UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON ARCHIVES
ORAL HISTORY PROGRAM
Interview #1069
WILLIAMS, PAUL
WILLIAMS, PAUL (1938-)
Professor Emeritus of Plant Pathology
At UW: 1959-1962 [as student]; 1963- [as professor of plant pathology]
Interviewed:
Interviewer:
Index by:
Length:
2010 (10 sessions)
Robert Lange
Stephen A. Pierce
21 hours, 34 minutes
Abstract: In his 2010 interviews with Bob Lange, Paul Williams details his early life,
education, and five decades of involvement with the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
In the first two interviews, he traces his growing passion for the natural world as
experienced around Vancouver, BC, and recounts how this passion was encouraged by
his relationships with his family and close friends. In the next three interviews, he
chronicles his undergraduate and graduate education, noting the prominent influence of
Glenn Pound and J. C. Walker as his mentors, and discussing being offered a position at
UW following a year at the Boyce Thompson Institute. The final five interviews consist
of William’s reflections on his major contributions to plant pathology, the training of
plant breeders, teaching (especially in Biocore), rapid-cycling Brassicas (Fast Plants ®),
educational models such as Bottle Biology and the Center for Biology Education, his
graduate students, and his public service. Throughout, he shares anecdotes about major
figures and events he’d interacted with, such as World War II, Glenn Pound, J. C.
Walker, Russell Labs, Science magazine, the Guggenheim Foundation, WARF, the NSF,
Sputnik, the Madison Plan, and early 1970s diplomacy with China. This interview was
conducted for inclusion into the UW-Madison Oral History Program.
Key Words: Vancouver BC; Winnipeg MB; World War II; Great Depression; horticulture; blue poppies; Ernest Thompson Seton; University of British Columbia; virology;
Vernon Brink; Glenn Pound; plant pathology department; University of WisconsinMadison; Audrey Dunlap; J. C. Walker; Boyce-Thompson Institute; tenure; graduate
students; electron microscopy; cytology; Eriksson medal; Rudolph Heitefuss; UniversityIndustry Relations (UIR); Fast Plants®; Crucifer Genetics Cooperative (CrGC); Gustaaf
deZoeten; Bottle Biology; Biotron; Theodore Tibbitts; Wisconsin Alumni Research
Foundation (WARF); UW Foundation; Carolina Biological Supply Company; Tetrad
Seed Co.; Hedi Baxter Lauffer; Luis Sequeira; Biocore; Plant Breeding and Plant
Genetics Program; Howard Hughes Medical Institute; Center for Biological Education
(CBE); Wisconsin Teaching Academy; Noel Keen; UW Merger (1973); committee
service; tenure; biological sciences divisional committee; campus planning; School of
Allied Health Sciences; Donna Shalala.
Paul Williams #1069
First Interview Session (January 11, 2010): Digital File
Time
Keywords
00:00:00 Start of Interview/Interviewer’s Introduction
00:00:24 Question: Birthplace and parents? Answer: Williams was born in Vancouver BC in
1938. He expressed how privileged he felt to have lived at a time in history when
things were happening so rapidly.
00:02:45 [no question] Williams talked about Vancouver in the late 1930s, just coming out of
the Depression, where his father was the first of his generation to go to university. He
said his family was deeply imbued with a sense of their Scottish heritage, and his
father’s family’s early history in United Empire Loyalism. From Maritime Canada,
his father’s family had moved west to Winnipeg for opportunity. He recounted his
grandfather’s story, eventually having a key position in the Canadian Nat’l Railway;
and his grandmother’s, who was a poet of moderate note.
00:09:06 [no question] He talked about how his father, the eldest of four boys, was pushed by
his grandmother to academic achievement in Winnipeg, entering the University of
Manitoba, pushing through the sciences, and getting an MD at a very early age. This
was important because his father often reminded the boys of his own achievement,
something some of the boys rebelled against.
00:11:44 [no question] Returning to talk about his mother’s story, he explained that she was a
child of strongly Protestant N. Irish parents; her father enlisted for the Boer War in
Ireland, but wasn’t able to go because of an injury he sustained. So he emigrated to
NY with his brother, where he then discovered there were jobs in Winnipeg. Once in
Winnipeg, he worked as a dry goods clerk, eventually becoming president of the
growing and successful company now called Safeway.
00:15:57 [no question] He explained how his maternal grandfather retired to “Canada’s
Florida,” the Canadian West Coast, which was burgeoning at the time. He retired in
the midst of the Depression.
00:19:11 [no question] He recounted how his father loved getting out on the Red River, how he
took on agricultural bacteriology as summer work to get himself through medical
school, and how he got scholarships to pay for school.
00:23:02 [no question] He explained how his parents met, when his father was the main
bellman at a resort hotel along the Canadian Pacific Railway. His mother’s family
traveled through this hotel, they fell instantly in love, and they got married just before
his father graduated into a 3-year medical fellowship in London.
00:25:59 [no question] He discussed his parents’ time living in London, where his father
studied biochemistry and bacteriology, but became very ill due to stress and returned
from London early to go to Mayo Clinic. Williams’ eldest brother was born there.
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00:28:33 [no question] When the fellowship ended in 1938, his father moved the family to
Vancouver, where Williams was born in the home of his grandparents. He talked
about living in his grandparents’ home. This took on significance when WWII came
along and his father operated as a public health officer overseas.
00:33:01 [no question] Williams talked about his relationship with his father, whom he didn’t
see during the war except on “idyllic vacations,” and with his eccentric grandfather,
who loved to collect memorabilia, read, and built a significant library (which included
Franklin’s original Arctic expedition report).
00:40:38 [no question] He observed that when WWII ended, his father had three boys and no
house, so in 1946 he set himself up in a dermatology practice and bought a home in
Vancouver. He commented on his father’s sense of the value of material wealth, but
conservatism in how he acquired it. He also commented on the experience of these
boys growing up with other “McDonald St gang” kids of similar conditions (fathers at
war), and how fathers in the neighborhood, returning home to children they basically
didn’t know, was a serious challenge.
00:48:00 [no question] Continuing to talk about how his father coped with coming home after
WWII, he discussed the stories his father would tell, not about their experiences in the
war, but about the hiking that he and his war buddies engaged in. So when he
returned, his father would occasionally give each of his boys a Saturday to spend with
him, which Williams spent fishing and on the shore. But eventually this wasn’t
enough for his father, who, wanting property, would take the entire family on weekly
“expeditions” to look at properties.
00:53:45 [no question] Continuing to talk about his father’s return from the war, he discussed
catching his father’s love of gardening, including his employing gardeners and getting
him jobs with estate gardeners around Vancouver. He said his father met these high
society people in Vancouver through curing their stress-related diseases, but in the
end he got Williams a job with the head gardener of the Foley estate.
00:58:56 [no question] Williams talked about Evans, his mentor in gardening, noting that he
serendipitously introduced him to the meconopsis (blue poppy), which are located in
very few places in the world.
01:02:46 Question: Was Evans one of your teachers? Answer: Absolutely. He had tremendous
patience, and showed him as a boy how to do everything related to the garden in an
environment with few distractions. Follow up: Recognition in your mind of the
interest in this? Answer: Very much so; he said that being able to replicate what
Evans was teaching him became an obsession for him, making school almost
secondary.
01:07:22 [no question] He pointed to his experience at Athlone School, starting a year younger
than most children as a fundamental event in his childhood. He explained how the
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school was started by the widow of a Battle of Britain pilot who lived across from his
grandfather, and how starting a year early advanced his education but disadvantaged
him socially.
01:13:00 [no question] “Another fortuitous thing” that happened in his childhood was being
sent to a “long-established girls’ camp” on the Pacific coast that introduced him to
tides, shorelines, and the ecology of the tide-pools. He was “mesmerized” by the sea,
and when he expressed his interest to his father, who got more involved in these seaside vacations, his father enrolled him in an entomology course taught by Prof.
Spencer, a famous UBC professor. Even though he was a world-renown scholar,
Spencer related well to young people and helped Williams understand how to make
things, a skill Williams believed lost in current generations.
01:19:58 Question: Was your father recognizing you as a smart boy? Answer: He didn’t think
so, only because he didn’t excel in school until college. Rather he was a curious boy,
which his dad encouraged under certain restrictions.
01:21:30 [no question] Just as plants were expanding in his domain, so was his curiosity in
animals. He contextualized how, living just on the alluvial floodplain in Vancouver,
he got to know the first white child born in the province of British Columbia, local
farm wife Mrs. McCleary. He talked about how late in Canada’s history BC was
settled in the late 1800s. He then reviewed his childhood, getting excited about
horticulture and animals and discussing how being at a place long enough gave a
wonderful reward of seeing one’s roots flourish.
01:26:35 Question: Elementary and junior high school? Answer: He said that the richness of
the experience was really outside school, but he said elementary school was a highquality education. He talked about the importance of having a male fifth-grade
teacher, the Canadian educational culture of corporal punishment, and the quintessentially British domains of soccer, choir, etc. He didn’t think any of this as
unusual, but observed how interested and involved his parents were in his education.
01:32:23 [no question] Continuing to describe his experiences in school, he talked about how
social mixing really happened in middle schools, which were huge in Vancouver,
while elementary and high schools were small. He recalled enjoying shop class in
junior high, which all boys had to take; he also remembered the tracking system
beginning in junior high school.
01:36:30 [no question] He talked about the diverse socio-economic composition of his junior
high school, in which blue-collar sawmill workers’ kids met professional workers’
and displaced persons’ kids. He related this to the state of the domestic economy—
with massive local building that attracted immigrant workers—and how these very
tough kids from Eastern Europe were in many of his classes. But he said shop classes
focused them, which he loved.
01:39:54 [no question] Responding to a question about science curriculum in junior high, he
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explained how he got deep mentorship in the natural world by individuals outside of
school, and also by his relationship with two boys from the most formative family in
his boyhood development. He talked about a class of gentlemen farmers—“second
sons”—who established themselves on Vancouver Island near where he was
exploring the natural world. He grew very close with one of these farmers’ sons, the
Groves, whom he first met collecting butterflies, etc. He shared a number of
anecdotes about their farm, their schooling, and their British connections.
01:48:32 Question: Your younger brother? Answer: While not quite as into what Paul was
doing, he said, Donald was watching everything. He talked about how one of
Donald’s friends recently wrote a book about life in Vancouver, parts of which were
learned by proxy from Paul’s experiences. He gave some examples of this trend,
including the self-sufficiency they were developing in preparation for “the Russians.”
01:52:16 [no question] He observed that another influence, as a young “collector of things,”
was his experiences on two farms he visited regularly. Along with interesting farm
experience, reading Ernest Thompson Seton’s work on wildlife and native craft was
influential in his intense teenage years with the Groves boys.
01:57:51 [no question] Continuing to talk about his teen years, he discussed stamp collecting,
which required powers of observation, noting that he “just assimilated the natural
world.” Follow up: That’s the essence of being a scientist? Answer: Yes; he said this
was so much so that when he got to university, he was bored.
02:00:01 End of First Interview Session
Second Interview Session (January 18, 2010): Digital File
Time
Keywords
00:00:00 Start of Interview/Interviewer’s Introduction
00:00:16 Question: Your teenage years? Answer: Williams talked about how junior high was a
transitional moment, meeting many people he’d not normally interact with.
00:02:39 [no question] Reviewing how he was socially immature (younger than most of his
classmates), he said the natural world took sharper focus for him than classmates,
who were beginning to be interested in girls—especially through reading Seton. So
getting out of school was more interesting than being in school—he collected a group
of friends who liked to go out exploring Vancouver Island. He detailed the history of
the jack pines and old growth fir regions of the island and how they explored it.
00:09:08 [no question] Continuing to talk about how they explored the island during the week,
on weekends and holidays, he became the “third son” on the Grove family’s farm,
where they trapped and hunted. He talked about trapping muskrat, etc.
00:12:14 [no question] In high school, he said, they came away from the large junior high
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experience to a more local (and hence white collar) school situation in which
academics “raised its head.” This marked a change for him, though he continued to be
a conscientious B student who wasn’t particularly interested in school.
00:16:52 Follow up: Noteworthy teachers? Answer: Yes; he remarked that one teacher, his
biology instructor, turned him onto the natural sciences. He discussed being called
“nature boy” in high school, relating several anecdotes that led to this comment. He
said when given the opportunity, he was using the world around him as his mode of
interacting with school, and there was a “very positive feedback loop” for his
bringing this material into class.
00:21:15 [no question] He related a specific experience of doing science in high school to the
previous question about marketing muskrat and the larger issue of how educators
engage students’ interest by doing. He explained how he would take muskrat skins to
Water Street, and how this experience led, later on, to the Fast Plant program —how
to produce a set of ideas that are of higher value than simply ideas.
00:28:42 [no question] Returning to talk about high school, he observed that it was these
mentorships in high school that he found valuable, because they allowed him to do
rather than just talk about. This energized him at the current moment in his career,
when he retired from plant pathology to help teachers in the School of Education to
engage in active education, which motivated him in school.
00:32:45 Follow up: Were you respected for your interests in nature? Answer: He said that
even his parents didn’t necessarily understand, in their social world, but gave him
space to do what motivated him. The space for doing what he enjoyed was different
on the Grove farm, but the social milieu was also very different with its engrained
ideas about race, manhood, and social conformity in the British Empire. He discussed
“slaloming in between” these two traditions, at his home and at the Groves.
00:40:06 Follow up: Did your parents think you were odd? Answer: No; he didn’t think so. He
talked about his brothers and traditional (and he thought anachronistic) discipline in
his home, writing lines or essays. Follow up: Your fellow students? Answer: He guessed he was neutrally perceived, as “nature boy” uninterested in girls but interested in
shop class, etc. Thus he said he gravitated toward a younger set of boys interested in
the outdoors, for whom he could bring an element of experience with the outdoors.
00:45:36 [no question] He related that his parents finally acquired some land in the Fraser
Valley, which he described in some detail. He then explained how at the end of high
school, he sold all his white mice to schoolmates in order to let them go on the last
day of school. This, he thought, demonstrated his creative and somewhat devious
character.
00:50:52 Follow up: So the purchase of the land was fortunate/random? Answer: He said this
was a good way of describing it, discussing how his father’s acquisitiveness would
affect his own later career and how his father turned the land into a farm. This
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experience affected his brothers in different ways. It led to his brother leaving home
before the land was purchased, and being very social, he eventually became a
businessman. Paul became more inquisitive.
00:54:53 [no question] After the departure of his older brother, he observed the younger
brothers gravitated toward the farm, though they still went to Vancouver Island to
learn how to do outdoor skills on their own. He related how the skills he learned there
related to the later bottle biology project he’d done, and how these skills were
common on farms in the 1950s. He also thought this ability to do things on his own
made him attractive to graduate school instructors.
00:59:23 [no question] Returning to the original question about his father’s land, he observed
that his father was a bit of a loner, deciding not to get into an enclave with other
military veterans, but purchase land 35 miles out of Vancouver and built a farm from
scratch, which appealed deeply to him. He observed that his plan through HS was not
to continue with academics, but to have an outdoor life. He felt privileged to have
engaged in these kinds of activities without the distractions of contemporary life.
01:07:50 Follow up: Were you identified as exceptional? Answer: He didn’t think so. He
thought he was aware that he’d be tested, but didn’t realize the whole tracking system
that lay behind these aptitude tests. He recalled the interview process that went after
high school and how they thought he “might graduate” if he applied himself.
01:11:54 Question: When did you decide to go to university? Answer: He observed that he was
mentally fighting the notion during high school, having and idyllic view of living in
nature and farming/fishing, etc. He also said he wasn’t aware of marks, which
weren’t as important in his school. He noted that his brother and father fought
constantly about grades, but it wasn’t a significant issue for him.
01:16:39 Follow up: Were other schools in your consciousness? Answer: He said that
agriculture was his heading, and people didn’t apply to numerous colleges. He spoke
again about work they did on the Groves farm.
01:20:05 Follow up: You’ve talked more about the Groves than anyone else. Answer: He
talked about how formative an influence they were on him and his brother, and
explained that they provided emancipation from the restrictive environment at his
parents’ house. He again compared his family and the Groves boys and their
trajectories. He speculated who he might have become had he not experienced these
things.
01:27:25 End of Second Interview Session
Third Interview Session (January 25, 2010): Digital File
Time
Keywords
00:00:00 Start of Interview/Interviewer’s Introduction
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00:00:20 Question: Talk about UBC. Answer: Williams reflected again about his ideal career
and how the Groves boys preceded him to university. The summer before going to
UBC, however, he and the Groves decided to build a barn with nothing more than an
axe. He also reviewed his first interview with the UBC counselor in which they
thought he might succeed if he applied himself.
00:04:44 [no question] He observed that he looked forward to entering the College of
Agriculture at UBC, and talked about how all incoming freshman were obligated to
attend a Saturday session during which each department presented their subject
matter, at the end of which was an exam. Students also competed with one another for
the “Dean’s Cup,” which he won during his freshman year.
00:09:10 [no question] He continued by talking about hazing during the first week of one’s
freshman year, which involved bringing freshman “to knee”, and could occasionally
get out of hand. Men hazed men and women-women, but he narrated a number of
specific challenges that occurred as a result of the feeling among “aggies,” foresters,
engineers and nurses that they were superior to others. Some examples were barrel
broncos (for aggies), chariot races, and fighting with other majors at class breaks.
00:14:53 [no question] He talked about the challenging academic environment he found at
UBC, having to take introductory science, math and humanities courses. Courses ran
the whole year and weren’t offered all by the Ag School. He said he struggled most
with math courses, and noted that he didn’t take any languages in undergrad.
00:18:52 [no question] He pointed to the dean of the Ag School, who also felt strongly about
public speaking training for all majors, was particularly influential in his freshman
year. He was struggling with most courses he was in, at this time. He also explained
the Canadian grading system (1st & 2nd class honors, pass, fail).
00:21:00 Follow up: You struggled in math? Answer: He said he found it difficult all through
high school, wondering how his friends could do it easily. While he passed freshman
math, he said calculus was coming up and he didn’t know anything about it.
00:21:54 [no question] He talked about enjoying his freshman year at UBC, and distinctly
remembered his zoology lecturer talking about the Nobel prize being given for the
identification of DNA for the first time in salmon sperm. He also recalled getting
acquainted for the first time with black friends through Canada’s interaction with
Caribbean Commonwealth nations.
00:25:50 Follow up: Were you very familiar with the Commonwealth? Answer: Absolutely—
his father had answered the call to serve the Commonwealth in WWII. He also talked
about going to the Commonwealth Games with the Groves and the relative isolation
of BC compared with the rest of Canada.
00:30:16 Follow up: Were blacks segregated at all at UBC? Answer: No; he said whatever
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prejudices existed related to ethnic distinctions. He talked about how interesting his
friendships with black Caribbeans were.
00:32:44 Follow up: Women? Answer: There were very few in the Ag School, and Home Ec.
was separate and exclusively the domain of women.
00:33:17 [no question] He explained how he spent a lot of his time outside of school again,
partly because he was living at home and biking to school.
00:35:55 Follow up: Did you have to learn French because of Canadian culture? Answer: In
BC, French was “totally off the radar,” since the French movement hadn’t arrived yet.
Another component to this was that Vancouver was relatively small when he was
growing up, and in the process of the forest and mining boom.
00:40:30 Question: Feeling at the end of freshman year? Answer: He wasn’t particularly
pleased with his achievement, nor was it clear where he was going, since he still
loved his father’s farmland.
00:42:34 [no question] He recalled realizing that he needed to get a summer job and heard that
university students could be entitled to jobs in plant and animal science in the
Canadian Dept of Agriculture. He applied and got a position in the pomology
department in Summerland (one of the premier fruit-producing regions in Canada)
working with Charles Lappens, who was breeding “all manner of” varieties of fruit.
00:46:13 Follow up: Was this a seminal moment? Answer: He explained how that summer
affected him, in that he was actually doing the cutting edge scientific research of
propagating plants—he was working on grafting mutated strains of fruit trees into
existing plants to effect new varietals. This was much more exciting to him than the
classes he’d been taking freshman year, and he liked the mentorship relationship.
00:50:21 Follow up: Were you intimidated that the plants had been irradiated? Answer: No; the
science of it motivated him and he knew the program had been going on for a long
time. He explained how he was actually asked to apply cytogenetic techniques to
make seminal discoveries about the plant chromosomes, and how this simply
“became part of” him (disciplining one to make connections and enjoy discovery).
00:55:25 [no question] Outside of work at Summerland, he observed, he biked a lot and
enjoyed the different flora and fauna of the inland region, completely different than
the coastal region. In this sense, he felt his relationship with the station photographer
had been seminal in developing his interests. This led him to muse about the
importance both of genetics and environment in determining historical outcomes.
00:59:00 [no question] He explained how the seminal moment of this summer came down to an
experience in Summerland Experimental Station’s garden, when Dave Mackintosh
offered for Williams to join his lab the next summer studying plant pathology. The
newness of this appealed to him, though he knew “next to nothing” about it.
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01:02:13 [no question] Reviewing his average performance his freshman year, he said that his
experience his freshman summer caused him to then get first-class in all his
sophomore courses, although he struggled with calculus. He recounted how the dean
allowed him to do a series of difficult directed studies in lieu of calculus, which he
just didn’t understand. He reflected on how he’d carried the realization of this
experience (that each student was exceptional in their own way and exceptions are
important) with him in his own teaching.
01:10:43 [no question] A “derivative” of this experience, he noted, his dean knew his father,
but he thought that the dean would have done this for any of his students. The
downside of this was that Williams wouldn’t be eligible for the medal that his father
had won at UBC during his career, which he thought must have been a blow to his
father, though not to him.
01:15:21 [no question] He said that as plant pathology came on his radar screen, he applied to
the Summerland plant pathology position, but so did a graduate student from Holland.
So he was able to fill an opening at a larger plant virology lab on UBC’s campus
instead, which allowed him to be immersed in plant virology. This proved to be
serendipitous, since it helped immerse him in the most cutting-edge science.
01:20:25 [no question] Correcting himself (that he wasn’t at UBC in summer 1957, but ’58), he
explained that his father gave each of his boys the gift of a summer in Europe after
their second year of college. He explained that the summer started with a guided tour
from Quebec to France, England, Germany, Italy, etc., at the end of which he went to
the World’s Fair in Brussels, where he got to experience Sputnik in person.
01:25:14 [no question] Returning from the “immersive experience” of summer 1957, he
returned ready for a more advanced year of college, including an invitation to do
some plant pathology in the summer of 1959. At the same time, he was intensively
propagating on his own, recounting how his efforts had led to the growth of a massive
crabapple tree and other plants in Vancouver’s Williams Park.
01:30:41 [no question] He recounted how, when it came time for him to choose a major, he
chose plant pathology because horticulture was somewhat second nature. He got
interested in potato culture through a research project going on at UBC that
investigated strains of potato virus that may have caused the Irish Potato Famine.
01:33:18 Follow up: Talk about the virology lab in summer 1958. Answer: He said he didn’t
have the same kind of experience of discovery as at Summerland, but he developed
great friendships with the lab personnel, who were mentors to him and helped
transition him to a dream of research.
01:35:48 [no question] He talked about how, at the same time the virology staff were
mentoring him to go forward, his professors at UBC were also encouraging him. He
talked specifically about Vernon Brink, one of Canada’s preeminent naturalist and
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conservationist and an alumnus of UW-Madison. Brink had been one of his mentors
in directed study and suggested he go on to UW for graduate training.
01:39:23 Follow up: Had you given thought to grad school? Answer: He thought it was being
among the young talented virologists in summer 1958 made the decision seem
natural. Many of these talented scientists had been trained in the US and were
advising him in that direction.
01:41:22 [no question] Continuing to narrate his development toward UW, he recalled that his
major plant pathology professor, Neil MacLean (an American), called Glenn Pound,
for whom he’d worked during high school. Pound immediately offered Williams an
assistantship, which led him to talk about the importance of the WARF money in
terms of encouraging graduate students.
01:46:02 Question: Were you apprehensive about leaving Canada for the US? Answer: He
cited the example of an aunt who had married an American to show how the tone of
American-Canadian relationships in his family had already been set. He also recalled
his father’s view of Wisconsin, which was all funneled through the experience of the
Depression.
01:49:34 Follow up: You had applied to UW? Answer: Yes; he told another interesting
anecdote about attaching a photo of himself onto the application for the plant
pathology department. When he arrived at UW, he had already begun to collect fungi
for his research assistantship.
01:53:08 [no question] He talked about the train journey to Madison, arranging for quarters in
Tripp Hall, and being met at the train station.
01:55:43 End of Third Interview Session
Fourth Interview Session (February 1, 2010): Digital File
Time
Keywords
00:00:00 Start of Interview/Interviewer’s Introduction
00:00:18 Question: Talk about coming to Madison. Answer: Williams observed again that
some of his most formative undergraduate experiences had been outside of university
classes. He also reviewed the train journey through the Midwest and west, finally
arriving at Madison to Tripp Hall and realizing that this new stage would be “truly
formative.” He explained his feelings of wonder at the expansive corn fields of the
Midwest, and the beauty of Lake Mendota as one of his first views of town.
00:05:13 [no question] Continuing to talk about his experience of moving into Madison, he
recalled walking that first day to Moore Hall, the department center. In the open
office of the department, he met Audrey Dunlap (who he later discovered “ran the
department”), who introduced him to Pound as “the boy with the bunny fur around
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his neck”. He explained the humor of the background to this story.
00:09:13 [no question] Continuing to narrate his first experiences at UW, he talked about
meeting Glenn Pound, whose appearance and office surprised him but who welcomed
him very cordially. Pound introduced him to his laboratory in T-18 (now the site of
Russell Laboratories), a Quonset hut that had been erected to help contain the
burgeoning population of the university. Describing the lab, he noted that he was to
be in charge of Pound’s two major pieces of equipment in that lab.
00:15:41 [no question] On the same afternoon, he recounted, Pound showed him the radish
plots (on the marsh where Neilson Tennis Stadium is now) that he was to care for; as
well as plots he had on what is now the Hill Farms development.
00:18:50 [no question] Continuing to talk about his introduction to the department, he related a
number of important people serving in support roles. Pound introduced him formally
the next day to Audrey Dunlap and Marlene Steinmetz, daughter of Albert Steinmetz,
the manager of the teaching and research greenhouses. He described Steinmetz as a
warm, accommodating and influential person in his life.
00:21:34 [no question] Associated with Steinmetz, he explained, were four managers who
assigned particular crop domains (the defining division in the department). They put
him under J.C. Walker (vegetable crops), who became the “paramount” influence in
his career at UW. He mused about how he related all of these experiences early on in
his letters home daily.
00:25:52 [no question] He talked about his beginning research in T-18, a group of about a
dozen graduate students who became his closest colleagues. Pound, a “curricular
minimalist,” allowed him to skip a number of classes in order to get into research, but
made him take the difficult (biochemistry and other) courses.
00:30:31 [no question] He discussed dorm life at UW for him. He got to know another
Canadian grad student (who later became a prominent geographer), as well as Dennis
Maki and Dion Kempthorne (member of the 1963 Badger football team). He
expressed how difficult dorm life was for him because he was deprived of sleep,
though he observed positive elements of dorm life such as the food, social pranks, etc.
00:36:17 [no question] Returning to his experiences at T-18, who were his socializing and
support group, he discussed regular bridge games at lunchtimes, as well as the
demographic composition of the department’s graduate cohort.
00:37:31 [no question] He talked about his “epiphany” about the US educational system. After
the first exam in fungal physiology, (for which he only answered only one question
and thought he was going to fail out and have to go home) two fellow students “took
him in hand” and taught him how to take examinations in the US. He credited Paul
Allen with giving him an A even though he was adjusting to the US system.
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00:41:17 [no question] He observed that very soon thereafter, his research really got going
because his coursework wasn’t difficult for him. Since he made it a habit to seek out
techniques used by more senior scholars (he was impoverished with respect to
equipment), Pound allowed him to apply for part of his NIH grant to obtain new
equipment. This theme in his career had continued into the bottle biology project.
When he couldn’t get equipment for himself, he “rubbed shoulders” with other
scientists who had access to the equipment he needed.
00:46:46 Question: Thesis topic? Answer: His topic was basically chosen by Pound’s funding
stream—he studied the “OO spore,” which led him into studying the nature of disease
in crops.
00:50:20 Follow up: What about the nature of the disease captured you? Answer: Two things:
as he applied the fungus to plant populations, there were differences of response,
which he studied at the genetic level. He talked about the kind of apparatus he needed
to study these responses.
00:53:20 [no question] He described how encouraging his professors were to him during
graduate school. He discussed specifically John Berbee, with whom he resurrected
the department’s weekly colloquium. He talked about how structured the event was
and quipped about how he thought they burned the department out quickly. This
academic vigor paralleled the graduate student social life that kept students up
playing cards until 3 or 4 am.
00:58:54 [no question] He discussed the tradition of oral preliminary exams. After passing, it
was tradition to take chocolates and cigars around to all the department members. He
listed who was on his prelims committee.
01:02:00 Follow up: Reflect more on that? Answer: Williams expanded on how he prepared for
the exams, which tested the certification fields.
01:03:46 [no question] He explained in detail the preparations for language requirements—
since he’d taken no foreign language as an undergrad, he had to learn either French,
German, or Spanish, which was grueling. He described the language proficiency
exam, which he flunked the first time and which he categorized as “a farce.”
01:08:18 Follow up: Preparing for the oral exam? Answer: He said that he prepared like he
prepared for any exam, by reviewing course notes and learning by doing. He
remembered Pound advising him to go out and see a movie the night before his exam.
He thought the exam went well from people’s comments afterward, and also from his
experience that the role of the major professor was to make sure his students were
prepared, though this was less evident today than it had been before.
01:13:57 Follow up: Dissertation? Answer: He said that very quickly after his prelims, one of
the promising virologist in UW’s dept. needed to move for personal reasons;
thereafter Pound asked him to take over Shepherd’s lettuce project until they replaced
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Paul Williams #1069
him. Thus in Fall 1961, he became the lettuce expert in the department.
01:17:16 [no question] He explained how, through his good research and his intervention with
the lettuce research, he knew he’d finish his PhD in his 3rd year. So in that year, the
department made an offer for him to take J. C. Walker’s position when he retired.
Follow up: Were you stunned? Answer: He thought he was probably surprised, but
also thought it was wonderful.
01:20:36 [no question] Because this situation was somewhat unusual, the dept. asked Williams
to prepare for the position, and then when he was finished, to go (on salary) away,
anywhere he wanted to.
01:22:36 Follow up: Walker? Answer: He answered that Walker’s name opened doors. The
department asked him to tail Walker, the greatest plant pathologist in the world at the
time, to learn what he knew. At the same time, the national sauerkraut packers built a
cabbage greenhouse in Walker’s name.
01:25:11 [no question] Continuing to talk about his early years at UW, he noted that Pound,
needing to travel for a Rockefeller project, asked him to finish quickly. So he
explained how he wrote up one portion of his project. At the same time, he had
established good relationships with the Boyce-Thompson Research Institute, so he
asked to go there for a year.
01:27:06 Follow up: The PhD? Answer: He explained how the defense went fine, but he was
only 23 when he got the PhD.
01:27:58 [no question] He explained that in addition to being young, he moved into Walker’s
greenhouses when he moved to another greenhouses. He also talked about getting his
own graduate students, beginning with Jim Strandburg and Howard Harding.
01:29:32 [no question] Continuing to talk about graduate students, he shared an anecdote about
how harsh Walker could be with his graduate students. One of his students, a South
Asian, had been looking at clubroot, which Williams then took up and won an
Eriksson medal (which no American had won previously).
01:34:06 [no question] From this experience, he thought, he recognized that if he stayed with a
subject long enough, he could push beyond the boundaries. This also pointed to
Pound’s style of leadership, which was to read people accurately, keep information
organized, and be active in public service. While he wasn’t a “joiner,” he did watch
Pound and Walker as leaders, admiring their deep sense of history. Follow up: You
enjoyed Walker? Answer: Immensely; he talked about the hours they spent together
traveling, while he was seconded to him.
01:40:13 Follow up: Cabbage grown where? Answer: He related how cabbage was brought into
southeastern WI by the German and Scandinavian tradition. Walker was the student
of L. R. Jones, who solved the cabbage disease problem of the state.
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01:41:38 [no question] He then talked a little about Walker’s educational history and about the
“big four” in the department during its early history, and the lineage he, Walker and
Pound had at UW. Follow up: Was Walker part of the manufacturing family from
Racine? Answer: No; but he talked about other local relatives he had, and about the
“imprinting” he’d undergone by being involved in the lives of these two “giants.”
01:44:27 Follow up: They would’ve been careful about who they invested in? Answer: He was
always cognizant of this heritage and that he’d taken the “road less traveled” in the
department.
01:46:11 Question: Then what? Answer: He talked about two social dimensions that had
occurred in the meantime—he negotiated with Paul Ginsberg to move out of his
dormitory, and settled in a room at Marion Peabody West’s house (daughter of Arthur
Peabody, famous campus architect at UW), eating at the Three Squares eating coop
(for $.90/day). Then during graduate school Pound applied for Williams to be a
Knapp Residential Fellowship, which he took advantage of for his last three years as
a graduate student.
01:52:48 [no question] He recounted his transition to being a young professor, becoming more
familiar with his professors, and meeting his wife at a Wesleyan church function.
They talked about his wife’s family background in Green Bay, her education, and her
dorm life at UW.
01:59:29 [no question] He reflected on what was “in the works” that first year, when he moved
his office to Moore Hall in anticipation of Russell Labs. He reviewed departmental
changes in those exciting years, and related how in early 1964, Glenn Pound asked
him to take over his students and research, since he’d been asked to be the dean of the
Ag School.
02:03:33 Question: Talk about the Boyce-Thompson Institute. Answer: He discussed the
history of BTI, when, after the Spanish American War, wealthy Arizona copper (and
gold) prospector Boyce Thompson built an institute for basic plant research in
Yonkers, NY. It was such an important institution that it had its own journal, and used
this to accumulate a fabulous library of literature on plant biology. He talked about
the incredible resources at the disposal of the Institute.
02:09:26 Follow up: Was BTI more sophisticated? Answer: Yes; sophisticated and esoteric,
because all his mentorship at UW was to keep “one foot in the furrow” (to keep
grounded in the experience of the state). His research at BTI was esoteric, but was
encouraged because it was the model of science research moving forward into the
Sputnik age at universities. He talked about other grants he received subsequently.
02:13:54 Follow up: Were you ever tempted to work at BTI permanently? Answer: He
observed that while they had a wonderful experience, they were deeply rooted at UW
and were excited about the prospect of Russell Lab and the young cohort of
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Paul Williams #1069
professors at UW. He also recounted getting offered jobs at Canadian universities, but
the scale of access and quality made it appealing to stay at UW.
02:18:17 [no question] He talked about the collegiality and support that existed among his
former professors, who welcomed them with open arms into the dept. upon their
return from NY. He also discussed differences between his “non-joiner” personality
and that of previous faculty.
02:20:39 Question: Talk about tenure. Answer: He recalled moving back into University
Houses upon arrival from NY, and tenure not happening for a couple more years. He
recalled U-Houses as being a wonderful experience, and also recounted moving into
Russell Labs right next to Walker’s lab.
02:23:02 [no question] He discussed working with graduate students, some from Glenn Pound,
and his innate ability to identify quickly whether students would be capable of conducting productive PhD research. In cases where students weren’t going to cut it, he
tried to move them into different tracks in which they would succeed. He explained
how he measured this and how he’d discuss with students when he felt this was the
case. The “real gems,” he said, were the students who were driving him.
02:29:57 Follow up: Tenure? Answer: He said the derivative of the social mix was lots of
publication, etc. He noted that tenure didn’t loom large in his consciousness, such that
he didn’t even know he had tenure until he saw his name in the Capital Times. His
career then spanned the change from this informal tenure procedure to “the
dehumanization of the academic world.” This, he felt, was a move away from a
feeling of privilege to a feeling of entitlement.
02:35:16 End of Fourth Interview Session
Fifth Interview Session (February 8, 2010): Digital File
Time
Keywords
00:00:00 Start of Interview/Interviewer’s Introduction
00:00:18 Question: Talk about your research program in the early 1960s. Answer: Williams
contextualized that, returning from Boyce-Thompson, where he’d picked up microscopy skills, he realized that the field of plant pathology was in a stage of pivotal
transition from “descriptive”/environmental plant pathology to the investigation of
disease at the cellular, biochemical and physiological levels. Moving into Russell
Labs, he and colleagues were then able to write an equipment grant to prepare
scientifically for this transition.
00:05:19 [no question] He talked about his “research lineage,” remarking that he had the good
fortune to have some truly brilliant students. He detailed the accomplishments of
Noel Keen, who was an Iowa farmboy, but applied everything he learned in the
classroom to his lab research (could “operationally think biochemically”), and thus
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Paul Williams #1069
had 17 publications by the time he left UW, helped him untangle the “knotty problem
of clubroot,” and later became a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
00:10:27 [no question] Continuing to talk about how his research program was affected by new
technology, he discussed the arrival of the electron microscope, which allowed them
for the first time to visualize viruses and was one of the pieces of equipment they
acquired for Russell Labs. He believed that a crude version of the electron
microscope had been available for a decade, but post-war technology refined it. He
then talked about how he was able to apply electron microscopy to investigating
clubroot.
00:14:17 [no question] Continuing to talk about changes in his research program, he discussed
advances in cytology and histology that applied light optics to cytochemistry. In its
infancy in the 1960s, this cytochemical technology had to be constructed piece by
piece but later became the standard equipment for biological investigation. He noted
that the electron microscopy was on “day and night” once it was on campus,
following the lead of the medical sciences.
00:18:27 [no question] He told some anecdotes about the team of scientists who were using the
new technology to discover new information during the 1960s, including a microscope lab technician and Canadian cytologist. He related how his team would always
acknowledge granting agencies, including the National Sauerkraut Producers Assoc.,
and how, by the time they started publishing, his team had already solved many of the
problems of clubroot that a new professor at Cambridge was being hired to look at.
00:24:24 [no question] After his work on clubroot, he received the Eriksson medal from the
Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for this work. Follow up: Was this reinforcing
for you? Answer: He said that it was nice to be recognized by others and that the
work was important, but it was the work itself that was interesting and motivating.
00:27:40 [no question] He observed the importance of the “field piece” of investigating
clubroot, by meeting with farmers who were dealing with the disease. This led him to
recognize that an understanding of how the disease develops is only a small piece of
the equation of controlling it.
00:30:26 [no question] He talked about close working relationships with colleagues in the
USDA and horticultural dept.—Warren Gabelman and Clinton Peterson.
00:32:15 [no question] He observed that the reason he was able to undertake such a robust
research program was partly because of state line-item research assistantships enabled
by the lobby of grower groups. Over time, these positions were slowly eroded.
00:35:08 [no question] One other critical relationship in this period, he said, was with a
German postdoc, Rudolph Heitefuss, who initially came to work with Walker and
whom he got to know. Heitefuss invited him to co-edit a volume (Physiological
Plant Plathology, U. Gottingen, 1976) of a prestigious journal series.
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Paul Williams #1069
00:38:01 [no question] The synthesis process of Physiological Plant Pathology, he reflected,
gave him pause to evaluate whether his basic scientific research was engaging normal
people and society at a greater level than just citations in the Annual Review (a
public-ation, he explained, which had been necessitated by the rapidly burgeoning
literature on basic science). He saw this “active and moving” public engagement
growing in his mind after this first decade of basic science research, and setting the
stage for what was to come in his career.
00:43:42 [no question] He related how, in the 1970s, the two genetic “tracks” of how the
pathogens are transmitted through generations and how resistance is developed in
hosts came together in his mind as part of the “endless game” of coevolution. He
discussed the difficulties of studying these genetic tendencies in biennial crops like
cabbage and carrots.
00:48:23 [no question] Continuing to talk about his genetic research in cabbage, he explained
how he collected pathogens and began to “screen” plants to find resistance. He
described the eureka moment when he realized that he could breed fast-flowering
plants in order to used them experimentally.
00:51:56 Follow up: Were you involving graduate students in this project? Answer: Yes; he
immediately got his students involved in breeding and collecting rapid-cycling plants.
Follow up: How quickly did this get published? Answer: The project started in the
early to mid-1970s, but started with turnip plants (which serendipitously was a major
portion of Asian vegetable consumption), not cabbage. He talked about how this was
an early form of genetic modification, but through natural means rather than modern
engineering. These became a central focus of his students’ publication.
00:56:28 [no question] Over time, he realized that these fast-cycling plants might be interesting
in the plant breeding course, noting that even few plant biology students had
experience in breeding plants from seed to seed. But with fast-breeding species this
might be possible. First begun in Biocore, then at Cornell and UC-Davis, he then
worked to breed mutated strains that had more obvious phenotype markers. Interest in
these plants went beyond just cycle speed to the method of it.
01:02:06 Follow up: Is this the beginning of an international reputation? Answer: No; the first
demand from his program was from the seed companies, who hired his students as
fast as they graduated. But coming out of the “physiological era,” in which he was a
rising star, he took a “right turn” to work in applied plant pathology.
01:05:30 [no question] Continuing to talk about his choice to leave the “burgeoning” era of
molecular biology, he said it was accompanied by a choice to study arabidopsus
thaliana, which he described as “the quintessential fruit fly of the plant world.”
01:07:41 [no question] Though he became quite knowledgeable about arabidopsus and was
invited to meet with two influential scholars of the plant, he explained why he
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Paul Williams #1069
continued to be most interested in brassica (which had been domesticated far back in
history as a large portion of the world’s food base). He talked about how this long
history of domestication was a story yet to be told even today, a story he knew and
would love to write about.
01:10:55 [no question] He discussed setting up a seed distribution scheme out of his lab called
the Crucifer Genetics Cooperative in 1982.
01:12:39 [no question] As his seed and brassica projects became more applicable to Biocore
and undergraduate education, he observed, his colleagues got more excited about it.
He at this point he was encouraged by a number of individuals to integrate rapidcycling brassicas into secondary school curriculum.
01:17:11 [no question] Continuing to talk about his work with secondary education, he noted
that his projects raised the interest of a colleague who encouraged him to publish an
article in Science magazine. He quipped about the relationships between the editor of
Science and UC-Berkeley, the Wrigley family, and John Carling. The Fast Plant made
the cover of Science.
01:22:31 [no question] Not long after the seminal Science article, Gus deZoeten encouraged
him to talk to the head of University-Industry Relations, Bob Marshall, about a grant
to get Fast Plant started. He applied for the grant with Wayne Becker, who had seen
his plants at work in Biocore.
01:27:51 [no question] Continuing to talk about the beginnings of Fast Plant, he explained how
they decided to go to NSF for a bigger grant and brought on his wife, Coe, and one of
her colleagues to write this grant, since they didn’t have much experience with
educational grants. They took the idea to Wisconsin Academy’s LeRoy Lee, whose
dismissal of it made them all the more determined to get the grant, one that began
over 12 years of funding and caught the attention of Bassam Shakhashiri (later UW’s
School of Ed.).
01:30:59 [no question] At the same time as the NSF grant, the National Academy of Sciences
was developing with the Smithsonian a program for science education outreach which
looked to William’s Fast Plant program to help them start writing curriculum for
plant biology. This was a “naturally developed dissemination scheme” for his work.
01:33:23 Follow up: Other reverberations from the Science article? Answer: He said that the
article was still the central reference for teachers today. After the article was a
“loopback” to the clubroot research, beginning with an invitation in 1968 to attend the
First Congress of Plant Pathology. This resulted in him meeting David Ingram.
01:34:36 [no question] He explained how he then applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship, and
worked with Ingram at Cambridge in 1978. He talked fondly about his time in the UK
with his family and working with the world’s leading canola breeders there.
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Paul Williams #1069
01:36:51 [no question] Reviewing the importance of the educational work he’d done in the
mid-1970s with Fast Plants, he noted that Ingram saw the potential for this work in
Britain. Ingram set up a meeting with wealthy David Sainsbury, who sent his
scientific advisors and some UK school teachers to visit Williams in Madison. This
“rich synergy” led to Sainsbury’s funding of Cambridge’s “Science and Plants for
Schools” (SAPS), modeled around Fast Plants and Bottle Biology.
01:42:03 [no question] Continuing to talk about the UW-SAPS collaboration, he discussed
conducting teacher training workshops at Lancaster University in the UK. He and
Lange mused about the influence UW had had on science education globally.
01:44:09 Question: Were you ever given outside offers? Answer: Many times, he said, but he
didn’t ever consider leaving “this”—work that epitomized the Wisconsin Idea. He
talked about how they implemented the large NSF grants to make sure that science
teachers could do the education they were undertaking.
01:46:35 [no question] Continuing to talk about how his work implemented the Wisconsin
Idea, he talked about how Bottle Biology was created when, working with Milwaukee
Public Schools, they realized that the budget for elementary school science was only
$00.32/year for each kid, and they had to work with other tools. It then became his
hobby to look at landfills and garbage cans to see what could be used to create
scientific equipment. He discussed how this idea led to a “College for Kids”
workshop at Russell Labs, which he wrote up as an NSF grant that got the best
reviews he ever received.
01:49:47 [no question] Continuing to talk about Bottle Biology, he reviewed how they
produced the Bottle Biology manual through Kendall Hunt, who thought it would be
a limited run but continued to have to publish further printings to the point that they
asked to renegotiate the initial contract. He noted that all the proceeds from these
printings had gone directly to the UW Foundation.
01:54:04 Question: What was the reaction of the scientific community at UW? Answer: He
said that it was hard to tell. He soon became president of his professional society,
which gave him a “bully pulpit.” He didn’t think this had much impact there, but the
American Society of Plant Biologists found it very interesting and invited him in the
late 1980s to come to their annual meeting and present his work. This grew into avid
support and led ASPB to sponsor Fast Plants to present at the National Science
Teachers Convention. He talked about how this had been incredibly successful.
02:00:14 Follow up: Do you think you’ve been appreciated here? Answer: He said the
appreciation didn’t faze him, but he was bothered by the fact that while these
innovations were adopted in other places, they weren’t being deployed at UW. While
he didn’t see this as unique to UW, he wondered why, when people were so interested
in scientific innovation, they weren’t as interested in educational innovation.
02:04:58 [no question] Williams and Lange reflected on why they thought this divide between
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Paul Williams #1069
the research university and teaching innovation existed, and why Fast Plants wasn’t
the “pillar of the CBE.” Williams reviewed his deliberate decision to stay with rapidcycling brassica research rather than “basic research” in the late 1960s, a decision that
perhaps set him apart from other professors.
02:12:51 Question: Other elements of Fast Plants development? Answer: Williams referred
back to the Science article, which validated the value of Fast Plants, and observed that
the CrGC had mushroomed to be credited in research across the world.
02:16:38 [no question] Returning to talk about the Fast Plants program, he explained how the
name Wisconsin Fast Plants evolved. Initially, they wanted people to be able to retain
local credit for where plants were developed. He also explained how, at the behest of
the NSF, they approached WARF to patent the materials and science kit that went
along with Fast Plants and Bottle Biology. While this was unusual, WARF went
forward with patenting the materials, though not the seed.
02:21:34 [no question] As the patent work was moving forward, he observed, the National
Academy of the Sciences was also looking for a publisher for their instructional
materials, which was also something that the UW program didn’t want to take on.
Thus, after unsuccessfully trying to get licenses with Wisconsin companies, they
eventually signed a contract with Carolina Biological Supply Company, who
immediately wanted Fast Plants.
02:25:27 Follow up: Did any of the money from this contract come back to Fast Plants?
Answer: He explained the “standard WARF formula” for royalties, which Fast Plant
elected to put their segment into the UW Foundation.
02:28:56 Follow up: Speaking invitations? Answer: He said he accepted very few of them,
since it took a huge amount of energy to prepare talks and he was very busy. He also
talked again about how outside offers weren’t even remotely appealing to him.
02:29:58 [no question] He went on to talk about how many organizations began to realize the
value of what Fast Plants was offering, including Future Farmers of America, who
were concerned with cultural and curricular changes in high schools and wanted to
implement quality agri-science classes that could stand as entrance requirements to
college for bright students.
02:33:34 [no question] Another derivative of Fast Plants at ASPB, he said, was a relationship
with space plant biologists, who were dreaming of what plants could be grown in
different gravitational environments. He explained how Ted Tibbitts, later the director
of the Biotron, was instrumental in getting Fast Plants on a number of Space Shuttle
flights—an alternative to growing much larger plants on the shuttle. This connection
then led to a fruitful relationship with post-Soviet Ukraine in which they asked to use
Fast Plants on their space missions. He described how these missions progressed, including training Ukranian and US school children on how to experiment with Fast
Plants.
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Paul Williams #1069
02:43:33 Follow up: You’ve had a huge impact on education? Answer: Williams questioned
what the impact actually had been, considering that “every day there is a new
generation of kids.”
02:45:20 End of Fifth Interview Session
Sixth Interview Session (February 22, 2010): Digital File
Time
Keywords
00:00:00 Start of Interview/Interviewer’s Introduction
00:00:17 Question: Additional observations about Fast Plants? Answer: Williams said that,
unknown to him, as the patents for Fast Plants were running out, WARF trademarked
the name Fast Plants, which they felt had become branded in the educational market
place. This affected the balance of the royalty stream that ran as a relationship
between Plant Pathology, WARF and Carolina Biological Supply Company.
00:05:54 [no question] He added explanation of why he’d kept the seed separate from the Fast
Plant patents. When the patents were issued, he had started a small private company
(Tetrad), intended as a cottage industry for Madison, to produce rapid-cycling
brassica seed for sale to Carolina. He explained how this process had to be closely
monitored by UW’s external relations review process to assure that there were no
conflicts of interests involved.
00:10:48 Follow up: Was WARF entitled to trademark the kit? Answer: He thought it was a
grey area, since Tetrad may have been interested in trademarking it. He commented
that UW didn’t want to touch the trademark on the product, and explained the
intricacies of the process that was going on behind the scenes at the end of the patent
on Fast Plants in the 1990s.
00:15:30 Follow up: WARF’s claim on patents at UW? Answer: He thought the WARF model
was a good model, though he didn’t think they understood where the name Fast
Plants came from or how they had ownership of it. While he didn’t understand why
WARF wasn’t more forward about the process, he felt good about WARF owning the
trade-mark, knowing that he didn’t have to worry about it and could rest assured that
they would protect the name and the quality of the product.
00:20:38 [no question] He remarked that the challenge of Fast Plant for the current age (since
WARF owned the trade-mark) was to maintain the quality that they’d set, especially
with internet technology “interceding” with the delivery of materials. Thus his
decision to keep the “rapid cycling brassica collection” (the successor to CrGC)
separate from Fast Plants was a key stopgap to keep quality high, out of the hands of
WARF or anyone else.
00:23:49 [no question] Continuing to talk about the current iteration of the Fast Plant program,
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Paul Williams #1069
he discussed a new generation of scholars, Dan and Hedi Baxter Lauffer, who were
instrumental in developing cutting edge website integration. They have also been
involved with Terry Millar in making deliverables accessible to secondary and
college educators. Dan had also been appointed to oversee UW’s Bioenergy grant and
was the president of Tetrad Seed Co.
00:29:31 [no question] Continuing to talk about “the final leg on the stool” of Fast Plants, he
discussed teacher professional development as key to educational excellence in the
US. In relation to this, the Lauffers had worked to get grants for teacher development.
00:32:58 Follow up: This must be satisfying? Answer: He said that being able to turn over
many non-scientific elements of Fast Plants allowed him to relax a little bit and
concentrate on the genetic stock more fully, which was satisfying. He explained how
he’d initially not seen Fast Plants as “science,” but then realized that “the best science
is art.” He saw his work now as art, taking the palate of tools he had and painting with
it genetically.
00:38:11 Follow up: Have you written this up? Answer: He mused about whether it would be
useful to write these observations up in Science, since some of the most profound
observations he had lay between the “boxes” that language sets up for describing
human experience, a space where this synergy happens and that can only be
experienced in the actual research he does. He observed that this was why Fast Plant
was such an interesting diversion from research, because it directly affected his
philosophy about teaching.
00:44:15 Question: Talk about your teaching. Answer: Williams saw his teaching changing
over time, in part as the department moved from a crop-oriented department to the
transitional period prompted by Sputnik and biochemical investigations of crop
disease. Thus he was initially teaching Walker’s old courses on vegetables as well as
newer (team-taught) ones on the science of disease, but the department gradually
even moved away from these crop courses as well.
00:49:32 [no question] At the same time, he said, he became aware of zoology’s Walter Plaut’s
teaching in optical microscopy and the new Biocore curriculum (which stressed highquality lab research across the biological disciplines). Biocore was a limited-access
series of courses that stressed writing as well as research, and was blessed with
abundant resources from the very beginning.
00:54:42 [no question] Continuing to talk about Biocore, he discussed being asked to join the
curriculum when a botany professor was asked to become the director of Kew
Gardens in London. He remembered beginning teaching in Biocore “with temerity.”
While there was no salary associated with the courses—each faculty volunteered—he
said the experience was profoundly beneficial in terms of working with talented
undergraduates and colleagues and “boundary crossing.” He talked about the pulls
and pushes of interdisciplinary teaching.
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00:59:18 [no question] Continuing to talk about Biocore, he observed that he essentially
learned to be a good teacher from Marion Meyer, with whom he team-taught. He
quipped about “wild and wooly” teaching strategies they used during the 1960s
involving bringing radioactive materials into class that would no longer be acceptable
today. But over time they simplified (and he thought improved) what they taught and
how they taught.
01:03:43 Follow up: Admission to Biocore? Answer: He observed that Biocore was most
largely populated by pre-med students, but there were also lots of interesting double
majors as well, fed by a healthy grapevine of information trickling down. He also
discussed the course requirements for Biocore.
01:07:53 Follow up: How does one teach in a lab? Answer: He overviewed the process of
previous reading, group work, extending labs over several weeks, taking “carbon
breaks,” and having dedicated lab space. Follow up: Did you work in Biocore until
retirement? Answer: Pretty much; he might have pulled away right at the end, but still
loved it until the end.
01:12:28 [no question] Returning to his mentorship by Marion Meyer, he observed that getting
his message across to students in Biocore was similar to presenting Fast Plants to
teachers in Madison—one had to be strategic about what language you used. In order
to build what he called a “responsive constituency,” one had to become a story-teller
the likes of other effective faculty on campus (Mosse, Petrovich, etc). This was a
strategy he had to grow into—he didn’t know it at the beginning.
01:18:00 Follow up: Did you teach the intro course? Answer: No; he mused about how
professionally narrow plant pathology was, and whether if he’d taught the intro
course it would have been a success. He talked about how rewarding it was to teach
students in vastly different disciplines.
01:21:37 Follow up: Did you have students who challenged you with provocative ideas?
Answer: All the time; and then, he noted, there were those that you had no idea that
you influenced. He talked about getting a letter from a former student who wanted to
reconnect with him years after being in Biocore, and said that these frequent
“feedback loops” were the icing on the rewards of teaching.
01:28:00 Follow up: Did Biocore faculty meet? Answer: Erratically, and out of need, such as
curriculum or business—it wasn’t a social cohort. Perhaps a seminar or colloquium
would have enriched the Biocore, but it wasn’t there at the time. He suggested that if
Biocore were to survive, professors would have to correct the erosion of interpersonal
relationships that were built as a result of the volunteerism (and value judgement
involved) implicit in the early Biocore personnel (as opposed to academic staff who
teach much of the Biocore today). Follow up: What’s going to happen to Biocore?
Answer: He discussed how the structure had changed, using the example of his new
course in genetics.
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01:36:32 [no question] He moved on to talk about the Plant Breeding and Plant Genetics
Program (PBPG) in which he got involved in the mid-1970s. PBPG is an interdepartmental program of CALS that provided specialized graduate advanced training
on plant breeding and genetics across disciplines—crops, forestry, grass, etc. In its
heyday, PBPG needed a pathology element—building genetic resistance to disease
into new breeds—which Williams provided through his new research on screening
for multiple disease resistance. He explained how his course allowed students to
become experts themselves on breeding disease resistance in the crop in which they
were interested (an extremely useful skill).
01:43:56 Follow up: Did those students go on to academia? Answer: He said it was about an
even split between foreign students going on to high government positions and plant
breeders at seed companies. He mused about the importance of the highly applied
nature of his teaching, which gave students a more rounded view of breeding. But the
trend hadn’t been continued to the present.
01:48:14 [no question] He remarked about how all of his teaching was increasingly “wedged”
between his initial basic research in microscopy and physiology and his work with
Fast Plants, such that some of his later plant breeder students did their work with
rapid-cycling brassicas.
01:51:11 [no question] He talked about how the implementation of Fast Plants in coursework
resulted in weekly discussions in the late 1980s in Dick Burgess’ office in the
Enzyme Institute. He listed participants in these discussions, and observed that after
some time, Phil Certain contacted them about a competition from Howard Hughes
Medical Institute (HHMI) focusing on improving undergraduate education and
outreach at research universities.
01:57:17 [no question] Continuing to talk about the HHMI grant, he explained how he pulled
together the application and submitted it to the Institute. The grant had outreach,
course improvement, and other opportunities that applied the WARF grant model to
offer grants for improving teaching, not just research.
02:01:13 [no question] Continuing to talk about the HHMI grant, he contextualized that at the
same time, Donna Shalala was about to arrive on campus and committed to match the
grant with state funds. He was named interim director on the grant, and he reminisced
about his conversations with Shalala and how she operated in her early years. This
then became the formal creation of the Center for Biological Education (CBE).
02:06:25 Follow up: Were you meeting much resistance? Answer: Very gung-ho as a group of
15 to 20 faculty, he noted, they met every Friday at 7am. He described the energy
with which they went at establishing the CBE. After time and a continuation on the
grant, he also explained the initiative from Tom Sharkey for a broad biology major,
which CBE facilitated. When the Center was well established and had won a new
grant, he stepped down as director.
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02:10:33 [no question] He said that the challenge he faced with the CBE was the need for a
bio-deans meeting, which put him right in the heart of campus politics. He felt the
CBE was never able to live up to its potential, which he felt was to conduct research
in biology education—a kind of meta-analysis of what UW does in educating
students. He didn’t think the central focus of the CBE had been how to improve the
education that student were getting and UW’s outreach function to teachers, partly
because there was never a strategic think-tank organization in the CBE.
02:15:59 [no question] Continuing to talk about whether the CBE met its mission, he explained
that the implementation of the new biology major took steps toward this and more
recently the Institute for Cross-College Biology Education (ICBE) was in the process
of subsuming the CBE and improving the quality of elements of education that are
hard to get at from the perspective of a dean, or associate dean, at the college level.
He was unclear as to whether this would solve the problems of the CBE.
02:18:03 [no question] He reflected about the important questions raised by the explosion of
scientific knowledge at the hands of national funding, especially as regards how it fit
into the public understanding of the core of scientific and biological training and its
connection to the other disciplines and humanities. Some progress had been made,
notably in the Delta Project, but there were still questions for the future.
02:24:21 Follow up: Would you do it again? The HHMI grant? Answer: Absolutely; now he
knew what he could really do with the grant, something he didn’t quite comprehend
at the time. He responded to a question about criticisms of CBE that he’d been one of
the most vocal critics, and noted that the HHMI prospectus could have been written
differently to emphasize research on the fundamental nature of educational change
that was necessary.
02:28:42 Follow up: How did you do all this? Answer: He said one of the best derivatives of
Fast Plants was that it halved his sleep requirements. He also talked about having
excellent staff and a few great graduate students.
02:32:37 [no question] He suggested that the problem with CBE’s model (and indeed with the
larger American society) was that it had so many resources early on that it didn’t
force good people to come up with great ideas and go out and get funding for them.
He related this to the larger society, noting that the abundance of resources had not
forced people to come up with truly creative solutions to the difficult problems.
02:36:59 End of Sixth Interview Session
Seventh Interview Session (February 24, 2010): Digital File
Time
Keywords
00:00:00 Start of Interview/Interviewer’s Introduction
00:00:20 Question: The interface of art and science? Answer: Williams observed that emerging
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out of early bottle biology work with secondary school students, he wondered what
would happen if he introduced it to 3rd-year Biocore students. This observation
emerged from watching the natural curiosity and creativity of 9 and 10 year olds and
wondering what would happen if that were tapped in talented college students.
00:05:28 [no question] He explained how he introduced bottle biology to his Biocore class,
including how they needed to find bottles, engineer their project, and work
individually and in groups toward a celebratory festival that showed what students
had done. He noted that almost all the students engaged fully in the project.
00:09:45 [no question] Continuing to talk about his experiment with bottle biology on campus,
he told some anecdotes about how it made an impact in students’ lives. Serendipitously during this semester, a CNN Education reporter bumped into some of his
students with these bottles, got interested in the project, and filmed some of the
presentations. One student in particular explored the decomposition of a squirrel in
his bottle, but many of the bottle presentations were spectacular. And the campus
newspaper began to pick up on anecdotes from the course.
00:15:39 Follow up: Why didn’t you replicate that again? Answer: He didn’t know, but did talk
about how whenever he was asked to stand in for his colleagues for more than one
class, he would often use bottle biology and always got a good response from it.
00:18:05 [no question] He explained in more detail about how one had to work to retain the 5th
grade mind, in terms of curiosity and pre-socialization openness, which made him
interested in the “wow factor” that humanizes us. Follow up: Do your colleagues
accept this as research? Answer: Not many; but that didn’t bother him because he
recognized his students as his responsive constituency. He went on to question
whether modern technology was enhancers or detractors from the “11 year old mind”
that was his model for bottle biology.
00:24:11 [no question] Going on to answer the question of why he didn’t replicate bottle
biology for undergraduates, he speculated that perhaps he lacked the time during that
intense time in his career, when his research, graduate students, and travel were
engaging so much of his energy.
00:28:36 Question: Were you involved with the Teaching Academy? Answer: He recalled
being invited to be part of the inaugural Academy, especially how it was refreshing to
meet like minds and enjoy a greater breadth of disciplinary experience. The Academy
was fairly formalized, and he didn’t think it had succeeded in actualizing teaching
methods or creating social synergy, but he thought the central strength of it was that it
allowed you to feel that you weren’t alone in this massive university.
00:34:57 Question: Anything else about the CBE? Answer: He reflected on the “essence” of
such a cross-college center such at the CBE. Noting that within the last 5 to 7 years,
he’d been called before review committees of the CBE, he said that he’d recently
recommended that the center had outlived its usefulness. He explained what he
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Paul Williams #1069
believed CBE’s mission had been when it had been created.
00:40:35 [no question] Continuing to explain why he felt CBE had outlived its usefulness, he
contextualized that he believed that centers on campus, at their inception, needed a
built-in group of its membership who would review whether it is implementing its
strategic mission. This flaw resulted from the fact that faculty often have good ideas
for how things should be done, but also often have little time to implement those
ideas. Thus, ideas get adequate resources that allow faculty to step back and allow
non-faculty to deliver on the mission. But staff always bring a variety of visions,
passions, and creativity that give mixed results, especially in terms of leadership—he
suggested that graduate students seeking PhD’s were usually the most effective. CBE,
he felt, was “humming along” for the first five years or so due to good hires, etc., but
thereafter it was unable to acquire funding from HHMI—so “something left the
Center” and has been more dependent on state funding.
00:48:36 [no question] He lamented that in its early years, as a center of educational innovation, CBE could have resolved one of the central “albatrosses” currently around the
chancellor’s neck by addressing the quality of the undergraduate biology educational
experience, which he described as balkanized between the schools, lecturing faculty,
and lab professors.
00:51:17 [no question] Continuing to discussed the weakness of the CBE, he observed that
very few faculty attend CBE meetings anymore (it was mostly academic staff),
indicative of an abrogation of responsibility for teaching innovation at the faculty
level in lieu of pursuing research, especially before tenure. But he believed that by the
time faculty got tenure, they’d been “socialized out of teaching,” and felt that deans
and department chairs needed to re-correct the balance between research and teaching
if this were to change.
00:55:29 Follow up: You think that’s indicative of all centers? Answer: He didn’t want to
generalize, pointing to the example of the LaFollette Institute for Public Policy, which
he felt served the needs of WI well.
00:57:38 Follow up: Was Shalala supportive? Answer: Yes; he reviewed how she supported it
with state money. Follow up: What would have happened had she stayed? Answer: It
might have been different, but still during her years, the structural issues (hiring staff;
tenure for research, etc.) stayed the same. He also felt that people hired for their great
ideas for teaching should have been considered faculty and tenured for teaching.
01:01:45 Follow up: The argument that UW can give undergraduates a first-class research education? Answer: He admitted that UW had been at the forefront of this argument, and
his own sons had benefitted from being in labs with professors, but this was for the
“guided few,” while the majority suffered from inadequate teaching. Follow up: Are
you in the minority holding this position on CBE? Answer: He didn’t know, but
thought strategically the dean should listen to him and other past/current directors.
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01:04:49 Question: Talk about your own research and work with PhDs. Answer: He reviewed
how he left to go to the Boyce-Thompson Institute during the early work of Jim
Strandburg with clubroot, and how he emphasized both field work and lab work with
his students.
01:08:23 [no question] When he returned from BTI with greater funding streams (both federal
and UW), he said, his students got deeply involved with electron microscopy. This
allowed him to focus on two distinct research programs—one with breeding cabbage,
supported by local business interests, and microscopy on disease resistance research
federally funded.
01:14:32 [no question] He talked about how he handled graduate students, by showing them
the range of material to work on, allowing them independence, and being available to
answer questions. He discussed how graduate student research tended to stem from
issues of interest among growers (which they then funded) and how in that market it
wasn’t difficult for UW students to get jobs immediately after graduation.
01:20:03 [no question] He discussed how the market demand for qualified plant breeders began
to effect his stable of graduate students, who then went into industry rather than
academia or government.
01:21:38 [no question] He talked about the arrival of Noel Keen as his graduate student, whose
rough exterior betrayed a highly intelligent and creative mind. Keen accepted a
cucumber assistantship, basically lived in the lab, and “lived chemistry” in unique
ways. He reviewed Keen’s accomplishments again.
01:25:52 [no question] He recalled the process of “broadening the scientific community”
externally at the same time as growing his graduate student cohort. This was largely
due to breeding of crucifers and contributing to the community of knowledge.
01:27:33 [no question] Explaining the difference between inbred lines and named cultivars, he
discussed the postwar emergence of the production of hybrid vegetable lines,
especially in Japan. Because all the literature on these hybrid lines was in Japanese,
he sought a grant to hire translators to publish Japanese journals in English. This
emphasis on breeding was part of the “eureka moment” that led to Fast Plants.
01:32:48 Follow up: Heirloom tomatoes? Answer: He explained “what it was all about,”
suggesting that it was largely a deception of the public that drew on a kind of public
nostalgia that assumed the past was better than today, as well as a literature emerging
in opposition to genetic engineering. He suggested that the only way to discount this
cleverly named movement was to conduct actual taste test research.
01:39:22 Follow up: Have you been surprised by the modern organic movement? Answer: He
said he was pleased by it, noting that it recognized the long-term danger of the overuse of chemicals in people’s personal environment. He also mused on how the
movement did seek to manipulate choices, but no more than the way people were
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Paul Williams #1069
manipulated to buy bred vegetables before the organic movement. Thus he
emphasized that it was important to be skeptical about everything.
01:43:39 [no question] Contrasting his research with the organic movement, he discussed the
difference between genetic engineering and natural breeding, a distinction he found
fallacious as well. He talked about research done at the University of Illinois on
chemicals found in plants that were bio-reactive, which could be selected because
they made plants disease-resistant, but may be harmful to humans who consume
them.
01:48:18 Follow up: So you were well known globally by the 1970s? Answer: Yes; while
crucifer vegetables were known in the US to be nutritious, they weren’t consumed in
large quantities here. But globally, a wide range of crucifers were part of the daily
economies of people, which garnered international interest in his work, especially
among Asian countries.
01:51:09 [no question] He discussed being invited to form a plant scientists delegation to visit
China. Observing that people in the West knew very little about what was happening
in China in the 1950s and 1960s, he outlined how after the initial “ping-pong
diplomacy” of the early 1970s, scientific exchanges followed in the late 1970s,
focusing on the food system of China especially.
01:56:46 [no question] Reviewing some historical contexts of the 1977 visit (the failure of the
Cultural Revolution, the death of Mao, and the expulsion of the Gang of Four), he
said it was an incredibly interesting time to see China, when the infrastructure was
still primarily Russian.
02:00:09 [no question] He sketched the group’s trip to Beijing, where it seemed like everyone
was living on the streets because of fear from a major earthquake earlier in Tianjin.
While there, they studied the marketing system of vegetables from the peri-urban
areas around Beijing, traveled all over China, and worked closely with a small cohort
of Chinese specialists who knew about the West (while many, he said, had no idea
about life in the US). He mentioned that they requested to meet with former UW
graduates (from the 1930s and 40s), who received them very emotionally. The result
of this trip was a substantial book in which each scholar wrote a chapter.
02:09:53 [no question] Continuing to talk about the trip to China, he mentioned that the
research director of the Rodale Institute (of later organic fame) was a participant.
02:11:38 [no question] The “derivative” of the China delegation was that he was invited in
1979 to come back to Beijing by Chen Hong to teach breeding disease resistance to
representatives of all China’s provinces. As a thank-you for this trip, they took a trip
through the Three Gorges area of Sichuan, which had been off-limits during the 1977
trip due to political unrest.
02:15:58 [no question] As a result of the 1979 trip, in 1981 the top Chinese cabbage breeder
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Paul Williams #1069
was sent to Williams’ lab for a year. This scholar, a heavy smoker, died during this
year and was one of the first Chinese delegates to die in the US, which involved
diplomatic relations between the two countries.
02:19:24 End of Seventh Interview Session
Eighth Interview Session (March 1, 2010): Digital File
Time
Keywords
00:00:00 Start of Interview/Interviewer’s Introduction
00:00:17 Question: Describe what just happened. Answer: After contextualizing that very few
classroom situations deploy the olfactory sense, he explained how he had invited the
interviewer to smell, with eyes closed, a bottle-biology moss garden he’d been
growing, and how the interviewer described the smell as reminding him of his
childhood near the ocean. He observed that this was a ubiquitous human response to
the interface between olfaction and human memory and wondered how olfaction
could be used better to improve human experience.
00:08:44 Follow up: Talk about the universality of the human experience. Answer: As an
educator, he thought olfaction was an opportunity to use additional senses for
teaching and understanding in a context where seeing and hearing were bombarded
by experience. Talking about current research at UW as such “full education”
experiences, he responded to the interviewer’s question about putting together a
cross-disciplinary team of researchers to investigate the question.
00:12:59 Question: Continue talking about your research in the 1980s. Answer: Reviewing his
earlier research in electron microscopy (the “physiological period”), he said that by
the beginning of the 1980s, he became aware of some missing elements—lack of
understanding of the fundamentals underlying the biochemistry, and this required
genetics investigation which then drove his desire to develop rapid-cycling brassica
as a research tool for his genetic research.
00:17:38 [no question] Continuing to talk about his development of rapid-cycling brassicas for
use in genetic investigation, he reviewed his conscious choice to continue working
with brassica, rather than Arabidopsis, which would become the primary tool of plant
genetics research. He addressed the question of whether he regretted this choice,
noting again that, in other areas of the world, brassicas have had a much more
important role in the food supply, and also that brassicas are much better adapted to
be used as a classroom tool.
00:24:24 [no question] Continuing to talk about brassicas, he said he was able to do interspecies crossing. This research got most popularity through (especially Canadian)
work using brassicas that affected canola, which produced very popular oil for the
human diet and also in industry.
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Paul Williams #1069
00:31:03 [no question] Continuing to talk about his research, he observed that at this time, as
the expert on rapid-cycling brassicas, his students developed methodologies that
helped plant breeders to select for resistance—but he did this through conventional,
not genomic, means of genetic selection, which meant many of his students became
pathologists or went to plant breeding institutes.
00:35:25 [no question] He reviewed how his deliberate decision to stay with brassicas stemmed
from his realization that educational innovation would be a major part of his career
trajectory.
00:38:08 [no question] He explained how his decision to follow the phenotypic approach to
breeding affected his graduate students, who often were co-advised by him (for rapidcycling brassicas) and another advisor (for genomic techniques), often Tom Osborn.
00:40:34 [no question] Toward the end of his research career, he said, he took a second
sabbatical in 1996 at the Edinburgh Botanical Garden with David Ingram, a close
friend. When he came home from this sabbatical in 1997s, he realized that it was time
to relinquish his laboratory and focus on education, so he retired.
00:44:12 [no question] Implored by the dean of CALS to stay on campus, but wanting to
relinquish his lab space, he asked to be able to take some of his critical equipment to
set up a lab in his basement. Offered the farmhouse across the street from his offices
(Science House, which was the oldest frame building on campus), he continued Fast
Plants there. In Science House, once he got it into running shape, he established a
“node” with a commons where people could exchange ideas. This “node” also housed
the Delta Program. He felt that it was working as he’d intended, as a kind of “village
green.”
00:51:04 Follow up: Your relationship with the School of Ed? Answer: He observed that his
contact with SoE came relatively early in the Fast Plants program, when former
secondary teacher Bob Hafner applied for a position with the program. When Hafner
saw the potential for Fast Plants in education and worked on a master’s in education,
he got to know his advisor Jim Stewart, who had come across Fast Plants at Cornell.
00:54:31 [no question] Continuing to talk about his collaboration with SoE, he outlined how
Stewart became a key component in helping obtain the first Fast Plants grant. Then,
through several round of granting, Williams was progressively getting to know other
C&I instructors and getting attention from the dean until he was ultimately offered a
joint appointment with SoE. He discussed how even prominent math education
researchers in C&I and cognitive also found Fast Plants interesting.
01:02:24 Follow up: What was the cost to you professionally? Answer: Basically, that he
decided not to pursue the world of molecular biology, but he felt this was justified by
his later career. He said the one “test”, professionally, was being elected as president
of his professional society in 1990, but when his bully pulpit was ineffective there, his
activity diminished.
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01:08:04 Follow up: But you always tend to travel the less-traveled path? Answer: Yes; he and
Lange talked about how everything he did was a prototype, which made him a little
like “quicksilver.” But this made him not able to know what the future of Fast Plants
was.
01:10:53 [no question] Continuing to talk about his tendency to be at the cutting edge, he
reflected on how the core of the entire Fast Plants collection was the seed collection.
He thought that the seed had gone out internationally, though he didn’t need to. Thus
the core of the program was its nimbleness.
01:14:23 Question: Talk about University service. Answer: Williams began by talking about
his 1967-70 participation in the University Faculty Assembly. Established during the
Harrington era, the assembly called representatives from each college and all the
campuses (prior to Merger) to discuss the major issues facing the UW. While he
remembered few details from these meetings, he said the “imprinting” of meeting
fellow colleagues from other colleges and treating them respectfully stuck with him.
01:19:42 Follow up: Did you in fact feel non-Madison faculty were as significant as Madison
faculty? Is this rare? Answer: He believed that all faculty should be evaluated on the
basis of their individual accomplishments, but there weren’t many venues in which
faculty throughout the System could meet and get to know each other. He observed
that there was particular sensitivity to the geographical complexity of UW in the
School of Education.
01:23:00 Follow up: Why such a junior faculty? Answer: He said he was surprised by this fact
too, reflecting that he remembered clearly his feelings coming out of these assemblies
and feeling faculty miss something by not being part of the larger institution.
01:26:28 [no question] Continuing to talk about university service, he discussed the Biocore
curriculum committee, where his “reward” was getting to know his peers across the
campus who were interested in students and teaching.
01:28:37 Follow up: How has Biocore changed over the years? Answer: Very little in structure
and design, he said, which he thought jeopardized its future by alienating faculty
effort. A problem he had thought a lot about in recent years.
01:30:40 Follow up: What is your current thinking on Biocore? Answer: He reiterated that
Biocore was conceptualized as a high-quality track for health professionals and
prospective graduate students in the biological sciences. Its initial quality was
determined by the founding vision, faculty buy-in, and the quality of the equipment;
but as federal money became increasingly available, professors pursued the research
engine and Biocore became spun off to staff. While the quality of students (and even
staff) had remained, the hierarchy had shifted. He believed that when individual
professors handed off the responsibility for teaching well-crafted courses due to time
constraints, it was difficult for courses to keep up with the ramping up of knowledge.
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01:37:12 [no question] Continuing to talk about Biocore in the present, he reflected on the fact
that the needs of education have changed—from effective storytelling and contentrich courses to more effective teaching methods (which are largely obscure to science
instructors). The current thinking was to substitute the research experience for undergraduates, but Williams thought this wasn’t a stand-in for a broad and excellent
biology experience. He felt the disjuncture between separate laboratory staff and
faculty lecturers created parallel tracks that created deep gaps.
01:41:16 [no question] He shared his opinion about how to “retrofit” Biocore—faculty
passionate about teaching needed to be recognized by the university and engage in an
ongoing dialogue about the learning objectives.
01:44:01 Follow up: Will Biocore wither and go away? Answer: He said this was up for review
because administration viewed it as a costly endeavor. He thought it depended on
whether faculty was willing to move into modern educational integration. He thought
the key question was what UW would be willing to do to encourage great teachers.
01:46:30 Follow up: How will the campus respond? Answer: He responded that in time a resocialization of campus would be hard, but necessary. Fiscal rewards would need to
be offered for great teaching at the department and campus level, not the institute
level. In the end, if nothing happened to change and evolve, UW would not continue
to be the great university it is.
01:54:03 [no question] Continuing to talk about university service, he discussed his
appointment to the divisional committee, which he considered a great system and a
great experience, being able to meet faculty from across the sciences. He reviewed
the tenure process at the divisional committee and the complications of this; he
suggested that like all university processes, divisional committee work ought to be
reviewed and perhaps the “village elders” should be consulted about the structures in
place.
02:01:45 Follow up: Your opinion on tenure? Answer: Observing that tenure was a social
structure and powerful incentive tool, he thought that it would need to be replaced
with something else. He was saddened that tenure was a primary motivator for young
faculty, reflecting on his own mentorship by faculty at UW, and that he never even
knew he was up for tenure. He felt that in the changing situation of academia, negotiations for tenure heralded a lack of loyalty to the institution, and more for the
individual.
02:07:57 End of Eighth Interview Session
Ninth Interview Session (March 2, 2010): Digital File
Time
Keywords
00:00:00 Start of Interview/Interviewer’s Introduction
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00:00:19 Question: Talk about committee work. Answer: Williams continued by chronicling
his rise to chair of the inter-divisional committee, where one got the flavor of the
culture on other divisional committees.
00:02:35 [no question] In 1974, he became involved with the Wisconsin-Japan Cooperative
Committee through his plant breeding research with Japanese scholars and seed
companies. He was able to bring an agricultural dimension to the committee and
benefited from long hours with Ed Daub.
00:07:42 Follow up: Was UW on the cutting edge of reestablishing relations with Japan?
Answer: While he found it difficult to assess this, he suspected the affirmative
because UW had such an active committee. He also noted how Brian Joiner had made
a significant mark doing statistical analyses for Japanese car companies. Follow up:
Were you the first CALS participant? Answer: He didn’t know anyone else in CALS
working as deeply in Japan, though he later met some who had long been involved
there.
00:12:22 [no question] He explained his involvement in the Knapp committee, possibly
because he himself had been a Knapp fellow in his last year of graduate school.
00:15:46 [no question] In the early 1980s, he said, preceding his involvement with WARF on
Fast Plants, he participated in the ad hoc committee on research cooperation that
looked at how to protect intellectual property claimed by the research interests on
campus. He had generated interest through his development of seed stocks with his
CrGC. The ad hoc committee met and culminated in a conference in which “the
scions of industry” and university interested parties met to engage in universityindustry relations. (UIR got going not long after this).
00:22:35 Follow up: The conference? Answer: He detailed how the conference was about 300400 strong and centered around some examples of how UW research was moving into
industry. This was at an active time when biotech, etc., were just starting to generate
interest in the business world. The conference was pointing to the future and involved
a broad range of professors and graduate students across the campus.
00:28:24 [no question] He continued to reflect about how the conference gave him insight into
his own intellectual property. Explaining how he’d always seen service as service to
the agricultural industries through Extension, he said that UIR opened up a very
different world for him in which he realized that in order to get his discoveries to the
public, someone had to invest in them. He thought this might have been the reason he
went to WARF to patent his innovations (unheard of at the time).
00:34:57 [no question] He talked about his role on the Parking and Transportation Committee.
He suspected that he was asked to serve on this committee because at the time he was
one of the very few faculty who biked to campus and because he had vehicles as part
of his research.
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Paul Williams #1069
00:37:56 [no question] As chair of the parking and transportation committee (and thus on the
campus planning committee), he said, he got a glimpse at the campus planning
process at a transitional time when parking was beginning to become an issue on
campus. Quipping about the “last stand” of his cabbage plants on the west end of
campus, he observed that he was amazed at how long-term the planning was by the
Medical School while people in CALS departments still in reactionary mode. He also
chronicled the encroachment of the medical campus on formerly inviolable areas as
campus planners saw this space being necessary for the medical facilities.
00:45:04 Follow up: Did you receive special requests? Answer: He said that they were mostly
handled by the deans, although they adjudicated special complaints.
00:46:14 Follow up: Are the medical sciences basically running the campus now? Answer: He
suggested that if one compared, the health sciences budget might eclipse the rest of
the campus; and that the medical sciences leadership had the skill to know the
“slalom course” toward success. He saw this as a function of investment in planning
infrastructure, which was evident even to him in the 1980s.
00:48:36 [no question] He reflected on the “conundrum” of the cost of “this overpractice of
human health” to the individual in the US, juxtaposing the problem with his
experience of health care (as one of several essential entitlements, but at a basic level)
delivery in China in the 1970s.
00:52:24 [no question] Continuing to reflect on the significance of health sciences on campus,
he suggested that health care and military were major components of the national
economy because the sold it as a “mission” that needed to be accomplished.
00:54:27 [no question] Stemming naturally from the involvement by UW faculty in outside
activities, he was then called to serve on a committee on these activities. Since the
guidelines about outside activities were fairly clear, the committee tried to clarify and
communicate the nuances to faculty. Some of these nuances related to time spent on
outside activities
00:58:42 Follow up: Was UW facing faculty abuses? Answer: He said there was an amount of
“whistle-blowing” which needed a pathway of resolution, but the federal government
was also interest to make sure that their investments were being used properly.
01:00:17 [no question] He said the ad hoc committee’s language was adopted across campus,
and thought there was a standing committee on outside activities now. Follow up:
Were you happy with the result? Answer: He said he was, but was fraught personally
because 1) the culture of CALS emphasized giving away intellectual property and 2)
he’d set up a small company to market his seeds. He discussed how conflict of
interest cases were handled.
01:03:25 Follow up: Textbooks? Answer: He said this was considered scholarly activity and
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Paul Williams #1069
therefore exempted from reporting. Follow up: Your opinion? Answer: Observing
that textbooks were an endangered species, he thought that if a significant portion of
the writing time of the textbook was salaried by the university, the university should
reap some of the rewards of the royalties. His personal perspective on his activities
was to avoid bookkeeping by giving back all the proceeds to UW.
01:07:50 [no question] He discussed his short activity on the Wisconsin Center for Space
Automation and Robotics, which generated some opposition on the basis of pure
jealousy for his reception at NASA. He described this as the “lowest of the low of the
academic animal.”
01:13:39 [no question] He continued by talking about the research committee of the Graduate
School, where he served from 1988-91. He felt gratified to be invited by Bob Bock,
who he believed did a great job as a researcher and dean. The committee reviewed
requests for “seed money” from WARF, which was “really hard work” since they met
Saturday mornings on applications from all over campus. He reviewed the process of
applying and interviewing applicants about their research, and didn’t remember ever
being lobbied by his colleagues.
01:19:30 Follow up: How did the committee decide? Answer: He explained that each case was
thoroughly discussed, similar to the divisional committee. While you became skilled
in presenting your colleagues’ work, it was necessary also to develop screening skills.
Once the WARF money was distributed, the research committee also awarded the
named professorships at UW, which were very prestigious and required a sense of the
needs of UW as a whole community.
01:24:29 [no question] He moved on to talk about helping to review how to dissolve the School
of Allied Health Professions, which hadn’t, it was felt, lived up to its potential. They
tried to sort out where to place the stronger programs and departments in the School,
such as occupational therapy and kinesiology.
01:29:53 [no question] He continued to talk about the Biological Sciences Review Committee,
initiated by Donna Shalala to give direction to the biological sciences as a whole.
Directed by John Hearn, it tried to track the quality and quantity of undergraduate
offerings under the rubric of Shalala’s commitment to undergrad education. Out of
this committee and the Hearn report came the first ever biology major.
01:36:12 Follow up: How did you see this committee? Answer: He evaluated it as a large
committee that suggested some of the things BCE had been calling for over the years,
but also suggesting some revolutionary things. But much of what it proposed had
gone unimplemented. He discussed with Lange his level of activity in the committee
at the time when he was at the apex of his career. Follow up: Did you think it strange
that Hearn was asked to head it? Answer: Yes; but he said Shalala was a savvy
political character and had her reasons.
01:42:41 Question: Evaluate your time spent in university service? Answer: He said it was
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valuable, distracting, etc. But he realized he was on an unconventional trajectory
once he realized Fast Plants was valuable, and it was a much more interesting path
when one said yes rather than no. Another component of service was national
foundation service that constantly asked for Williams’ time.
01:46:30 [no question] He talked about his personal practice of logging his time every day. He
mused about the importance of having everything he did every day, though he didn’t
know what he’d do with all these shoeboxes of information he’d collected.
01:51:53 Question: Service to CALS? Answer: He first talked about being on the executive
committee of the Plant Breeding and Plant Genetics program, one of his tenures that
had the most impact from a worldwide stance. The prominence of this program was
now yielding the largesse of those who benefitted from it over the years.
01:56:20 [no question] He commented on being asked by Roger Wyse to chair the search
committee that hired Dick Barrows as academic dean for CALS. He detailed the
progress of the search, which yielded some very interesting local candidates who
were too radical for the College. He actually suggested Barrows, who later got the job
but who he thought was the least interesting of the candidates.
02:03:13 Question: Departmental service? Answer: He talked about shifts in the leadership
style within the department from Glenn Pound to Arthur Kellman, who was more
consensus driven and under whom faculty meetings became onerous.
02:06:53 [no question] The other contributions to the department, he observed, were international initiatives that brought interesting people to the department.
02:09:40 End of Ninth Interview Session
Tenth Interview Session (March 11, 2010): Digital File
Time
Keywords
00:00:00 Start of Interview/Interviewer’s Introduction
00:00:17 Question: Talk about other university service. Answer: Williams again related Glenn
Pound’s injunction that he “wear three hats,” and observed that he understood his
greatest service to be service to the farming community of the state of WI. While this
relationships (between UW and WI) had changed from being largely farm-based to
being lab-based, he felt he’d remained true to his charge by supporting the vegetable
growers of WI and by breeding more effective seed.
00:05:00 [no question] While he said they’d described this “wonderful cycle” of production of
new seed, he went on to ponder whether, in the changing research climate, it was
possible for basic research to reach the greater agricultural public now. In his early
career, applied journals and ag. station bulletins had filled the needs of growers for
information on diseases and new products. But, using the Sauerkraut Packers
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Paul Williams #1069
Association’s diminishing annual grant to his research program as an example, he
wondered whether shrinking markets like sauerkraut and cabbage growers would be
able to access the basic research they needed. He noted that more and more,
specialized Extension agents who did this weren’t directly involved in the research.
00:12:23 Follow up: Is Jamie Thompson’s research a counter-example? Answer: He suggested
that there was a disconnect between the capacity for the health sciences to sell their
long-term fiscal planning to the degree that the public is willing to sustain the heavy
financial burden of such research, where in agriculture the expectation was that
research would pay off immediately.
00:17:07 [no question] Continuing to talk about his own service to the public, he discussed
participating in structures that could transfer knowledge from his research to growers
both nationally and internationally. One form of this was the Crucifer Improvement
Committee, which first met in his fields and combined people from all sectors of the
cabbage industry.
00:21:27 [no question] He said that as basic research became more specialized, a subset of the
Crucifer Improvement Committee was spawned into the Crucifer Genetic Workshop,
which met at UC-Davis and published a newsletter that shared their findings in an
informal way. But he said he stopped going to these meetings when over 20% of the
attendees were lawyers protecting the patents on breeds, which he said marked a
change in the way knowledge was being handed over to farmers. He said he was
going to attend the upcoming meeting out of a sense that they needed to understand
their responsibility to educating future generations of children (using Fast Plants).
00:28:41 Follow up: And it wasn’t a distraction? Answer: No; it was a focus and a source of
great insight. He found this public service tantalizing because it represented a
constituency that he defined, rather than granting agencies. He saw this when he got
into schools and realized the need in the public domain.
00:32:45 Follow up: And you’ve moved closer to what you really wanted to do since
retirement? Answer: He didn’t know that wanted it early on, but knew he enjoyed
talking to growers, and that that constituency shifted to teachers when he began Fast
Plants. He reflected that discovery was innately energizing to people, which was why
he thought in many cases teaching was done improperly, not allowing students the joy
of discovering for themselves.
00:36:24 Question: How much interest is there in what you do at Russell Labs? Answer: He
said he was “totally out of sight” in a department where there was no institutional
reward for what he did.
00:39:24 Question: International initiatives? Answer: He thought one of the “fortuitous”
insights he’d had that UW was an international melting-pot compared to many places.
He related the excitement in the department generate in the 1960s and 70s when
faculty traveled.
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Paul Williams #1069
00:41:26 [no question] He remarked that it was Yoshio Yukawa as the first of many visiting
professors and his presentation of clubroot research at the First International Congress
of Plant Pathology in London that really opened the international door, generating a
lot of international interested. From this interest he developed a number of more
specialized workshops on clubroot that even brought some Soviet scientist to the US.
He said from the late 1960s he had a revolving door of scientists coming to work with
him on his brassica projects.
00:47:05 Follow up: What was the value for your lab? Answer: He said it was enriching for his
graduate students and teaching to have this international component, but the main
stream of value was from his work to the international scientists.
00:50:01 [no question] After visiting China, he said, the Chinese connection began which saw
a succession of those scientist coming even at a time when China wasn’t doing well
economically. He discussed the dynamics of the international flux of Chinese students
from the 1970s to today, when Chinese students often fueled the US’ needs
educationally. He suggested that UW was very much a global institution of learning,
and was only increasing to be so.
00:55:19 Follow up: Is there concern about international students taking intellectual property
back to their home countries? Answer: He didn’t think so, supposing that with the
role of the internet being what it was, UW’s role was more providing wisdom,
mentorship and the applied use of knowledge.
00:57:26 Follow up: Is UW as attractive as it was 30 years ago? Answer: He thought so, though
he sensed it had waned for a few years.
00:59:22 [no question] He talked about helping in international undertakings like the Canadian
government’s effort to produce high-quality seed for farmers in Thailand, which had
difficulty producing vegetables in high-latitude situations where opium was the
primary crop.
01:04:37 [no question] Parallel to this, the Asian Vegetable and Development Center grew up
in Taiwan as one of the World Bank’s centers for research and development of major
world food crops.
01:07:27 [no question] He also talked about a one-month project in India working in a
sequestered mountainous northern agricultural station, learning how to prevent
diseases of cauliflower from wiping out this most-important crop in India.
01:14:22 Question: Reflect on your career and on the future of UW. Answer: He reviewed his
experience of coming to UW, recognized as a bright graduate student, being asked to
stay on (which is unusual), realizing over the years that UW was the best place for
him to work and stay, being influenced by Glenn Pound and J. C. Walker, and
understanding that the only limiting factor at UW would be himself.
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Paul Williams #1069
01:21:17 Question: Were you ever tempted to leave? Answer: Never, though he’d been offered
a number of positions. Part of the equation in this regard was that it enabled his wife
and children to be in Madison, and he discussed how he’d convinced his boys to
attend UW-Madison when they got to college age.
01:24:48 [no question] He also mentioned that fairly quickly Biocore opened the domain of
teaching for him as well, discussing his mentors in the program. This led him to
comment that any faculty with the right mindset could be a “boundary crosser,”
getting beyond the silo mentality of the institution of departments and schools.
01:26:03 [no question] He reemphasized how he felt rewarded from “using the University to
the optimum,” by moving beyond it to public service to teachers. He suggested that
teachers were important because UW’s role as was to “derive compound interest” by
influencing those who influenced many. Follow up: Is that happening? Answer: It all
depended on how UW imagined its constituency—was it one’s students, one’s
profession, or the institution? It all boiled down for him to the WI Idea, which he
thought was too abstract in some senses and needed to be defined.
01:29:11 [no question] He related the WI Idea to social networking and internet technologies,
which he said was the beginning of an experiment that allowed professors to have a
“feedback loop” both similar to and different from previous Extension work. He
discussed how one of the key components of the Fast Plants program was their work
with internet-based professional development. He observed that the federal agencies
were just now coming up to speed on these developments by including “broader
impact” requirements on all of their primary research grants.
01:33:40 Follow up: But aren’t faculty more entrepreneurial for themselves, not for the
institution? Answer: Absolutely true; there were internal problems as an institution,
but he responded to the professor who would think only in terms of themselves as
their constituency. He also, however, felt that the graduate students he was seeing
come through from China had a deep sense of commitment to their home countries.
01:37:56 Follow up: Public school infrastructure? Answer: He thought it was a worldwide
problem endemic to how the public values education, suggesting that until they
understand the value of education change won’t happen. Hence it was really a philosophical and strategic question, a component he thought UW didn’t have enough of.
01:42:58 End of Tenth Interview Session
End of Oral History #1069
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