WISE Archives: Oral History Collection

Interview transcript portion:

TZB: Now, when you were in college—okay, once you switched to chemistry, even if you weren't initially interested, what did you like about it?

HF: Oh, I just liked it—I liked the lab part and I liked the idea that you could do things and try to figure out stuff and make different things happen that nobody had made happen before. I like qualitative analysis with all the different color reactions and discovering what was in this unknown vial that we had for lab exams. And that was the great part. And I didn't care so much for quantitative analysis—you know, weighing things down to the very nearest tenth of a milligram and all that, measuring things precise—they keep saying that chemists are great—measuring things—when I cook, I have a dash of this and a dash of that. And I didn't enjoy the measuring precise volumes and stuff as well as I liked mixing this and see what happens, and mix that together and see what happens. If I'd ever come close to anything that was explosive I probably would have enjoyed that but [chuckles] I guess I had enough sense not to try to mix those.

TZB: Did you have any good chemistry professors while you were in college?

HF: Oh, a wonderful—my two favorites were, of course, Dr. Roy Grady and Dr. John Chittum. And Bill Kieffer came back to teach at Wooster after he went away to get his Ph.D.—he was just a young guy—and he was there the last year I was there, so he was a favorite too. I was a lab assistant and so I had a lot of fun; I enjoyed it.

TZB: Was it different because World War II was going on? I mean—

HF: Sure, there were—there were no men—hardly any men on campus, except—I went through in three years. I went two summers and then three full years and right straight through. And during the summers we had a V5 or a V7 or some kind of Air Force training happening on the campus as well. So we got to go out with those guys once in awhile, but it was—there was not much social life. [chuckles]

TZB: What kind of things did you work on when you first went to Miles?

HF: Oh, I was in the Quality Control Lab and I would be assigned—like take these references and figure out a way to measure Vitamin B6 because we were just putting together multivitamins. And so once you got that methodology all set up, then all you'd do was do Vitamin B6 analyses day after day after day—every time they made a batch of Vitamin B Complex tablets. And I kept saying, you know, “This is kind of boring. [laughs] I would like to get into research where it's real glamorous.”

TZB: Is that—now, why did you think of research that way? You thought it was very glamorous?

HF: Oh, sure. Research—you do research and discover things—all this glamorous kind of stuff. And so at that time Miles had a small organic chemistry—a synthetic organic chemistry lab. And they were synthesizing different compounds and trying to find a new wonder drug. Penicillin had just been—discovered and all that. And then they decided to expand, and so they expanded to include a bacteriology department and a physiology department and a biochemistry department. And they said, “Well, this guy is coming from Cleveland and he's going to start a biochemistry section. Why don't you go over and interview and see if maybe he has a research job for you?” So I was hired as a research assistant by Dr. Free and two years later I married the boss,” [laughter] which I thought was pretty good.

TZB: And so what did you think when you first met him?

HF: Oh, I thought he was a nice guy, real enthusiastic and he was a great boss. And then I had to do all these boring things with bilirubin all the time. [laughs]

TZB: And so you worked for him for two years and then you got married and what was that like?

HF: That was terrific because—I mean, people could say, “How could you be with the same person 24 hours a day?” [laughs] Well, we had all these chemical things to talk about and we had—it was great; it was terrific.

TZB: And what kind of things did you work on together?

HF: And we worked on the diagnostics. Well, actually, we worked on some of the Alka-Seltzer stuff as well. But at that time Miles was—you know, Alka-Seltzer was their big product.

TZB: Right.

HF: And that had just been introduced some several years before that. And they had one product called Clinitest ®, which was a test for urine sugar that Dr. Walter Compton, who was then off in the medical Army and—but he and this friend of his had devised a way to—let me tell you—are you knowledgeable about chemistry?

TZB: I've had basic chemistry.

HF: Okay, good. The test for sugar in urine at that time was a reduction test. They would take copper ions—blue cupric ions and with heat and alkali mixing in a reducing agent would change those cupric ions of blue to an orange cuprous ion. And so this was called the Benedict's Test, because Stanley Benedict, who was a 17-year-old medical student, invented this bunch of solutions you mixed together and did this with and you got answers.

TZB: The results.

HF: Yes. And Dr. Compton and Jonas Kamlet had a patent on this little gadget. They used a real short test tube and they had a tablet and in that—pill, tablet—and in that tablet was cupric sulfate and sodium hydroxide (for the alkali) and citric acid. And, because it was Miles, they put a little carbonate in to make it fizz. And so they would drop this little tablet into this tube and the heat of solution of that sodium hydroxide—you know, it makes a hot solution—when you dissolve it. And the heat of interaction of sodium hydroxide and citric acid gave enough heat so they didn't have to have an external source of heat, (so they didn't have to put it in a boiling water bath or heat it over a Bunsen burner), or have it splash on the wall and all that stuff.

So it was a terrific convenient test to do reduction test with—to determine sugar in urine. And up until that time people who were diabetic would, you know, take their urine to the doctor's office and let the doctor do the test. And so it was really a boon because it made things easier for the labs, and then finally they got to the idea, “Well, by golly, we should sell this to people who could do their own tests at home.” And they were just beginning to do that when we started to get involved. Well, I was with Al at the very beginning, we did some nutrition experiments and we used to gastric tube feed the rats and do all that stuff, and do these metabolism experiments. We had read someplace that the Chinese were developing some kind of an anti-obesity drug out of gossypol, which was a compound found in cotton seed. And so we extracted the stuff from cotton seed and we'd do all kinds of tests, and we were trying to make this wonderful pill that you could take and would take away your hunger, and you wouldn't have to bother going on diets and you could lose weight. And it never worked [laughs].

TZB: I'm really sorry about that. [laughter]

HF: But that—was that kind of stuff. And then we talked—and we also worked on why aspirin in Alka-Seltzer got into the blood stream faster than aspirin if you just took a tablet and a glass of water. And there were some competitive products that were being thought of that said, “If you take this tablet that we make and stick it under your tongue, why then the aspirin is really absorbed fast from under your tongue”—of course, it tasted so horrible, you didn't want to do it that way. But anyway, we did some work on aspirin, how fast it got through the blood stream and measuring salicyate levels. And then there weren't any laws or any modus operandi, which said you couldn't use yourself as guinea pigs.

TZB: Right.

HF: And so we used to do all of this stuff. Al had actually gotten his Ph.D. by doing a series of studies on duodenal contents. And so he would tube himself, take this big, fat tube and push it all the way down in his stomach and he'd sit there collecting gastric fluid while he was writing reports and stuff. You know, it was—[chuckles] it made me gag to just think about it. [laughs]

TZB: So you all would test the stuff on yourselves.

HF: Well, of course.

TZB: And so what would—what was that like?

HF: Well, I never did—[laughter]

TZB: You never did that.

HF: No way! I collected urine and did all that stuff [laughter] but I didn't do gastric tubes.

TZB: That is dedication. [laughter]