NOBEL THOUGHTS: William Lipscomb
Profound Insights of the Laureates
William Lipscomb is the Abbot and James Lawrence Professor of Chemistry
Emeritus at Harvard University. In 1976 he was awarded the Nobel Prize
in chemistry for his research on the structure and bonding of boron compounds
and for his general discoveries about the nature of chemical bonding. This
interview was conducted in 1992.
As a chemist, what are your recommendations to women about using perfume?
A. Well, personally I don't like the smell of perfume. So I recommend they don't use it at all. But that has nothing to do with the fact that I'm a chemist. I have no objection as a chemist to their using it. I just don't like the smell.
You'd give the same advice, then, to men about wearing aftershave?
A. Yes, I guess so. Maybe some aftershave lotions are formulated in order to attract women. I suspect this is true. I've been told by some women that they get turned on by it.
Any chemical insights about which lotions are most likely to have an effect?
A. No. I don't know the brand names. And I don't use it myself.
Does love make the world go around?
A. Technically,
not. There is a question of what happened when the sun stood still, and
there's a theory that scientists have that Joshua went around
the other way, taking up the angular momentum. — But it helps!
How are men and women fundamentally different?
A. It's a good thing that they are different. The French say, "Vive la difference." In some ways they are complementary. I don't mean that literally — although I could. They tend to work together in very complementary ways. I know my wife and I work in a complementary way with respect to our little girl. She's four years old. We sort of share things, divide up the duties and so on. I think that whether it's cultural or whether it's natural, women like to do certain things and men tend to like to do other things, and when you can arrange it that way it's fine. In some ways it's biological — because I would have a difficult time nursing a young child — but in other ways some of it's cultural.
Do you have any advice for young people who are entering the field?
A. This is a more serious question, because the support is not just declining a little bit but it's being turned away from fundamental work to applied work. I think that people who are interested in science should do the very best science they can, and not worry too much about all the other problems.
When I started science there was no National Science Foundation, there was no National Institutes of Health. I needed to set up an X-ray lab, so I called the local distributor and asked him to tell me some doctor or dentist that was getting rid of some old equipment for new equipment so I could have the old equipment and take that to the lab and wire it up and have an apparatus. That's the way it was in the early times, back in the dark ages when I got started.
Well, you see, things are not so good right now, but they're very much better than they used to be, and they're very much better still in this country than they are in any other. Many other countries, and especially the United Kingdom, have tried to turn the fundamental side into applied work, and I think that's a shame. I believe that young people really should try to do what I did — if they're really interested in science — to work on something, some idea that may take 20 or 30 years. It's out of fashion to do that, because you put that in a research proposal and it won't be approved. You may have to put pieces of it in that may show immediate results so that you can get your long-term objective.
The study of long-term objectives is very difficult to handle, and getting more difficult all the time. I also think that you cannot foresee the applications. You cannot foresee the practical results people want immediately. People may want immediately some drug that lowers blood pressure, for example. They would not think of doing the three dimensional structure of a digestive enzyme — but that's exactly the way it happened. We did the structure of the enzyme. The Upjohn company used that structure to design Captopril, which was the going drug for many, many years for high blood pressure. I have many, many examples of that, where the fundamental research is done because you're pursuing some idea — like how enzymes work, the mechanisms — rather than the applications, such as the blood pressure. The boron research for which I got the prize studying chemical bonding — these compounds are used in Japan for treating inaccessible brain tumors by neutron activation, getting radioactivity right there where the tumor is. You can't do that in this country because they've got too many lawyers. But it has been successful. It's a heroic operation, but it's an application that nobody did foresee at the time they started the research. There are many such examples.
I think people underestimate the ideas. The whole biotechnology industry came from this study of restriction enzymes by Nathans, Arber and Smith, who got the Nobel Prize for it, and later Paul Berg for the recombinant DNA business, for this enzyme splicing. The whole biotechnology industry -- no company would have supported these initial studies in order to make a biotechnology, in order to make growth hormone, in order to do all these things that they're doing for commercial purposes.
But I think that people really need to be educated about the value of allowing very good people to pursue their ideas without any restrictions. It's what has made our system the envy of the whole scientific world, and it is being compromised by the present administration, who wants results. All politicians want results within two or four years.
Anyway, that's all I have to say. I get wound up on this.
Each year we present Ig Nobel Prizes to people whose achievements cannot or should not be reproduced. Who would you nominate to win an Ig Nobel Prize?
A. Oh, I think Peter Duesberg. He has advocated the position that HIV is not the cause of AIDS. The evidence for this involvement of HIV in AIDS is absolutely overwhelming. The problem that he creates is that people will go ahead with their behavior that's dangerous — unprotected sex, for example — because of his statements, and I think it's very mischievous. I think I don't know anybody that compares with Duesberg as a possible candidate.
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