Richard R. Schrock

INTERVIEWER: Today is June 30, 2011. I'm Barbara Moran, and today we are speaking with Richard Schrock as part of the MIT 150 Infinite History project. Dr. Schrock was born in Indiana but spent his high school years in San Diego, and obtained his BA in 1967 from the University of California at Riverside. He attended graduate school at Harvard, receiving his PhD in organic chemistry. He spent one year as an NSF postdoctoral fellow at Cambridge University, and then three years at Dupont before coming to MIT in 1975.

At MIT, he became full professor in 1980, and in 1989, the Frederick G. Keyes professor of chemistry. In 2005, Dr. Schrock won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the development of the metathesis method in organic synthesis. This work has opened up new opportunities for synthesizing molecules that streamline the development and production of pharmaceuticals, plastics, and other materials. Welcome, Dr. Schrock.

SCHROCK: Thank you.

INTERVIEWER: Thanks for being here. So to begin, I have to ask you the first question I would ask any chemist, and tell me about your first chemistry set.

SCHROCK: Well, it actually was a chemistry set, first of all. And that was when I was eight years old. So it was a great little chemistry set. Had a lot of good stuff in it.

INTERVIEWER: And it was a birthday present from your brother?

SCHROCK: From my brother. Yeah. I have two brothers. The one five years older was then in high school. And he was very good in chemistry himself. So he thought I might like it.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah. And you did?

SCHROCK: I did.

INTERVIEWER: And I understand you set up a little corner in the garage, the woodworking shop? How did you--

SCHROCK: It was, I don't know what you'd call it, a cannery where you kept canned goods in the back.

INTERVIEWER: Pantry.

SCHROCK: Yeah, a pantry. And I took it over.

INTERVIEWER: Now most kids get a chemistry set. And they play with it for a couple weeks. And then they never play with it again. But you seemed to really take to it and expand on it and keep the interest alive. What was it that you liked about it, even at that young age?

SCHROCK: I could make things, transform matter. I could do stuff.

INTERVIEWER: Did you ever do anything dangerous?

SCHROCK: Yes.

[LAUGHTER]

You want me to tell you about that? Oh, let's see. I can't really tell you in detail. But let's say, it's easy to make things like gunpowder, right?

You have an oxidizing agent. You have something you can reduce. And then you have fire. And those two make gunpowder. So it's sodium nitrate and charcoal and sulfur, basically.

INTERVIEWER: I understand there was at least one incident where the fire department was called to the house?

SCHROCK: That's true. There's one incident.

INTERVIEWER: So did your parents encourage this? Were they happy about your--

SCHROCK: My parents always supported what I did. I think they didn't like the fire department coming to the house. But yeah, both my mother and father were very supportive.

INTERVIEWER: Can you tell me a little bit about your upbringing? I understand you grew up in Indiana. You seem to have this very idyllic boyhood, with lots of woods and mud puddles and that sort of thing.

SCHROCK: That's right.

INTERVIEWER: Please tell me a little bit about that?

SCHROCK: So I was born in Berne, which is a little bitty city in Indiana. And my parents were actually of, well, they call themselves Plain People. But they were really Amish, an Amish sect. And so there was a break in the church. And my parents left that little town and moved to Decatur when I was nine months old. And in Decatur, of course, they became more modern. So my parents did not go back, as did my father's brother and his mother, to the old ways, you might say.

INTERVIEWER: Your parents came more modern.

SCHROCK: Yes. His brother and mother then became, I don't want to call it more primitive, but back to the old ways, no electricity, no running water. They even moved out of that area. Anyway, Decatur was much more an environment where my father felt more comfortable, and my mother.

INTERVIEWER: And they came of age in the Depression and had two sons during the Depression.

SCHROCK: They did, yeah.

INTERVIEWER: How did that affect them?

SCHROCK: Well, I can't really speak to that. Because I read things, but, of course, I wasn't around at the time. But it was very, very difficult for everybody. And they were, however, generally on a farm. They were just being brought up, so my mother's Depression age is 20-something. And they were married at about that age.

And then they worked on a farm. So they had enough to eat. They didn't have any money, but they were okay.

But it was still difficult, and very demanding physically, and working day and night, and so on. But my father became a carpenter in Decatur, or was a carpenter, and furthered his business interests in Decatur. And that's what he was known as, or a cabinet maker actually.

INTERVIEWER: And he taught you and your brothers woodworking.

SCHROCK: He taught me, sort of. I went into his shop and taught myself, avoiding the power tools and so on. But yeah, tools were available, and wood was available, and techniques were available. And I from my earliest memories, five or so on, or something like that, yeah, was interested in woodworking.

INTERVIEWER: It's interesting. You have a brother who's an engineer, and one who's a surgeon, correct?

SCHROCK: Right. Both retired now, but yeah.

INTERVIEWER: And you ended up in chemistry. Were there certain things about your upbringing, or values that you got from your parents, you think that shaped you or sort of encouraged you and your brothers to go into these scientific or technical careers?

SCHROCK: Well, they didn't finish high school. They were not allowed to finish high school. So when they turned 16, they were taken out of high school, and went to work on the farm. By their elders, pulled out of high school. So we didn't see much of a future. I'm guessing now, my oldest brother, 10 years older than I am, or the one five years older, didn't see much of a future in that way of life.

So they valued education, I should point out. My parents valued education, and they always resented greatly the fact that they were taken out of high school. So they both got high school degrees when I got my high school degree, in 1963. And then my mother went on to get an accounting degree, and worked as an accountant for a couple of decades after that. And my father never went on, but remained interested in learning.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah. That's amazing. They really sound like extraordinary people.

SCHROCK: Yeah, they were. They were. And so, I guess the question was, what did we get from that. Well, the values of education, they always told us that we should get an education. And we valued an education. We didn't see anything else in the future for us, and so that's what we did. And they, of course, taught us to work hard, and don't be discouraged, and a lot of the things that are needed to continue, for them, during the Depression of course, and then after that, for us. Although it was a lot easier for us.

INTERVIEWER: Sure. And it also sounds like at your childhood, you had a free run of the area, what seemed like a giant yard to you. Do you think that gave you an interest in the natural world, and in figuring out nature's secrets at all?

SCHROCK: Yeah, that's right. So we lived at the edge of town. My father bought an old house for maybe, I don't know, $10,000. And he fixed it up. And it was quite a nice house. It's gone now. There's a big Walmart or something there.

But it was at the edge of town, so there wasn't much else. There was the woods. And I could go out and hang out and look at what makes the world work. And so that's what I did. And I spent a lot of time just in an unorganized way, going around, looking at things.

There was what we call a tile mill. So they took clay out of the ground, and put it in cars, and hauled it over and made tiles. They went under the road near our house. And so there was a big, not a ditch, but an underpass, unfinished. And I would go over there. And I'd find fossils. And I'd wonder what these fossils are.

And of course, in Indiana, that was a great sea at one time, so a lot of fossils. Nothing very significant, at least, I didn't find anything very significant. But it exposed me to the world of nature and how things work, and certainly kept me interested. And then I had the chemistry set to fall back, right, when I went home.

INTERVIEWER: It's funny. That's one of those things that would have a fence around it now, right? You know, the ditch--

SCHROCK: The ditch, yeah, the ditch is gone. They filled it in. It's gone.

INTERVIEWER: So at what point did you start getting serious about chemistry, or more serious?

SCHROCK: Yeah, that's a good question. I would say, well, probably as I approached high school. I started to think, I like doing this. And I guess I never made a conscious decision. But I felt that I would like to continue to do chemistry. I don't think I ever thought much about anything else. I tried other things, of course. I had my instrument and so on.

INTERVIEWER: You mean a musical instrument?

SCHROCK: A musical instrument, but that didn't stick. Chemistry stuck, so, for whatever reason, all those experiments that we do, chemistry stuck. And so I figured out in high school that's probably what I want to do.

INTERVIEWER: Interesting. And then you-- because it seems like early on, you said, well, I'm obviously going to go to college and study chemistry. Did you ever, musical instruments aside, were there any other thoughts of medicine or physics or engineering? Or what was it? Was there something about chemistry in particular? Was it the, I don't know, the basic-ness of it, or the building things of it?

SCHROCK: Yeah, I think that's right. It's really the beginning of all things, in terms of transforming matter and understanding how to transform matter and so on. So medicine's a perfectly respectable field. My brother went on to become a surgeon, as you know. And he was very good in chemistry. He won the state championship, I think, in some chemistry contest when he was in high school.

And my older brother was an engineer. So those are certainly respectable ways to spend your time. But I felt that I really wanted to get to the basics, to really move those molecules and atoms around and reconnect them on a molecular level.

INTERVIEWER: Very interesting. So how did you end up at UC Riverside?

SCHROCK: So--

INTERVIEWER: Oh, sorry, let me back up and ask you one thing. Was there anybody in high school? Did you have any particular teachers or mentors or anybody who encouraged you to stick with chemistry, or to go on and study chemistry?

SCHROCK: There was one person. So he was my brother's teacher, when my brother was in high school. His name is Harry Dailey. He passed away a few years ago.

But he was very helpful. He would give me books. And I would use those books to do experiments. It's amazing what you find in old chemistry books. They tell you how to do everything. It's really amazing. I didn't do everything, but I did a lot.

And then he gave me equipment. And I also started to purchase equipment. And I loved the flasks, and the stoppers, and distillations, and all that. I just liked the physical-ness of it.

INTERVIEWER: Yes. Where does a teenager buy flasks and things like that?

SCHROCK: At a flask house. No, there was a scientific supply house, I think it was called, down in San Diego, near Balboa Park. And they had a lot of nice stuff in there, beautiful stuff, really nice. I don't know where you would-- no such place exists now.

INTERVIEWER: There's the internet, I suppose.

SCHROCK: Internet now, and of course, they're all gigantic companies, and so on. But this was just a little place. It had really nice, nice things. So I saved up my money from my paper route, and went and bought flasks and beakers and--

INTERVIEWER: And did experiments from the old chemistry book.

SCHROCK: Did experiments from the old chemistry books, probably things I shouldn't have done, but--

INTERVIEWER: But it must have all helped in there somewhere. So then you decided to go to UC Riverside. Can you tell me about that process?

SCHROCK: Yeah, so at first, when we moved to California, when I was 14, I was just going into high school. So I spent a half a year in junior high, and then three years in high school at Pacific Beach. Well, it was Mission Bay High School in Pacific Beach.

And then, when it came time to go to college, I was really not very well-prepared in terms of my possibilities. I think I was prepared academically. And I really didn't know where I should go. We didn't have money. I mean, we weren't poor, but we couldn't afford to go to Harvard, or places where it would be expensive.

And so I thought state school. And the University of California, at that time, had a very good state school system. And so I applied at Berkeley and Riverside, among other places. I think I applied to places like Harvey Mudd, too, which is a private school. But I didn't get into Harvey Mudd, because I wasn't smart enough, and we couldn't afford it, either.

INTERVIEWER: Oops.

SCHROCK: But it was just, I did it on a lark. And then I was accepted at several places. And Riverside was not too far away, 90 miles straight north of San Diego. And so I thought I could come home.

And it was a small place. It was just starting. It had been established for only a few years. And so I went there thinking, maybe I could get in on the ground floor in terms of doing research as an undergraduate, which I did my first summer, started.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah, tell me about that. A chemistry professor sought you out? How did that--

SCHROCK: Well, it was after the first exam in, I've forgotten the number of it, but it's Chem 50, or whatever it was. And it was taught by a guy named James Pitts, who was an atmospheric chemist at Riverside. Back then, smog and pollution was a very big deal, because it would roll in from Los Angeles to Riverside, which was 60 miles away, every day around 3 pm And it would be awful.

And they really didn't know the basic problems associated with smog and how it formed. And so that was a big deal back then. And he taught this course. And so three of us that got the highest scores in the exam were called to his office.

And he said, you want a job? And I said, sure. So all three of us worked for him during the summer, that summer. And then during the year, I worked for him, and the next summer. And I may have taken one summer off to do something else. But I worked for him that whole time.

INTERVIEWER: That's great to get that research experience as an undergrad.

SCHROCK: Yeah, and I was on my own. I learned how to blow glass, and I made vacuum lines. And I worked with an infrared spectrophotometer. I thought I was going to be a physical chemist. So that's what I anticipated as I went through college, that I would be a physical chemist, not really knowing what a physical chemist did.

And most physical chemists don't make things like I wanted to make. So when I found out that that was true, I decided that I probably was not going to be a physical chemist. And that happened toward the end of my period in college.

I took an inorganic chemistry course from somebody named Fred Hawthorne. And he really opened my eyes as far as inorganic chemistry is, which is all of chemistry. Organic chemistry is a subset of inorganic chemistry, and so on. Everything is inorganic chemistry, all the elements. And so that's really the basic science, the basic chemistry.

INTERVIEWER: Let me ask you this. At the time when you were an undergraduate, were there certain big questions in chemistry? Or what were the things that people were-- you mentioned the atmospheric chemistry, and smog was a big question there. Were there other big issues in chemistry at the time?

SCHROCK: Oh, many, sure. Certainly a lot of biological questions. The structure of DNA had been predicted about 10 years before that. and also confirmed. And so everybody was wondering, how does DNA work? How do we make cells? How do they get differentiated? There's all that biological stuff.

And then physical chemistry, of course, was, as always in the 20th century, pretty important. And people were always asking physical questions, deeper and deeper physical questions. And organic chemistry, I remember one day in my physical chemistry course, actually-- I think it was when I was a senior. That would have been about '67. Maybe it was when I was a junior. The teacher came in, and he said, I've got a great thing to tell you. We've just found out how certain organic reactions work. And it's all explained by something called the Woodward-Hoffman rules. Now, Woodward and Hoffman were at Harvard at the time. And it has to do with why don't certain reactions work and other reactions work, either photo-chemically or thermally.

And so we spent the day going through the simplest of those problems. And it was a revelation. So yeah, a lot of things were happening. And they're still happening, just at a different level. Always more of them and at a higher level, maybe.

INTERVIEWER: So how did you-- you went directly from there to Harvard for graduate school, is that right?

SCHROCK: Yeah, so there was a teacher there named Jerry Bell--

INTERVIEWER: A teacher at Riverside?

SCHROCK: At Riverside, who was a physical chemist. And so we, my friends and I, thought, as I said, we were going to be physical chemists, because of the chemistry course that he taught. Which, he was a very energetic guy. And he really was a great teacher. And so that certainly affects people who are taking a course. And it affected us and made us think, well, we want to be like him.

And we got good grades. Jerry was from Harvard. So he decided that I maybe should go to Harvard. I was good enough to go to Harvard to graduate school. And so there had never been anybody sent to Harvard. It was a young college. That's not really hard to understand. But he decided that maybe I should apply to Harvard.

And so I did. And I was accepted. And it was pretty amazing, because Harvard was like the other side of the world, and I knew nothing about Harvard.

Now, these days, of course, people who go to graduate school, they go and they visit 10 or 12 schools. And they spend weeks doing this. And they grill everybody in the department, and so on. But I went to Harvard just totally blind, more or less. And it was a revelation. So it was exciting.

INTERVIEWER: I can imagine. So you were how old, 20?

SCHROCK: Well, I was 21.

INTERVIEWER: 21. So you're 21, and you're like, I'm going to grad school at Harvard, and you just show up in Cambridge.

SCHROCK: Right. Actually, I just turned 22. My birthday's in January, so I'd turned 22.

INTERVIEWER: Wow. Yes, that must have been pretty heady.

SCHROCK: Yeah. So that was '67. And so I drove across country and got stopped by the police, who noticed that I was driving somewhat erratically. And I told them I was just happy.

[LAUGHTER]

They said, yeah, sure. But then they believed me and let me go. They thought I was on something, I think.

INTERVIEWER: Right. High on chemistry.

SCHROCK: High on chemistry. And yeah, drove cross-country in my Volkswagen, I think it was, and arrived at Harvard. No, it wasn't a Volkswagen. It was a Dodge Dart.

INTERVIEWER: A Dodge Dart. Even better, even better. So when you got to Harvard, not having researched the department or anything like that, did you have a little trouble finding what you were going to study here?

SCHROCK: Oh yeah. Yeah. So I checked out all the people who were doing physical chemistry. And they were doing very good physical chemistry, molecular beams and things that were at the forefront physical chemistry. And Dudley Herschbach got a Nobel Prize, for example, for that work. And that's all excellent physical chemistry. But I knew something was missing.

And I just didn't feel like I was a physical chemist. Because very often you spend most of your career building an instrument. And then you tried your experiment, and it might or might not work. And then you wrote your thesis. And then you got your PhD.

I wanted to make things. So I was actually a little dejected. But I walked by an office where there was somebody who had just arrived at Harvard that I didn't know. I didn't know about this person. Well, I didn't know about anybody else, either.

But his name was John Osborn. And he was a student of Geoffrey Wilkinson, who won the Nobel Prize in '73, later, when I was at Dupont, and has written many books. And he passed away in '96.

But John was one of his favorite students, and a very successful one. And he was sent to Harvard by Wilkinson. And he had just arrived. And I was his first student. I turned out to be his first student. So I talked to him.

And he told me about all the sorts of things I used to do in my laboratory. I used to make things and crystallize things, and pretty colors of compounds. And I thought that was pretty neat. Catalysis, that's very big in my subsequent career.

INTERVIEWER: So that's where you first got--

SCHROCK: That's where I first learned about transition metals, catalysts, making metal compounds, which are catalysts for reactions, and then actually doing organic reactions with those catalysts. And in my case, then, it was hydrogenation of alkenes or olefins.

INTERVIEWER: Okay. That's interesting. So he's sort of responsible for bringing that into your life.

SCHROCK: Yeah, he was somebody in the right place at the right time for my needs. I don't know what I would have done without him being there.

INTERVIEWER: Interesting. So tell me about 1968.

SCHROCK: Hmm. Oh, yes. What about 1968? So that was-- are you talking about the summer of '68?

INTERVIEWER: Well, tell me what Cambridge was like then, and what you did.

SCHROCK: Well, that time was a very rebellious time, I'd say. So I don't know what time these various events occurred. I think in '68, the students occupied the buildings at Columbia. Later, they occupied the administration buildings at Harvard. There were demonstrations. There were a lot of things going on during '68, '69, and even '70. '69 was probably the worst.

In '68, I was feeling like I should see another part of the world. So after the spring of '68, after my first year, I had taken some classes, and I'd got started in research. And that was all fine. But I went to John Osborn. And I can just imagine a student of mine doing this in my group now. And told him that I was leaving for 15 weeks, and I was going on my world tour, which I did.

INTERVIEWER: And what did he say?

SCHROCK: He said fine. Well, he may not have said fine, but he let me go.

INTERVIEWER: Huh. I mean do you, with all this tumult going on--

SCHROCK: He didn't pay me.

[LAUGHTER]

INTERVIEWER: --all this turmoil going on in Cambridge, did it affect what was going on in the lab, or with your work, or the way people were thinking about work and how it fit in to the world?

SCHROCK: I don't think so. I don't think so.

INTERVIEWER: Why did you feel the need to go--

SCHROCK: To Europe?

INTERVIEWER: Yeah.

SCHROCK: I was born in Indiana. And I lived in California. So that was a taste of another world. And then I decided that, well, Harvard, that was Cambridge and Boston, pretty interesting, and that I really had to see some place else. Like Europe, I'd never been to Europe. I think I'd never flown in a plane. Is that right? I think that's right.

INTERVIEWER: Wow. So where did you go? All by yourself?

SCHROCK: All by myself, yeah. Well, I met up with people. But that was back when you could hitchhike. And there were books written about hitchhiking your way through Europe, and Europe on 5 Dollars a Day. Now it should be $50 a day or more. And there was a lot of hitchhiking. And that was it, back then. That's how you got around. Or you could take a train, get a Eurail pass, which is wimping out. It's the comfortable way to do it. Real people hitchhiked. So I hitchhiked my way around Europe. And I had a lot of interesting experiences.

INTERVIEWER: Wow. Was it a transformative time in your life?

SCHROCK: I think so. It certainly taught me about Europe. And I still have a lot of close connections and good memories. And I'm not European, but I certainly do love to go to Europe.

INTERVIEWER: When you came back, did you feel changed, older, different? Or did you just--

SCHROCK: I gained about 10 pounds. And I was quite tired. But yeah, I certainly felt like I'd been around. I went to France and Spain and Italy and Switzerland. And my mother's side is from Switzerland. So I visited the place where my great-grandmother was born, and things like that.

And I went to Czechoslovakia, Austria, Hungary. I even went to Hungary and Czechoslovakia, before the Russians invaded, by two weeks, fortunately. And then into Germany and Denmark, went north into Scandinavia, part of Sweden. I didn't go to Stockholm. Went up to Oslo and back down over through England, up through Scotland. So yeah, I went all over the place.

INTERVIEWER: Well, it's just interesting, because a lot of people seem, in that time, to go through that experience. But then they don't actually come back. They just sort of whatever, drop out or get into politics, go into some sort of alternate thing. But you came back to Harvard and picked up with your work.

SCHROCK: Oh yeah. I didn't intend not to come back. I just wanted to go out and see the world. And that's what I did.

INTERVIEWER: Good. And then something else happened the following year, 1969. I believe the date was November 16, is what--

SCHROCK: Yes, November 16. I think that's correct. I met my wife, Nancy, at a party in Somerville, and we hit it off. And so we were married in '71. But for a year and a half or so-- is that right? So there's November-- okay, a little more than a year and a half, yeah, we dated and went out. She would come over and throw stones at my window to get me out of the lab, because I tended to stay in the lab too long. And whenever I was really hungry and hadn't seen her for a while, I'd phone her up and we'd go out to dinner. And we had a time. Had a good time.

INTERVIEWER: She's not a scientist?

SCHROCK: She's not a scientist, no. Her undergraduate degree was in art history. And she later learned how to bind books. She's a bookbinder. And she has a lot of experience in that area, now works here at MIT. And she used to be at Harvard. She worked at Harvard for nine years.

INTERVIEWER: So you got married, got your PhD all around the same time.

SCHROCK: '71, yeah.

INTERVIEWER: Okay. And then went on to a--

SCHROCK: And traveled to England. So got my PhD, got married, moved, traveled to England, all in the latter part of the summer of '71.

INTERVIEWER: Wow.

SCHROCK: And that was exciting, too.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah. So tell me about your year at Cambridge.

SCHROCK: So that was a wonderful year. I was an NSF postdoctoral fellow. And so my salary was paid in dollars. But the value of the pound versus the dollar, the pound was $2.60, I believe, in dollars. It was extremely valuable. And I got paid in the lower currency, the dollar. So it was a struggle, I would say.

But we were young. It didn't matter. So we didn't have any money, but I could buy a car. I think I bought a car for 300 or 400 pounds. And we traveled around, and we did a lot of wonderful things all over in England. And the weather was sometimes agreeable, sometimes not.

I went to the lab. I could walk to the lab. And so I spent my time working pretty hard, but nothing really significant ever came of it. I think I published one paper.

And she worked in an architectural firm. And she became interested in architecture. Probably she was interested before that, but that certainly accelerated her interest. And she maintains that interest now, in architecture. So she's my guide whenever we go abroad, in art and architecture. It's really very nice.

INTERVIEWER: So after that was Dupont. Is that right?

SCHROCK: After that was Dupont. Well, the reason I had to go to-- I shouldn't say "had to go" to England. Sort of, that's true. So in 1971, when I got my PhD degree, there were no jobs.

INTERVIEWER: What do you mean, no jobs?

SCHROCK: I mean no jobs in chemistry.

INTERVIEWER: How can there be no jobs in chemistry?

SCHROCK: Well, if there's zero, that's no jobs.

INTERVIEWER: It just seems impossible to comprehend.

SCHROCK: It was a very tough time. I think there was one academic job for which there were 600 applicants, in Alberta.

INTERVIEWER: Wow.

SCHROCK: It's cold up there.

INTERVIEWER: Wow. It's just hard for me to imagine no jobs for a PhD in chemistry from Harvard.

SCHROCK: And industrial jobs didn't exist. So I had the very bad timing. So fortunately, I didn't go to Vietnam and managed to get through graduate school. That's another issue. But I didn't have any place to go. And so I managed, thank God, to get an NSF fellowship, and went to England, which was wonderful.

But then, there were not many more jobs in the spring of 1972. And so there was a guy who was on sabbatical there named Earl Muetterties, who was an associate director at Dupont, one of six associate directors. And he was there. He knew Jack Lewis, whom I worked for for a long time. And he managed to convince Dupont that he could take a sabbatical, even though that wasn't done at that time. And so he was there for six months. And so I met him there, and we talked, and so on. And he basically made me an offer to come and work at Dupont. And so that, I decided, was what I was going to do.

I looked around at other places. There were some academic jobs available at that time, and a few other industrial jobs. But Dupont was a place where it was really an academic environment. And they had terrific people. And I'd read many of their papers. And Muetterties was a real mover and shaker in that area.

And Dupont was really the premier basic research laboratory in the world. There were others, maybe six or eight others. There aren't any now of that type, where you could go and do whatever you wanted, up to a point, and for a certain period, be creative, be innovative, do something new. Which I think I did.

INTERVIEWER: Now, I want to talk to you a little bit about your work at Dupont. But before we go there, when you were going through this time of getting your PhD, and there was no jobs, did you ever think that you had chosen the wrong field? Or you're like, oh--

SCHROCK: Ah, but I didn't know there were no jobs.

[LAUGHTER]

And if you don't know you're going to fall off a cliff, then you don't know, right? So I never thought about it. I just did my work, thought about getting my PhD. And I know today, people think a lot about after that, and is this going to be the profession I want, and so on and so on. But I guess I just didn't do that.

INTERVIEWER: Well, it's good it worked out.

SCHROCK: So I just winged it, more or less.

INTERVIEWER: So you went to Dupont. And I might be mistaken, but that's where you started doing the work that would eventually lead to the Nobel. Is that--

SCHROCK: That's correct, yeah.

INTERVIEWER: --correct? Okay. So can you tell me a little bit about how that ball started rolling, there at Dupont?

SCHROCK: Yeah. So when I was in Cambridge, I worked on some ruthenium chemistry. And one of the ideas I had was to use a kind of molecule that's called cyclooctatetraene. Don't try to say that 10 times. Cyclooctatetraene dianion was a ligand that would stick onto a metal. People were interested in that particular ligand, it's an organic molecule, and what it could do. And I became interested in it. And I made some complexes of ruthenium when I was at Cambridge.

Then I came to Dupont, and I decided that I would continue that work. But Dupont wasn't interested in ruthenium. They were interested in what we call early metals, things in Group 4 and 5, things that were used as catalysts to make polymers.

So polyethylene and polypropylene were discovered in the early '50s. And still, in the early '70s, people were very interested, since it was obviously going to be a huge market, and they were right, in other ways of making polymers from olefins. Olefins, ethylene , propylene in particular, come out of petroleum crackers in large quantities. So they're really cheap.

INTERVIEWER: And the issue was to make the process simpler. Is that why they were interested?

SCHROCK: Well, maybe to make a catalyst that was better than anybody else had, and therefore, you could patent it. And therefore, you had an edge. And you made a better product, and it was cheaper. And I convinced them that I looked around at some of the metals in Group 4 and 5, so you have titanium, zirconium, and hafnium, and vanadium, niobium, and tantalum. And I thought about tantalum chemistry, because another person in the lab named Ulrich Klabunde had done a little tantalum chemistry, made tantalocene bis(cyclopentadienyl) complexes, trihydrides. Sorry, too much chemistry here.

INTERVIEWER: Nope, bring it on.

SCHROCK: And so he was talking to me about tantalum chemistry. And I said, hmm, tantalum. That's an interesting metal. I wonder if anybody had done organometallic chemistry-- metal-carbon bonds of some sort, alkyls-- on tantalum. And then I said, well, maybe I'll check that out.

And I checked it out. And it turns out that somebody named Juvinall, who I've never seen publish anything else, at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, G. L. Juvinall, had made trimethyl, three methyl groups, tantalum dichloride, so a very simple compound. Beautiful synthesis, 100 percent yield, and it had metal-carbon bonds in it. And that was the only thing I could find.

And so I took that and added the cyclooctatetraene dianion into it and made a tantalum trimethyl cyclooctatetraene complex. And it was blue, beautiful color. I don't think it's been used for anything. But I soon got diverted. Because what happened was that we had, I guess they were, what were they called? Well, advisers or consultants, that's what they were called, so full-time consultants at that time. And one of them was Geoffrey Wilkinson. And so--

INTERVIEWER: Comes back around.

SCHROCK: Yeah, there he was. So he came in 1973 and told us, he would usually give a lecture and then talk to us about what we were doing and give us advice. So in 1973, he came and gave a lecture at Dupont. He lectured at MIT, I know, probably at Harvard, probably other places. He didn't travel much, but sometimes he would do that. Didn't travel and lecture very much.

And he told us that he had just made tungsten, which is right next door to tantalum in Group 6, with six methyl groups on it. That's the maximum number you can have around tungsten. And it was a compound. You could isolate it. People thought that metal-carbon bonds were weak, and that you couldn't actually make compounds having metal-carbon bonds, that they would fall off, and you'd get radicals. Well, that turned out not to be true.

And I thought that was really interesting. And so I looked at tungsten, six methyl groups, tantalum, five methyl groups. I thought I would make tantalum with five methyl groups around it, which I did. And I noticed in Wilkinson's-- you have to write an autobiography as well as your description of your research. And at the bottom, he put in a footnote. And he said, he told the world in his address at Stockholm about hexamethyltungsten and other things. And then in a footnote, he said, pentamethyltantalum has recently been made by R. Schock at Dupont.

So I made that. It wasn't very stable. But it was a lot of fun to work with it. And then I decided, how do I make it more stable?

And so the way to make it more stable is, a methyl group is just C, H, H, H, with three protons on it. So it's very small. So to make it bigger, make each of those five groups bigger, so that they would not decompose in what we call a bimolecular fashion. It would be stable as mono-atomic species. They wouldn't decompose in that way. And fortunately, I could do that.

And then one experiment I tried failed completely. I could not make the pentaalkyl. Because that pentaalkyl, almost certainly an intermediate, didn't decompose bimolecularly. It decomposed intramolecularly. So within the molecule, it would decompose and spit out neopentane. Turned out it made a metal-carbon double bond. And then that compound was incredibly thermally stable, and a totally new type of compound. And so that was pretty interesting.

INTERVIEWER: And that was a mistake that led to that.

SCHROCK: It wasn't a mistake. It was a split in the road.

[LAUGHTER]

INTERVIEWER: Sorry.

SCHROCK: It wasn't a mistake. No, it was a fortunate result.

INTERVIEWER: Fortunate result, okay.

SCHROCK: But, well, it was pretty obvious that it was a really interesting new species.

INTERVIEWER: Well, that's what I was going to ask you. At that moment, did you say, huh, this is big. Or--

SCHROCK: I did, in my own way. I went home, and I told my wife that I think I'd done something interesting.

INTERVIEWER: And she said, that's nice, dear. What are we having for dinner?

SCHROCK: Yeah.

[LAUGHTER]

Well, no. No, she asked me, and I told her.

INTERVIEWER: Huh, wow. Wow, so that's interesting. So right at that moment, you said, aha. And that almost has become a key component of your life's work.

SCHROCK: Yeah, I still do that.

INTERVIEWER: And did you think--

SCHROCK: Forty years later.

INTERVIEWER: --at that time that that-- or did you just think, huh, interesting. Or did you think, wow, this is--

SCHROCK: Well, two things. So there was a guy named Fisher. So I made a metal-carbon double bond of a different type. And a guy named Fischer had made molecules in about '66 that he called Fischer carbenes, having metal-carbon double bonds in them. But they were of a different oxidation state. I won't go into details. They weren't of the type that I made. And that's number one. So they were interesting new metal-carbon double bonds, not single bounds.

And then, met-uh-thee-sis, or metathesis, was in the air. So it was discovered at Dupont, actually, in 1956. So about 15 years went by before I, at Dupont, came in one day when Earl Muetterties, an associate director, was in the laboratory taking something out of an oven that was a tube. And it had some black compound in it, black something. I don't know what it was.

And I said, oh, good morning, Earl, and how are you, and what are you doing, because he's not supposed to be in the lab. He's an associate director. And he said, I'm making a metathesis catalyst. I said, what's that? And he said, it's a very interesting reaction.

I don't know if he told me that I should go off and do metathesis. But it caught my eye. And if you're this guy who's at the top was in the lab making something that he thought was interesting, the wave of the future.

So I started to read up on it and find out how it works. And a lot of other people were interested in finding out, I found out, how it works, people like Bob Grubbs, with whom I shared the prize, and Yves Chauvin, a Frenchman in a polymer institute, and Chuck Casey and Tom Katz. And a lot of both organic and inorganic people were interested in the mechanism of this strange reaction, really a fascinating reaction, where you take carbon-carbon double bonds and just take them apart and rearrange them.

They're very strong. Single bonds are very strong. Double bonds are even stronger.

So how does that happen? That was the question. It involves a catalyst.

INTERVIEWER: So it seems to me like Dupont was a very fertile place for you. And it has all this, gave you this lab. You could do the work that you wanted. You have these big questions

SCHROCK: I could buy anything I want, more or less.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah, you're satisfied.

SCHROCK: That's important.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah, right. All the equipment you want, space. But then you left.

[LAUGHTER]

SCHROCK: Yes, I left. So I left because I wasn't sure that I wanted to be there forever. And I went there because it was a good place, but I really think I wanted to be in academics. But it was a very fertile place, as you point out. And I had the freedom to buy what I want, really, within reason.

And I was going to say, this is important, because of these big things that you put on metals, big alkyls-- everybody else who was interested in this, which included Geoffrey Wilkinson, by the way, had used something called trimethylsilylmethyl. It has a silicon, in place of a carbon. And that was a big group, but it wasn't the right size, just the right size. There's another thing called neopentyl, which has a carbon there instead of a silicon, that is similar, but very expensive.

So most people buy the cheap one. But I was at Dupont. I said, I'm going to buy 100 grams of neopentyl chloride and make a zinc reagent. I'm going to do neopentyl. I made that choice, number one, because the trimethylsilylmethyl work didn't seem to be panning out. Other people were working on it. And I could work in an area that nobody was working in, neopentyl. More expensive, but I was at Dupont.

INTERVIEWER: Well, why--

SCHROCK: So why did I leave?

INTERVIEWER: Yeah.

SCHROCK: Well, they changed two things. So my immediate supervisor, George Parshall, at some point, I can't recall when it was, probably during one of our reviews at work every few months, six months, let's say, he said, what are you going to do next? I said, gee, I don't know. Well, have you ever thought about academia? Maybe you should think about getting an academic job. and I said, that's what I always wanted to do. And I found out later, he also told my other supervisor, PhD supervisor, John Osborn, that maybe Dupont wasn't for me in the long run, or something like that. So--

INTERVIEWER: I just wonder. Because it seems like the actual lab work and the synthesis of the molecules gets you really excited, and you really enjoy it. So I was wondering--

SCHROCK: And I did it all myself, more or less.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah, that's what it sounds like. So what would be the pull of academia? When you say you were always interested in academia, what about it interested you?

SCHROCK: Well, I could have lots of students doing all the work for me. Or with me, I should say. And I could teach, and I would have more vacation, maybe. And I could travel to Europe and give lectures, and do all the stuff that I wouldn't be able to do at Dupont.

So I was advised, maybe the time was right for me to do get an academic job. I said, well, I've got to find one, first of all. So that was late in '74. And two other things happened.

Before that time, soon after I got to Dupont, in late 1971, no, '72, Earl Muetterties announced that he was leaving. And he went to Cornell. And he spent about seven years at Cornell. He wanted an academic job, too.

He thought, he can do this. He ran a fantastic group at Dupont. He had all the wonderful people like me, Ulrich Klabunde, Fred Tebbe, and so forth working for him. And he said, well, that'll be a piece of cake. He found out that students weren't the same as the people I just mentioned. You have good students and maybe not-so-good students. So he wanted to go to academia, also. So that was one thing.

And then the other thing is that they changed in 1974, I think, of the department, from Central Research to Central Research & Development Department. And so it was always in the wind at that time that basic research was very expensive. You guys cost too much money. You discover useless things like metathesis. And we just can't afford you. And that ultimately was the decision made in virtually every company around the world, that they could not afford running basic research labs containing a couple of hundred people, who just are having fun and making discoveries, but it's very costly.

INTERVIEWER: It's amazing now that when you look at the advances that have come out of all the basic research and all those labs, to think that it's--

SCHROCK: Well, look at metathesis. Okay, then I became interested in finding a job. And then my first interview was in the fall of 1974. And I was not made an offer. And so I was a little dejected about that.

And two other things, oh, consultants. One of the consultants at Dupont was Barry Sharpless. So Barry Sharpless was at MIT. He was interested in osmium chemistry. He ultimately received a Nobel Prize in 1971. At that time, he was a consultant. He was a consultant in the '70s, the period I was there. And I had just made this discovery in 1974. And I think he came through in the fall of '74.

And I invited him. We could invite people to come and give a talk, if they weren't scheduled to be a consultant. And I told him what I was doing. I'd just made this fantastic new compound.

There's another person named Grant Urry who was at Tufts, who was a consultant. And I told him about it, and he got very excited. And he said something like, you just made a metallic Wittig reagent. And he started jumping up and down in his chair. And so I did some of the experiments he suggested, and they worked out.

And I told Barry Sharpless about them. He was interested in metal-oxygen double bonds. I was interested in metal-carbon double bonds, these new types of carbon double bonds. And I don't know if I had been rejected or not made an offer at that time or not. Maybe I had not been made an offer and told him about it.