joint European Torus was right there. Another place I'd never visited, like Norway, they had an Institute of Neuroscience in Norway I knew zero. But these were the wonderful challenges of the job, the cultural differences. I just jumped in. When I got there, you got to go and visit every one of those Institutes. You go meet them. I told you this, you not only meet the faculty and the leaders of the Institute, but you also meet the deans who govern the Institute, you meet the presidents or the provosts who are responsible for the Institute, you meet everybody that's going to make a difference to the success of that Institute because they need to not only do great science, but they also need to fund raise. And so, you had two reasons and two layers of people. It wasn't just, get to know the director of the Institute.

So, I think that's the way I would answer your question. I knew of almost all. I did not know of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. That, I admit, I didn't know. But every other university, I either knew or had heard of, and knew something about it, including Delft in Holland.

Tracking the Success of the Institutes

ZIERLER: What were your expectations on the reporting structure between the Institutes and the Foundation? What would you want to hear on a sort of annual basis or a reporting basis from the director? Did you ever hear news that you didn't like?

CONN: Oh, yes. Yeah. So, remember the model. The model is that we give you our money in the form of a transference of our wealth from our endowment to your endowment. Caltech's got $20 million that you could put a label Kavli on, and then it grows over time. Same with Yale, same with Columbia, same with the others. And with the matching funds, that made the dollars in grow to $30 and $40 million, and then all of it would grow over time. So, it's a lot of money at most places.

So, what you're after is not, "Did they do this program that they told you they were going to do?" or "Did they do that specific thing?" Because it's not a grant. You didn't give them a grant to do this specific piece of work, and you're not going to go there to hear a report about a specific piece of work. What you're going to go there for is to see, is the Institute gelling? Are the faculty and their students keen about having it? Is it working for them and filling a gap that they would otherwise have?

And I'll give you two examples of the plus and the minus. Caltech, by and large, was a plus because they had used the money to build a lab full of electron microscopes and other equipment, and this, that, and the other thing, where they used the money to buy the equipment that they couldn't get from a grant. So, in that sense, the faculty loved it because it provided this common nanotechnology laboratory, which was used by all the people doing nanotech and nanoscience at Caltech. On the other hand, I worried at Caltech about the true cohesiveness of it. Were they coming together and writing papers where they would label Kavli Institute for Nanoscience in the title of what they wrote? Roukes, Kavli Institute for Nanoscience, Physics Department. Or did they leave the Kavli Institute off? Mostly, they left it off and put it in an acknowledgement. Well, okay. And so, by and large, it was working well there.

Chicago, it was working fabulously. At Chicago, even though it's ranked six or seven in the country, and it's got a pretty good endowment, founded by Rockefeller and you name it, they didn't have a lot of support in astronomy, even as strong as they are. If there's a competitor in astronomy to Caltech, it's Chicago. Historically, not just recently. So, it's the home of Chandrasekhar. Yet, they didn't have big support outside of the University for their cosmology and astronomy program, and they were great in cosmology. So, they loved Kavli because Kavli was a unifying principle for them. Gave them the money, named everything they were doing in that area, put it under the Kavli umbrella. It was about as successful an investment as I think we had. More successful even that Caltech in that sense.

And Columbia was an example of, were you happy everywhere you went? The answer is no. My first trip to New York, it's led by a Nobel Prize winner, Eric Kandel. He's the God of neuroscience, literally. He wrote the textbook. To everybody, he's the God of neuroscience. He's the director. He talked Fred in the early 2000s into having a neuroscience institute at Columbia. He took Fred to the Nobel Prize ceremonies in 2004. He had won his own Nobel Prize in the late 90s. To introduce Fred to, how does a big prize program work? And Fred used a lot of that knowledge when he was trying to think about setting up the Kavli Prize. And yet, I could tell when I went to Columbia, Eric would use the money to take us to a restaurant on 54th Street or 53rd Street in Midtown Manhattan, a great French restaurant. And he'd invite all the people, and he would hold court like it was a faculty meeting around the long table. It'd be me, and my science program officer, and ten faculty.

Yet, what I discovered was that he would entertain me, he would entertain us, everything looked honky-dory, but yet, when you started to talk to the faculty, you'd find out that as soon as we left, Eric was just doing with the money whatever he wanted, and there wasn't a lot of engagement. There wasn't a lot of coordination or cooperation or cohesion. The young faculty felt left out. It didn't make any difference to them. That was a problem. Think about it. You have a Nobel Prize leader of this Institute. He's also leading all kinds of other stuff at and for Columbia. How are you going to deal with that system? How are you going to make a change? How are you going to get the younger people involved? So, there were places with challenges like Columbia. There were places that were just, "How much more can I give you, and how fast can you run?" like Chicago. There were places like KITP at Santa Barbara. "Well, we tolerate you, but it's okay."

So, there was this mix, right? And when I went to Europe, except for Cambridge, they didn't know what to do with the money. There's no tradition of philanthropy. They can't even invest the money. We have to figure out what to do with the gift we're giving them because they're sort of frittering it away. They make 2% a year putting it in some Norwegian bond. [Laugh] So, we're dealing with cultural differences around the world, where how universities are run and their relationship with the government–all the universities in Europe are public. There are no such things as private universities. How do you deal with that? And they're not public in the same way that American universities are public, which is really a mix of public and private. All the publics also have endowments. Not as big as the true privates, but big enough. Not in Europe or Japan, or China.

So, it was really an interesting mix, to get on the road, make a trip to Europe, and meet all the ones in Europe. We had two in China. One of the early trips I made in December of 2009 was to China. It's totally fascinating. I'll tell you, man, it is cold in December in Beijing. And it is out on a high plain, and the wind blows. I went over a weekend, had a grad student or postdoc drive me out. "What do you want to do for the weekend?" "I want to see the Great Wall." He drove me out, and me and this student go and stand on the Great Wall. The wind's got to be blowing 50 miles an hour, and it is as cold as you can imagine. [Laugh] No matter how much clothing you put on; you don't have enough clothing. But it was great. China is completely different from American universities and how they're run. Again, they're not only government owned, but the Chinese government is apoplectic about a student revolution.

Remember, Tienanmen Square was students. The biggest fear that the Chinese government has is that the young people will revolt. So, what happens on our campuses today with the encampments and so on, they would have the army on the campuses in China. How's this actually going to work in China? [Laugh] And American philanthropies, by the way, like American business, it's the wild West. It's the new place to be. "We're going to go, and we're going to do." In China, we're saying, "We're open to doing it," until the Xi regime came in and showed its true colors. Up until then, it was, "Come. We'll steal your stuff but come so we can steal your stuff. And by the way, you'll probably do okay anyway." [Laugh] That was the days in China. So, every place was different, and every place had different problems.

The equivalent of the Theoretical Physics Institute at the Chinese Academy of Sciences was a disaster. And getting that to change is a story in and of itself, and it involves Caltech in that the president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences at the time was one of the early postdocs from China in the early 80s who came from China to the United States, and he had done a postdoc at Caltech and JPL. He had these fond memories, not only of the United States, but of Caltech. So, when I met him, the president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and we learned that we each had Caltech in our history, that was a bond. We got along. We had something in common that we both understood, and we both loved. And the fact that he loved Caltech was great for what I was trying to do, because he had trust in me.

The trust came from, "I was at Caltech, you were at Caltech. I know people who have been at Caltech. I trust you." It's a big deal. You just meet a person; it was the institutional trust that made all the difference. And I got that problem eventually solved. It took me five years. But if it weren't for the president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, I couldn't have solved that problem. So, Caltech made a difference there.

Some places were doing great. The Institute in Astronomy and Astrophysics at Peking University was doing wonderfully. But the one in theoretical physics was doing crappy. [Laugh] I had to figure out what to do. And so it was. I was at Cornell, they had this issue, and I had to figure out what to do there, and so on, and so forth.

It was a wonderful time. And you asked at the start of this conversation what we expected when we visited and what we expected from the Institutes. And the answer was just that it would be a prominent organizing principle around that subject matter for the Institute. If we were the reason they were doing things they wouldn't otherwise do, that was success. And that was true at some places, truer at other places, less true at some, and not true at others. And it was assessing all of that and then figuring out what to do about each circumstance that was a wonderful challenge of the first five years or so.

I should add, by the way, that when we came out of the recession, we were open to establishing some new Institutes, and we did. Those are great stories of themselves. We're already after Fred's death. I didn't tell you this story, but we established a new Institute in nanoscience at Berkeley, and we established a new Institute in theoretical physics, astronomy, astrophysics, and cosmology at the University of Tokyo. And those are great stories, and they were important successes for the Foundation. And then, we did three more in neuroscience, and then we did a few more in nanoscience. So, through the period from 2010 to 2020, we put about another seven Institutes in place.

ZIERLER: What was the success rate of how many would-be Institutes that pitched the Kavli and how many actually came into fruition?

CONN: We didn't do a call for proposals. So, I can't tell you that–everybody wanted a Kavli Institute in those days, but we didn't call for a proposal and say, "Send us your best ideas, and we'll get a review committee, we'll look at what you say, we'll make a site visit, and we'll make a choice." That wasn't how it worked. It had more to do with us looking at where we wanted to be, where we might have holes in our program, and where we thought particular universities were opportunity for us, and that might be opportune for them. So, as an example, the two Institutes I told you we set up in 2011, 2012, one at Berkeley and one at the University of Tokyo, both have a Berkeley connection. Turns out that Berkeley wanted a Kavli Institute, and we didn't have Berkeley in our group. And I know Berkeley, and it's deservedly a great university. Why aren't we at Berkeley? They want a Kavli Institute. Well, we're a West Coast foundation. Maybe we should have a dominant number of Institutes in California. That's okay, we're going to always have a majority in the United States.

That was kind of a principle. But not necessarily a majority in California of those in the United States, but why not a lot? We had one at San Diego, we had one at Caltech, we had one at UC Santa Barbara, we had one at Stanford, so we already had four. Who was missing that I thought was great? Berkeley. Possibly UCLA, but in science, Berkeley more than UCLA. And I didn't think a lot of USC. So, that's it. Therefore, we should add Berkeley.

Thinking like that made it easy for me. Might sound outrageous, or egotistical, or something like that, but it was a very easy calculation. They were great at nanoscience, they wanted a Kavli Institute, and we were ready to begin starting new Kavli Institutes. The one in Tokyo, the director was a professor of theoretical physics at Berkeley in the Physics Department, who was Japanese by birth and education, and who was on the faculty at Berkeley. And they had drawn him back to lead a major new Institute at the University of Tokyo. So, there was a Berkeley connection in both those two new things.

A Purview of Global Support

ZIERLER: Was there always an impetus to strike a balance between Institutes that were domestic and international?

CONN: Yes. It's a unique feature of the Kavli Foundation that we are international. To give you an example of a great foundation in California that's not international, but supports science deeply, is the Moore Foundation. Your alumnus, Gordon Moore. Gordon wanted the Foundation to be focused on the United States, and he wanted a third of the resources to be focused in the Bay Area. And he wanted to be good to the folks at Caltech, too, where he was a student [Laugh] So, you're going to have a hell of a lot of money, but you want it spent not just in a certain way subject matter-wise, but geographically. Fred was international. He was born in Norway. I've told you the saying, he would say, "Norway gave me my roots, and America gave me everything else." So, he thought internationally.

We were comfortable with international Institutes, and we're one of the few foundations that actually has a major presence outside the United States, an American foundation. That's a unique feature. We were comfortable with it, and we wanted more of it. So, when I was looking at what we would expand, I thought we needed to expand a little bit in astrophysics and cosmology, and they, Tokyo, had a branch of theoretical physics. At Tokyo, they had something called the Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe, IPMU. Well, it fit in all our subjects - cosmology, astronomy, astrophysics, theoretical physics. And the math comes along for the ride. And we had nothing more in Asia but the two in China. We needed to be also in Japan. Japan has the strongest science of any country in Asia, without question.

So, between Berkeley in California and our needing another Institute in nanoscience–wanting another one in nanoscience– and knowing Berkeley, which I did, and them coming to us and saying they would like a Kavli Institute, and us going, "Well, where else in the country would it be better to have one than at Berkeley?" And the answer was, probably no other place.

So, it was easy. And it worked more like that than, "We're going to put out a call for a proposal for a new Kavli Institute in nanoscience, and do a landscape study, and see who's doing what, and try to make a decision." And that might sound a little arbitrary. But the one thing that we did do, which is elitist in the best use of the word elite, - is to make sure that the universities where you have your Institutes will always keep them as good as they can be. And if they get in trouble, they're going to fix the trouble. I had trouble at Caltech. Tom fixed it. Universities where it's important enough they're going to fix the problems, if they need fixing. So, one of the risk controllers you have when you're giving your money to them–I'm giving from our endowment, $10 million, $20 million, to the university.

What's the risk control that the university will never let it go south? If I'm at a different institution that doesn't have that historical greatness, what guarantee do I have that they're going to pay attention to us if we get in trouble? Not a lot. So, you could look at where all the Kavli Institutes are and say, "Boy, you didn't take any risk at all." And the answer is, that's right. Because that was our risk control because we were transferring wealth. We weren't doing what other people do, which is to give you a grant, and we don't like the outcome, we just leave. Fine. No harm, no foul. No, no, we'd given you our endowment, so you need to succeed. How do I control the risk of failure? By going to great places and saying, "You can't let this fail." And I only had one failure out of 20, and that was at Harvard. So, that's a story by itself. Anyway, that was how we started on the new path, two Institutes. But again, we only had 13 at the time, that brought us to 15, and then we did another five later. Anyway, we got to 20.

ZIERLER: Let's go there now if you're comfortable doing so. What was the miss at Harvard?

CONN: Well, Harvard is Harvard. What I mean by that is, it's too rich. Let that sink in. So, if you don't come with hundreds of millions, not tens, you can't get the time of day. Now, I learned that because you would think, "Oh, Yale. Well, Yale's got a big endowment. Not quite as big as Harvard, but not that far away." Turns out Yale's completely different. They respect donors of every scale. And if you can do something there that they can't get done some other way, which we were able to do for them in neuroscience, you get all the respect in the world. At Harvard, they've always got somebody willing to give them $50 or $100 million. If you've got $10, hey, not enough–and so, we've got a leveraging model in which we put up $10 million and ask you to raise $10 million. We'll put up $5 million and ask you to raise $5 million, and we add onto the endowment in this cooperative way.

We call it a cooperative way. Their view was, "Why should we be spending our time on that when we can go to somebody and just get all the money we want?" So, they were too rich. So what happened? Fred put this Institute at Harvard in 2006, I think. Why? Because he wanted Harvard. He wanted the Harvard name. I don't think at any other place that he'd go because he wanted the name. But he wanted Harvard. So, now, if we don't have Harvard, the panoply will be missing a bright star. That's not true by the way. I knew it wasn't true even before the issues came up. But he felt that way. In other words, that was the impact of Harvard's reputation on somebody who's not an academic. "If I don't have Harvard, I don't have the best." Bullshit.

I told you we had an initial gift of $7.5 million. Harvard demanded $10 million for the naming of an institute, so Fred gave them $10 million. The only ones who got more than seven and a half. But then, when we came up to ask, "Well, how do we build the endowment beyond $10 million?", we had an issue. We had determined we had to get to at least $30 million total dollars in to let it grow over time, they were nice enough, they signed up to the agreement. "We'll raise $8 million, you give us $4 million, we'll get to $20 million."

That was the phase two program that we were having with everybody else. I told you the story of going to Yale and talking to the dean of medicine, and he said, "Okay, done." I didn't have a chance to leave his office. We were done. He put up $8 million all by himself, we put up our $4 million, there we were, they're now at $20 million.

With Harvard, we were speaking to deaf ears. And then, Harvard got themselves in very deep trouble in the 2008, 2009 financial meltdown. Much more difficulty than others. And why was that so? It has to do with why we failed at Harvard, ultimately. Harvard, before the meltdown, had committed to developing a big alternative campus at Allston. It's called Allston. There's a Boston Underground stop in Allston. So, they had the business school there already, but they were going to move the whole school of engineering and applied science to this new campus at Allston.

And then, they ran out of money. They had all these commitments to build all this stuff, and they had contracts to do it, and suddenly, their endowment was down 20 or 25%. And the income was therefore going to be down. What were they going to do? So, the deans at Harvard at the time–fundraising at Harvard is very important and very different. It's the one place where the president doesn't make much difference. The deans are responsible for the fundraising at Harvard, whether it's the arts and sciences, engineering, the business school, those deans go and do the fundraising. That's where the action really is. I don't mean that the president doesn't partner with all the places to get this done. They do, because the head has to be on board. But the responsibility is with the deans. That's not even true at Caltech. So, all these deans were suddenly required to raise current funds, funds they could spend that year. Not endowment. They had no interest in approaching a donor and asking them to make an endowment gift. And what we were talking about was building up the endowment at the Kavli Institute at Harvard.

And their priority was, "We're not going to ask anybody for an endowment gift. We need current funds to fill the holes we've got in our budgets." And so, it wasn't until 2016 or ‘17 that they finally got that financial hole filled and were now able to think about focusing on, "Okay, we're going to raise endowment more, and we're going to go back to the more traditional fundraising approach of most universities." That meant we had been fallow for six, seven years. There was no more money. They sat there with the $10 million endowment, and that was it. It's not enough money to make any difference, so they could never pull together a nanoscience Institute. It was supposed to be bio and nano, and the integration of the biosciences with the nanosciences. George Whitesides was one of the directors, famous chemist. All your chemists will know George Whitesides. He's now retired, but he's one of their giants in chemistry. One thing he hasn't won is the Nobel Prize, but everything else.

And people love George Whitesides. So, George, like Eric Kandel, said, "I'll do it, I'll lead." But he's too busy to do it, and he's too busy to be paying attention, just like Eric was too busy to be paying attention." So, nothing happened, really, at Harvard.

And finally, even though I knew the dean of the engineering school who was responsible for fund-raising, Frank Doyle–he's now provost at Brown, and I knew him from Santa Barbara when he was there. Anyway, I said to the board around 2018, I've concluded that this is never going to work at Harvard. We would never raise a dime, and that it's just a failed Institute. So, I went to the board finally with this determination of mine. "Here are all the reasons why Harvard's failed, and we can't resurrect it. They're not open to being resurrected," was really the point. And so, the board approved, and I wrote a letter to President Bacow, who was president of Harvard at the time, explaining that we wanted to have the Kavli Institute for Bionano Science at Harvard closed. Obviously, we would leave them the money. I think I've said this to you before. A donor can't ask for their money back. Somebody asked me on the board, by the way, "Why don't you just ask them for the money back?" It was a business person.

The world of academia doesn't work like that. Gifts are not refundable. [Laugh] "Well, they didn't do what they said they would do." "I know, but that's not the real world." And so, Bacow and I had a call. He understood. He had been at MIT; he knew the success of the MIT Kavli Institute and was actually sorry that this hadn't worked out. But he wasn't going to change it. So, we agreed, and he just said, "Work it out with Alan Garber," who was the provost, current interim president at Harvard. And Alan's a wonderful guy, and we sat down. And I had a proposal for them, which was to take the endowment, which had grown to about $13 million at that point, and establish two senior endowed chairs at $5 million apiece named for Fred Kavli, and a junior endowed chair with the final $2.5 or $3 million for an associate professor at Harvard. We had already had one that was for an associate professor. And that would be the way Fred Kavli would have contributed in being known at Harvard, endowed chairs. And he asked me for flexibility. He said, "I'd like the flexibility to be at the level of the provost and not at the dean," because the endowment had been with the dean of engineering.

The dean of engineering was responsible for the Institute. He wanted it shifted to the provost. And I told you that deans are very powerful at Harvard. It's the way they run. He said, "I might need a special faculty position in some area or other, and if I could make the decision at the level of the provost, it would be better for the institution. "And I said, "So long as it's in one of the three major fields that we support: astrophysics and cosmology, nanoscience, or neuroscience. You pick. It'll be OK" And he said, "Done," and we left with a smile, and we were gone from Harvard. That's how it worked. But it was many years, knowing that Harvard was failing, before I could get to the place where I could go to the board and say, "We failed at Harvard." I had to say, "We failed at Harvard," because our approach did not work at Harvard. That's our problem, not Harvard's. But Harvard said, "Your approach doesn't work for us." They shouldn't have taken the money in the first place. But that's another story. So, there we are. That's the Harvard story.

ZIERLER: Let's round out our discussion today with when you started to think about stepping down from the Kavli. When did that begin, and thinking about 2020, was COVID a factor, or it was still too early?

CONN: No, it was too early. But I wanted to tell the story about the budgets and how we drove Kavli into a new level of spending, why that made a difference, and how we supported the BRAIN Initiative with three new Institutes in neuroscience. I haven't told you that story. I told you the story of the two at Berkeley and Tokyo. There are three more coming in neuroscience, and then there's a replacement for Harvard that comes towards the end, which is Oxford. And I should tell you that story. That's actually in my final year. So, once I get through the new neuro Institutes and the idea of, "Let's get all the Institutes up to $30 million," which is what drove the budget increases before we actually had the money, those two things are important to that final story of how what happened at Kavli happened. Then, we can talk about the final year and any retrospective you'd like.

ZIERLER: Okay. Should we pick up on that basis next time?

CONN: Yeah.

ZIERLER: Okay.

[End of Recording]

ZIERLER: This is David Zierler, Director of the Caltech Heritage Project. It is Wednesday, June 12, 2024. It is wonderful to be back once again with Professor Robert Conn. Bob, as always, it's great to see you. Happy Wednesday.

CONN: Happy Wednesday, David. Good to see you, as always.

Neuroscience and the BRAIN Initiative

ZIERLER: Today, we're getting closer and closer to the present. We're going to pick up around 2020, and I wanted to start right on the topic that we left off last time, the new initiatives for the Kavli, one of the most important and last things you did at the helm of the Kavli, focusing on the Neuroscience Institute. Let me start with a question. Especially after the experiences with Harvard, what were the kinds of programs that you were thinking about partnering with?

CONN: Now, let me be clear about the Neuroscience Institutes because you framed it as 2020 and Neuroscience Institutes. We always had neuroscience as a focus. And we initially only had four Institutes in neuroscience, whereas we had six, I think, in astrophysics, two in theoretical physics, and I think we ended up with five in nanoscience, and we added a sixth in nanoscience the last year of my presidency. But the real increase in the Neuroscience Institutes came along in parallel with the BRAIN Initiative of President Obama in the period 2013-2014, and I've talked about that story, how we had a meeting in 2011. The outcome of that meeting was the prospect of mapping the functioning brain over the coming decade or two, not mapping the neural structure of the static brain. That was being done already by the Allen Foundation. But what parts of the brain worked with other parts of the brain, and how did they do it in dynamic time, in real time?

How, in effect, are you going to measure millions and millions of neurons firing at the same time, possibly at many different locations within the brain and correlating all of them? And this convening that we organized, what are the opportunities at the intersection of nanoscience and neuroscience, led to a white paper about the prospect of being capable of doing what I've just described. And initially, at least half the neuroscience community thought it was absolutely nuts, this could not be done in any reasonable time. But a lot of people came along, including Michael Roukes at Caltech, who was a real champion of this idea, nanosensors. And the upshot was, we had a group of six people who had attended the conference write a white paper on the prospects of this idea. And I told you the story of one thing leading to another. I knew John Holdren very well, Obama's science advisor.

And we got this in front of him, and we got it in front of the NIH, got it in front of the NSF. And within 18 months of that meeting, I was in the East Room with President Obama in April of 2013 as he announced the BRAIN Initiative.

So, as part of the BRAIN Initiative, we had been asked by the administration if we wouldn't commit a reasonable sum of funds as a public-private partnership, where the government was going to commit upwards of a half a billion dollars a year, but would we do something? And we agreed to put up $40 million, and Howard Hughes said they'd put up a bunch of money, and Allen said the same. So, they had a couple hundred million dollars' worth of private commitments to go along with the public commitment. As part of that, we decided to add two Institutes in neuroscience. And we did an internal evaluation, we decided on 12 locations that we felt had the scale, scope, and quality of program for which we would be interested to have a Kavli Institute at their location. We got proposals back, short proposals, ten pages or something like that, from all of them.

We down selected to four with the idea of establishing two. And then, in 2014, my vice president of science and I made visits to all of these, and three of the four turned out to be so compelling, I went back to the board and said, "We've got to do one more," in essence. "And I know it's more money, but"–and these were now being done in a different format. We would provide $10 million upfront, and they would agree to match it with $10 million over a reasonable period of time. So, we would get to $20 million right away. That would throw off a million bucks a year. And the three places that we selected were Rockefeller University in New York, Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, and UC San Francisco, obviously in San Francisco. So, now, we had seven neuroscience Institutes, and we were going to grow all of them to $20 million, which we succeeded at most by 2015.

These new ones, we had to get to $20 million, and then we would do a program to get to $30 million. And the program to get to $30 was that we'd put up five, and they'd raise five, add an extra $10 million. So, in the end, all of the Kavli Institutes would end up with $30-million endowments, by hook or by crook. And that would throw off at least a million and a half a year, and the most successful of them was the Neuroscience Institute at Yale, where they put the matching money up themselves. The dean of medicine had the funds, and he said, "This is a priority, neuroscience. I'm going to put the money up." It was the easiest partnership I ever had. [Laugh] And so, when I talked to him about it, he said, "I'll put up $8 million, no problem, and we're done." That was phase two. Some years later, when we finished phase two, I went to him and said, "Let's get it to $30 million. We'll put up five, how about you put up five?" He put up five, we were at $30 million. And as a result of doing it right away, they ended up with the largest endowment of any Kavli Institute, any of the 20.

And the reason is that, by putting the money up right away, it had an opportunity to grow right away. And Yale manages its endowment extraordinarily well, they're famous for it. So, I would say today, as an example of this model working well, Yale's endowment for their Neuroscience Kavli Institute is about $45 million. And that throws off more than $2 million a year in unrestricted funds for the faculty's use in the area of neuroscience. That is stunning. And I can tell you from being a director of two institutes during my career, that type of unrestricted, no-overhead money is unbelievably leverage-able. And what I mean by that is that some of the best use of that kind of funding is to ask the faculty and the students, "What are your best ideas? Not only your best ideas, your craziest ideas. The ones that you think it's nuts, you can't get funding from the government, it's too early, but if it were to work, it might really change the landscape?" Now, they have money to fund those people. And they do.

So, I think those universities with Kavli Institutes who use their funds in that way have an unfair advantage. And that has always been the ideal for Kavli Institutes, that's the model. Now, they don't all do that. Caltech, for example, needed new instrumentation, and they spent a million or two of Kavli throw-off money to buy the instruments they needed. Fine. As I've said all along, and I believe deeply, the faculty really do know best what to do with the money. You have to trust that you have the best faculty. And if you trust that you have the best faculty affiliated with your programs, then you have to trust them to use the money wisely. And they know how precious such money is. I've been there and done it. So, they use the money very effectively is what my experience was throughout the universe of Kavli Institutes and the faculty in those Institutes. In any case, back to your question about neuroscience. We funded three.

We put up $10 million, and they agreed to match the $10 million, and they all ultimately did. And then, once that was done, we did this phase three of $5 million plus $5 million. So, I feel very proud that we were able to do not only a second phase and get everybody to $20 million, but a third phase and get them to $30 million. Now, you could say, "Why not get them to $60 million? Why not get them to $100 million?" Well, at some point, you don't want to be replacing their desire and need to go to the government and get grants. I don't want to make anybody lazy. But if you can front-end discovery with resources of this kind, it adds enormously at the edges of the creation of knowledge within the scientific enterprise. And that was the concept. So, by 2020, we had the extra three Neuroscience Institutes. And I've told you, we had one Institute that failed. And by the way, just today, they announced the 2024 Kavli Prize winners.

And one of those Kavli Prize winners is from Harvard and holds the Fred Kavli Chair in Astrophysics, which is one of the three chairs that they agreed to create with the funds that we had given them for the Institute. And when we disbanded the Institute, we said, "You can name three Kavli professors at $5 million a chair each." And one of them just won the Kavli Prize this morning. In fact, interestingly, he holds the Fred Kavli Chair. The other person is Sara Seager for exoplanets, and she's a member of the Kavli Institute for Space and Astrophysics at MIT. And Paul Alivisatos won on the chemistry side, and he's the founder of the Kavli Institute for Nanoscience at Berkeley. He's now president of the University of Chicago. So, we've chosen well both the places and the people. And that's what I mean by, you trust them to use the money wisely. And that's a very special attribute that I, because of my experience, appreciated the most. And I think if you had a different set of experiences, either in academia, or you came to a foundation from the business world, you would not do a program like this.

So, by the time we got to the latter part of my tenure, we had most of the Institutes done. We had this effort at Harvard that did not work out. I've told you the story of working that out with the president and the provost. And in my last year, unbeknownst to us ahead of time, Oxford came a-calling. And I don't know if I commented about that in the last meeting. So, we had 20 Institutes, and we had these final three in neuroscience. So, we had seven in neuroscience, six in astrophysics, five in nanoscience, and two in theoretical physics, one in the US and one in China. Because the effort didn't work at Harvard, we had an opening, so to speak, without having to deal with going north of 20 Kavli Institutes. And I'll tell you the background of that. One day, my director of physical sciences programs got a call from Oxford. They have a brand-new building for their chemistry program.

It contains mostly chemists doing nanoscience research, and they have to have a Kavli Institute. [Laugh] We said, "Well, that sounds interesting. Why don't you write us a proposal and tell us what you actually would do?" And we got a phenomenal proposal from them. And we didn't search. We didn't go out and say, "Who's competitive with Oxford?" Why? We know Oxford. It's fabulous. And now, they're coming to us. That's not bad. If it makes sense, we'll do it. If it doesn't make sense, we'll say no. And it made enormous sense. They named the damn building for Kavli, and they housed the Kavli Institute in Nanoscience at Oxford in this brand-new six-story building. And we said, "We'll give you $10 million, and you can raise $10 million, and we'll help you raise it." They said, "We don't care about that. All we want is the name." So, we gave them the $10 million, of course. And I hope they'll give them another five and at least get $15 million. But that was one of these–I'll call it a serendipity story- in which, on the heels of losing Harvard, we get Oxford. What goes around comes around.

And I think the thing that it proves is, don't be afraid to say no. Don't be afraid to shut something down. Something else will come along, and you'll be proud to have that something else. In this case, it happened very quickly, and that's the serendipity of it all. But that's how we got the 20 Institutes. Now, why do I have emphasized 20? When Fred passed, I've talked about this a lot earlier, he wrote what's called in legal terms a precatory letter, meaning he expresses his desires, but the board and the Foundation are not obliged to follow. But at least they know what the founder had in mind. And Fred felt there ought not be more than 20 Institutes. How he came to 20, I never really asked him, and I never really understood. And I understood the money issue, and therefore, I didn't think that Kavli could produce 50 Institutes at these levels of funding. But I certainly thought they ought to be balanced out, seven in neuroscience, seven in astrophysics, seven in nano, so two more here, and maybe three in theoretical physics, so one more is this area. For theoretical physics, having one in Europe, one in Asia, which is the one in China–there's a partial one in Japan because they do both the physics and the mathematics of the universe, and mostly astrophysics, but they also do theoretical physics–and then one at UC Santa Barbara, which is the most famous of them. So, I would've leveled off at 23 or 24. But that would have raised an issue within the board about Fred's desires. We had already done one of the things Fred didn't want, which was to not to put the headquarters the Foundation in Santa Barbara. For reasons we talked about, we moved to LA instead. This would've been the second time we would've gone against a wish. I didn't have to deal with it, and as far as I can tell, they have not done another Kavli Institute since I left, and my thinking is, they're not going to do any. They've moved back towards a more grant-making type of organization, like most foundations. That's their choice, and I'm not here to argue with it. I'm just saying, it's not what I would've wanted to do. So, I'm glad I left at the time I left. [Laugh]

ZIERLER: If you had to guess, what would Fred's reaction to be to this non-growth approach to new Institutes?

CONN: Well, it's the same question as what Fred's attitude would have been if we chose to move to Los Angeles versus Santa Barbara. Who knows? Once you made the case, for example, for Los Angeles, Fred might've said, "You know, that's really better." There isn't a major foundation in Santa Barbara. The likelihood we're going to survive at the quality of foundation we want to be in Santa Barbara, there's no existence proof that it's possible. Why do you think you're going to be the first? Hard to travel–all the reasons I gave. So, he might've listened to the arguments about location and changed his mind. And the same thing is possible here with the number of institutes. You don't know the answer to that question, and that's the role of the board of directors. It's the board's responsibility to decide programmatically what the Foundation should do and how close it should adhere to the wishes of the donor.

Now, let me say, I think in the context of the Kavli Foundation, the board and I were very close all the time to the wishes of the donor. Three fields, we never went beyond the three fields. Institutes and Kavli Prizes, those were the things he cared about the most, that's what we did. But we did other things, too, that raised the profile of the Foundation. And during the time we did that, such as meetings that led to the BRAIN Initiative, he didn't express a lot of joy or value for it, and yet, it raised the reputation as much or more than the other programs -- BRAIN Initiative and the catalytic role of the Kavli Foundation in the context of the BRAIN Initiative. That had an enormous impact on Kavli's reputation and recognition. And yet, it didn't come from an Institute, and it didn't come from a Prize. So, times change. I just was reading about the Prizes themselves, and the truth of the matter is, Fred had in mind a vision of the Kavli Prize as the Nobel Prize for the 21st century.

That has simply not worked out as he dreamed it might. And he didn't anticipate that the year that he put the Kavli Prize in place and had the idea of starting the Foundation, 2000, that decade, from 2000 to 2010, the landscape of science prizes exploded. All the new wealth that I have written about that's driving philanthropic giving to higher and higher levels is also giving prizes all over the place. And the New York Times, for example, there became such a growth in number of prizes, they covered the first couple of years we gave the Kavli Prize, and then they said, "We're not covering the prizes anymore." And all the New York Times covers now is the Nobel Prize.

They don't cover the Breakthrough Prize, which is $3 million a pop. You name the prize; they don't cover it. And it's gone in a completely different way than Fred had hoped. So, again, Fred wanted the Prizes. We would not have canceled the Kavli Prize program. [Laugh] I can tell you that. But is it reaching the level of external recognition that he had hoped it would? I think the frank answer is no. It doesn't mean people in science don't know about it. They do, and they respect it. But it's not a household word in the way that the Nobel Prize is kind of known by everybody. They've at least heard something about it. So, times and circumstances change.

ZIERLER: Is there a Kavli Family that needs to be updated and made happy to feel like Fred's vision is continuing in one way or another?

CONN: Not really. The board at the time of Fred's death asked one of his nephews, Gunnar Nielsen, the son of Fred's sister, to be a member of the board and asked him to represent the family. And I told you about the board meeting, where we voted to move to Los Angeles. He was practically in tears because he felt it didn't matter that it wasn't going to be good for the Foundation, it was what his uncle wanted. Right? And so, he's there, and he has a say in what goes on. But Fred himself did not have a large family. He did redo the family farm in Norway, and that's now been converted into a museum operated by the county in which the small hamlet Fred grew up in, Eresfjord, is a town of a few hundred people. So, there's not a large influence, but there's a family representation.

Preparing to Step Down from the Kavli

ZIERLER: When 2020 arrived, and you were starting to think about stepping down, did you see the writing on the wall that the Foundation was moving away from Institute-building, and did that factor into your decision-making?

CONN: No. I basically sat down with the chairman of the board in late 2019, and we both agreed when I would step down – end of 2020 –when I would be 78. Now, there are examples like Vartan Gregorian at the Carnegie Corporation in New York, who served until he was 90. But I think ten-twelve years is about right. I wanted to do a few more than ten because I wanted to finish the 20 Institutes and finish a few other items that we had gotten started. I'm advising a wealthy person at the moment about setting up their foundation, and they want to start with a billion, and they've got much more that they can do than that. And I say, whomever you think to hire, they need to see it as a ten-year pull. You can't get anything done in five years unless it's a fully developed enterprise. It's a startup company. And Kavli was still a startup when I joined, without question, and it had only $200 million in its endowment, which grew, four years later, to $600 million.

So, three times the annual spending. So, that was a real growth story, more like a startup than steady state. Anyway, I knew that a decade was right. I did two more years than a decade, but that was also agreed upon. And so, at the end of 2019, the board and I agreed that I'd be stepping down at the end of 2020. Had nothing to do with programmatics, so to speak. I think the board also felt that I had provided the leadership that I'd provided, but there's an argument about whether or not change is good or not. Doesn't matter who you have as president, there are a lot of very good people out there. Caltech, ten years, right? Tom's going to do an extra two years to give Caltech time to find the next president, but most presidents at Caltech serve ten years. There's an interregnum year in which they do the search and the provost acts as the acting president, and then they've got a new person. And Caltech historically has always hired from the outside. The last insider might have been Lee DuBridge.

So, there's this idea that depending on who you talk to – the chairman of the Kavli board has been chairman of a board of a public company for 25, 30 years. He doesn't believe in this idea of ten-year rotation. [Laugh] He certainly doesn't practice it. On the other hand, there were others, align their thinking with what they did. Like Tom Everhart. Tom served ten years, so ten years is the right time for a person. [Laugh] Okay? So, it all reflects your experience a little bit. But no, no, I did, nominally, ten years, right? And I think that's about the right time for people to do a job of this kind and then let another horse lead the wagon. So, that answers the question. It had nothing to do with programs, it had everything to do with age, and timing, and that sort of thing.

ZIERLER: What about the circumstances of your personal health before you led the Kavli? How were you feeling circa 2020?

CONN: Oh, I was feeling very good. There were no health issues. As I said to you, I had some heart stents put in in 2014, but they worked great. And I had a carotid artery procedure, and it worked great. So, I was feeling healthy. Then, there's another decision, which is, don't wait until you're falling over. And that turned out to be a smart decision on my part because three years after I retired, I started to have health issues that would've made it very difficult to continue at the Foundation. So, it was perfect. Not that I was anticipating health issues, but I was going to be 78 at that point, and I really decided it was time. I had my shoulder to the wheel for a very long time, longer than most. And I really decided, "I want to take this winter of life and do it a different way."

Some people, all they know is work, and all they want is work. I work, I write, I do all this stuff, but I do only what I want to do. That's very different from a job. You're president of Caltech, you don't do what you want to do, you do what you have to do. And there are many things that you can do, wish you had more time to do, but you can't do because of the job you've chosen. And you chose the job. I'm sure Tom, David before him, loved it. You love it, right? So, you don't say, "Oh, I'm sad that I'm missing this or missing that." [Laugh] You're doing what you want to do. But at the age I was getting to, you don't live forever, and if I have a lovely decade in front of me or even more, then do something else and do it differently, with fewer obligations. And I didn't need to work for money, so I really fundamentally just decided, "I'm going to go find out what life's like on the other side of work."

ZIERLER: And as you mentioned last time, it was too early. This was really before COVID became a major problem, that didn't influence your decision.

CONN: Very tricky. You've really got to get it right from a historical point of view. So, I'm not kidding. It was October or November of 2019 when I sat down with the board chairman, and we made this decision. And we told the board, but we didn't make a public announcement about it, but we hired a search firm in January or February of 2020 to do the search. March 2020, the world shut down. So, they were really unrelated. And my decision to step down meant I was spending the last year at home, like we're doing now. [Laugh] I don't know, it was mid to late March, we were going to have a board meeting, I remember very distinctly, and Rock Hankin wanted to have it in person. Then, within two weeks, the whole country shut down. From March 1 to March 20, it went from everybody's going to work to nobody's going to work, that fast. And we canceled the board meeting and had it by electronic Zoom. It was a wonderful experience because what did the leader have to do? How do we work from home? How do we stay productive? How do we not lose many steps? So on and so forth.

And it was astonishing how productive that year turned out to be. But we had to all learn a different way of working. And we did. And we were pretty innovative in many of the things that we ended up doing as an enterprise. So, that proved to be a really interesting final year, right? Because you're managing in a wholly new circumstance where everybody's getting used to not seeing each other at the water cooler, and you can't just go call somebody up, and so on. Well, you sort of can, right? So, if I had to talk to somebody, I would just send them a text message or an email, "I need to talk." And within a half hour, we would be talking. So, it worked, but yes, the COVID part was unrelated to my decision-making. But it did add a nuance to my experience at managing and running something. How do you do it in a remote way? And we had about 28 people at that point, so it wasn't a small organization.

ZIERLER: When was your last day? When did you officially step down?

CONN: January 1 of 2021. I think there was a tax reason why it was better to do it on January 1 than on December 31. [Laugh]

ZIERLER: So in truth, you were at the helm for the worst of the pandemic. You didn't miss it.

CONN: No, I did not. And the new president came on, and we were still in work-out-of-the-office mode, and she's had to work the issue of coming back to work, and what kind of hybrid mode, if any, should there be, will there be, etc. That's on her docket.

The Pandemic Impact

ZIERLER: Besides your own experiences running your own staff, what were you hearing from the view from 35,000 feet about how academia, how science and engineering, how everybody was dealing with the pandemic? What are some of your big takeaways in engaging in these kinds of conversations?

CONN: Well, I think the main takeaway was that everybody figured it out. That is, the people that we were dealing with all this figured out how to find other forms of doing what they needed to do. The people who were most affected were the faculty at institutes that happened to be experimental people. Because it's hard to do experiments remotely without going to the lab. There's equipment, there may be animals, there may be this, there may be that. I think the group that I found most heavily affected was scientists doing experimental activities, where they didn't have easy access to their facilities, and their facilities were in some location at a university. At the university they worked at, typically. And you couldn't just go in and continue – you had to figure out how to run experiments with people being safe. What were the new protocols going to be? All of that was, I think, harder. The theoreticians had it a little easier because they could work with their students over Zoom, you could do blackboards, you could do all the stuff that theorists might do. Computational people often do the work remotely anyway, so they were able to continue.

So, I think the hardest hit from a work point of view were seeing people who had experimental activities and had to figure out how to continue to be productive in that way when you couldn't go into the lab, you couldn't have 20 people walking around in close proximity to each other. So, you developed all the protocols, and the masking, and this, and that. And eventually, they were able to come together with all the proper protocols. But scientists in particular know the nature of the danger. So, they're not, like the president, saying, "Well, could you drink bleach and get rid of this?" Scientists know about disease, they know about bacteria, they know about viruses, they know about transmission. So, that was not the issue. The issue was, what are effective protocols? And at the beginning, that wasn't really known. We didn't know exactly how transmission occurred, what distances this virus would travel, how contagious it would be, and so on, and so forth. But within three months, much of that got itself resolved.

Fauci and the CDC, I suppose that there can be criticism and will be criticism of some things they did, I don't know. But if you look on balance, it was amazing what they were able to get out done to provide guidelines for people as to what to do. So, we didn't face any of that, and it was a much easier task, I would say. For example, I would have a Monday morning weekly staff meeting at 1 o'clock that could run as much as two hours about every program. We would review who was doing what, why they were doing it, and we would just have that on Zoom. And then, the staff earned how to do those things within their own groups, and there are all these programs where you chat internal to a company, so people can communicate all the time. And you can use that remotely as well as being in the office. So, the lesson that I took away was, A, find the protocols, B, find the mechanisms by which you work, and C, those who had it hardest were the people trying to do experimental work where they couldn't get out to their equipment.

ZIERLER: Did you have a conversation with your successor, and can you share any details from that?

CONN: Oh, first of all, the way the search ran, the board ran the search, and the board chairman, in particular, ran the search. And I almost deliberately wasn't involved in a lot of the pre-selection and things of that sort. But once they had a short list, the way they organized it is, they had the person speak to everybody but me, and I'd be the last person to speak with them. So, they could learn about the Foundation, get a lot of input, form their own ideas, and then they could ask me a lot of questions. And that seemed to work out well. And then, of course, it was still COVID, so I didn't physically overlap with my successor, Cynthia Friend. She came from Harvard, and she had to find a place to live, and she had to jump in in a remote way. But she was doing the same thing with her research group in chemistry at Harvard, so she found her way forward. We didn't have a lot of discussions. I think at the beginning, we had a monthly call, where she might ask, "How did this work? How did that work? What about this? What about that?" But after about six months, that sort of tapered off, and she found her own sea legs, and off she went.

ZIERLER: What did January 1, 2021 look like for you?

CONN: My last full year was 2020, so I've been retired formally since then. So, ‘21, ‘22, ‘23, three and a half years, roughly. So, what did the first six months look like? Well, we were coming out of COVID, and that was helpful, right? And I had in mind any number of projects that I wanted to do. And so, the first six months looked like work without a formal schedule. I wanted to do this project, and I've sent you the paper about it, about science, philanthropy and American leadership. That got going in the spring of 2021. I got myself affiliated with the graduate School for Public Policy and Strategy at UCSD. It's like the Center for Strategic Studies in politics. They're a graduate school. I knew the dean; he was a good friend of mine. I knew the chancellor here. He was the one who actually suggested that I get affiliated with GPS, global policy and strategy, rather than the engineering school. So, I'm emeritus in the engineering school, but I got myself a title–that's all I needed–with GPS. And with an economist – we needed an economist because the close friend of mine was a political scientist, expert in communications policy, he was the dean of that school for 15 years, by the way, and he had just retired.

So, between the two of us and an economist–who's really terrific, but young, meaning 50, we got started, slowly at first [Laugh] And he was super. We started to think about the structure of this project. And they were interested in the project, and I was the one who had put all the time and energy into philanthropy, so I started to think through what we would do, and how we would do it, and who would be on the advisory committee, and this, that, and the other thing. And that became my primary outside activity. Now, I also have this Salon group that meets once a month and addresses national science policy questions. During 2020, David Baltimore and I put this group together to support what became the CHIPS and Science Act. Originally, it was called the Endless Frontier Act, named after Vannevar Bush's Endless Frontier Report of 1945. And we had a significant impact. Tom Rosenbaum was on that committee, along with David, but there are seven or eight of us. So, I had this group I called the Salon Group. We got that off the ground. And I got that off the ground in 2020 in anticipation of retiring.

So, that started in the spring of 2020 with the Science Philanthropy Alliance. And we had a meeting, I think it must've been remote at that point. David is a consultant. Rafael Reif was president of MIT, and we asked Rafael–who was very close to this legislation and a real hero in helping it get done- to describe the legislation when it was first announced in May of 2020. And David, bless his heart, raised the question about how they were going to differentiate between funds for basic science and funds for applied science and translation. And Rafael is keen about what's called the upper righthand quadrant of Pasteur's quadrant, basic research done to solve a problem. Not done because you're curious about how nature works. You've got a problem to solve, but you need fundamental knowledge to solve it, and you don't have that fundamental knowledge, so how are you going to get it?

But we worried about it becoming too applications-oriented because it's always natural to go find a cure for something. And so, we got a group together that included the former president of Princeton, a couple other Nobel Prize winers, the head of Simons Foundation, and the head of this one and that one. Almost all of us had retired at least once. [Laugh] And so, that group formed, and the idea behind it, as I think I may have mentioned, was, we're now a group of muckety mucks. We're well-known people who have accomplished a lot in fields of science, engineering, and technology. But we don't have an axe to grind. We don't want more money for our institution, we don't want more money for this or more money for that. What we want is for the United States to have the strongest scientific program and activity within our ecosystem as we possibly can.

That's a noble motivation, and we ended up being listened to. So, in 2021 and 2022, as that legislation was forming, we had a lot of influence on it. We had Zoom calls with the staff of Senator Schumer and Senator Young from Indiana who were the co-sponsors of the bill. We actually had Young on the call himself, and we had calls with the committees in the House, and so on. So, that took up time. And I made up these things that I wanted to do. The common theme is policy. So, what I'm really interested in is policy questions, like if philanthropy is having such a big impact on the ecosystem of science and innovation, what is the scale of it? Does it make any real difference? Isn't the government doing everything? Why do we need philanthropy? Well, that was the question they said in the 1960s, and philanthropy walked away from science. I don't know if you know that.

By 1960, Rockefeller, who had done so much for science–modern biology, you wouldn't have it without the Rockefeller Foundation–got out of any support for science. Said, "The government's doing it. It's the government's job. We can't compete with the government. We're out." So, some continued, but science philanthropy was not a big deal. It only began to become a bigger deal in the 2000s, when the wealth was being created, and people were saying, "What do I want to do with the wealth?" And many of them had come from companies that made their wealth where science and technology underpinned the success, so they were willing to do more. And I recognized this, wrote a paper about it in 2019, 2020, delivered it at the National Academy. So, these became projects that I was interested in, and they all were outside my historical scientific expertise, but now, I had 12 years in the philanthropic world.

Finally, I just know that things will come along. They sort of always have. And so, I've mentioned that there's a philanthropist, very well-known, you'd know if I said right away, and they asked me to consult with them on forming their foundation, and recruiting a leader, and things of that sort. So, these projects come along, and I tend to make some up, like Science, Philanthropy, and American Leadership, and we've produced some wonderful outcomes. We have a magnum opus that we've written and discovered universities' self-funding of science with philanthropy is 40% of what the federal government spends on universities in support of science. 40%, David. Not 2%, not 4%. 40%. $22 billion a year compared to $55 billion from the federal government. That's a stunning finding, and people are shocked in general. If I come out and say, "How much do you think philanthropy spends in support of science? Pick a number." It's usually $5 B or less.

The government spends on basic science, about $55 billion, and on basic plus applied, about $80 billion. How much do you think philanthropy spends a year on that? How much do you think universities, of their own money, spend on that per year? And you'd get a few billion. You'd get numbers like that. And you tell them, "No, no, it's 40% of what the government spends." Holy shit. And so, now, as an example, we're working on influencing government agencies to include philanthropists on their advisory committees. Just like you want diversity of this type or that, you also want representation from somebody who's spending 40% of what you're spending, which is philanthropy. So, we just had a call with the Government-University-Industry Research Roundtable at the National Academy. Why not add Philanthropy to the name? And include people from foundations on committees?

So, these things develop a life of their own, and I think they're also going to develop an ending of their own. Not my ending, but they'll come to a place where I don't think there's a lot more we could add. And I think I'm sort of getting to that spot with Science, Philanthropy, and American Leadership. I think we've written a magnum opus. I think we've got to get it out there more. But what's the follow-on? I think the follow-on might be for others. I've done what I can do. I'm not an expert in all of this. This is out of experience. But I know how to do these things.

I'll give you another example. The three of us, we're all academics, right? I'm retired, and my colleague is retired, and the economics professor is fully loaded. [Laugh] So, who's got time? Well, it turns out, a guy who worked for me as head of physical sciences at the Kavli Foundation left the Foundation, and he wanted to take a year off, and he did, and he's still at loose ends. So, I said to my colleagues, "I've got the perfect person for us to figure out all the numbers. Chris Martin. And he's in New Zealand with his wife and child, he wants to get back the United States, but he's free right now."

And so, I engaged Chris in all of this, and the impact of that was stunning. So, you don't have to do everything yourself. It's like I've always said, just get the right people. Understand what the set of skills is that's needed to attack an issue, and make sure you've got it covered. If you cover the waterfront with high-quality people, you get way down the road. And that's what happened with this project. So, I didn't lose a lot of sleep or twiddle my thumbs, finding, "What am I doing? I'm bored by noon." I wasn't bored by noon. I haven't been bored by noon. And I've got people like you, who call up and say, "I'd like to do an oral history with you." And I'm winning these awards. I think there's another one that might come next year. So, you get to a certain age, and this happens to you, and then another thing happens to you. In this last year, I've won two major awards, and there might be another one, and so you enjoy that.

ZIERLER: And all you have to do is stay healthy and keep having fun.

CONN: Yeah, well, you try. You work at it. So, yeah, I think that looking back, when you get to where I'm at, the right thing is, to some degree, have things in mind that you want to do that can make a difference. But also, let things come to you. I keep using David Baltimore as my model just because he's older than me. [Laugh] But David is known by everybody, and he is stunning. I have so enjoyed my interactions with David. But David is so wise that things come to him. People ask him to do things. It doesn't hurt that he has a Nobel Prize, but he's actually really good. Sometimes, you can win the Nobel Prize because you've stumbled upon something, but you don't have a lot of common sense or other stuff like that. It's a real skill. So, in any case, to some degree, letting things come to you is a smart approach. Don't fill your dance card to the hilt.

Ongoing Commitments and Initiatives

ZIERLER: We'll bring the story right up to the present. What are you focused on these days?

CONN: Well, the things I just talked about. Finishing up the project on philanthropy and science leadership in the United States, and, really, the issues of American leadership, what it will take. And in particular, in the competition with China, which is an issue for the country at the moment. How is that likely to go? And what are the things that we need to do if we're going to be sure to remain competitive and maybe even remain at the forefront? That's not an easy question, so that's what I'll continue on. I'm worried about certain policy issues. One is immigration. Not the immigration at the border, but our immigration policies that affect the students coming to study science, technology, engineering, medicine at the graduate level. We are not doing ourselves a favor by trying to stop Chinese students from coming to the United States.

And my salon group is doing a lot on that. I think this is a really, really tough one because immigration is such a political hot potato, and people confuse this immigration issue, with that immigration issue, with this third immigration issue. The Brits, for example, almost shot both feet off. They have such pressure with respect to the immigration issue, they have the equivalent of letting people who came to study and get PhD degrees in the UK stay for a couple of years if they got an offer for a job or they got an offer of a postdoc. And they were going to do away entirely with that program. Of course, everybody who came to the UK from elsewhere wasn't a UK citizen and would be sent away to their home country. And yet, it's this sort of stuff, creative, new people, and in the United States, that's a big question. Because Americans are not going into STEM at the rate and at the scale that the country's likely to need, and they never have. They haven't for 50 years. We have relied on immigration, mainly, people coming through graduate school. I used to talk about foreigners coming to graduate school as the Ellis Island of high technology. That's what the graduate schools of America are. They get to come, they want to stay, they stay, they become the head of Google, they become the head of Microsoft, they become the head of NVIDIA. [Laugh] Right?

Of the ten most valuable companies in the United States, at least five of them are run by immigrants who came here to study. So, that's a big question that I feel passionately about, and I'll continue to work on. And I'm writing. I've written my history of my time as dean of engineering and how we went from a good base to a better place. I've written about the interregnum that you and I have covered. And now, I'm writing about my time at the Kavli Foundation and trying to intersperse stories. You can say what happened, but you've got to tell it with stories and intersperse stories. So, today, this morning, I was just writing one about how I met King Harald of Norway. [Laugh] And it's a cute story. This was in 2010. Anyway, I won't tell you the story, I'll just say recounting stories of that kind–and they're not just those sorts of stories, there are lessons in a lot of the stories.

How do you really work with a foreign country, where the culture is so different? Norway's culture is very different from the United States. Their sense of competitiveness amongst people is much lower than it is here. And you've got to be very careful to work with them. Everybody's equal. It's Animal Farm. Everybody's equal. Just a few are a little more equal than others, but just a few. And hierarchy, well, there isn't much hierarchy and so on. So, it's a great country, six million people. They do things their way, they're very effective, but they're not the United States. It's very different. So, writing about working across cultural boundaries–same in China, wonderful experiences there. And I'm writing about Chun Li Bai , who was a postdoc, one of the early Chinese postdocs coming to the United States in the mid-80s who came to Caltech and spent a year or two at JPL in the early, mid-80s. And he turned out to be a crucial contact for me in China. And I didn't know him, and he didn't know me, but we had a Kavli Institute in the Chinese Academy of Sciences, which is gigantic, by the way. 5,000 people.

It's a working operation, not like the Academy here, which is just honorific. He's running military programs and all the rest. He's present. And I get to meet him, and what do we have in common? Caltech. And because of that commonality, "Oh, do you remember whether you could see the mountains? Oh, do you remember Millikan Library?"–no longer Millikan Library, but you know–and so on, it gave us a common base. And what it really provided was trust. He felt he could trust somebody who'd been at Caltech, and I felt that I could talk to somebody who'd spent time at Caltech. And we could talk about Caltech ethics, how things were done at Caltech. He experienced it, and I experienced it. Those are the sorts of things that are profound. I've written about that. So, everywhere, there are lessons. What to do between Japan and China. Oh, that's really interesting. What about Europe? Well, I got an Institute in Norway, one in Holland, one in the UK. What are the similarities? What are the differences?

No two places are the same. And even here, when there were 12 Kavli Institutes, every one of them had its own issues. Every one of them had its own difficulties. And sometimes, difficulties with the Foundation, and you had to work that through. So, like the provost at UCSD saying he had a difficulty because he couldn't imagine how he could raise matching funds. He just thought it was a nutty idea. And the fact that I had to insist upon it, because that was what we were doing, he thought that I just didn't listen, and I'm not a very good guy. [Laugh] Everybody is different, and you've got to learn to deal with all of it and take the good with the bad. You work with the good, and you manage the bad.

The Omnipresence of Caltech

ZIERLER: You mentioned Caltech ethics. I think that's a perfect segue. Now, that we've worked right up to the present, I want to ask some overall retrospective questions about your long and decorated career. I've been looking forward to this moment, actually. Let's start, first, with Caltech. I want to ask, what has stayed with you from Caltech, in terms of the way you learned how to do science, the way you learned what integrity and ethics means, has been transportable everywhere you've gone, and what maybe has not been because Caltech is such a unique place?

CONN: Well, that's a wonderful question. First of all, something very personal. I came from Pratt Institute to Caltech. And Pratt's mainly known as an art and architecture school. It's not known for science. It had engineering when I was there, it doesn't have it anymore. So, learning how to succeed with others who are just stunningly good was one of the bigger lessons I learned. In other words, it really tested your mettle. And coming from where I came from, first generation going to college, first generation to go to grad school–still the only one in my whole family to ever get an advanced degree in anything–it was life-affirming. "You can do this." And the rigor that it taught me, the discipline, the need to stay with a problem and not give up too soon or too easily–if something's not working out, I learned the importance of, "Don't bury the problem." Sometimes, the insight that is the biggest insight in a physical problem is the one that you try to bury because you can't figure it out. It's the oddball result. And you just don't know how the hell to explain it.

And if it's theory, there's got to be a mathematical underpinning to why you're seeing the anomaly you're seeing. And I learned that in my thesis work at Caltech. And that's stuck with me forever. Don't give up, and in particular, don't look away from an anomaly. That's kind of on the scientific side. I learned a lot about how to work with students, and I had many. And I think the notion at Caltech is, you're your own bucket. Your advisor's there, but you pick the problem, and you're expected to really do it. And what was nice about my time at Caltech was that I had these fellowships that didn't require me to work with anybody in particular. In other words, I could choose my advisor rather than the other way around. I didn't need money, or a TA or an RA, where I have to go to somebody who's got the money and ask to be an RA. And they said, "Well, I'm working on this problem. If you're willing to work on this problem, fine. But if you're not going to work on this problem, I'm sorry, I don't have the slot." I didn't face that.

So, I got a chance to work with somebody and on a problem that that person was very interested in, but I wanted to work on that problem. I chose him as opposed to him choosing me. And because I wanted to work on the problem he knew a lot about, it worked out beautifully. So, I really did learn how to do research independently. And as a theoretician, basically, you don't have many people to talk to. There's you, the paper in front of you, a blackboard, and your advisor, to whom you go say, "Look, I've found this," or "I can't get past this," or "What do you think?" And sometimes, they've had experience with those sorts of issues and say, "Well, why don't you try this? Why don't you try that?" And I advised all my students that way. "Go dig around for the problem you think might be important. Here are the things we're working on, but if you find something else, come tell me about it.

Because that might be the best thing to do, where you've discovered the problem, and you want to work on it." I have a former student now, George Tynan here at UC San Diego, who's a distinguished professor in plasma physics. And George–this is in the mid to late 80s. First of all, he came from Cal State something or other. So, "Okay, how good is he?" It's like me showing up at Caltech. Caltech's taking a chance on me. But how good am I? And Caltech only brought one other person from Pratt Institute, who didn't make it, and they never took another kid from Pratt. Just not good enough. So, he came to see me, and I thought of my experience with Pratt and said, "Well, tell me why you want to do, what you're interested in, and so on." And I said, "Okay, let's give it a go," and so, I took him on as a grad student. He turned out to be interested in turbulence, but in plasmas.

Now, fluid turbulence, we've known for 150 years. And still, it's a problem people can't solve exactly. Now, add in electromagnetism and charged particles to the picture. Oh my God, right? George wanted to work on that problem and try to understand the fundamentals of heat and mass transport in a plasma. I wasn't working on it. I was working on the plasma boundary layer and how the plasma interacts with surfaces, things of this sort. I knew this other problem was the key problem, but I didn't think I had the skillset personally to really work on it. And there were so many other people who were trained in the area, but I said, "George, go ahead." And so, another guy at UCLA had a tokamak. So George worked on a colleague's experiment. Fast forward 30 years. In the last 12 years, he has figured out, in experiments that look just like the ones I had at UCLA and brought down to UC San Diego, although he made some small tweaks to it, he develops the insights into how heat and mass actually escape from a plasma and what helps it stay in rather than leak out.

We want to make plasmas hot, so we don't want the heat to get out. We want it to stay in, be a very good insulator. How do you do that? And he's figured out the fundamentals of how it happens and why it happens in magnetic fusion devices with all kinds of complex shapes of the magnetic field and so on. I couldn't be prouder. Now, I let him go do this problem. That was Caltech. "You want to do this problem? I have at least enough knowledge to know it's fundamentally important. [Laugh] So, it's okay with me." And I learned how to manage a group so that I always had enough money for the crazy idea. Like I said about Institutes and the free money, right? So, I could allow him to go do that and pay for him as an RA. It was all on the up and up. And I think those were lessons that came from my experience at Caltech.

Give people rope. Let them go do what they want to do. Help them if they look like they're getting too far off track, but don't put tight rails. Right? Because the uncertainty, the unknown is not usually within the rails. It's a very fundamental part. And so, I learned all that, in a way, just looking back at my experiences learning to do research at Caltech. And had I been at some other place, I'm not sure I would've learned what I learned at Caltech. In any case, Caltech has got my dying admiration for how it operates, how it treats its students, how the faculty have a joy for science and joy for technology. They're not doing it for a living.

Nobody leaves Caltech. Very few people leave Caltech. And there's a reason. You hire the very best, and you let them go do what they want to do. You trust, "If I hire the very best people, they're going to do great things." And they do. I defy you to say which one's going to do the greatest thing at the beginning. Nobody can figure that part out, right? [Laugh]

But people evolve, and people do it, and you have to trust that you've hired the very best person you possibly can. That's another Caltech thing that I always found amazing, right? And big institutions can't quite do that because they hire too many people. So, the average has obviously got to be lower than it would be at a place like Caltech. [Laugh] But it's the benchmark, it's what you try to do. So, I learned a lot of lessons, and then I might've learned this lesson from any advisor, but I doubt it.

I told you the story of going to Wisconsin, my very first job. When the department chairman asked if I wanted to work on plasma physics and fusion, and I didn't take plasma physics at Caltech, I was interested in nuclear reactors, and Noel Corngold, my Caltech advisor, said to me, "Listen to your colleagues. Work on some of the issues that they've got. If they ask you to help, see what you can do to help. In two or three years, you'll have helped them so much, they'll let you do anything you want."

I've operated like that my whole life. So, there's this combination of what to do, how to do it, things about management, people, don't always be a bull in a China shop. I'm a bull in a China shop often, especially when I was young. And that was an example. "Why is this guy telling me what to do? I'm going to be a professor. Don't I get to pick my problems?" That was my attitude. And Noel gave me some balance. And it turned out, I went to work on that plasma and fusion problem and it became my career. [Laugh] So, there were many, many things at Caltech that I found extraordinary and have used over the years, and I'm not sure I can make a more complete list. But at the highest level, it's those sorts of concepts that traveled with me through time. And I think, frankly, I added to them in my way. In other words, I absorb them, and then I use them in a way that fit who I am, what I am, how I think, etc. So, it really did make me, I think, overall, a better person and a more successful one.

ZIERLER: The joke about nuclear fusion always being 40 years away, just around the corner, when that achievement is finally reached, looking at your own research career, before we get to the administrative leadership, but your own research career at Wisconsin and UCLA, what role do you think you'll have played in the grand scheme of things in getting ultimately to that goal?

CONN: Outlining what a machine that makes fusion power might really look like and what the major technological and engineering problems that really have to be solved. What are the fundamental engineering and technology problems that need solution if you're going to make a practical fusion device? We did that in the 1970s, and we got at the roots of the engineering issues associated with making fusion a practical device. It's a very hard problem, and we examined many technical approaches – type of plasma confinement (tokamak, mirror machine, laser fusion, …), what would you build it out of, how would you handle heat and the plasma that comes out, how would you breed the tritium, how would you make superconducting magnets with the highest possible fields, and on and on. It's so hard that in the 1990s, our government decided to refocus back on the physics. Because the physics is also a hard problem. And today, they wish they had more fusion engineering than they do, and they're trying to recreate it. But if you ask, "What were the contributions of that decade in Wisconsin in particular?", it was putting together in a systematic way and with a group effort that could look at a full fusion machine in all its depth and all its glory, and say, "How do I do this? How do I breed tritium? How do I make a vacuum system that will stand up for ten years? How do I handle the heat and particles? How do I shield the superconducting magnets? How do I make the superconducting magnets? How do I do this? How do I do that?"

And you systematically work your way through every issue that an engineer coming to design the fusion reactor to make power will have to face. Fusion's got a bit of a renaissance right now. And you talk about things to do. I've been asked to give a special lecture here at UCSD. Sol Penner, who for years was at Caltech, great in combustion, fluids, jet engines, and stuff like that, UC San Diego hired him in 1964 to build engineering at the campus. He came down with Bert Fung also from Caltech. And they brought their Caltech approach to engineering at UC San Diego, and they called it engineering and applied science, engineering science, which was my major. He created my major with people like Milt Plesset and Harold Lurie and people like that at Caltech. So, they now have a Distinguished Penner Lecture at UCSD, and I'm going to give it. And what I'm going to talk about is the state of fusion today, and why I've changed my mind. Because up until about two years ago, I thought it was 50 years away and always would be. The joke that you made at the start. Now I'm not so sure. There have been some transformational discoveries in engineering these systems that will really make a difference in what they look like, how big they have to be, and how soon we may see a practical device.

They don't have to be as big as they used to have to be. And I'm working actually with George Tynan. [Laugh] Turns out, the head of the MIT program is a former postdoc of mine, and the leading faculty member here is my PhD student, then at UCLA. So, I've got a nice legacy. And MIT and UC San Diego are talking about collaborating on rebuilding a very massive, $10-million-a-year kind of effort, in fusion engineering to go along in parallel with these machines that are being developed to achieve what is called plasma ignition and burn. And I think that they will achieve that within the next five to ten years. And once they achieve it, what do you do for an encore? So, the program is, what are they going to do for an encore? Start now. Because you know the problems. You know the problems from the 1970s. And I see a lot of the gaps, and the gaps are similar ones we identified 40 years ago.

Because we'd done the work. Like, what's the rate of radioactivity induced in a fusion machine by the neutrons that are made from DT reactions? Well, we calculated all that 40 years ago. We know. And now, we've got to confront it. So, here's an example. I said to George–they were talking about what areas to emphasize. And he knows this, but he didn't write it down. He wrote a white paper that's joint with MIT, and they left this particular piece out. And I said, "George, if you don't solve the problem of induced radioactivity in a fusion machine, it'll never be any better than fission. And it won't be accepted."

So, what you need to do is approach it from the point of view that how much radioactivity there is in a fusion device depends on what you build it out off – the structure, the breeding materials, the coolant, the shielding, and so on. It's like you are what you eat. It's not like fission, where the fission is fundamental to nuclear power, and the fission products are a product of the fundamental reaction. Whereas with deuterium and tritium, the product of the fundamental reaction is helium and a neutron. Neither of which is radioactive.

But the neutron is energetic and induces radioactivity. So, if I pick a material like silicon carbon and make it pure enough and can figure out how to make it work as a structural material, the radioactivity will be very low. It'll die away in ten years. You won't have to wait 1,000 years or 10,000 years. Well, these days, with databases and AI, they're inventing new materials and new ways for the materials to behave. So, I said to him, "Write in there a program," and they've got a materials scientist at UC San Diego who does this, and they do at MIT as well, "and say, ‘Here are the elements you're allowed to use. Now, try to make me a structural material made from those elements that'll work in a fusion reactor environment.'"

That's not a question I could ask 40 years ago. 40 years ago, I had to say, "There's this alloy of molybdenum, and this alloy of titanium, and this alloy of aluminum, and this alloy of steel." And I would investigate how those alloys would work if they were the structure of a fusion machine. Today, I can say, "Here are the right elements to use to minimize induced radioactivity. Make a material and have it had these properties needed to work in a fusion environment." That's unknown, but I think doable today. Was not doable 40 years ago.

There's a lot of basic science and technology and engineering in front of us, but it's not hopeless. Still, you have to ask different questions. And what I'm getting at is that's the Caltech way, don't ignore the most important question. So, I wrote George an email essentially saying what I just said. He said, "Of course, you're right." And he wrote it into the proposal. And that's going to be a big piece of what they'll do. So, you can still contribute a little bit here and a little bit there.

The Mutuality of Discovery and Science Policy

ZIERLER: Kind of a chicken and the egg question. Your deep interest in policy, science policy, energy policy, national policy, would you say that was an outgrowth of your recognition that nuclear fusion needed good policy, or was there a preexisting interest for you in policy matters, and you just happened to have the expertise in fusion, so that was a convenient entrée?

CONN: Well, first of all, when I was young, seemed to me, many of the people whom I admired, who did really good work, went back and did some things with government to advise on policy. Of all people, Roy Gould took two years off to be the head the fusion program at the AEC in the early 1970's, head the government's program in fusion. Roy Gould, the most fundamental plasma scientist you could think about, goes back there to run a program and learn how to manage something. So, we all have an interest in contributing that way. If he could do it, it says almost everybody's got it in their blood to want to do it. What I'm getting at is, I admired the people who were on these committees, helping to make policy, and I wanted to be one of them. I just felt like it was something that I might contribute to. And what turned out is, by the late 70s, this work on fusion engineering that I had done with the team at Wisconsin–Jerry Kulcinski and I were the two leaders- and we made this work.

And he and I were perfect complements to one another, and that's why it worked. So, I became well-known. And whenever they wanted somebody to say, "Well, if you were going to build a fusion machine, what were the issues you have to deal with?" "Go call Bob Conn." And so, I would end up on these committees, and I found I enjoyed it. And I found that it was relevant and important. I was on the review committee for the NIF, the machine that just got ignition and burn at Livermore. That was back in the late 80s, early 90s, when they were first thinking about building this big device at Livermore to try to do what, 30 years later, they've eventually done.

So, I think I learned that it was enjoyable to do it, but also that the government really needed it, that it did make a difference in the programs. And at any point, we could've said, with NIF, as we did say with the Superconducting Supercollider, "Stop. It's too hard. It won't work. We can't afford it. Other parts of science deserve more money. You should take that money and fund other things."

So, how you make priorities to do big things and to make sure that you do other science that's done on a smaller scale and have the right balance between big science and small science, those are fundamental questions that any government has to deal with if the government's going to fund science. Philanthropists have to deal with it, too, and should. And so, those topics were just intriguing to me all along the way. And at first, I didn't do any of that because I wasn't known, and nobody asked me. [Laugh] But within five years of going to Wisconsin and doing the kind of work I started doing, I was starting to get asked. And a lot of times–out of some of that work, I can think of one particular example - a recommendation would come out that the government should understand and follow, "What would you do to make a test reactor to test the systems of a fusion reactor without building a full reactor? Could you do that?"

And I was in Russia on a train, they called it the Midnight Express, from Moscow to Leningrad with another guy, Dan Jassby, from Princeton. And we stayed up all night because we couldn't sleep on the train, rickety, and people talking and smoking. And we had this idea about how to do that, how to build a test machine, and we made a project together, Princeton and Wisconsin. And we did this design. But it came out of a "how would you?" question from a committee. So, it wasn't always just fly to Washington, sit down, give your opinion, fly home. Sometimes, interesting things came of it that motivated research, and that was always an interesting synergy.

ZIERLER: Have other deans of engineering come to you to say, "What you did in San Diego, how can I do that to my institute?" Is there anything that can be replicate-able elsewhere, or is this really magic in a bottle for what you did?

CONN: I don't know. The circumstances of going to a place that isn't great yet, but has the ambition to be great, there aren't that many opportunities around. You can't go to UCLA and say, "You are what you are. Now, how do you get to be ranked five?" They don't even want to ask that question. I know because I talked to them about it years ago. And they have a budget. And there's a certain budget for engineering, and that's the budget. And there's a certain scale size for engineering, and that's the scale size. And they just sort of operate within those limits, so they're ranked 14 or 15, and they always will be. But yes, people have expressed admiration for what happened, and that is clear. And I have gotten asked, "When you're building an organization, what are the lessons you learned in doing what you did down there?"

Even the current dean is interested in at least talking with me about what he has in mind. He runs things by me. And I take the position, "You're the boss. You're in charge. I'll give you my best judgement, my best opinion. You have to decide. I support the School of Engineering at UC San Diego. Whatever you decide to do, I'm going to back you and help you do it as well as you can. It might not be how I would do it, but I'll tell you how I would do it, and you can choose." And so, it's that approach. [Laugh] But I don't get asked that much because it's not so easy. You think about it, you're a dean at Northwestern. You don't need to call up a guy in California and ask him how he did this or how he did that.

By the time you're ready for that kind of a job, you usually have a sense that you know what you want to do, and you talk to your predecessor. And the cultures are different at every place, so what you can do at one place and how you do it at one place may not be what you can do and how you do it at another place. Every place has got its own rhythm, it's got its own cultural setting, and you have to learn about those. And I had to learn about them here at UC San Diego in order to succeed. And not everybody at UC San Diego thought I was great. They loved what they got, looking back, but they didn't necessarily like everything with respect to how they got what they got, when they got it.

ZIERLER: Would you say that's more a reflection of your process or your style?

CONN: Well, a little bit of both. I was very considerate. As I said to you, I would go to departments and I would ask them, "Tell me the three areas you're going to focus on where you're going to be among the top ten in the country. You tell me, and I'll back you. We'll have a dialog. I'll have to agree with you, but if I agree with you, you'll get a whole bunch of resources. But you've got to tell me the answer to that question." And a lot of people didn't like that. "I know what I'm doing. I'm a department chair. Sol Penner, "I built this school. I made this school. I know what makes it. I don't want to change the name from engineering science to mechanical and aerospace engineering." He was emeritus at that time, but he had enormous influence.

So, they, meaning Applied Mechanics and Engineering Science, or AMES, were one of the last departments to actually come around because they had very distinguished senior faculty who loved engineering science from the 1960s and didn't see any reason to do anything differently. Patience. I write about it. I'm not a patient person, but if you're going to affect big change, you sometimes have to wait until the circumstances change enough to allow what you're after to actually happen. So, when I first got here, the department that my faculty appointment was in was called applied mechanics and engineering science – again AMES. And the senior faculty in that department thought everything was hunky-dory, and there wasn't a single thing they had except bioengineering that was ranked high. And yet, everything was hunky-dory. "Well, rankings don't really matter. We know quality when we see it." So, you face that. Some of those people didn't like it. Paul Libby , the brother of the Libby who did Carbon-14 dating at UCLA, he was a fluid mechanic guy there. He thought I was terrible.

So, you can't want to be loved. That's, I think, the bottom line. And you've got to be old enough and mature enough, and have enough confidence, not to be arrogant about what you're doing, but find a way to get where you want to go that engages the other side. And so, I found when I came down here, I asked that question, and the EE department down here said, "I got it. Here are my three fields. How fast can we go?" Computer science, another one. But AMES, nothing. Yet they all came around in one way or another and at different times. And when they came around, I acted immediately so they could see that so long as we could find some common ground, you could really do things differently than you were doing. You could add people. And faculty want to hire more faculty. They always want new faculty at most places. So, the answer is, most people ultimately saw the value of everything that got done and loved it in the end. And to this day, they admire what went on.

ZIERLER: I wanted to ask you about that. If the institutional memory at UC San Diego is still young enough, still fresh enough, were there people that recognize where the school of engineering was prior to your arrival and what it is now.

CONN: I have had faculty come up to me and say, "You said this," or "You did things like this," or "You told us this. I tell the faculty in faculty meetings, ‘That idiot,'" or whatever it might have been. So, yes, there is a lot of faculty who are still active who were here when I was here. That'll eventually go away, and the legacy will really be that they're a ranked top 12 engineering school in the country. While many more have said to me. – what you did was unique, way ahead of its time, and it was great. We went from ranked44 to ranked 11. They got as high as nine. They've never been as low as 12 or 13. They're ranked 11 again now. The top ten is a very tough nut to crack, but they have grown to be the largest engineering school in California. And ranked second only to Berkeley among publics and ranked fourth amongst all in California. They are fourth amongst Stanford, UC Berkeley, Caltech and now UC San Diego. And, I would argue, as good as Berkeley is, it also has150 years of history, and UC San Diego's got 30. But UCSD engineering is ranked higher than UCLA, Irvine, Santa Barbara, every other place in the system. Higher than USC. The only ones ahead of it in the state of California, as I said, are Stanford, Caltech, and Berkeley. And that's damn good company.

Caltech is seven or something like that. San Diego's 11. Berkeley's four. Stanford's one or two, usually two behind MIT. You're playing with the big boys in the big leagues. I don't mean boys or girls, it's a baseball analogy. You're playing in the major leagues, and you're no longer Kansas City. You're now LA, or the Yankees, or the Giants, or Boston. You're in that league here. And that's a nice thing to be.

ZIERLER: Do you think you were on a trajectory of becoming a university president, and Kavli knocked you into a different path?

CONN: No. I never liked doing the operational role, so I never wanted to be a department chair, and I never was. A dean really leads something and runs something. was Above the dean is the executive vice chancellor for academic affairs. That's the chief operating officer or provost. And then, the president's the president. So, I like the position of very distinguished faculty, dean, president. And I didn't like the two slots in between, department chair and provost. [Laugh] And I had an opportunity to be a provost. And I was doing well as dean. And I interviewed at two different places. But I turned both down for a variety of reasons. And when I was finished with the run at UC San Diego, I wasn't a provost who was naturally ready to move into a presidency.

And so, I decided to go in a wholly different direction, and that's when I went to be a managing director of a venture capital firm. So, I didn't really get officers to be president of a university. I got offers to be provost, which would have been the step you had to take to become a president. And I just didn't want to–I stayed at the research bench almost until I was 50. I ran research programs, and founded institutes, and did all that stuff. But when I came down here in 1993, I was 51. So, the idea to do ten years as dean, five or ten years as provost, become president in your mid-60s, yeah, maybe.

But I loved what I did at UC San Diego. It worked out great. And then, I got out of academic life. And then, I got into a different life with philanthropy. So, in the end, it's been very fulfilling, and I've probably done more things than almost anybody around. I've been reasonably good, pretty good faculty member and researcher. I founded a field. I led a school. I built a company. I was a venture capitalist. I was president of a major science foundation. That's a hell of a lot.

ZIERLER: That is a hell of a lot.

CONN: And they're all different. They were all different experiences. They had lots of similarities, and I learned lessons all along the way. But founding a company and trying to get a company to become successful, that's very different than, say, taking a school and trying to make the school great. There are some commonalities, but in business, you hire and fire people, and you're constantly changing your staff. At a university, you're not doing any of that. Look at Caltech. What's your turnover rate? Zilch. Right? So, that's why for Caltech, every hire is life or death. And you have to have a faculty who think like that and won't just hire their friend, but who says, "This is a 30-year commitment, and this person's going to be a Harry Atwater, or Michael Roukes, or you name your favorite faculty member. Mory Gharib. Who came from San Diego, by the way. Caltech hired him away from UC San Diego. You've got to have taste. The taste Caltech has to have been extreme. Man, I don't envy you because if you make a mistake, it's hard to live with. So, you do make mistakes. Everybody does. But the number has to be very small. When you have a small faculty, as Caltech does, everybody's got to be good. It's Lake Wobegon.

ZIERLER: Your time in venture capital, and your time in private business, what was valuable to that as sort of prelude for the Kavli?

CONN: Well, I understood startup. Both in venture capital and in starting my own company, I understood a lot about what it takes to make an organization successful. Fundamentally, you have to have a very good idea and very good people, right? And the good idea in business has to be something that will change where business is. Because if you're marginally better than somebody else, the somebody else you're marginally better than is enormous compared to you, and they'll eat your lunch. You have to have something very distinctive, distinctive enough that it can find its own path forward. At least, you've got to believe that at the beginning. Got to be a Google, right? There wasn't a competitor who could eat Google up. And if Google could do things right, they'd become dominant, and they did. Apple had that experience, fell, brought Jobs back, had the experience again.

So, I think I learned a lot about what it takes to make a successful organization. And it always is good ideas and good people. That's the essence of it. So, you've got to keep generating good ideas, and you have to keep hiring good people.

I also learned from both those experiences, but I also learned it in academic life, a lot of things–like, I made an experimental program for many years, and I'm not an experimentalist. So, you can have good ideas about how to do things and yet get other people to implement them. And if you hire good enough people, you're not the one that necessarily makes the discoveries. They make the discoveries. You get to participate, but you've got to rely on the quality of people to ensure it. I just told you the story of George Tynan. And that's the kind of thing you have to bet on, right? So, George did foundational work for something that it would take him 30 years to fully accomplish, but he started the work in my group at UCLA.

So, good people working on really good problems, being careful not to waste your time on things that are too easy. That's another one that's probably important to say. There was this old adage attributed to Fermi, that, if there was a problem to be worked on, but you had an 80, 85% confidence level that you know what the answer is, then Don't work on it. It's improvement at the edges. Find something that's much harder, and maybe therefore more fundamental, and work on that. Now, I can't say I'm Fermi and I did that all the time. [Laugh] No, no, no. But that's where taste comes from. You have to have insight into what's needed, insight into whether this approach to something versus that approach to something–which is more likely to lead to the outcome you hope for or lead to new paths to new things, more likely lead to new ways of doing things than the other way, which does not mean just marginally improve how you do what you already know how to do. Those judgments, you're making all the time.

So, in the end, I would say with business, with university, with research programs, I use the word taste. It takes very good ideas, it takes the ability to connect ideas, connect the dots, connect results from one area to results from another area to generate the idea for a third area. And it takes the best possible people you can bring to work with you on those areas. And lastly, although I'm not a great listener–I wasn't a great listener early on, I was a bull in a china shop–learn to listen. Lastly, If you have great people, they will have good ideas. And you should be big enough and good enough to see the value in those ideas. And if they're in your area of capability, and you can fund it, and all the rest, go for it, right? So, don't be afraid of other people's ideas.

When I came down to San Diego, somebody asked a person who worked with me at UCLA, "What's Bob Conn like to work with?" And the answer was, "Bob Conn always wins, but you always win, too." And that's the flavor. You let people go, and they win. Like I said, the current initiative in fusion engineering that's going to get going in this country will be led by one of my students and one of my postdocs. Let them go. They're great. Have confidence in them, have good ideas, and then help them.

The way I got reintroduced in fusion is, last summer, I went back to Boston, to MIT, and I went to visit my former postdoc. He was a postdoc with me from the late 90s into the early 2000s at UC San Diego. And then, he got a faculty position at Wisconsin, which George had turned down to stay here, thank goodness. And then he got stolen from Wisconsin to MIT and became head of the plasma fusion program at MIT. And he's had a gazillion good ideas, part of the renaissance in fusion today. Dennis Whyte's his name. So, the lesson: hire great people, let them do great things. Don't be afraid to lose them, like I lost Dennis to Wisconsin. "Right, Dennis, I don't have a slot for you here, and you've got a professorship at Wisconsin. It's great in plasma physics, it's great in fusion. Go to Wisconsin." Don't try to keep them. Let them go. Have the confidence that you can hire other good people.

There's also the humbleness that comes with the knowledge that nobody's indispensable. And you're not indispensable. Keep that in mind as you work. Doesn't mean somebody's going to come along and do exactly what you would have done. There might be more than one way to skin a cat. So, somebody else coming down to San Diego might've figured some other way of making the school go from a good base to a better place. I don't know. I did it my way. Frank Sinatra. [Laugh] These are deep, deep, deep questions that don't have simple answers, but they have these aphorisms that you can suggest might be in play.

ZIERLER: All of the research that you helped make possible leading the Kavli Foundation, what sticks out in your memory as the most significant? The research, the discovery wouldn't have happened without the Kavli's support?

CONN: I'm not sure I have the answer to that. Largely because there were always multiple sources of support for most things people were doing. But I remember two stories. One story, I think I already relayed, from UC San Diego, where we asked them not about the scientific result, but something related to it. San Diego's Kavli Institute explicitly used the income from the endowment in $50,000 and $100,000 chunks to support people's new ideas that weren't ready for primetime. And I remember asking them, after a five- or seven-year period where they had enough data, "What is the ratio of new projects that you fund that go on to find important enough results that you can write a proposal to the federal government and get funding? What was the ratio of the funding they got from government to what seed money you put up?" And they said it was about 25 to 1. That is, they spent some number, and they got $30 million in research grants based on maybe $300,000 investment. Maybe it was ten to one. Anywhere from 25 to 100 to 1 return on capital.

So, that's a financial metric. The director gave the Kavli affiliated faculty mad money to work on the craziest things they wanted to work on, and he could calculate how much he gave them all over a five-year period, and he could ask "How much federal funding followed on to these seed grants?'–

And this question got asked very precisely. I don't want them to have had a second year of funds from somebody else. I wanted to know if at the end of the first year, they made a proposal to the government, and the government funded it, how much did that funding add up to relative to the funding you put in? And it was like 25 or 30 to 1. So, I felt like that was a home run. In venture capital, that would be a great return on capital. I put $10 million in, and I get $300 million out. That's pretty nice. So, that's a 30X return. That much I knew. And there were many examples of that sort of story.

As far as what was the most startling discovery, I remember going back and talking to the woman who today won the Kavli Prize for exoplanet discoveries. She's at MIT.. And she dreamed up this idea that when a planet goes in front of a star, it creates a shadow and a slight dip in the intensity of the light that comes through it, but also, the light refracts through the atmosphere if the planet has an atmosphere, and you can assess the nature of the atmosphere with that kind of a measurement. I remember her telling me about that, and some of that was funded by the income to the MIT Kavli Institute, and here she's won the Kavli Prize. So, not bad.

Cornelia Bargmann at Rockefeller, she worked on little worms that had 800 neurons, and she's won more prizes than you can shake a stick at for the discoveries of what you can learn about the nervous system with just 800 neurons. That was pretty spectacular. So, there's a lot of work where you can't automatically tie it to Kavli money because Kavli money is, tops, $2 million a year to the entire Institute. But you know Kavli made a difference.

And small amounts go to this one, and that one, and the other one for this purpose, that purpose, and the other purpose. Here's the biggest return on capital. In 2010 or 2011, when we had the big financial meltdown, MIT was competing with JPL to put up a satellite that would do a survey of the sky for exoplanets. And a guy at MIT had dreamed up an orbit for the satellite that was central to this proposal, but he was a member of the research staff, not a faculty member. And NASA cut the budget for this at MIT. Well, JPL had backup money, but MIT didn't have any backup money. So, they called me up and said, "I know it's against our rules, we said we would support students and postdocs, never professional research staff, with your money, but we have this issue." The satellites program was called TESS, Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. And George Richter was the guy's name at MIT.

They said, "We have this guy and another guy, and they're central to whether or not we can do this, and we need a bridge. Would you allow us to use the Kavli payout money for a couple of years to pay their salaries until this storm passes, and perhaps we can get it back on track?" And sure enough, two years pass, NASA re-instituted the program and MIT got design money. They did a competition between MIT and JPL, and MIT won. And they won because George Richter has the best idea - was the 1960s and remembered some strange orbit, extremely elliptical orbit that allowed the satellite 24/7 to look at the sky, never interfered by the moon, or by the Earth, or by anything else. It never went behind anything. So, they won based on that orbit. They didn't build it. They had industry build it. And it has been mapping of the sky for exoplanet researchers looking for exoplanets, including providing the basic guidance to the Webb Telescope for where to look. Now, that's impact.

Lessons on Using Funds Wisely

ZIERLER: What have you learned from how academic institutions have used these funds wisely or not? When there's a big infusion from the Foundation, what are some examples, without naming names specifically, of a real, wise stewardship of resources, and if you've ever seen a squandering of resources?

CONN: Yes, both. Harvard squandered the resources, mainly because they wouldn't participate in growing the endowment and having a bigger vision for the whole concept. So, in the end, the resources were squandered. And they ended up turning the institute money into endowed chair professorships, and one of those endowed chair professors, just today, David Charbonneau, won the Kavli Prize. But it wasn't the intention. It's a little bit serendipitous, it's Harvard, they have very good people. Then, good, we backed a good individual.

At another place, for example, the Institute is led by a Nobel Prize winner, and he was fabulous. And he was a fabulous personality. And everybody loved him. The world loved him, and the field loved him, and so on. But he just did what he wanted with the money, and he didn't really engage the other faculty. And so, we would go there, and he'd organize and put on a big show, and everybody was very respectful of him because of who he was and his stature. But we would come to discover, when we would go around and talk to the individual faculty members, "Well, it all sounds great when you visit, but we don't have any input as to what's done with the money. It goes to this, or it goes to that. This person makes all the decisions." I call that squandering. And we eventually had to work with that university to change the director, to get the big hero not to be the leader. And they bought in–finally, he became emeritus. And two younger people took over, and the whole spirit of the place changed overnight. So, yeah, money was squandered.

Again, it has to do with idiosyncrasies of the various places and the way universities operate. Sometimes, you can do something about it, and sometimes, you can't. It's all right. But I also saw it very wisely used, for example, at UC San Francisco, terrific. And they have young leadership, they backed that young leadership, the administration backed it. UC San Francisco's now the number one med school in the country, and I include Harvard and Hopkins here. They are an amazing place. And you see it. It's like Caltech. You see it in how they support their people.

ZIERLER: The numbers you shared with me, the percentage of scientific research that's supported by private foundations, by benefactors, do they strike you as the right balance? And how would you change it if you had the opportunity?

CONN: Well, that's a fascinating question, so let me be clear about the number. Current annual giving directed to science by philanthropy is about $5 billion, so that's 10% of what the Government spends. But when you add in the payout from endowments, which house all past giving, plus other flexible funds that universities and non-profit research organizations have, when you sum all that, in 2022, it came to about $22 billion. That turns out to be about 40% of what the government spent on basic and applied research that year - $55 billion. So philanthropy and philanthropy-derived funds are enormous and effect the whole system.

A very large other part of this 40% is what the universities spend on themselves supporting science, like startup packages for faculty (most expensive in science and engineering) or like pre-proposal money, or whatever. Where does much of this money come from? I coined the phrase legacy philanthropy. So, that's from past giving that sits in your endowment and pays out 5% a year. And not all that money is spoken for. A lot of it is but even there, funds are used for this endowed chair or that endowed chair, pay the salary of the faculty. Some is also unrestricted, and the president, and the provost, and deans, and so on, have the ability to use some of that money for purposes of advancing the agenda of the university, like doing good science. And they'll fund it.

In other words, the amount of money is a combination of current giving, payout from endowment from legacy giving, and there's a third bucket, which is sort of everything else. They get overhead back from federal grants, so that's somewhat federal money. They get this, they get that. They have many sources of other funds besides just tuition. If you're a state university, you have state funds. How all those monies get used is a complex thing, we found. [Laugh] And we surveyed 10 or 12 universities to try to figure out how they actually spent money on themselves. So, about half of the $22 billion is a combination of current giving and legacy philanthropy, and the other half is other monies that the universities themselves have access to, which they choose to use to spend on science and support science. The big finding is that some of them are heading toward being almost self-sufficient.

Somebody has told me, and I don't know if it's verifiable or true, I have to ask, that MIT is moving towards a model where the payout from their endowment plus all the other sources of external funds they have might allow them in some number of years to become somewhat independent of government funding. Now, that would be a radical change, right?

I think what's important overall in this story I've been telling, when you make policy about what to support at the national level, how to support it, who to support, you should consider the full panoply of support available in the ecosystem of science and technology in the country. Right now, the government makes decisions with no knowledge of what else is happening or why other things are happening. They are like a bucket with a helmet on. Right? And they internally are determining their own objectives and then spending government money on it. And if they don't have enough government money, they just don't do it.

So, my sense is that from a policy point of view, if there were more conversation, not government telling philanthropy what to do, and not philanthropy necessarily telling government what to do, [Laugh] but a dialog that allows each to talk to the other so that they're aware of the larger picture that's evolved, they could make different choices. And it's just awareness to inform decision-making that I think is the most important thing. I'm not pushing for the government to partner with philanthropy on everything or for philanthropy to look to the government for what important projects are. I think there's great diversity and idea creation.

So, by having many foundations and many philanthropists who have different ideas about what's important, and they fund them in different ways, that adds to the system on balance. Some people might say, "Oh, they're just wasting their money," or "It's frivolous. They've got money, so they spend it." I haven't found that to be true. I've found philanthropists who are supporting and doing philanthropy, and in my case, science philanthropy, they're very careful about it. They're very thoughtful about it. It's their money, and they're choosing to use it, and they're committing to use it, but they're careful about thinking through what they're doing and why they're doing it. And one of the findings from our work is that philanthropy does two things differently than government. One, it can act much more quickly, and two, it can take more risk. So, a lot of the ideas not ready for prime time, philanthropy will support. And the time it takes to decide about whether to support something or not is much faster, much shorter, in philanthropy than it is in government. And there's risk tolerance. It adds to the risk tolerance of the system. That's very important, right? Because that's discovery. And if you're adding risk, it means you're adding reward, too. Because some of those risks are going to work out. And then, you're going to get results you wouldn't have gotten any other way. So, I think that's America's distinctive advantage. Understanding it is important, first of all, so you do not damage, right? Like, in medicine, you do no harm.

And then, how do you make it most effective without killing the goose that lays the golden egg? And everybody is deeply, deeply frightened. But as soon as you say it to the government, "Look at all the money that's also being spent by others," the government will say, "I don't need to spend the money. You do it." That's what people are afraid of. So, they want to whisper about the numbers I'm talking about because they feel if somebody gets their hands on this "dangerous" information, they're going to misuse it. Well, there's a risk to that, I agree. But on the other hand, nowadays, it's maybe a little harder to have this sense, but I have a sense with the Biden Administration that you have to rely on them to listen and do what government is supposed to do. And government is supposed to spend money on those things industry will not. And particularly, long-term scientific and technological research. And if the government does its job and philanthropy does its job, the country's unbeatable. But if the government cuts science funding too hard, and philanthropy is not going to step in to fill the gap, you're shooting the goose that laid the golden egg. Similarly, if the government just says, "Well, let them do it," you're going to kill the goose that laid the golden egg.

So, there's a lot of danger to our system now. I think there's always been danger, like when philanthropy walked away from science in the 1960s. And because we were so frightened of the Russians and spent so much money on both defense and science in space, we kind of overcame the difficulty. It reappeared in the 80s and 90s, and philanthropy got back in the game. And even Rockefeller's now back in the game because government spending's been basically flat for more than a decade, maybe 20 years. The last real increase in government funding in real terms was the doubling of the NIH budget 25 years ago.

Scientific Optimism for an American Future

ZIERLER: Yours is a made-in-America story. You've seen America in the middle of the 20th century at the height of its powers. You've seen all of the wonders that American ingenuity can do. You've seen American finance, science, leadership across the board. Looking to the future, where are you bullish about American leadership, and where do you have concerns?

CONN: Well, I'm bullish because the system as a whole, I believe, has demonstrated the way we have structured things, not over-managing the economy, not over-managing anything–like, we have the only public and private university system in the world that's really substantial. We have philanthropy at a scale nobody else has. We operate government in a different way. I think the diversity in ways in which we do things is our great strength. Our weakness is the tendency to autocracy, the tendency to take the idea of individual freedom to such an extreme that it outweighs the public good. And what I've seen in my lifetime is a change in the balance in the good for the individual versus the good for the public as a whole. The balance between societal good and individual good has shifted much more towards individual. The individual uber alles idea that leads to trampling. It's not just the issue that you can't shout fire in a crowded movie house. There is a balance between being willing to do what's in the public good and having the freedom to live a life, and say what you want, and do what you want by and large, right?

And I think that balance probably was extreme before I was alive in the degree of separation of wealth in the first gilded age. I think there is an extreme in separation of wealth in the current age, and I frankly call it the second gilded age. It has its advantages in extraordinary innovation. And wealth is coming from extraordinary people doing extraordinary things. That's the good side of it. The other side of it is extreme individualism, Ayn Randian type thinking. And I think we have always had that strain in America. Ayn Rand is American. [Laugh] Frank Lloyd Wright, her hero, is American. And so, we have this tension in our system and in our society. We had Huey Long in the 30s who was the Trump of his day, we had George Wallace, now we have Trump. And we have this kind of distribution of wealth with a fraction going way out with many dots holding 30% of the wealth.

So, that's out of balance for the benefit of the whole. And it may be one of the reasons that you combine that with rapid change in the nature of work, and what one's training or education needs to be to work in the current economy, those two things may be underpinning the strains that are in the society.

And what's most fascinating and hard to understand is that the group that has always been mostly for business, and for low taxes, and for high wealth, are now backed by those who pay very little tax and have no wealth. How that group became the spokesperson for the other group is one of the interesting conundrums in political science. So, you're asking me about the outlook. We've always had these tensions, and sometimes the tensions are more exaggerated or exacerbated than at other times. I think the smallest gap we had in income from top to bottom was probably in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It's back now to where it was in the 1920s in terms of the separation. So, those are issues. Now, we've always had, as well, a history of what I'll call it a moral imperative to give it back.

Not everybody who makes a lot of money gives it back, but most do. And you see it in the size of gifts at Caltech, like $750 million for the Resnick Institute. I'm not sure if Caltech is the place to get a gift like that, by the way, because you're not organized to manage institutes with that kind of money. But Stanford's going to do fine with the $1.1 billion from John Doerr for their Sustainability Institute because they're ten times your size. They're only 25% of UC San Diego, but they're ten times your size, so it says how small Caltech is, right? So, when you get a gift of that scale, it perturbs the system in a way that the system isn't comfortable dealing with. And I hear stories that they don't know quite what to do or what they're doing. But anyway, the giving back part, I think there needs to be more of it, and there will be more of it. I just look at the history of – Bill Gates got criticized extraordinarily heavily in the 90s for not giving his money back. He was working, running Microsoft. He was chairman and CEO, ran the whole goddamn place. Now, for the last 25 years, that's all he's been doing is giving it back and giving it away. So, what I'm hopeful for is that the philanthropists will recognize the importance not only of giving back, being charitable, and being reasonable, I must note that they are a large part of what is supporting the Right in politics that's converting the masses to the idea that we ought to have autocracy, and therefore, oligarchy.

So, I have these high-level deep concerns for the country. You have to be a real optimist to say, "We've been there before, we'll get through it." But the truth is, we have sort of been there before, and you have to hope we're going to get through it. But it's a bargain with the devil, and every now and then, it could happen that you have a quantum flip, a little Feynman bubble out of the ether and vacuum background, and it grows into a new universe, and that new universe is not the democracy you want, but it's an autocracy you hoped you'd never see. Our system has the capability of to have this happen. So, I see that the future could be extraordinarily bright, but it's not without its issues, and it could become very dark.

ZIERLER: You're still active. As long as your health cooperates with you, what do you want to accomplish that you haven't done yet?

CONN: [Laugh] I don't have an ambition in that way. There isn't something I want to do, that I feel I must do. I'm in the winter of life. The things that I'm doing are more things that I've learned over time that can help make a difference for the society as a whole. And that's what I want to do. So, the things I'm doing are about understanding our system better, helping other people understand what our system's actually like, especially with the pieces that aren't so commonly understood, trying to help policy being made as best possible, things of that sort. I think I've had my last great sort of intellectual discovery, which is the power of philanthropy in society. That is not a widely appreciated or understood phenomenon. And when I tell people what I tell you–and I first talked about this in 2020, and the ideas go back a decade or more. It's why the Science Philanthropy Alliance exists, because I had this idea that the rich had to give back. How are we going to help them do it, and how are we going to help them do it for science? Right?

But the idea is not new, to me, anyway. It turns out, you're like a frog in water. You're just living in a system, and the water temperature goes up or goes down, and you try to just adjust, somewhat adiabatically. And if you're in the water long enough and it gets hot enough, you suddenly say, "Holy shit, it's really hot." Right? And that's a little bit of what these last ten years have been about. "Holy crap, we are in a new age – a Second Gilded Age. How is it working? What's it going to do? Who's going to do what and to whom? Who's going to benefit, who's going to lose?"

So, if you're asking what ambition I have, it's an ambition just to participate. I'm retired. I'm old. I like it. I say I'm old, I'm 81. By most definitions, that's in the old category. So, I know I'm not going to discover some fundamental thing in science in the last ten years of my life. And I worked in fields that are not like biology, where you can stay at the bench and really make discoveries in your 50s, 60s, and 70s. I've been in a field where it's a younger person's game. The big discoveries get made earlier in life, and then you use your skillset to keep it going, mostly by hiring extraordinary people to work with you. But that's the truth of the matter. So, does that make sense to you?

ZIERLER: It makes sense for all that I've learned about you, absolutely.

CONN: So, it's not one thing, it's, "Where can I contribute?" as opposed to, "Where can I make a difference or discover something new?" And I think I'm bright enough that if I see something new in what I'm working on, I'll be able to capture it. But it's not the primary motivation, as it was when I was doing science, or learning how to run a school, or build a big organization, or make it great. That was different. There, I had a real objective, a real ambition. Now, I'm more mellow. [Laugh]

ZIERLER: Bob, it has been an extraordinary pleasure and honor to spend all of this time with you. What a treasure for American history, for Caltech, for UC San Diego, for Kavli, for all the things that you've done. I really want to thank you for spending this time with me.

CONN: You're too generous.

[END]