Q: Just two questions to develop along these lines. There're two questions that confront the history of biology right now. One is, could you go into more detail, starting in the World War II period, perhaps, of the interaction between government agencies, Department of Defense, physical chemistry, Rockefeller Foundation?
Tullis: Yes, yes. Again, you'd have to put yourself in the era that this took place, because the same kinds of things can't take place today because of regulatory controls of one kind or another. As an example--well, let me give you an example. A little bit peripheral to that, the Red Cross, under General Marshall, who had become head of Red Cross, hadn't made up his mind whether it wanted to stay in the field of blood collection, which it had done just for the war--
Q: What were the years that we're talking about?
Tullis: Late 1940s. They hadn't decided whether they wanted to continue in that field, although there was quite an attraction to do so, because it was a public image for the Red Cross. But just collecting the blood and sticking it in a refrigerator didn't have much meaning. Marshall and Cohn developed a very close friendship in Washington because of a very exclusive club, intellectual group, that they both belonged to in Washington. And Marshall would come up here and talk, and he decided that the Red Cross should put a little bit of its public money into support of research. One of the first things I began to work on there in the department was platelets, because this is one of the cells that was most easily damaged in trying to separate blood. Nobody had even been able to isolate or concentrate platelets, and so on. I got a call one afternoon from Washington. Someone said, "Are you really going to do some work on platelets?" And I said, "Yes." He said, "Well, we'll give you some money," and about a week later I got a check for $50,000--just said, "American Red Cross; $50,000"--nothing! No responsibility, no one to report to, nobody knew who I was. I felt like a thief! And I called up and said, "I don't even want to deposit this in the bank, because I feel responsible for it." They said, "No, it's for you to use in platelet research." And I did. I used it in platelet research, and we published several papers in this area. But there was not tight regulatory control. There were so few people working in science, and, in the Washington arena--because this was just before Korea, you see--they realized that blood and the products of blood were essential for the proper management of any kind of casualties, and that people should know more about these things. So, they wanted to stimulate the research, but they had nowhere to give the money. The NIH in those days was a small institution, very small. So I did this, but, you know, they might have given it to somebody else and nobody would have known the difference. But that's the era I'm speaking of. I don't mean it was an evil era at all. It was a very dedicated era, because there were very few people working in basic science, and those that were had unlimited opportunity because they could just decide what they wanted to do, and there was plenty of support. One didn't have to fight and struggle and compete for support. So that this got started that way.
Now, to go back to your question again. I'm sorry; I got a little bit diverted from how--
Q: Okay. I was wondering if you could go into detail about the interaction between actual government agencies--
Tullis: Yes, that's right. Government agencies.
Q: Private philanthropies--
Tullis: Well, this was difficult to do, but this is again one of the things that Cohn sensed the need for, and so he set up not only these weekly conferences in our department, but he also set up an annual meeting, a scientific meeting, which he had here, and he then incorporated something called the Protein Foundation, and the Protein Foundation sponsored these annual meetings. They specifically were directed both to government and to industry and to academia as a common forum where the three could get together without bringing their prior prejudices.
Q: When was the Protein Foundation established?
Tullis: I believe it was 1950. The reason for the Protein Foundation is again interesting to those of you today who live in the era of doctors patenting their inventions. Cohn had gone to Harvard University when he first was working in the plasma field. He said, "Do you want me to patent these things?" They said, no, it was contrary to University policy; we don't profit from patents. But he and the Board of Governors, or the Overseers, as they're called at Harvard, finally decided the smart thing to do would be to patent these products for purposes of quality control. Only for purposes of quality control. So everything was patented, and everybody in Cohn's department then had to agree to do the same thing. For instance, I had four patents that I took out on different equipment for separating blood into different parts, and so on. Some of this is used today by a number of manufacturers. But all of those patents I turned over to the University for one dollar. Then they turned them over to the Protein Foundation, which was just a holding body in Dr. Cohn's department to elevate standards and insist on quality control. Then any manufacturer--and there were at that time seven manufacturers of albumin, and so on, pharmaceutical firms: Amour, Smith Kline, French, all of them, you know, Merck, et cetera. They all had plasma fractionation plants, headed up by people who had trained here with Cohn, scientifically headed up. Then the Protein Foundation, holding the patent, would license these companies, and, before anything could be distributed in interstate control, we had to certify that it was okay. Well, this led to much higher quality products than ever would have been achieved in that era. Because in that era, the F.D.A. had no power whatsoever. I mean, it was essentially powerless--all it checked on were horse vaccines and a few things like that. In fact, the F.D.A. was not even involved. It was something called Bureau of Biologic Standards which was part of the NIH. The Bureau of Biologics, when they wrote the existing regulations for the production, use, and all of this, and sales of albumin, gamma globulin, all of these products, they came up and let us write the standards because we had the patent, and were licensing these people. They just took them verbatim, and used those, and published them as the standards. We even had higher standards than that, because they could not, at that time, insist on human proof of safety. For example, with albumin, every lot of albumin that was sold in the 1950s until the patents ran out sometime in the 1960s, every lot of albumin we would test out here, and I would bring it over, and find somebody that needed albumin, where we could check their temperature, and their pulse, and their blood pressure and be sure there were no allergic reactions, and so on, no febrile reactions, no urticaria1 reactions, anything of that sort. Because the only standards the manufacturers were required to use was a rabbit test, and rabbits are a little different from humans. But the NIH had no such standards. They do now. But they didn't, you see, at that time. So, I think these patents were used very wisely. But that's what the Protein Foundation was, just a holding body for those patents. It had no money. Everybody misinterpreted it and thought it was a wealthy thing to support research, which it wasn't at all. It was just the use of patents for quality control.
But we had--and getting back to your original question of the interaction between government, university, and so on: Cohn was really quite dedicated to the importance of bringing these diverse bodies together in such a way that they could function, and talk the same language. He felt they could never do it if they did it in Washington, because the federal people would be inhibited for fear they'd say something that would be misinterpreted by a Congressman. They could never do it in the university under ordinary circumstances because the university was so, sort of, snide, it wouldn't accept people who were in industry. And industry wouldn't do it because of patent problems. So all of these things were kept separate. So our annual meetings were held at the Hasty Pudding Club over in Cambridge, which is where the shows are held by the undergraduate students every year. At the Hasty Pudding Club, every November, we would have a scientific meeting, and one-third of the audience would be government, one-third of the audience would be university, and one-third commercial, and we really had a good total exchange of knowledge without barriers.
Q: Did this grow directly out of Cohn's experience during World War II?
Tullis: Yes.
Q: The interdisciplinary review--
Tullis: Largely because of the need for him to relate to the Navy, for example, as the source of his money for his research, and all the other bodies around, to justify it.
Q: And he was the real driving force?
Tullis: He was the driving force. Absolutely! No question about it. He was, as I said, he would have been a good president of Merck, or something of that sort, because he was an organizer. He knew how to delegate authority. He gave people responsibility and as long as they did a good job, he left them alone. But if they did a bad job, boy, their head came off right at the shoulders! He was a very strong personality, totally without a balance wheel. He was the Type A personality in its most epitomized form, just--he didn't know what the clock was.
One time I was in Europe with him. At about two o'clock in the morning the telephone rang. He said, "I've got the greatest idea." He didn't start with hello, or anything of that sort: "I've got the greatest idea." "Yes, Dr. Cohn." So, I said, "I'll get my pants on and be right over." And he started telling me what he was thinking about at that moment. He was this kind of a person. Then, he might not come to work the next day till four in the afternoon, because he slept when he was exhausted and then he worked when his mind was working. He was a very, very strong person in that respect.
Q: Just a slight digression now. There's a debate in history of science right now concerning the origins of molecular biology, but the story that you're giving now might pertain to some of the arguments advanced. It's suggested that it was scientific managers, such as Warren Weaver at Rockefeller Foundation, who were actually responsible for creating the new discipline such as molecular biology. But the story that you're giving here would suggest that it was scientists acting in both managerial and intellectual leading roles, rather than foundation or government agency, that's playing the leading role.
Tullis: I've been interested in this for many years, and I don't know the answer to your question. But one of the things that I have thought about on many occasions is why, if you look back through history, there have been these bursts of original knowledge in strange places with no apparent reason. They'll flower in a period of fifty years, and then die out. One of those, I think the best example, is Padua. Now, Padua was a little university in Italy--it's maybe forty miles or so south of Venice--that in a short period of time, it had, I believe it was, Fabricius there in anatomy. It had strong people in the then developing concepts of body fluids. It had, as a summer student only, the man Harvey who later discovered the circulation. It had another man, Vesalius, who was a great anatomist and, if you will, the first physiologist. Just a vast amount of knowledge evolved from that little insignificant university in this one period of time, and then it just disappeared. I've gone over there in recent years, and sat in the amphitheater there, just sat, and thought, "Well, now, what was there here to get all this knowledge together?" I think, probably the most important thing was, first, it was multi-disciplinary, and, secondly, there was good, relaxed, free communications between people. For example, now, if you look at Harvey's publication, De Motu Cordis, and his claim for the discovery of this knowledge of circulation, he states that one of the things that made him think about it was the valves in the forearm and he shows a forearm with a tourniquet on it, making the valves stand out. If you go back and look at a publication from Fabricius, one of the other people in this group, you'll find that Harvey's woodcut is of the opposite arm from the one that was published about ten or fifteen years earlier, which, obviously, he got his knowledge from, you see, and took it back to England. And it was just that the woodcut produced it from the other side when they printed it. It just means, you see, that Harvey was thinking about something else, so that when this man showed the veins, it meant something to him, because of a different disciplinary background than it meant to the man who was looking at it purely anatomically.
I think that this is--and again, this is where I think Cohn's department flourished, was the same way, that biochemists were talking with mathematicians who were talking with practicing internists who were talking with cell biologists. You know, everybody was looking at it with a different perspective, whatever the problem of the day was.
Q: Do you think that Cohn's background itself might have something to do with this, a physical chemist who works on a biochemical problem--
Tullis: --that had medical implications--
Q: --with medical implications and--
Tullis: Yes, yes, I do. I think that has a lot to do with it, but I think you have to have a multi-disciplinary approach in order to plant the seed, you see, that will really go beyond the barriers of just what one person thinks, and you have to have freedom of communication.
Q: Which leads to the second question: could you go into a little more detail about the intellectual interaction that took place in these lunchtime sessions that Cohn had organized? What sort of topics were discussed, research problems?
Tullis: Well, it's interesting, you know, all of those are available. Every one of those lunches was taped and transcribed for a period of perhaps eight years or more. I have most of the volumes either here or at home, and I have never looked at them--but I could some day--but it would go--from one day it would be a discussion of the sedimentation of blood. Because, you see, right at this time we had fibrinogen available, and we found that fibrinogen accelerated the sedimentation of cells, and there was a graduate student from--what's the town in Sweden right north of the capital--
Q: Uppsala?
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