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Douglas Osheroff won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1996. After growing up in a rural area of Washington state, he attended the California Institute of Technology for college, and then Cornell for graduate studies. After finishing his doctorate, he started his career at Bell Labs, working there for 15 years. In 1987, he moved to Stanford, where he has worked since. He was chair of the school's physics department from 1993-1996, and served recently on the appointed panel to investigate the Columbia shuttle disaster.
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PH: I wanted to get a sense of how you handled your early-career management - that's the focus of the project. Obviously, as an academic, you had a lot of preparatory work in terms of your graduate studies. It would be great to get a sense from you, in a narrative form, of how you chose to become a professor, if there were bumps along the way -
DO: Okay. I did not choose initially to become a professor at all. I was a graduate student at Cornell University. I sort of went into physics because I found it interesting, and I guess I was good at it. When it came time to actually look for jobs, I really thought more about going into industry.
So I think the only - I only interviewed with two companies. One was AT&T/Bell Laboratories, and the other was General Electric. So I interviewed with AT&T in the spring of '71, and then again in the fall of '71. In the spring, there was a hiring freeze on, but some guy named Dean McCumber was talking to me about making little tiny switches or plugs or something that were used in the tens or hundreds of millions in the Bell system. I guess my conclusion was well, that was kind of interesting. I'm not sure that was what I wanted to do.
Then I talked to the General Electric person, and he said there were no jobs available. He didn't talk at all about what they did there. Eventually I asked him and he goes, "Oh, well, we sort of bang on superconductors to try to get the critical fields up higher. Critical currents." So I say, okay, that sounds like fun. He says, "Oh, actually, we have a lot of parties." So eventually he gave me this application form, and I think the next week I talked again to the Bell Labs people, and this time it was XXXX Murdee, who's now dean of applied sciences at Harvard. For many years, we were at Bell Labs together. He asked me about what I was doing, and I told him about that. Then I asked him a few questions about Bell Labs, and it really sounded like the kind of place I really wanted to go to, basically doing research in an industrial setting.
There was still a hiring freeze on, but that was lifted in December, I think, and he sent an email [?] saying, "They've lifted the hiring freeze; when do you think you'll have enough to come by and give a talk?" I said, well, we just made this discovery - of course, this discovery eventually won the Nobel Prize, and so I spent the first 15 years of my career at Bell Laboratories. It was unquestionably in terms of research, the best years of my life.
PH: What made you make the decision to from there over to academia?
DO: I guess a couple of things: One was, the climate was changing at Bell Labs, there's no questions about that. My wife perceived in me a frustrated professor waiting to be born. I would go around the state of New Jersey and give lectures on low-temperature physics. Then I tried - for instance, I actually had an offer from Berkeley in '77 - that was a terrible year personally for both my wife and me. I left my visit to Berkeley to go down to claim the body of my brother, who'd just committed suicide. Within 3 months, my father also died. My wife left there to be at the bedside of her mother, who was dying from liver cancer. So we never considered that - the idea of making a major change at that time in my life seemed crazy.
Almost every year starting in probably - well, the first offer I got was in 1973 - these are informal offers. And I just said, "I'm really happy at Bell Labs, and I'm going to stay there." The person said, "You're riding the crest of superfluid Helium-3; if you wait very long, that's going to break on the beach..." I told him, "If that's the case, I certainly wouldn't want to go to a university and disappoint them." (Chuckles)
PH: That's an interesting bit of perspective.
DO: Anyway, I stayed where I was. In 85, I think it was - actually, starting in probably 81 or 82, Cal Tech tried very patiently to hire me. I think in the end they made me an offer and it was extremely difficult to say no to it. It just went on and on and on, of trying to decide. We didn't particularly want to live in Los Angeles basin, for one thing. I was very concerned about my ability to attract research funding. I was not used to that kind of environment. At Bell Labs, occasionally I would lectured to that I wasn't spending enough money, and I knew the National Science Foundation was never going to do that to me.
PH: Right - a totally different frame of mind.
DO: So I stayed at Bell Labs, and really what made me leave was, in 1987, my wife, who's a protein bio-chemist, working in the pharmaceutical industry in New Jersey - those companies, their small molecule places which have very little use for a protein biochemist. So she was not - she didn't think she was very well appreciated. One day she said she'd like to apply for new jobs. I said, "That's fine." Then she said, "In California." (Chuckles) I swallowed very deeply and - what's true is, I think we were a very egalitarian couple. Both of us considered our careers important, and she had spent the better part of 15 years in New Jersey, which wasn't a particularly good environment for her.
PH: There was a little bit of give-and-take there.
DO: Yeah. Then my wife said, "You should really go off to a university." So the first job offer she got was at Amgen. If she'd actually gone to Amgen, her stock options would've been worth - this is just the 4000 shares she would've gotten for signing - would now be worth about $14 million. But, we didn't go. Cal Tech had actually said they'd reinstate the offer they'd made.
In the meantime, she'd gotten an offer from Genentech, which was publishing the best biotechnology in the world at the time, period. Just had really great people. So she went to Genentech. I had offers from both Stanford and Berkeley. I knew a lot more people at Berkeley, and they offered me in-house LBL support, but I still went to Stanford. It was a combination of a whole bunch of issues. I think I sort of liked the Stanford environment more than the Berkeley environment. There's an easier commute for my wife, and I guess I felt a bit more comfortable at a private university than a public university.
PH: It's interesting the number of times you've mentioned the influence your wife has had on your career - in terms of the advice she gave you, as well as what you mentioned with the give-and-take of your jobs. How conscious was that early in your career? Did you know going in that this is going to have to be a balance, or did it develop on a de facto basis over time?
DO: It's interesting. For me, my mother had been a nurse, and my father had been a physician. My father's attitude was that my mother's career was completely irrelevant, that it was simply a way of making money. There were 5 kids in the family, and when we all left, my mother wanted to go back to being a nurse. But my father said, well, most of her salary would end up going to Uncle Sam. Besides, he'd prefer for her just to be at home fixing lunch for him. That seemed sufficiently glaring (Laughs) that I recognized that was not a particularly illuminated way of thinking. So we were always - things have always been very even.
PH: I just have one more question, because I know you're very busy. The last question I wanted to delve into was, what about the role of mentors? Did you rely on them over the course of your career?
DO: I would say that growing up, I didn't really have any role models. I grew up in a logging town. My father influenced my career most, even though he was the physician. I think he was fascinated by my interest in science and nature, and he encouraged that in subtle and not so subtle ways.
I think Dave Lee, my thesis advisor, was extremely important to me, in that he provided really good support, really good advice. Between him and Bob Richardson - Because Bob was always in the lab. He had gotten tenured after 3 years at Cornell, so he was always around. But Dave allowed me to do what I wanted to do. Dave would look at his graduate students and could tell pretty quickly how much they were capable of doing, and how much freedom they were capable of using productively. There were some students that ended up working with postdocs, and these were obviously the guys who needed a lot of guidance. Then people who were in fact really capable of doing things on their own were given that freedom. I never felt any pressure.
PH: Were these individuals - did you seek them out proactively, or were you just lucky enough to have crossed paths with them?
DO: Rather shortly after coming to Cornell, there was a colloquium, and a solid-state seminar - one on dilution refrigerators. This was 67, and dilution refrigerator - the first demonstration was in 65, so these were very new devices. The other one was Pomeranchuk cooling, and that was a talk given by Bob Richardson.
I just looked at those new technologies as having the promise to allow man to look at nature in a new and very different realm, which was kind of a very simplistic view, because people had looked down, actually, to 2 millidegrees without finding superfluidity in helium 3. But it didn't matter - it had the necessary effect on me, which was that I signed on the line, and became a low-temperature physicist.
PH: So it was the fascination with the topic that drew you to those individuals.
DO: Yeah. I guess when I'd been a senior at Cal Tech, in order to get out of a third semester of advanced lab, I worked in what was becoming David Goodstein's low-temperature lab. Who'd just joined the faculty at Cal Tech, and had promptly gone off to Italy, one of his favorite places. So he wasn't around, but there were two guys there, one from UC-Riverside, and the other from Pomona -
You know, if you want, you can actually read a lot of this about my early career and all of these early decisions in my Nobel biography.
PH: Yes, I've actually looked at that. But it's great to get these extra insights.
DO: Okay. Well, Dave Lee and Bob Richardson came along with the lab, as far as that was concerned.
When I went to Bell Laboratories, gee, there were great people. Phil Anderson played a very, very important role - I wouldn't say he was my mentor, but when I was at Bell Laboratories, most of the time, I would do the experiments, and people like Phil Anderson or Bill Brinkman, Mike Cross - all of these guys would do the theory. That's why it was such an exceptionally exciting place for me to be. You really did these things together. It wasn't like you threw out a bunch of observations and then someone else would explain it. You were part of this process.
Bill Brinkman is certainly a good, dear friend of mine, and even though I missed his second wedding - after his first wife died - and Phil Anderson was certainly - he would come to my lab on probably a weekly basis, just to see what was going on, or to sell me on some crazy idea he had.
PH: (Chuckles) Interesting. Well, listen, I appreciate the time, but I thought of one more question as we close. Did you have any axioms or saws or epigrams that shaped your career - any principles that you really tried to hold to?
DO: I wouldn't put it that way, though I wasn't a person who ever really had a great deal of self-confidence. I think I recognized that in myself at a rather early age. For me, it was very important to push myself to accept new opportunities, which I probably wouldn't have done otherwise, for fear of failure. I dare say, when they invited me to be a member of the board investigating the [Columbia] shuttle accident...(Chuckles)
PH: Even that was -
DO: Even that was - Well, that was kind of a double-edged sword. On the one hand, I could see that it was going to be very exciting. On the other hand, this was certainly not something that I was an expert at. Also, I could see that it was going to take a great deal of my time.
PH: Great, I really appreciate this time...
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