"I am the Smartest Man I Know"

The following section is included:

• CONTENTS

Life is not fair, and I, for one, am happy about that. That I should receive the Nobel Prize in Physics coming from a tiny village in Norway was very unlikely, and I shall try to describe in this small book, how and perhaps why it happened to me. I do not write a diary and thus must rely on my memory, so the story may be somewhat choppy and not exactly correct, but I promise to do my best. I should say here that I have a brother, John, who is only about a year older than me; we grew up together and we shared most of our memories for the first 16 years or so. But I left for Canada when I was 25 years old, while he stayed in Norway. Sometimes now when we get together to swap stories from our youth, I am very surprised how bad my brother’s memory is! So keep that in mind as we go along.

Like almost everybody on Earth I had two parents who never went to college or even high school. But they were good and intelligent people. My father was a pharmacist. In order to become a pharmacist at that time in Norway, one had to spend a semester at university after 10 years in public schools. My mother had the same education as my father, except she never went to university. Besides helping out at the drugstore a few times when they were short of workers, my mother was home taking care of her family. At the time that was what most women did. Both my parents were interested in reading, and we had a lot of books. Books then were expensive and I can remember that my father bought books from auctions in Copenhagen, Denmark. I do not think he shopped at auctions to save money. Instead, he truly liked the surprise and suspense of receiving and opening the big wooden crates. He always hoped to find a nugget or two inside the crates, but the contents were mostly cheap literature in Danish. It was okay that the books were written in Danish because at the time there was little difference between written Danish and Norwegian. That was due to the fact that Norway had been under Danish rule for 400 years, until 1814. Norway then entered into a union with Sweden. It was about this time that the average Norwegian became literate. Since we had been ruled by Denmark for such a long time, the official written language remained Danish. I actually learned to read the year I had my tonsils removed. I must have had lots of colds when I was young, or the decision to remove my tonsils would not have been made. It was a medical fad at the time, because tonsillectomies are seldom performed today. Today we seem to trust nature a bit more; if you were born with tonsils, maybe they do something important that we haven’t figured out yet. At the time we lived in a little village called Lena, but the operation was done is a city called Hamar where they had a hospital. The city was a two-hour boat ride across Mjøsa, the name of the biggest lake in Norway. I was only about 5 years old, and I clearly remember lying on the operating table. The surgeon asked me to count backwards starting at 100. By the time I got to 94 I was out cold. When I woke up, my head was on a rubber pillow and blood was coming out of my mouth. The surgeon and my mother were there, and I cried like a stuck pig. The doctor said, “If you don’t stop crying, your mother must leave.” So of course I cried even more, and my mother left. The next thing I remember is waking up in a room in the hospital with 4 or 5 adults. I guess there was no children’s ward in the hospital at that time. My mother had left me with several children’s books. Since I was the only child in that ward, I must have become everyone’s little pet; I remember all the adult patients were eager to help me. One book had simple sentences with words missing. You could guess what the words were by gluing the correct pictures into the blanks. After a short time I suddenly recognized I could guess where the pictures in the books should go by myself, and after that I could sort of read.

Norway was occupied by Germany for five years. Germany attacked Norway on April 9, 1940, to everybody’s surprise. The German excuse was that they wanted to protect us from the English. But since the Norwegian Queen was born in England, we had good relations with the English and did not need to be protected. Norway was not prepared and thus was an easy target. Prior to the occupation, my mother used to save articles from the newspapers about the brutal winter war between the Soviet Union and Finland in 1939; she strongly felt that this was as close to war as Norway would ever get. Little did she know…

The following sections are included:

• Preparation for the University
• Norwegian technical University (NTH)
• First trip outside Norway
• Back at the Norwegian institute of technology (NTH)

The following sections are included:

• The military
• First job

The following sections are included:

• The journey
• Canada
• The worst period of my life
• Peterborough

The following sections are included:

• B and C course
• B-course
• Anne is born
• C course

To get a job at the GE laboratory without a Ph.D. was a good break for me, so Inger and I decided to go back to Norway for a visit before I started. We had now been away from Norway for about 5 years, and we could afford to make the trip. We flew with Icelandic Airlines because it had the cheapest airfare and a boat would be too slow. I told the laboratory that I would take two months leave, and start full-time when I came back, and that was okay. I also asked what I would be working on and they said “probably thin films”. So I took a book on photography with me to Norway, as that was the only film I knew, but as I would later learn, they had very different films in mind!

When we got back I looked forward to starting my new job. It turned out to be very difficult because no one told me what to do. When I asked my manager he said: “Good work”, and left it at that. In those days, Ph.D.s that were hired normally continued with their thesis work in their new job. In fact many scientists continue to work on their thesis throughout the rest of their career. I still did not know what to do and went in desperation to the department head, but he also said “good work.” Then I went to Dr. John Fischer and he asked me what I wanted to do. I said: “I want to learn some physics but I know I am too old to have an impact on the field.” I knew that most physicists make their discoveries very young and I had now become 30 years old. John said, “That is not true because when you are young you are learning things. Since you do not know any physics, you will acquire new knowledge and can make discoveries. My advice is to change careers every 5 years or so, then you can make discoveries your whole life.” John was a very wise man. Then he explained that he was also a mechanical engineer like I was, but he had worked in physical metallurgy for several years. He had resigned as a manager because he had some ideas about fundamental particles. He was going to apply second quantization which was an approach used in the theory of superconductivity. I did not understand what he said, but I was impressed. Then he told me that he wanted me to work with thin films, and he wanted me to place two metal plates very close to one another so that electrons can tunnel from one metal to the other. I had never heard of tunneling and must have looked perplexed so John continued, “If you throw a tennis ball against a wall it will bounce back.” That I believed. But then he continued: “However, if you throw it enough times, sooner or later, the laws of physics permit the ball to go through the wall and appear on the other side.” That I did not believe. But he continued, “The ball will not have changed and there will be no hole in the wall.” Now he left me incredulous. So he said, “I want you to try to place two metals about 20 angstroms apart (about 2 billionths of a meter!), and see if you can measure this effect.” I remember I thought that maybe this was a theory in physics, but that it would never happen in real life. But since they were paying me I had to please them and give it a try. And now I had something to do, even though I got no more instructions.

I had many friends at the laboratory and my manager Roland Schmitt was very nice to my family and me. He clearly took a big risk hiring me into the Physical Science Branch because I had absolutely no prior track record in research. He had just bought an old cottage at Lake George. Lake George is a beautiful pristine lake in upstate New York which is a very popular vacation place. Roland’s cottage was located at Tongue Mountain and only accessible by boat. So he let my family use both his boat and cottage in the fall when he no longer used it. The boat was an old, but beautiful boat with an inboard engine and a rudder, so it took some skill to make it work, but I managed. In addition to the cottage there was a boathouse with several additional beds and a working player piano. The beds were laid out as if in a hospital, and it was clear to me that the boathouse and the cottage had likely been used as an illegal abortion clinic, because it was hidden and difficult to get to. At that time (1960) abortions were illegal and regulated by the states; it was well before Roe vs. Wade in 1973. Roland had many rules that he wanted us to obey. The main rule was that you should use a stick or cane in front of you when you walked because there were rattlesnakes on the mountain. Another rule was that you should never jump or dive into the lake from the boathouse’s roof. So we went by the rules. But one day when we were there he visited us with his family. His children dove from the boathouse roof and walked in the forest with no protective canes. So in my family, “Roland’s rule” came to mean a rule that could be broken. He soon bought a small sailboat to have at the cottage, and I taught some of his family to sail. Roland had first bought an instruction booklet, and I got a kick out of the first instruction: “Untie the boat from the dock!”

Tunneling had by now become a popular field and there was at least one session about tunneling at every March meeting of the American Physical Society. Tunneling in superconductors had also become a major subject, and when a low temperature meeting was arranged in Moscow I received a special invitation to attend. Actually several scientists from the GE laboratory attended the meeting, and since this was during the Cold War we all needed special visas. We were required to prepay for our stay, and there were three classes to choose from: economy, normal, and deluxe. So we all applied for normal, but then I was assigned to the deluxe class. Roland, my manager, said I should refuse and go for the standard class, so I wrote them back and got the answer: “Ivar Giaever will go deluxe or not at all”. I of course was happy about that, and Roland gave in so I went deluxe.

The following sections are included:

• The DC transformer
• Some other experiments

In 1968 after having worked at the GE Lab for over 10 years, I decided to apply for a sabbatical leave which GE offered. The unwritten rule was that if you could get some support from a foundation, GE would then pay the rest. I decided to apply for a Guggenheim fellowship and they gave me a stipend. What they said in the agreement was that the money is yours to do with as you please and whatever you do, please do not wrwite and tell us what you did! GE agreed, so now we had to decide where we wanted to go. Since we had three children in school and one who was only four years old, we decided on England because there would be few problems with the language. And since I had already met Professor Brian Pippard I wrote him and asked about the possibility of coming on sabbatical leave. He reacted positively to the idea, and since he had become headmaster at a new college, Clare Hall, he also offered me a new, fully furnished house at the college. We decided to take our old Chevrolet station wagon with us and therefore went to England by boat. We settled on the SS France, and planned to take a trip in Europe first, a vacation in Norway, and then finally a ferry from Norway to England. I remember driving the station wagon down to the docks in New York City to hand it over to the SS France’s crew. The first thing I noticed was somebody pushing a refrigerator off a truck onto the dock — the refrigerator got crumpled in the bottom. I managed to locate the person who was responsible for loading cars onto the ship, and when I gave him the key he said: “It is customary to give us a tip”. I asked him how much and he said: “Oh, about $200.” I thought for a moment and decided to give him $20, which he took grudgingly. I was nervous that he would damage my car, but when it was unloaded in France, it was okay.

Coming back to Schenectady the first thing we had to do was to buy another car, and we were fortunate that one of my friends, Bob Fleischer, lent us a Volkswagen Beetle for a week or so. We had rented the house out while we were away and that turned out to be a problem because the renter had a dog which we had not known about. Therefore Inger had quite a big job cleaning the house as mice had gotten into the dog food and even hid some of it in the furniture that we had stored in the basement.

The GE Research Laboratory had started a program similar to a Ph.D. program. With a bachelor’s degree you could be hired at the Lab for two years and work for a scientist while simultaneously studying at a nearby university. I had helped to hire a young Swede into the program, John Valin, in 1971. I had met him in Sweden when his wife was pregnant, and he hoped that it would be a boy, because they had two girls from before. So I bet him a bottle of cognac it would be. I knew the odds were slightly on my side, as there are approximately 2% more boys born than girls. It was a boy, and he showed up at my house one day with the bottle. We became good friends and played a lot of tennis together. After two years he went back to Sweden, but he remained in contact with my new manager Dr. Milan Fiske. I had no idea, but I had been suggested for the Nobel Prize by people at the laboratory. Actually they needed help, because only previous Nobel Prize winners, professors at Scandinavian universities, or universities in the world selected by the Nobel Prize committee can suggest people for the Nobel Prize. So I have no idea who submitted the application. There had been a tunneling conference in Riso, Denmark, in June 1967, arranged by Professor Eli Burnstein. That fall I was a little nervous because it was rumored that I had been suggested for the Nobel Prize. Since I did not get it at that time, I forgot about it. In my mind I thought I would have a chance if superconducting tunneling became practical. The reason it did not is, of course, that it requires low temperatures. Anyway this time Milan used John Valin as his spy in Sweden since he was at Chalmers Technological University where two of the professors on the Physics Nobel Prize Committee worked. On October 22, 1973, Milan called me into his office and said he had heard there was a chance that I would receive the Nobel Prize in Physics the next day. The reason he did this was that my mother was again visiting from Norway and he knew she was scheduled to leave the next day. He thought it would have been awful for her to learn that her son had received the Nobel Prize after she got back home in Norway. But he emphasized that he was not certain. Milan was a very considerate person.

On a different adventure entirely, I was invited via mail by Professor Charles Schlicter, a professor at the University of Illinois in Urbana, to go to China for one month together with some of the most famous solid state scientists in the USA. I had travelled a lot that year, and since Inger could not come along, I said no to the trip. But then I met Schlicter at an American Physical Society meeting and he asked me in person. Since he was very persuasive, I changed my mind and said yes. I have never regretted that decision.

The following sections are included:

• Working with schistosomiasis
• Trying to commercialize indium slides

Right before I received the Nobel Prize I had received the Coolidge prize from GE laboratory management. This award gave me the right to take leave from the laboratory for one year. I was invited by the American Physical Society to spend a month in Japan, and I decided to use part of my Coolidge prize for this. At the time GE had an office in Tokyo. The manager there met Inger and me at the airport, and told us about Japan and Japanese customs. He gave us a slip of paper with our address in Tokyo written in Japanese, which we were supposed to give to the taxi drivers so they could get us home. At the time they really did not have street addresses like we do in the USA. Almost no one spoke English in Japan, and you could not hail a taxi on the street like you did in NY. The taxis simply did not stop for foreigners, because they knew that the passengers could not explain where they wanted to go.

At the GE laboratory I continued to work on biological problems and I enjoyed that. Charlie Bean hired a young biologist from Cobleskill into our branch, a scientist named Charles Keese who had an NSF scholarship and wanted to work at the GE lab for a year. Charlie Bean wanted him to work with me and because he had the right credentials, including an undergrad degree in physics from SUNY, Albany and a Ph.D. in biology from RPI, I decided to take him on. I never regretted this decision and we are still working together after having co-authored around 50 publications. The first paper we published together dealt with a new idea for a radioimmunoassay, where the antibody is tagged after the binding assay is performed rather than before. After the antibody is tagged it is removed with an acid which makes it safer to perform an immunology test because you are not using radiolabeled protein. We were proud of that idea, but the number of citations we have received for that paper is exactly zero. The problem may be that it is a method paper, but we published it in a medical journal. Or heaven forbid, maybe the paper is no good! It is very educational to look in the citation index to see how your various papers have fared, and then try to remember what you felt about them at the time the papers were written. When you are young you are terribly afraid of someone stealing your ideas; when you become more experienced you become more relaxed, and sometimes happy that someone liked your ideas even if they stole them.

When I first started to spend summers as a Vista professor in Norway, we rented a small apartment in Oslo. This changed when I took over my parents’ cottage in Tonsberg. My father had died many years earlier, but my mother, who was 90+ years old, finally decided to relieve herself of the responsibility of owning the cottage. She really loved the place and wanted to be sure it would be well taken care of. The original plan was that my sister Mette, who is 9 years younger than me, would take over responsibility for the cottage. But Mette was, and still is, not the best when it comes to managing money. I made a deal with my siblings where Inger and I would take over the cottage and I paid each of them their share. The cottage is on the Oslo fjord and, at the time it was “rustic”, with an outhouse and no indoor water. We had a carpenter add an indoor toilet, a sauna, and an additional bedroom. We have spent every summer there since 1992 and we love the place.

Since Charlie and I worked in biophysics and studied cellular behavior, we did not fall neatly into a single science category and as a result we had difficulty funding our research. Most agencies in the US pay lip service to how important interdisciplinary research is, but few of them back it up with funds. We applied for grants at both the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) with little luck. Then Charlie heard about the Small Business Innovating Research (SBIR) program and suggested that we apply to them for funding. Since our measurements of impedance caused by mammalian cells cultured on small electrodes were new, we decided to go with a grant proposal in this area or as we called it Electrical Cell-substrate Impedance Sensing (ECIS). The business would be to teach researchers that by monitoring cells grown on metal surfaces, it is possible to learn a lot about the cells. For example we can see how the cells respond to various drugs, insertion of DNA, or various physical parameters such as temperature. Our customers would then be professors, medical doctors, and drug companies.

On my first visit to South Korea I was invited by Edward de Bono. He is a medical doctor, but his mission in life was to teach people how to think. He invited twelve Nobel laureates and their wives for a 10-day trip, providing us with $5000 each and first class airfare. I do not know who paid for the trip, but I suspect it was the government of Korea, as we got to meet the President. I was not going to accept but Dr. Keese talked me into it. It was my first junket trip, and I had an interesting time; not least because I got to know the 11 other laureates. De Bono was also an interesting person; he said that we teach people everything now, even sex, but we do not teach people how to think. He has written several books dealing with how to think, and he has several interesting ideas. After our return he asked me to write an introduction to one of his books, “I am right, you are wrong.”.

Every year there is a meeting of Nobel Prize science laureates in Lindau, Germany. Since there are three prizes, medicine, chemistry and physics, the physics meeting used to happen every three years. But they have recently introduced a common meeting for all the prizes so now the physics meeting is every 4 years. In my opinion these meetings are very valuable for the students and also for the Nobel laureates. In Lindau you have an opportunity to meet Nobel laureates whom you would rarely see at an ordinary meeting. The first three meetings I attended I had the chance to chat with Dr. Paul Dirac. Dr. Dirac is arguably one of the most admired physicists that has ever lived. He was not easy to chat with, but his wife was and she helped keep the conversations going. Interestingly, she was the sister of the Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner. There is a story about Dr. Dirac that he tended to introduce his wife as “Professor Wigner’s sister!”

Skiing has been an important part of my life, both downhill and cross country. Inger and I grew up cross-country skiing in Norway. For example, to get to school you had to have cross country skis. At Easter time in Norway many people take a week off from work to ski in the mountains. At that time of year the sun starts getting warm, and people like to get a tan in the mountain air. Inger and I had enjoyed such trips as well, and we had a very nice time as teenagers when we rented a cottage one Easter close to Skogshorn with several of our friends.

We tried to grow the business by giving talks about the science at conferences and at the invitation of professors interested in the technology. This worked reasonably well. We also went to listen to talks and RPI had some business-focused talks referred to as “Varsity Talks”. At one of these talks, Charlie listened to Chris Dehnert who gave a talk about how to sell scientific equipment. He listed 10 rules which described the wrong approach, and we were guilty of all of them! So we decided to meet with Chris, and after that there was no looking back. He joined our company as an adviser, and took no money. But our agreement was that he would be handsomely paid if he could make the company reach certain sales targets. He seemed very motivated and we got along well. It took longer than what he had anticipated in the beginning to hit those targets. When it was just Charlie and me, we often, talked about how we needed a catalogue but we never actually got around to designing one. Three weeks after Chris joined us, we had printed our first catalogue listing all our equipment for sale. Next he decided it was time to go to a trade show. When scientists host technical meetings, the business people or “vendors” go to the same meetings and pay for exhibit space to display their wares. It is an effective way to reach customers. Before we went we invested in a display tool and had large pictures taken of our equipment. I thought it was rather expensive, too fancy and a little over-the-top, but Charlie rationalized the cost by saying we could rent the equipment to other people in the incubator center. It was a reasonable argument, which of course we never followed through on.

There have been a lot of changes at Applied Biophysics in the past few years. While I originally did all the programming in APL, we wanted to make things more “user friendly” so I looked at other programming languages. After trying many options, I settled on the old standby known as “C”. After getting pretty good at this language, I went to Norway for the summer, as Inger and I do every summer. On my return I discovered Charlie and Chris had hired David who used MATLAB, a language very similar to APL, so I did not object too strenuously and handed over the reins. On other fronts, we developed the 96-well plates that the Pharma industry wanted, and we hired Christian, a researcher with an undergraduate degree in physics and a graduate degree in biology. He was a great asset and had no difficulty understanding the workings of our instrument. And he likes to travel, so Christian also handles foreign sales.

The following section is included:

• EPILOGUE