Maitland Jones Jr. wanted to be tennis player. At thirteen he attempted to enlist his parents into chauffeuring him around the east coast junior tennis circuit, to which they replied, “get a job kid.” That summer Maitland’s first job was bottle washer and gofer for chemistry giants Laurence H. Knox and William von Eggers Doering, at their Hickrill Chemical Research laboratory in Katonah New York.
Complex chemistry equations that were once meaningless scribbles on the laboratory blackboard began to make sense over the next five to six years. Maitland enrolled at Yale to study chemistry, following his formative mentors Knox and Doering, where he journeyed deeper into his craft during a postdoctoral year with his famous teachers and followed with a second year at the University of Wisconsin under the guidance of Dr. Jerry Berson.
Over the span of 43 years Maitland collaborated with undergraduates, graduate students, postdoctoral and visiting fellows to write 225 published papers and books while at “Jones Alley,” the Princeton Lab where they explored and discovered reactive intermediates including carbenes, quantum molecular reactions, carboranes, and heterocycles—with a focus on “how electrons talked to each other.”
During his teaching career Maitland experimented with the elimination of large lecture “talking head” style teaching, breaking students into small groups, providing an environment of problem solving, and fostering scientific discovery through the exploration and distillation of disparate information.
Professor Jones is the author of five books including, Organic Chemistry, (2014) published by W.W Norton, now in its fifth edition-- the prominent textbook taught to students across the globe. Today Maitland is following a parallel passion sparked during a performance by jazz innovator, the incomparable-- Thelonious Monk, at the NYC’s Five Spot jazz club in 1957. Maitland is a regular in New York’s jazz scene, and hosts Jazz Nights featuring evenings of great music at his home in New Jersey. He co-produced Monk’s Dreams: The Complete Compositions of Thelonious Sphere Monk, available on both compact disc and digital download. It’s our extreme pleasure to welcome Dr. Maitland “Mait” Jones Jr. to this episode of Intrinsic Drive®.
Intrinsic Drive ® is produced by Ellen Strickler and Phil Wharton and Andrew Hollingworth is sound editor and engineer.
Created for human beings by human beings. NO GENERATIVE AI USE ALLOWED.
Maitland Jones Jr. wanted to be tennis player. At thirteen he attempted to enlist his parents into chauffeuring him around the east coast junior tennis circuit, to which they replied, “get a job kid.” That summer Maitland’s first job was bottle washer and gofer for chemistry giants Laurence H. Knox and William von Eggers Doering, at their Hickrill Chemical Research laboratory in Katonah New York.
Complex chemistry equations that were once meaningless scribbles on the laboratory blackboard began to make sense over the next five to six years. Maitland enrolled at Yale to study chemistry, following his formative mentors Knox and Doering, where he journeyed deeper into his craft during a postdoctoral year with his famous teachers and followed with a second year at the University of Wisconsin under the guidance of Dr. Jerry Berson.
Over the span of 43 years Maitland collaborated with undergraduates, graduate students, postdoctoral and visiting fellows to write 225 published papers and books while at “Jones Alley,” the Princeton Lab where they explored and discovered reactive intermediates including carbenes, quantum molecular reactions, carboranes, and heterocycles—with a focus on “how electrons talked to each other.”
During his teaching career Maitland experimented with the elimination of large lecture “talking head” style teaching, breaking students into small groups, providing an environment of problem solving, and fostering scientific discovery through the exploration and distillation of disparate information.
Professor Jones is the author of five books including, Organic Chemistry, (2014) published by W.W Norton, now in its fifth edition-- the prominent textbook taught to students across the globe. Today Maitland is following a parallel passion sparked during a performance by jazz innovator, the incomparable-- Thelonious Monk, at the NYC’s Five Spot jazz club in 1957. Maitland is a regular in New York’s jazz scene, and hosts Jazz Nights featuring evenings of great music at his home in New Jersey. He co-produced Monk’s Dreams: The Complete Compositions of Thelonious Sphere Monk, available on both compact disc and digital download. It’s our extreme pleasure to welcome Dr. Maitland “Mait” Jones Jr. to this episode of Intrinsic Drive®.
Intrinsic Drive ® is produced by Ellen Strickler and Phil Wharton and Andrew Hollingworth is sound editor and engineer.
Created for human beings by human beings. NO GENERATIVE AI USE ALLOWED.
Phil Wharton (00:00):
A lifetime of training, practice, study hard work through discipline, some achieve excellence, mastery, fulfillment, self-actualization. What can we learn from their beginnings, discoveries, motivations, and falls? How do they dust themselves off and resume their journey? During these interviews, stories and conversations, we reveal their intrinsic drive.
(00:25):
Maitland Jones wanted to be a tennis player. At 13, he attempted to enlist his parents into chauffeuring him around the East coast junior tennis circuit, to which they replied, get a job kid. That summer Maitland's first job was bottle washer and gopher for chemistry giants, Lawrence H. Knox and William von Eggers Doering at their chemical research laboratory in Katonah New York. Complex chemistry equations that were once meaningless scribbles on the laboratory blackboard began to make sense. Over the next five to six years, Maitland enrolled at Yale to study chemistry following his seminal mentors Knox and Doering, where he journeyed deeper into his craft during a postdoctoral year with his famous teachers, and followed with a second year at the University of Wisconsin under the guidance of Dr. Jerry Berson. Over the span of 43 years, Maitland collaborated with undergraduates, graduate students, postdoctoral and visiting fellows to write 225 published papers and books while at Jones Alley, the Princeton Lab, where they explored and discovered reactive intermediates and including carbenes, quantum molecular reactions, carboranes, and heterocycles, with a focus on how electrons talk to each other.
(01:42):
During his teaching career, Maitland experimented with the elimination of large lecture talking head style teaching and broke students into small groups, providing an environment of problem solving and fostering scientific discovery through the exploration and distillation of disparate information. Professor Jones is the author of five books, including Organic Chemistry, now in its fifth edition, the prominent textbook taught to students across the globe. Today, Maitland is following a parallel passion sparked during a performance by jazz innovator, the incomparable Thelonious Monk at the New York City's Five Spot Jazz Club in 1957. Maitland is a regular and New York's jazz scene and host's jazz nights featuring evenings of great music at his home in New Jersey. He co-produced Monk's Dreams, The Complete Compositions of Thelonious Sphere Monk, available on both compact disc and digital download. It is our extreme pleasure to welcome Dr. Maitland Jones, Jr, to this episode of Intrinsic Drive. Maitland, thank you so much for coming on Intrinsic Drive. It's such a pleasure to have you with us, and thanks again for taking your time to tell your story with us here today.
Maitland Jones (03:02):
Well, Phil, it's my pleasure for sure. I'm an academic, they love to talk about themselves
Phil Wharton (03:09):
Or better, maybe jazz and tennis. It might be.
Maitland Jones (03:12):
It's true. They may come up.
Phil Wharton (03:18):
Take us to the beginning. Mait, take us to wherever you'd like to take us. I mean, obviously at the beginnings working for Bill Doering in the summers at 13, I read the piece that was well done from Princeton that sort of had a summary of you washing bottles there. What was the early spark for you in chemistry? What are your earliest memories?
Speaker 3 (03:43):
That was it. That came about because as probably a 13-year-old, I fancied myself as a tennis player or as a better tennis player than I was. And with all the arrogance of a 13-year-old, I went to my parents and said, well, next summer I'm going to play the 13-year-old circuit translation into English. I'm asking you or telling you to drive me around the East Coast. And they responded quite appropriately, although I didn't think so at the time. It's time to get a job kid.
Maitland Jones (04:28):
Yeah. This is not the time of travel sports at this time. That's right. Fortunately.
(04:35):
So by chance they had as a friend, an eminent organic chemist, Bill Doering, you mentioned his name. And although this is a long and fascinating story, he had a privately endowed research lab about five miles from where we lived at the time, in Katonah New York.
Phil Wharton (05:03):
In Katonah? Yeah, in Westchester County.
Maitland Jones (05:06):
Yeah, that's right. My parents lived in Bedford. We could talk about what Bedford was like too.
(05:14):
Wow. That would be neat.
(05:15):
And I wasn't there, but I imagine at some cocktail party or something, I can hear my mother going up to Bill Doering and saying, we have this kid who's so interested in science, which only meant it didn't mean anything. I picked up frogs in the garden, what is a thirteen year-old?, that thirteen year-old anyway, didn't know anything about science? Anyway, he capitulated and I worked at this lab as what today would be called an intern, but I was just a generalized gopher and bottle washer, and I knew nothing, absolutely nothing. I would look at the blackboards, at the drawings, and the black one, they meant absolutely zero to me. And of course I had no experience and I was probably a lot more trouble than I was worth. But they put up with me and I was apprentice to Larry Knox, Lawrence H. Knox, who was a sort of permanent research director of the day-to-day work at that lab.
(06:23):
There were six, seven, or eight postdocs there. But Larry was always there. And I still think that the high point of my career, my chemistry career was washing Larry Knox's dishes. He was an extraordinary person. His graduate work is still the stuff of textbooks, and in my view he did, he and Doering, did the most important experiment in organic chemistry of the 20th century. And I didn't realize any of this stuff till much later, but I owe Knox and Doering my entire career. So was there a formative moment? That was it. And although I knew nothing, you couldn't be in that lab and not sense the passion of those seven or eight people working on problems. It was just incredible. You would have to be made out of stone not to sense it. And I knew from that point that that's what I wanted to do. And I eventually learned to read those blackboards and do more serious work in the summers and then just washing dishes. And that was it. That was an absolute definite starting point for me, and it never changed.
(07:58):
Oh my gosh. How many summers did you do this process?
Speaker 3 (08:02):
I'm trying to think into my college years. Although I was doing research, I went to Yale and worked for Duren. I was doing research at Yale and I sort of segued into the summer, so it would've been five, six years, something like that.
Phil Wharton (08:25):
Yeah, that makes sense.
Maitland Jones (08:26):
So I was 18 or 19 maybe something.
Phil Wharton (08:30):
And so those were really the seminal mentors, Knox and Doering. Absolutely. And that sort of preempted the discovery. You're picking up things as well as now you're starting to study things. And so these chalk, the schematics are starting to make sense because actually working through them now, as you teach.
Maitland Jones (08:52):
That's exactly right. And as a sophomore at Yale, I took Doering's organic course, which is what really taught me to read the blackboards. And that was another moment of revelation because he's a great teacher, was a great teacher, and I loved that course. And I'd taken freshman chemistry the year before, I don't know if I should say this, but it was dreadful.
Phil Wharton (09:18):
Was it?
Maitland Jones (09:20):
If I hadn't known that better was coming, I wonder what would've happened.
Phil Wharton (09:27):
So maybe that was the difference between someone that was interested and then maybe a course that's possibly more rote or memorization, which you
Maitland Jones (09:36):
Absolutely
(09:37):
You forewarn against, in the book that I read in the preface at your own peril or something, exclamation point, memorize at your own peril. We found that midway through the semester, we lose students downstream when they're trying to.
(09:54):
If you're teaching organic chemistry, you're not teaching the facts. Very few of those future doctors and other things are going to need the facts. A few, a few, but mostly not. You're trying to teach people to think and to solve problems, to become problem solvers, and someone who can do well in organic chemistry. If the questions are written well and goes to medical school, will be a person who can diagnose, who can take disparate information coming from various sources and put 'em together to make a hypothesis and then think about treatment. So I don't think. It's fashionable to put down medical schools for depending on organic chemistry. I don't think that's right. No, it's not the memorization, it's the problem solving.
Phil Wharton (10:49):
That's right. That's exactly right. Okay. So you have the postdoctoral years. Is there more discovery there, obviously with Jerry Berson, Jerry, when you went to Wisconsin, and what did you feel about those? What was happening there at that time?
Speaker 3 (11:09):
Well, I loved Jerry. Jerry was one of the wonderful people in the world, in addition to being smart as hell and very, very creative. I had a really good postdoc year, and you're assigned a problem. This is not me thinking up stuff. Jerry, professor Berson suggested I work on a certain problem, and it really worked out well, and I wish I'd had another year there. He is a total sweetheart as a person.
Phil Wharton (11:49):
That's amazing.
Maitland Jones (11:50):
He later went on to Yale.
(11:53):
He was at Yale as well?
(11:55):
After he was at USC starting out, and then Madison, and then Yale where he was for the rest of his life.
(12:07):
And that's sort of at that time you were invited to come join the faculty at Princeton?
Speaker 3 (12:12):
Well, you go out on the market and it was a pretty good job market that year, and so you go around and you interview at, I probably went to 10 places, something like that, and I can still remember the ones where I did really badly.
Phil Wharton (12:33):
Really?
Maitland Jones (12:35):
Yeah. My first interview was at Berkeley. And at Berkeley, I'll never forget this, at Berkeley. And you give a lecture. Talk to people in a lecture. And the lecture I gave was in a lecture hall where the desk space in my memory was about eight inches from the blackboard, and the blackboard was about 20 feet in the air, and I had this long wiggly pointer, I was having trouble controlling. I did not do well at Berkeley. I did not get that job, but it was my first interview and I probably learned something from it.
Phil Wharton (13:15):
Absolutely. Yeah. That's high anxiety, not being able to even reach the blackboard and being nervous to boot and all those emotions.
Maitland Jones (13:23):
Awful. So I went to Princeton in a snowstorm, and I guess they thought I was intrepid or something for fighting my way through the snow and pushing one of the professors who was going to hire me VW bus out of the snow. I did that too.
Phil Wharton (13:44):
Oh really. That's good. That helps.
Maitland Jones (13:46):
That's an essential skill for a chemist.
Phil Wharton (13:48):
Yeah.
Maitland Jones (13:50):
So then the next year in fall of 64, I started out, and your job is to find stuff out to solve problems, and you arrive equipped with a set of things you want to do. And I was lucky in that one of them worked out right away. And so by the end of my first year in the spring, I had a couple of papers out already.
Phil Wharton (14:24):
That spring
Maitland Jones (14:26):
And working with undergraduates, because I didn't have any graduate students or postdocs for some years, but I had a couple of great undergraduates. One of them, Larry Scott, went on to a fine career at Nevada, Reno, first UCLA, then Nevada Reno, and then Boston College. So his undergraduate thesis at Princeton, one of the things that Princeton does really well is to require a senior thesis of everyone, not just honors students or people who get A's, but everyone. So we scoop up all the B students who are really good.
Phil Wharton (15:07):
Yeah, that makes sense.
Speaker 3 (15:10):
I think Larry Scott was probably better than that, but his thesis worked out well, and another kid's thesis worked out really well. So I had a bunch of papers early on which was encouraging to me, and confidence building, and probably pleased Princeton.
Phil Wharton (15:31):
And it's an amazing span. And I think it was something I read that you wrote that you put out as you were leaving Princeton, and it was sort of a beautiful love letter to everybody that had been with you in that Jones alley. Was that the lab?
Maitland Jones (15:46):
That was the lab.
Phil Wharton (15:47):
Okay. And it was something like a paper a year, and 225 through the span of the 40 years. But what struck me was the undergraduates, and the post-doc students, and then the visitors, all this collaboration through that three spectrum of different people on the algorithm there.
Maitland Jones (16:09):
Well, that's exactly how research and organic chemistry is done. It's done in groups of, well, my group is never very large, but eight to 40 at the other end of things, and it's made up of graduate students, undergraduates, if the institution is smart enough to let them work, and postdocs ,and visitors, and stuff like that, and they're all interacting with each other. Each one has a separate problem, but they're interacting with each other and talking about stuff and talking to me and so on. I mean, your job, it's a little bit like raising children. You want to raise independent children. Well, you have to raise independent scientist too, and that means you can't, I never thought you could sit on them too hard and you had to let them make mistakes and have their own ideas and transition from working on what we had decided. I had decided they should work on to driving the program themselves. As soon as they do that, it's time to kick 'em out.
(17:28):
That's Right.
Speaker 3 (17:28):
That makes sense.
Maitland Jones (17:28):
Then it's time for them to go off and be independent in one way or another.
Phil Wharton (17:33):
I think you mentioned that during a piece you wrote for the Boston Globe, which I thought was really appropriate, it says are we taking out failure, the natural process of learning? I thought that was really a beautiful sentiment, that idea of we've got to have that problem solving. That's the whole, and in your book, organic Chemistry, I loved, you're going to work with a pencil. I always work with a pencil.
Maitland Jones (17:59):
There is a direct connection between the pencil and the brain, which is absolutely true. And it's why you can't stop it, but it's why when you're sitting in front of a classroom and the class is all there on their laptops, that is not going to work. And I tell 'em that, but doesn't stop. It's like holding back the tide or something. There is a real, and it matters what kind of instrument you use. A pencil is better than a pen and everything's better than a tablet. And the reason is, it's why chalk is better than anything else. There's a feedback between the feel of a pencil or a piece of chalk moving across a piece of paper or a board that doesn't come up with whiteboards and markers and certainly not on a tablet.
(18:56):
That's so interesting. They said something about an article where you only needed these four pieces of chalk to the most complex problem you could work out and teach others, more importantly, teach the students how to start working those out in these small groups, which you really wanted that to happen as you move through different experiences. Tell me about Maitland. Tell me about the ascent as you're kind of rising in your field of Organic Chemistry. What are some of the amazing discoveries that you felt okay, came maybe from the Jones Alley experience or other experiences for you?
(19:39):
Well, I was never the smartest guy in the room. I was smart enough, but what made me successful to the extent that I was, was that I really wanted to solve problems. And we worked in the lab on some problems for a couple of decades, and we'd have an idea and it wouldn't work. And then we'd have an idea, even more clever, it wouldn't work and on and on and on. We'd let it lie for a few years. And then some poor student would come in and I'd say, you really ought to work on this, and here's a really clever idea to work. Well, then it didn't finally, but eventually, eventually you back off a little bit and you say, well, maybe we could just brute force this problem. Maybe we're being too clever. It's not going to yield to cleverness.
(20:45):
Maybe it needs a straight through approach.
(20:47):
Maybe you have to burrow through the mountain rather than climb over it. The problem I'm thinking of, I had a wonderful student tending who was brilliant, but was willing to do the dog work necessary to solve a problem because he wanted to solve the problem. So we wrote papers and I got tenure and began to write more papers and travel around and talk about what we were doing. And I don't know if you want to talk about exactly what I did broadly speaking, and it's something of a wisecrack. I worried about how electrons talk to each other, which means, and this is going to make it sound fancier than it really was.
(21:50):
How does the quantum description of one electron affect the properties of its neighbor electron? Well, that's an interesting question. And that's one of the things we worked on. And I was at Princeton for 43 years. I left in 2007 because I had become increasingly interested in teaching. And I had this idea that which is right, that the standard talking head method of standing up in front of several hundred students and telling them stuff was an extraordinarily poor way, teach people to think. And so instead, one year I called for volunteers to try a new way of doing it, and we got a huge number of volunteers, and we picked 60 of them, I think with the number and divided them into groups of four, sat them down at tables, said, there are going to be no lectures. You have to do the reading shock. You have to do the reading.
Phil Wharton (23:06):
And this was like at 8:00 AM you got that many.
Maitland Jones (23:08):
It was at 8:00am that's right.
Phil Wharton (23:09):
What I read, it was really interesting how many volunteered.
Maitland Jones (23:13):
And I would wander the room and talk to the tables in turn. Now, one of the problems with that, that works great by the way. That seems like a pretty good way to teach problem solving, but it has a problem with scale. How many people can you deal with? I started it actually as a pilot with I think twenty students, and then we expanded to sixty. You need help. Well, the best help is are the people who took the course the year before. And if you've been sitting down with them and discussing stuff for a full year, who's a good teacher and who isn't?
Phil Wharton (23:54):
Right. So that's identified.
Maitland Jones (23:56):
I would pick two or three of those folks and pay them off with a great letter to med school.
Phil Wharton (24:05):
There you go.
(24:07):
That's Awesome.
Maitland Jones (24:09):
Yeah, they need that too.
(24:10):
They would wander the room with me, and that works very well. They have a kind of street cred that I don't have, and they were living exemplars of the fact that it was possible to succeed.
Phil Wharton (24:23):
And it's fresh. It's a peer group, it's fresh. It's a lot. I think in athletics when we have the upper classwoman or the upper classmen athletes kind of bringing them through, taking okay, here's the ropes kid. Here's how you're going to
Maitland Jones (24:40):
That's absolutely right.
(24:41):
Up. And this is what
(24:42):
Jones says, this is easy. It's not, but here's how you do it.
Phil Wharton (24:45):
And there's a workaround and hey, this is what we got to focus on. And that's amazing.
Maitland Jones (24:51):
Speaking of workarounds, how do you do something like that at a university, as conservative as Princeton was probably is, if I had gone to the committee on the course of study and asked to do this, I would've been delayed for some time years, and given a pilot. So the solution is very simple. You just don't ask.
(25:19):
Right, this is what we're doing today.
(25:24):
You do it and apologize later if it doesn't work.
(25:27):
Yeah, I love the small groups and the fact that you have the students there, because then you're not worried about having to go through the bureaucracy of hiring more staff, which may not be able to, funds, may not be able to allocate towards that. And then, okay, what's the pacing of this person's fresh? And you've already identified they can solve the problem and then all of a sudden they're speaking to the same group.
(25:53):
The university isn't crazy to be skeptical of ideas like this. I mean after all, I can imagine some poor dean getting a letter from some parent saying, I'm not paying $50,000 to have Susie taught by a sophomore.
Phil Wharton (26:16):
I want Dr. Jones in there. I I want the best for my little Susie.
Maitland Jones (26:23):
The fact is that the sophomore would be really, really good. And if you can demonstrate that, then the university's delighted.
Phil Wharton (26:32):
That's great. And that's what you were able to do there. What about this low moments, Maitland? What about sort of the speed bumps we call 'em, or lowest moments for you in your career or life overall? Was there anything that comes up for you in that?
Maitland Jones (26:52):
Well, I moved to NYU in 2007, and partly to see if I could export this small group a method to another university. And one of the criticisms is that, oh it only could work at Princeton where you have great students and so on. It's dead wrong. So I did that and I was at NYU for 15 years I guess. And then in the spring of, so the answer is I didn't really have low points for a long, long time. I mean, problems you have a problem you can't solve or you're having trouble raising money or something like that. But those are really minor speed bumps and they always work out. But eventually, NYU, as many people must know, fired me in August of 2022, because my course was too hard. And a bunch of students had petitioned basically that we should go eat more easy, take it more easy on them. And well, that was certainly a low moment. And I was disappointing in the sense that the end of my teaching career was surely approaching. I was 85 at the time for heaven's sake, so I was going to be there for another year or two is all, but I would prefer to go out on my terms.
(28:30):
Absolutely. Absolutely. And what about the pivot? How did you steer yourself back on course and what turned you around for that? I mean, you mentioned
(28:40):
After that? Well, this is difficult because I'm not at liberty to talk about that matter any longer. And you can infer what that means. And I can say that a year and a half after the event, NYU and I are on, have a more amicable relationship. Than August of 22.
Phil Wharton (29:12):
That's good to hear.
(29:15):
That's good to hear. That is really good to hear Maitland. And we do this in the show, the rollback we call it, if you had the opportunity what would you redo, if anything, or do differently, if anything in your life or career?
Maitland Jones (29:30):
I would go back into the womb and reconfigure my DNA so that I had a better head for math.
(29:40):
Really?
(29:40):
Not good at it.
Phil Wharton (29:42):
Oh, amazing.
Maitland Jones (29:43):
And I wish, I mean, I can do it right, but the last math course that I felt I really internalized that is understood as opposed to just be able to pass the exams, was plain geometry.
(29:59):
Really. Okay. Wow.
(30:02):
And if I could change something, I would give myself a better head for mathematics.
Phil Wharton (30:07):
That's so interesting. You think with all you've done in chemistry that, so mathematics was not a strong suit for you?
Maitland Jones (30:14):
Well, it wasn't, and that's why I wasn't a physical chemist or a physicist. That's why I was an organic chemist, because you could do the kind of organic chemistry I did with the math I was able to handle.
Phil Wharton (30:31):
Yeah, that's really, really interesting. On the anvil, I think you've said some of them, you mentioned a lot of them, but an event or decision that forged you, a defining moment, any of the discoveries like bulvaline, or anything that comes to mind that sort of you were really proud of, or took you to a new level you felt?
Maitland Jones (30:58):
Well, the crystallizing moment was that moment at age thirteen when I walked into that lab.
Phil Wharton (31:05):
That's great.
Maitland Jones (31:07):
Absolutely. Everything followed from that. If there's a wonderful molecule called carborane, it's a icosahedron built of ten borons and two carbons and a bunch of hydrogens hanging onto each vertex. And that's not by any means, a classic organic chemical. It's more inorganic. But we were able to redo a lot of our carbon chemistry with this three dimensional ball of boron. And no one else, or very very few other people were doing that. And I think we did some very clever things with it. And that came sort of towards the endish of my last third of my time at Princeton.
Phil Wharton (32:08):
At Princeton. I thought that was at Princeton.
Maitland Jones (32:10):
It was yeah it was all when I left Princeton, I closed the lab very very painful. But I was 70 at the time. And it has to happen sometime. Research is peeling an onion, and there are always questions you have to leave on the table. And I regret having to do that, but it had to happen. So I moved to New York.
Phil Wharton (32:37):
Can you summarize, it must be hard, but in a sensory, taking us, what happened in a typical day in the lab in Jones Alley? What was your typical day? When would you arrive and what would it be like? Usually?
Maitland Jones (32:53):
I usually taught early. I would get in at 7:00, 7:30, or something like that if I had an eight o'clock class. Princeton had an idiosyncratic schedule for a long time, and the courses began at 7:40, let's say.
Phil Wharton (33:12):
7:40
Maitland Jones (33:15):
So I would get in for that and I'd teach my course. I'd go back to my office, which was remote from, on another floor from where the lab was at the time. And then later, a little bit closer. And I'd do what I had to do in terms of answering the mail, and small tasks, and maybe think a little bit about tomorrow's lecture. And sometime in the afternoon I would wander down into most days, I would wander down into the lab and talk to whoever was there, hopefully everybody, about their problems and how things were going with their molecules, and what do we do next? But as I said before, you do have to leave people alone. So I wasn't down there saying, you ought to pour a little bethylalcohol into the...
(34:15):
You weren't micromanaging
Speaker 3 (34:17):
Discovery. Yeah.
Maitland Jones (34:18):
No micromanaging.
(34:19):
And of course, if a problem is hot, then you're down there a lot because when you're close to a result, or get a result, I mean, that's the most delicious feeling.
Phil Wharton (34:31):
Yeah. Must be.
Maitland Jones (34:33):
You're poking around in the corner of Nature's house, and all of a sudden you understand something, what's going on. And so what do you do? Then you run back upstairs to your office, and write a paper and tell the world about it.
Phil Wharton (34:49):
Sounds like a great day.
Maitland Jones (34:50):
It is also fun. Yeah. Well, there are days when you go down there and that doesn't happen.
Phil Wharton (34:56):
Right. Or the ten years of not being able to solve the one problem.
Maitland Jones (34:58):
That's exactly right. It didn't work. Again.
(35:03):
To have that staying power, that endurance.
(35:08):
It's necessary. It truly is. There was one moment, here's a low moment that I didn't think of earlier, but it is in the long line of Grateful Dead Tunes, "Disaster Narrowly Averted."
(35:38):
I had a graduate student who did a really remarkable experiment, wonderful stuff and fabulous stuff. And it culminated in what's called an infrared spectrum, which is a chart with wiggly lines on it. And those wiggly lines tell you a lot. So he left and his work was taken over by a postdoc. And the first thing I asked him to do was to reproduce this work. Now he was going to work on the problem. And so let's go take a step back, do what the graduate student had done. And he couldn't get it to work, and he couldn't get it to work, and he couldn't get it to work and it didn't work. And eventually it creeps into your head that maybe just, maybe it's not right, and you're out in print with this stuff.
(36:43):
I can remember many 3am's worrying, just terrified about that. And so the postdoc went on to do some other things, but every once in a while he'd go back and try again. Didn't work, didn't work. Eventually his time was up and he was leaving. I was sitting in my office after class, and he comes in to, I figured to say goodbye, but he walks in and he takes a piece of paper and puts it down in front of me. And it is exactly the infrared spectrum that the graduate student had had in the last second, he had reproduced the work.
(37:21):
Right before he is about to leave.
(37:23):
just as he's leaving. I mean, that's good because of the absence of bad, I guess. But it wasn't wrong. It was right and it was just difficult. But God bless him, he hung in there. He kept doing it, and he got it.
Phil Wharton (37:45):
That's the Love Supreme Album by Coltrane or the last Note by Miles hanging in space. Right?
(37:53):
I mean, that is a beautiful, that must be, it just feels like in my world, in distance running, leaning at the tape. It's just like the elation of all the work and the moments coming into that. What about your journey now, Mait? What's most important to you now and what's the road ahead look like for you and what's next?
Maitland Jones (38:16):
Well, I'm 86. The road that is not as long as it once was, but there's another side, and it's not going to be chemistry that's over. But I do have another side to my life, which is music and in particular jazz. And that's one of the reasons, I guess I can say this without defaming NYU, it was one of the reasons I went to New York was that at five o'clock, or six o'clock every night after the problem solving class was over, my big decision was who do I go hear tonight?
Phil Wharton (38:58):
Yeah.
Maitland Jones (39:01):
What jazz club am I going to go? So I did that for years, and I'm still doing it, although the jazz scene is much diminished by the Covid catastrophe, but it's still there. And I'm also producing CDs. Remember CDs?
Phil Wharton (39:25):
I do. I still have them and use them.
Maitland Jones (39:31):
I do too. And I have many, many friends who are performers and sort of a jazz groupie. When you walk into a club and the drummer gives you a hug, it's a good feeling.
Phil Wharton (39:48):
It's a great, yeah. That's great. That's great.
Maitland Jones (39:53):
And every once in a while, I do produce a set of CDs. We did the complete works of Thelonius Monk, for example.
Phil Wharton (40:03):
No way. That's amazing.
Speaker 3 (40:04):
A six CD set by Frank Kimbrough, alas who's no longer with us, a great pianist, and a wonderful guy. And Scott Robinson, Rufus Reed, and Billy Drummond.
Phil Wharton (40:17):
Oh my Gosh.
Maitland Jones (40:17):
Yeah, it's really good.
(40:19):
Yeah. I want to get some, I'm going to have to order some of your CDs for sure.
(40:25):
Amazon has it.
Phil Wharton (40:26):
I will get it. I will get it. Jazz fan myself.
Maitland Jones (40:31):
So, I will continue to do that. And one of the benefits of being a scientist is that there are meetings, and those meetings are in good, interesting places.
Phil Wharton (40:48):
That's good.
Maitland Jones (40:48):
Not entirely by accident. And you can use chemistry, in my case as a device, to go to places that you wouldn't be able to get to otherwise, and to hang on the end of a meeting or a gig somewhere, a trip to someplace you want to go.
Phil Wharton (41:10):
That's wonderful.
Maitland Jones (41:11):
So I did that, and I'm still doing some of that, and it's not as easy now, but I can still do it. And so for the last couple of years, I've been going to Greece in the summer.
Phil Wharton (41:25):
Wonderful.
Maitland Jones (41:25):
I hope to continue that as long as I can.
(41:29):
That'd be great. Is there a good music scene in Greece as well?
(41:31):
No. No.
Phil Wharton (41:33):
Okay. But it's just great to be in Greece.
Maitland Jones (41:36):
It's not that I've discovered.
(41:37):
Okay. Not yet. Not yet. I'm sure you will. If we look back at your life, we call it the slipstream, sort of as a jet plane goes through the sky, and looking back in the rear view mirror, any parting gems of advice you'd like to leave for us.
(41:54):
Well, I know that it's a great privilege to be able to do this, and for those of you out there who have choices in what you want to do, not everybody does. So it's a tremendously lucky thing if you do have those choices. And I would say that the critical thing to do is to follow the path that makes you happy. You will be a happier person at 86 if you do that. And more important, I believe that you will do more for other people if you are happy in what you're doing. And too many kids either do what their parents want them to do or follow the money, and sometimes you have to. Sometimes you have to. There's no doubt of that. And I don't for a second believe that everyone is in a position to be able to do this, but if you're lucky enough, then that's what you should do. So if that's wisdom, I don't know.
Phil Wharton (43:08):
Sounds like it to me. Experience.
Maitland Jones (43:09):
It's experience, that's for sure.
Phil Wharton (43:11):
It sounds like it to me. Yeah. No, Maitland, thank you so much for coming to Intrinsic Drive. I just really loved meeting you and having you share your life with us.
Maitland Jones (43:22):
For me, it's been a real pleasure. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you so much.
Phil Wharton (43:27):
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