An Eclectic Collection

I was born in Harrisburg, PA and grew up in nearby Camp Hill, where I attended and graduated from the Camp Hill schools. Camp Hill is a small place (population »5,000) completely surrounded by other Harrisburg suburbs. My family had a long connection to Camp Hill and both sets of my grandparents lived there. My commute to High School was short, as my parents’ property abutted the high school in the back. I went to college at Penn State University, about 100 miles from Camp Hill, where I majored in biochemistry. I took a couple of computer classes in the mid-60s and this fueled my interest in computers and programming. I was also in Army ROTC (this was Vietnam War time) and rose to cadet Lt. Col., which meant I got to march a (cadet) battalion around the parade ground. When I received my B.S. (with High Honors) I was commissioned in the Army Chemical Corps. The normal arrangement was two years active duty, followed by two years active reserve and then two years inactive reserve. I had taken the Graduate Record Exam and, largely as a result of that and my GPA, received a National Science Foundation Fellowship for graduate school. I knew the army would grant a three-year delay in reporting for active duty in order to attend graduate school, but I did not know how likely it was this could be extended. As a result, I stayed at Penn State and completed a Ph.D. in three years. During this time, I met and married another biochemistry graduate student (Sui Ti Atienza, known as “Ti”), who was born in the Philippines of Chinese extraction. When I informed the Army when I would be available, I was offered a different arrangement: three months active duty for training and an active reserve commitment until the 8 anniversary of my date of commission. Since I had already used three of those years in grad school (and been promoted to first lieutenant based on time in grade), I chose this option. As a result, I reported to Ft. McClellan, AL, to attend the Chemical Officer Basic Course. The highlights were qualifying Expert with the portable flame thrower (not nearly as easy as it looks), fogging-in an interstate highway with smoke generators (conditions were too good), and attending a demonstration (where the audience and instructors all wore gas masks) in which a drop of the nerve agent VX was placed on a goat’s nose. The goat licked it and quickly went into convulsions. The goat was given an atropine injection and artificial respiration by the chest-pressure-hoof-lift method and was revived. I had no particular thought of going into brewing. When I finished my army training, jobs for Ph.D. biochemists were not plentiful. I sent out multiple resumes and the Stroh Brewery Co. (at that time, a large regional brewer based in Detroit) invited me for an interview. Soon afterward, they offered me a position as a research associate in the Research & Development (R&D) section of the Laboratory Department. I accepted and joined Lauren Stenroos, who had been there for some years; at that time, the two of us were the R&D section. Lauren was a biochemist who had considerable experience with gas chromatography, especially related to flavor. After three months, I was promoted to head of the section. At about this time, Stroh, acting on my advice, acquired the first high-performance liquid chromatograph (HPLC) in the brewing industry. About two years after I joined Stroh, Morten Meilgaard was hired to head a new department, Research & Development, comprised of the R&D Laboratory and the Pilot Plant (Peter Blum was Pilot Plant manager; he was assisted by Gus Anklam). I was promoted to R&D Lab Manager. Ted Wisk, who had been the head of the Analytical Section of the laboratory, joined us in the R&D lab. Morten was an amazing linguist (fluent in Danish, English, French, German, and Spanish) and had wide experience in brewing (as an international consultant for Alfred Jorgensen Laboratories and as Director of Research at Cerveceria Quauht emoc). He was also a dedicated correspondent and collaborator, most notably in sensory testing, flavor terminology, and the development of the beer flavor wheel. He was a very careful and thorough researcher, particularly in the area of beer flavor thresholds. He was a great boss for me, with helpful suggestions whenever I asked and an otherwise hands-off attitude. Dave Reid was hired principally to carry out Morten’s flavor work, but was sometimes available to help with other projects. Stroh hired Eric Knudson, an analytical chemist who had received his Ph.D. in Bruce Kowalski’s lab at the University of Washington (UW), to join the R&D lab. At UW, Eric had learned about and used chemometrics (the application of multivariate mathematics and statistics to chemical data) in his thesis research and passed some of this knowledge on to me. Three important topics in chemometrics are exploratory data analysis, pattern recognition, and statistical experiment design/response surface modeling. I realized the great utility of chemometrics as a set of tools not only for chemical, but also for microbiological and sensory data, and applied it in much of my subsequent work. A number of my studies and publications are “in silico”, meaning they did not involve any lab work on my part. Rather,