Philip Westerman, NMR Spectroscopist, and Research Leader in the Molecular Dynamics of Membranes

In the discussion below, Phil Westerman reflects on his education in chemistry in Australia, meeting Jack Roberts and his time as a postdoctoral scholar at Caltech in the late 1970s, and a career spent investigating the capabilities of NMR spectroscopy, membrane dynamics, and liquid crystals.

Westerman reflects fondly on his Caltech days and the sense of openness that permeates campus - both in the sense of research collaborations across disciplines, and in the intellectual freedom available to everyone in pursuit of the most interesting questions. He also discusses his long career at the Northeast Ohio Medical University (NEOMED), a research consortium that is a leading center in both fundamental and clinical research.

At the end of the conversation, Westerman mentions that he was up for a Lifetime Achievement Award from NEOMED; the video of his acceptance remarks are linked here, which provide additional perspective about his life and career.

DAVID ZIERLER: This is David Zierler, Director of the Caltech Heritage Project. It is Monday, November 27, 2023. I am delighted to be here with Dr. Philip Westerman. Phil, it is great to be with you. Thank you so much for joining me.

PHILIP WESTERMAN: I'm happy to join you.

ZIERLER: Phil, to start, would you please give me your current or most recent title and institutional affiliation?

WESTERMAN: My current title is Professor Emeritus of Biochemistry and Molecular Pathology at the Northeastern Ohio Medical University, which is a consortium medical school made up of four universities in the Northeastern Ohio area.

ZIERLER: Tell me a little bit about some of the main areas of research that you've pursued in your career.

WESTERMAN: My focus has mainly been in applications of nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy. I started off in the field of organic chemistry, stayed in that field until I was hired at a new medical school, and my role at that medical school was to participate in a joint proposal to study the cytochrome P450 enzyme system in the liver. My role was to use the technique of NMR, or nuclear magnetic resonance.

ZIERLER: I wonder if you can describe the value of NMR in medical research.

WESTERMAN: It's the basis of magnetic resonance imaging, and I think everybody is aware now of what an MRI is. Prior to the development of the technique for looking at anatomical features, it was used by chemists as a very powerful tool for determining the structure, firstly of small molecules; and then the techniques have become more sophisticated and used to determine three-dimensional structures, in solution, of proteins and other biomolecules.

Studying the Molecular Dynamics of Membranes

ZIERLER: What have been some of the translational aspects of your research either by you directly or by colleagues? Where have we seen your research have direct effect in patient communities?

WESTERMAN: I'd say it has had little effect in patient communities. I have been interested in studying molecular dynamics of membranes. Membranes surround every living cell and each of the organelles in a living cell, and people are interested how it has the properties of defining the morphology of a cell, controlling the transport of ions in and out of the cell. So, the role of cholesterol, and also how lipids that make up the membranes interact with the protein species that are in the biological membranes. It really is a very theoretical study with initially, I believe, no applications for clinical medicine.

ZIERLER: Yet you've been employed within a medical institute.

WESTERMAN: That's correct. I had a very important role in teaching biochemistry and molecular pathology. My research was with a physicist, actually, in the Liquid Crystal Institute, at Kent State, because he had the facilities. They also had the techniques and know-how in studying liquid crystals, and biological membranes are an example of a liquid crystal.

ZIERLER: I wonder if you can explain that. What does a liquid crystal mean within a biological context?

WESTERMAN: The name implies it's not a liquid; that means the molecules are totally random in their movement in three dimensions. And, it's not a solid, which means that the molecules are fixed, both in their distance and their orientation, in a crystal. There are phases of matter that are in between those two—liquid and solid, crystalline. There is restricted motion, but there is still motion. I think in most biological systems, particularly membranes, there's a dynamic aspect.

ZIERLER: The liquid crystals that you're talking about, are these the same or are they similar to the liquid crystals that we see in technological displays?

WESTERMAN: No, liquid crystals are divided into thermotropic liquid crystals—where they are a pure chemical or a mixture of several chemicals. Biological membranes are an example of a lyotropic liquid crystal. That means the molecules only form the liquid crystal in the presence of a solvent. In the case of biological systems, the solvent is nearly always water, or an aqueous environment.

ZIERLER: In your capacity as Emeritus, are you staying current with the literature? Are you involved at all in teaching or mentoring these days?

WESTERMAN: No, I retired in 2009 and I've had very little involvement since those days.

ZIERLER: This is a happy retirement for you!

WESTERMAN: I have five grandchildren now! And I've done quite a bit of travel.

ZIERLER: Let's take it all the way back to the beginning. Did you grow up in Australia?

WESTERMAN: Yes.

ZIERLER: What part?

WESTERMAN: I grew up in Sydney, which is the largest city.

Chemistry at the University of Sydney

ZIERLER: Were you always interested in science, growing up?

WESTERMAN: Yes, but my interest was crystallized by a chemistry teacher at high school.

ZIERLER: That put you on a path to study chemistry at the University of Sydney?

WESTERMAN: That's correct.

ZIERLER: Tell me about the curriculum there. What were you most interested in?

WESTERMAN: I was very focused in both physics and chemistry and mathematics, and very little in the humanities. I think that was the nature of education in Australian. I've noticed in colleges here, people are more exposed to the humanities in their college years. But I've caught up! [laughs]

ZIERLER: Is that to say that Australia is more like the British system where you declare a focus right away?

WESTERMAN: Yes.

ZIERLER: Phil, were computers relevant at all when you were an undergraduate?

WESTERMAN: Yes, I would take the stack of cards down to the big computer in the Physics Department. I learned one language, Fortran. I could write programs in that, and I could then punch the cards and then feed them into the computer. Something that took a day to accomplish can be done in a few minutes now, of course.

ZIERLER: You mentioned you were interested in chemistry and physics and mathematics and biology. How did you come to settle on or focus on organic chemistry for graduate school?

WESTERMAN: I think the subject appealed to me, plus the teaching was better in that subject than physical chemistry. I ended up really in physical organic chemistry, and let me explain that. Organic chemistry is very tangible. It's like cooking. You end up with a product that you can look at and say, "Wow, I've made a crystal"; "I've made a new compound." I can characterize it. I became interested in the physical side because the technique of nuclear magnetic resonance involves a knowledge of quantum mechanics. I could see the theory interwoven with the practical side. It was very logical and very appealing, to know that theory and practice melded.

ZIERLER: As you alluded earlier, it's one of those great things in science where a breakthrough in physics with nuclear magnetic resonance had this wonderful application in health science that nobody saw coming. It was a happy surprise. Where was that development when you were a student? Was that happening in real time? Were MRIs already in existence at that point?

WESTERMAN: No. That was the 1980s. In fact, one of my students, who I trained as a graduate student at Kent State, ended up in the MRI business. I went to the early Gordon Conferences where the people who discovered MRIs were present. For a while, I thought of making the switch, but I decided to stay with what's called broadline NMR, studying the liquid crystals, because I had the facilities here, and I had tenure at that time. So, I decided to stay in the field.

ZIERLER: Tell me about developing your dissertation research. What did you work on?

WESTERMAN: I worked on synthesizing a large number of compounds so that I could measure NMR parameters and build up the empirical data basis so that people can use these parameters for structural characterization.

Jack Roberts in Australia

ZIERLER: When did you hear about Caltech? How did you hear about this little school in California?

WESTERMAN: [laughs] Well, I knew Jack Roberts. He was the provost for a while. I don't know if you knew him.

ZIERLER: No, he's before my time.

WESTERMAN: He came to Australia a couple of times, and I met him there.

ZIERLER: Did he have collaborators in Australia?

WESTERMAN: I don't think so. No, at the time when I met him, I wasn't thinking of working for him. When I finished my PhD, I applied for postdoctoral fellowships. I applied to five places. I had three offers, but I chose Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. I worked with a chemist who, 20 years later, received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. I had a wonderful experience both professionally and personally in Cleveland. I made a number of friends. Then, I wanted to return to Australia, to an academic position, and I received a position at the Australian National University in Canberra, which is a showcase university for the Australian government. Its purpose, really, I believe, was to hire back Australians so that they could contribute to the Australian economy and not overseas. Most of my PhD colleagues ended up with postdoctoral fellowships either in Europe or North America, and many of them were staying there. I don't believe the Australian government was happy with that situation, so they lured us back with a very attractive position. But it was like an NTT, three years and that was it.

ZIERLER: Tell me about your time at Caltech as a postdoc. What was that like for you?

WESTERMAN: I had a wonderful experience, again personally and professionally. I was with a large number of foreign students. I liked that aspect of science. The advisor, I got along with very well. There was a seminar, every week almost, given by somebody famous, and that was very stimulating. I like the weather in Pasadena. You're very fortunate there! [laughs]

ZIERLER: [laughs] Jack Roberts was your postdoc advisor?

WESTERMAN: That's right, yeah. He wanted me to continue the work that I was doing in Cleveland at Case Western—and I didn't. I more or less just went on my own way. I wanted to do low-risk projects, get a number of publications, and improve my curriculum vitae, because at that stage, I was anxious to get a permanent academic position. Numbers of papers counted, and the quality of the papers counted. Also, being at Caltech, it was rather attractive for potential employers.

ZIERLER: I want to get the chronology right. You were at Case Western before you came to Caltech?

WESTERMAN: That's correct.

ZIERLER: That was your first postdoc?

WESTERMAN: That's right. Then I went back to Australia, for 21 months. It was an agonizing decision to return to the States, but I decided that my chances in the U.S. were better than in Australia.

NMR Work on Carbon and Nitrogen

ZIERLER: Clearly Jack Roberts saw what you were doing at Case Western as significant. I wonder if you can talk a little bit about what you were researching.

WESTERMAN: I was doing carbon-13 NMR. This was a different nucleus than the one I had studied as a graduate student. We were interested in unstable reaction intermediates. We would prepare these in a test tube, put the test tube in the NMR at low temperatures, and determine the structure of these reaction intermediates. Jack Roberts had made his name for discovering what are called benzynes, which are benzene rings with triple bonds in them. He proved that such an entity had to exist. So, he was interested in the mechanisms of organic reactions, which is what physical organic chemistry is. He was interested in my using the NMR technique to further look at some of the questions that remained from George Olah. That was the name of the person at Case Western. He knew that I knew the techniques on how to prepare these intermediates, and so he let me loose on the NMR. He had a prototype machine there which was looking at a different nucleus, again—nitrogen-15—and Caltech was one of the few places in the world where we could study this nucleus at natural abundance. I decided to build up the database again, for nitrogen-containing compounds. So, I studied peptides and various classes of organic compounds that contain nitrogen. I really went out of my way, in my own direction. Nevertheless, he was happy I was doing it, because I was productive.

ZIERLER: Was this at all related to what he was working on at the time?

WESTERMAN: Yes. One of the manufacturers had given him an NMR that was capable of looking at this rare nucleus, nitrogen-15.

ZIERLER: Were either you or him thinking about biology at all at this point?

WESTERMAN: Not really, except I did look at some peptides. That was the only biological aspect of the project that I was working in. I was working with a natural product chemist, actually, back at Case, in the peptides that I chose to look at.

ZIERLER: Were there any other Caltech faculty that you interacted with? I'm thinking, for example, Lee Hood.

WESTERMAN: I knew of Lee Hood. I did not interact with him. I did not interact with Feynman. I saw him. [laughs] Peter Dervan was there. I don't know if you knew him?

ZIERLER: Of course.

WESTERMAN: He was down the hall. There was an Englishman there who was doing x-ray crystallography. I played cricket with him, so [laughs]—that was my interaction!

ZIERLER: Was there a Caltech cricket club?

WESTERMAN: Oh, there was! Yes! A very good one!

ZIERLER: Where did they play?

WESTERMAN: We played some games at Caltech, but I remember a game in Santa Barbara where there was a real cricket pitch. I think there were so many English expatriates living in the Santa Barbara area that they [laughs] wanted to play cricket and watch cricket!

ZIERLER: [laughs] Phil, you said Caltech was a great experience. What stayed with you from your Caltech days? How did that experience affect the rest of your career?

WESTERMAN: I loved the environment, the open environment. I noticed that there was an extremely small administration at Caltech. Jack Roberts eventually became the provost or the university, and he would do it one day a week. So, I decided that the quality of a university was inversely proportion to the size of its administration. [laughs]

ZIERLER: [laughs] Very good. [laughs] That certainly stayed with you.

WESTERMAN: Yes, that did. And I moved to a university which is very proud of their reputation in certain fields, but they've certainly got a large administration, and a lot of vice presidents. I regard that as the dark side. I'm sorry if [laughs]—I hope you're not part of the administration! [laughs]

ZIERLER: [laughs] I'm sort of half and half. I appreciate your perspective. Phil, did you go on the job market in the United States, or were you recruited or attracted back to Australia even before you thought about such things?

WESTERMAN: I went onto the job market here, even in my days at Case Western. I interviewed for a job, I remember, at Notre Dame, in Indiana. When I was at Caltech I got a lot of job interviews. I felt like Henry Kissinger a little; I was always on a plane! Because most of the jobs that I applied for were on the East Coast, or the Midwest.

ZIERLER: What ultimately compelled you to go back to Australia?

WESTERMAN: You mean after Case Western, or—?

ZIERLER: After Caltech?

WESTERMAN: No, I was at Caltech after the Australian National University.

ZIERLER: I see.

WESTERMAN: I received a phone call while I was at Caltech from a gentleman with a very thick Hungarian accent, who said to me, "We're setting up a medical school in Northeast Ohio." I was interested because I had friends in the Cleveland area, I would be given the option of buying an NMR machine. The new medical institution would be an institution that was starting, and that appealed to me very much. I wasn't going to an established place. I knew that I'd be part of making the curriculum, of setting up my research project. And, I was attracted by the presence of the Liquid Crystal Institute in Kent, which had a national and an international reputation.

Origins of the Liquid Crystal Institute

ZIERLER: The Liquid Crystal Institute was already in existence at this point?

WESTERMAN: That's correct, yes.

ZIERLER: How did it get started?

WESTERMAN: A man called Glenn Brown started it. These were discovered in the 1800s by German chemists originally, but he decided that there were potentially applications. Initially, they developed mixtures of liquid crystals that could tell the temperature, because of the color. This was before displays were discovered. This material, this mixture of liquid crystals, would be painted on the human body, and you could identify regions that were at a higher temperature than other regions. A possibility was the diagnosis of breast cancer by using these liquid crystal mixtures. Glenn Brown was able to develop or to hire people who developed the Timex watch, the first Timex watch, which had a liquid crystal display, and that was the kickoff. That made a lot of money for the university, and it made a lot of fame. The initial International Liquid Crystal Conferences were set up in Kent, Ohio.

ZIERLER: Did they have a basic science or even a biological component to them as well, or they were only focused on technology?

WESTERMAN: No, those who became members of the Liquid Crystal Institute were in the Chemistry Department and the Physics Department, and almost nobody in the Biology Department at that stage.

ZIERLER: You mentioned the attractiveness of being a part of an institute building from the ground up. What were some of the challenges in not joining an established university right out of your postdoc?

WESTERMAN: We had to write bylaws. We had to establish protocols for tenure. We had to write a curriculum. For me, it was a learning process, because my background was mainly in organic chemistry, so I had a lot of material to learn. I'd done a biochemistry course as an undergraduate, but that was it! I was part of a joint proposal that involved an enzymologist, a molecular biologist, and a clinician. To me, I've always been extremely curious and always wanted to learn new fields. I was able to learn some clinical chemistry, some enzymology, some molecular biology, and interact with these other three scientists in setting up the curriculum for the medical school, biochemistry course, and in writing a proposal to NIH.

ZIERLER: This was a regular tenure track professorship?

WESTERMAN: That's correct, yes.

ZIERLER: And NIH provided funding to get your research lab up and running?

WESTERMAN: Yes. I was the second person in this new institution to be PI on an R01 NIH grant. I was quite successful at—I was more or less collaborating with one of the scientists at the Liquid Crystal Institute. The joint proposal on cytochrome P-450 was not funded. When the joint proposal was not funded, each of the three individual investigators ended up receiving ultimately NIH funding. Again, I had to go off on my own. Which was good. I had independence.

ZIERLER: What were your teaching and mentorship responsibilities here?

WESTERMAN: They were quite significant, because the medical school was set up to train primary care physicians rather than specialists. That's what the state of Ohio funded it for, so that we could get physicians out into rural areas. It has not turned out that way. We get a lot of people who end up in the specialties. Obviously the attraction in medicine is the specialties, because they have higher remuneration.

ZIERLER: Tell me about your decision, ultimately, when you did return to Australia.

WESTERMAN: Now, wait a minute, I've been at the medical school for 29 years. I haven't returned. This was the sequence: I was at Case, then Australia—Canberra—then Caltech.

ZIERLER: Oh, so you were only at Canberra for a short period of time!

WESTERMAN: Yes, 21 months.

ZIERLER: Did they try and retain you?

WESTERMAN: Yes, but I said, "I see all my colleagues going into the public service and giving up science." I didn't want that.

ZIERLER: What were the considerations? If you had left, what would that have looked like?

WESTERMAN: I would have gone into a new job, as I said, in the public service, probably a government job in one of the governmental departments. The NTTs, it was very rare for them to change them into a tenure track position. I saw that I probably was not going to get a tenure track position, so I decided I'd take the risk and come back to Caltech, back to the U.S. I've been based in the U.S. since 1975.

ZIERLER: Do you go back? Do you still have family in Australia?

WESTERMAN: Oh, yes. I've been twice this year. Of course, being retired, it's much easier now to go. I did a sabbatical in Australia, though.

ZIERLER: When did you do that?

WESTERMAN: 1984, 1985.

ZIERLER: It was in the eighties when MRI technology became widely adopted. Was that relevant for you at all?

WESTERMAN: No, not really. I understood it. I trained a student in NMR who ended up doing MRI, some of the early MRI work. At Technicare, which was affiliated with the Cleveland Clinic where my student ended up, I was often the subject of quite a few MRI images. I'd stick my head in the magnet and have a picture taken.

ZIERLER: What have been some of the really important technologies in your career, that have developed?

WESTERMAN: Various aspects of NMR. When I learnt the technique, it was rather limited. The two major technologies are MRS—magnetic resonance spectroscopy, where the chemical composition of the human body is determined and studied, and changes in that. ATP levels can be measured in vivo, directly. ADP. Inorganic phosphate can be measured. So a number of diseases, in particular muscle diseases, have been diagnosed with MRS and studied by MRS. MRI is the other major development, where you get spatial information, anatomical information, but little chemical information, because MRI is based on just the proton nucleus mainly, and the proton nucleus of water. You're really just looking at water in different tissues.

ZIERLER: How does looking at water help identify tumors, for example?

WESTERMAN: The water in tumors has different motional properties, and this can be identified from the water that is in healthy tissue from the water that's moving. NMR is response to molecular dynamics, how fast molecules are moving. Water in a blood vessel has completely different properties in the magnetic field, say, from water in bone tissue.

Fundamental Research and Clinical Collaborations

ZIERLER: Did you work directly with patients or collaborate with MDs?

WESTERMAN: I collaborated extensively with MDs because we had a case-based course. We would teach topics like gout, and diabetes, and we would have a session where a basic scientist would give the biochemistry of gout, or the biochemistry of sickle cell, and we would bring a patient in, and a clinician would interview the patient. We would dovetail these together. In addition to that, we developed cases where there was no clinician involved and no patient involved. We did both.

ZIERLER: The MDs that you collaborated with on case histories, would they then take these findings and it would have clinical relevance or even value?

WESTERMAN: Yes. I received a couple of emails during my career from practicing physicians who would thank me for a particular case that they had done in their training. One case I remember in particular, from Pittsburgh, one of my students was able to diagnose a patient with Wilson's Syndrome, and that resulted in a liver transplant and the patient's life was saved. This gave me some satisfaction, that I had developed this case history. In clinical medicine, this is known as a zebra, whereas the common diseases are horses. The zebras are the rare diseases. We often taught rare diseases because they illustrated a principle. The family of diseases we focused on were the hemoglobinopathies, of which sickle cell anemia is just a single example. You could illustrate how a single mutation at a single base, locus, in the genetic material, led to an altered protein, led to clinical symptoms. You could go through the whole logical sequence. To me, this was very appealing. This is what the field of molecular pathology really is. When we set up our course, it was not called Biochemistry; it was called Molecular Pathology, initially. Because it's not a popular subject with medical students.

ZIERLER: How come?

WESTERMAN: They regard it as extremely difficult. In undergraduate, premeds regard organic chemistry and biochemistry as the weeding-out courses.

ZIERLER: Phil, who would you train in your responsibilities as a professor? Everyone from undergraduates to medical students?

WESTERMAN: Yes, everybody—graduate students, undergraduates, medical students. I was not really involved in postgraduate medical education. That's training residents.

ZIERLER: You would do everything from teach large lectures to advanced seminars?

WESTERMAN: Yes. Did both.

Magnets and Vacuums

ZIERLER: Tell me about what your lab looked like. What were some of the most important instruments in it?

WESTERMAN: A rotary evaporator. A fume hood. A controlled atmosphere reaction chamber. I made principally deuterium-labeled compounds, and also fluorine-labeled compounds. I ended up doing fluorene NMR in a collaboration with a group at Harvard. It was heavily organic synthesis, so that was one half of the projects. The other half was the operation of the NMR machines. I'd say I spent equal amounts of time both at the magnet and doing synthesis, or supervising a technician or a graduate student doing the synthesis.

ZIERLER: When you say, "the magnet," what does that mean? What does it look like?

WESTERMAN: It's a huge metal chamber. The magnet itself is sitting in liquid helium, so it is superconducting. What that means is it doesn't use any power. You charge the thing up, and there's no resistance to the conduction of electricity through the coils, so you generate this strong magnetic field. That is in a chamber that's vacuum-sealed. There's a vacuum seal around it. Then you have liquid nitrogen on the outside to reduce the rate at which the liquid helium boils off. We had a very good temperature control system, because we studied phase transitions, and liquid crystals undergo phase transitions, and also biological membranes undergo phase transitions. That means one state of aggregation to another, both liquid crystalline but each with different motional properties.

ZIERLER: How did you get involved in fluorine NMR research?

WESTERMAN: This was a collaboration with someone in the Chemistry Department who was using the fluorene nucleus as a probe on membranes. I made fluorinated cholesterols, and we would put these into membranes and figure out what depth—or the orientation of the cholesterol molecule in the membrane. That was one application. The group at Harvard was doing surface studies. You would spread a liquid crystalline layer on a water surface and study the surface pressure. These people were interested in cholesterol metabolism in the liver because cholesterol is converted to the bile salts in the liver. We were interested in both fluorinated bile salts and fluorinated cholesterol. That was Martin Carey at Children's Hospital at Harvard. I published a couple of papers with him in that field.

ZIERLER: Was the rise of modern biotechnology relevant for you at all? All of the new methods of drug discovery?

WESTERMAN: Not really, no. I went to courses on PCR and molecular biology just to learn the language. We were so heavily involved in developing case histories, and so much of it was a genetic component. There were a couple of other colleagues in the department that were doing molecular biology and cloning, and so on. I was only marginally involved, but I could go to seminars and understand what was happening.

ZIERLER: You mentioned genetics. What about the Human Genome Project? Was mapping the human genome important for you?

WESTERMAN: No, not really. I was aware of what was going on, but no.

ZIERLER: What aspects of genetics was relevant for your research?

WESTERMAN: I'd say almost nothing. I developed the case histories, and we would ask the students to determine what the mutation was, but it was not important for my research, no.

ZIERLER: When you say case histories, does that include family histories?

WESTERMAN: Yes. I said there were two types of case histories, one where a clinician and a patient were involved, and also the ones where we just developed all the lab data, or we got the lab data from the literature and made up problems for the students to solve but there was no patient, no clinician present during those presentations.

ZIERLER: This was strictly for educational purposes.

WESTERMAN: Yes.

ZIERLER: I asked about computers as an undergraduate. What about later in your career? Did computers become more relevant? Did your research become more computational?

WESTERMAN: It has always been computational, but I have been a slow learner technologically. Most of my papers, early papers, were written on yellow pads, double spaced, and carbon copies, and handed to the secretary, to retype. That's a habit that's hard to break—writing on yellow pads, double spaced. I believe a number of authors still work that way and they prefer to work that way. I'm not computationally very savvy. The NMRs had software, and you had to learn how to use the packaged software program, and you had to learn the commands. That was the main part of my computational background.

ZIERLER: I wonder if you leaned on your students at all for help with the software.

WESTERMAN: I did, yeah!

ZIERLER: Presumably, they have gone on into more computational areas just because that's the name of the game now. You have to.

WESTERMAN: Right, yeah.

Lab Notes are Everything

ZIERLER: On that basis, what are some of the things you're most proud of as a mentor to students? What have they gone on to accomplish?

WESTERMAN: How to keep a notebook. [laughs]

ZIERLER: You mean the importance of keeping precise notes, the importance of data?

WESTERMAN: Exactly, yes, keeping a record. I had a technician who was doing the synthesis, so my students were involved really in more or less interpretation of the NMR data, the deuterium NMR data, in terms of what motions are the molecules undergoing. The students I had were physics students primarily, and they had been trained in classical physics and quantum physics. I co-advised them, really, and had an adjunct appointment in the Physics Department for a number of years. Then I moved to the Chemistry Department and had the adjunct appointment in the Chemistry Department.

ZIERLER: Phil, tell me about your decision to retire in 2011. What had you accomplished at that point?

WESTERMAN: I feel very satisfied, actually. I can tell you what drove me to retirement, really, was I was not having success in getting NIH funding, and that becomes very frustrating. I found at the end I was able to get small grants, but nothing major.

ZIERLER: Do you think age was a factor?

WESTERMAN: Yes, I think age is a factor. I'm not willing to work the hours that I worked when I was younger. The advent of grandchildren coming along was an incentive to retire. My wife retired at the same time, and we're able to spend time with our daughter, raising these children, helping to raise these children. And I always had a yen to travel, because during my career, I had been to many international conferences. Once you get the travel bug, that's it. [laughs] So, retirement seemed attractive, but I didn't want to retire cold turkey, so I gave up my tenure, was given Emeritus status by the university, the medical school, and agreed to teach the course, to run the course for another four years. That's what I did. At the end of that, I reverted to becoming a synthetic organic chemist! I was on a grant to synthesize chemicals that are called chiral dopants. These are important in the liquid crystal display business. They're added to a liquid crystal and they give the liquid crystal the property of displaying color.

ZIERLER: Is that to say that LCD displays have handedness?

WESTERMAN: Yes. These compounds are important in LCD displays. We've had a number of spinoff companies in the Kent area and also Ohio that really derive from the display industry. That was my only interaction with the display business, was to help synthesize these compounds. I did that for two years at the end of my career.

ZIERLER: Did you start up a new lab or did you join an existing lab for this?

WESTERMAN: I stocked up a new lab and then I was joined by a chemist from Kodak, who were just about going out of business at that time. The two of us, we made a large number of chiral dopants. There was no prospect of publishing any of this material. It was all proprietary for these local companies that were affiliated with Kent State University. I believe some of these compounds may still be used in the display business. I believe I've had a very interesting career, in terms of breadth. I've been stretched all the way from basic physics, quantum physics, through organic synthesis, all the way to biochemistry, all the way to case histories. At the extreme end, I was giving lectures in the medicine course, in the Hematology Subcouncil. That represents one end of the spectrum. The other end of the spectrum is quantum mechanics. To me that has just been so exciting and so thrilling, to learn all that material and to be exposed to all of that material. That's very rewarding. And I've just been nominated for a Lifetime Career Development Award, which I'm going to find out about in the next few weeks.

ZIERLER: Oh, wow. Good luck! What is the nominating institution?

WESTERMAN: It's the Alumni Association. I don't know how many people have been nominated, but I've been busy updating my CV recently to submit to people who are going to write references for me! Because I haven't used my CV in a while! [laughs]

The Pleasures of Breadth Over Depth

ZIERLER: Phil, if I may, I'll ask one last question to wrap up this very nice conversation. As you reflected on the breadth of your career and the exhilaration of being able to be exposed to all of these different branches of sciences, do you see that in generational terms? A young student today, thinking about charting their career, would they have that similar option?

WESTERMAN: I doubt it. The biggest rewards are for the specialists. I noticed in my department the couple of people who focused very intensely on one aspect of science were the ones that were rewarded, in terms of the funding agencies. Also they were not particularly interested in teaching, or particularly good at it. I think that's an unfortunate aspect. You must hear this from a lot of people. There's not much room for the generalist.

ZIERLER: As an addendum, what is lost, not rewarding the generalists?

WESTERMAN: I think it's a personal loss. I just feel so pleased about my broad education. I said I caught up in the humanities; well, I've done that in retirement! [laughs]

ZIERLER: [laughs]

WESTERMAN: Actually I've just written a biography of my great, great grandfather who led a very interesting life in the British Army. So, I'm interacting with historians. You know Matthew Crawford, right?

ZIERLER: Absolutely.

WESTERMAN: He was at San Diego. I've been up to the History Department and talked to some of the historians. To me, that's my inclination now. And, having just come back from a week in Athens—I mean, there's history! [laughs]

ZIERLER: It's full circle. You're getting the humanities you didn't as an undergraduate.

WESTERMAN: Exactly. [laughs] Right.

ZIERLER: Phil, it has been a great pleasure spending this time with you. I want to thank you so much.

[END]