Interview with William C. Campbell on 6 December 2015, during the Nobel Week in Stockholm, Sweden.

What brought you to science?

William C. Campbell: I came to science I think later than a lot of people certainly nowadays, because I know that I had not heard of science until I was thirteen/fourteen years old because I had a teacher who did not mention science. So I ended up going to boarding school, be thrown into science, not knowing the difference between physics and chemistry or what science was about. And so I came late, I came in the high school years, my late teen years, not my early years. It just happened more or less by chance which I can talk about if you like, but the chance my memories of those chances that made me interested.

At high school, the one thing that I do remember is going to a show when I was in high school, a agricultural show, a school outing and this is at a time when I was sort of struggling with my new exposure to physics and chemistry and I must have been about sixteen or seventeen years old. And the only thing I remember about the agricultural show, the absolutely only thing was coming away with a leaflet, an advertising leaflet from a company and I remember the company, I remember its name and it was about liver fluke disease, in sheep and cattle, caused by a warm parasite and it was advertising this treatment. And that didn’t change my life, I didn’t decide then and there that I wanted to work, but in retrospect I realize that that was the only thing that I remember seeing, the only leaflet I took home, I read it, I re-read it, I was totally fascinated by it. So in retrospect I think that I was predisposed or susceptible or right enough to want to be interested in natural science, so I think that was one thing. And then other things came at college, but I think that was sort of the earliest thing and then my college years were very formative.

How did your work lead to the Nobel Prize?

William C. Campbell: My work was not some very discrete thing that could be associated with the prize. I had become tremendously interested in experimental chemotherapy directed towards parasitic diseases. My objective was finding new drugs and I had had some exposure with that finding the drug called thiabendazole before this new drug ivermectin. So I was deeply involved in this for many many years. And then with this new drug the thing that is difficult to relate and to get through to people is how collaborative it was, not just with professor Ōmura’s contribution to get things started with a new bacteria, but my role … there were a few things that were very specific, one working on heartworm disease of dogs which I did, I did the experimental work on that. And then my work in getting started … interest in human application of the drug. I was already interested in teaching and involved in human medicine as well as veterinary medicine with respect to parasites. I had the dog heartworm, I had initiating the work on human application for river blindness and of course as it turns out that was the biggest thing. I had administrative responsibilities as head of parasitology. So those were sort of three discrete things and as it turns out making things happen with respect to river blindness was the most conspicuous of those.

Have you had a eureka moment?

William C. Campbell: Not in relation to this drug, and in fact not in relation to new drug discovery which is my primary field of interest. And I quite clear that I have not had a eureka moment and I think there is a good reason for it. And that is because I have a lot of experience and if you have experienced that field you know that when you discover a new substance that’s active in the disease you are working on it might be a drug that will be useful you know that the overwhelming probability is that it will not be useful because of so many things can go wrong and the chances of the drug surviving and overcoming all these hurtles is very small. And I think that is the reason, you get excited, but as always a subdued excitement and as it overcomes these various tests it has to go through you can ally yourself to get a little more excited, but that’s very different from a eureka moment and I think I had the eureka moments in stuff that I have done on the side.

What motivated you to live a life in science?

William C. Campbell: I think the thing that really motivated me in the scientific field was a particular professor in my early college years as an undergraduate Trinity College Dublin. I had this professor who changed my life as a good professor will try to do and the good professors succeed in doing, because he was interested in parasites, especially parasitic warms. I found his work interesting and he was very kind and brought me into his sphere of activities and talked to me, he’d meet me in the car, he would talk to me about his work even though I was just a mere undergraduate of the lowliest status and he would have me come to the lab and watch him do experiments and things. He just changed my life by being such a wonderful guy and helping to crystalize what might have been some preexisting interest and certainly focusing my interest on parasites. I was really interested in natural science, but the focus on parasitic worms was entirely due to him and my making it a carrier, well first my coming to the United States was entirely due to him because of contact he had with some of the universities of Wisconsin, so he was the one who initiated the whole business of going from Ireland to the United States.

What was his name and what do you think he would say if he saw you here today?

William C. Campbell: This professor was professor Desmond Smyth, J. D. Smyth, known as J.D. or Prof. Smith, but when I got to know him better after growing up, he was Desmond Smith and I remained in touch with him for the rest of his life and he visited me in the United States, visited my family. I visited him in London when he was based there and so we continued to be in touch for as long as he lived and it was a very good relationship. He inscribed one of his books that he sent to me and I haven’t thought of this recently, but it was an unusual inscription. It said ‘To Bill Campbell, my most appreciated student’, so he understood, I guess, I don’t know how that I appreciated his work. I don’t know if he ever understood how much I appreciated him, but he would be proud.

Do you have a good relationship with your students?

William C. Campbell: Yes, I was just recalling that with someone, cause just yesterday as we were traveling I got a text message from one of my former students who had just heard the news and she was so excited and was telling me about one of the other students and this has been one of the best parts of getting the Nobel Prize, has been hearing from students. One of my first students who’s gone on being a very successful medical practitioner, several of them have, but she just wrote the most exciting letter saying how she and my other students were all in touch with each other now to talk about this.

When do you do your best thinking?

William C. Campbell: I do my best thinking when writing. When you do experiments you are following something that’s in your mind. And the best ones are things that you are desperately curious about, the experiments that you are doing, but you’re involved in the actual doing of the experiment, more than thinking. I have always been lucky that I love to write and that’s because of another teacher that I have not mentioned, but the most important of all in a sense. I learnt to like to write and so even writing very technical reports, I really am interested in writing it, either for clarity or what I hope might be style, but I am interested in writing as writing and I find that that is when other thoughts are most likely to come to me, because you realize suddenly you are saying this and you are thinking have you really made it clear and if not is it because you are not clear yourself? And if so, you start thinking about why you are not clear on it. If it is something that you are proposing in the future, if you are going to write about it you have to ask yourself, not just in some general term. You have to actually think about that. So I think writing is conducive to thinking.

What did you donate to the Nobel Museum?

William C. Campbell: One of the interesting things to me was the question of donating items to the museum and my first response in fact, to the museum, was that I can’t really think of anything, but I will get back to you. And for a long time I couldn’t think of anything, because from examples in the past, I kept thinking of what I might have is an objective from the lab or something. I couldn’t think of anything that made sense, but then I suddenly realized that in fact a large part of my work has been related to non-work, to interest in writing and painting, so those were interests of mine. So what I decided that I would donate to the museum would be two books that I have published myself. I published myself on the assumption that they are too narrow in the focus for anybody else to want to publish them. Because the book of paintings are all paintings of parasites, but they are not illustrations, they are not scientific illustrations, they are expressionistic variations on parasites, but they are certainly identifiable, not only as parasites, but as specific parasites and parasitologist can identify them immediately as to what exactly they are. And I have great motivation to pursue this because they get sold at auctions to raise money for scholarships for parasitology students to enable to attend parasitology meetings. So it is a rather narrow focus, a clientele so to speak, but is a very exuberant one and very active and so I have motivation to paint.

But then also my writing is obviously much more a personal matter because it is a very personal thing to write poetry, but I find it … I decided partly because of other professors, one in particular, who asked if she could have manuscript copies of my poems and she would type them up and then she could use them in her classrooms, because a lot of them are about parasites. Then I realized that maybe I should do this in a book form and nowadays it is easy to do it even if you don’t think it could be something that the general publisher could be interested in and you can actually make a book. So I have made books and I have taken some of those to the auction too, but the book of poems is definitely not all about parasites. There are poems about history, a lot of poems about history, history of biomedical science, some not related to science at all, some quite personal, some written for children so … and that was a period of my life I wanted to write a poem about. I still want to paint, I don’t at present have … I have an amuse at my side, I don’t have poems that want to get out, so to speak and I don’t know if that will come back, but certainly for a period of my life there were poems that I just needed to write and not all scientific.

What challenges remain in your field of research?

William C. Campbell: In my field of research there is a number of specific technical things, but I think the overall importance in the future and the thing that is not talked about is the need to have more natural means of disease control, and I think of disease in terms of parasitic disease. But it is not necessarily confined parasitic disease, but I think although I have devoted a good part of my life to developing agents, chemical agents, natural projects leading to chemical agents to kill worms, I have a feeling in the long run that’s not the best way to go. I think chemical intervention as we have discovered over the years is likely to have not just unforeseen consequences, but natural consequences that lead to unnatural outcomes that can be bad.

So I think that the minimal interference with the natural world is to be desired and that if we can understand for example the immune system so well that we can actually stimulate it or simulate it even better with some natural way, we might have a more balanced approach to control disease and less looking for absolutes. And then that’s with psychological differences, psychological challenges with that because everybody would like a zero disease in 100% of people. But I think we need to try and get away from what we have been doing and try and focus on understanding disease and host parasite relationships, and by parasite then I mean all kind of infectious agents so deeply that we can actually use some control without trying to exterminate things widely and broadly.

What advice would you give yourself at 20 years old?

William C. Campbell: I would advise myself to find work that is hard and gratifying. I think I don’t believe in such a thing as a cushy job, because the cushy job is not really work and I think everybody needs to have hard work, and if you have hard work and you are miserable at it, then your life is miserable and your family is miserable and that’s to be avoided. Some people unfortunately get trapped into being committed to work that they don’t really enjoy and that’s unfortunate. So I think what I would say to myself is find something you would like to do and then don’t shy away from really working at it. I think there are the two things, hard work and getting satisfaction, not necessarily live a life of pleasure, but a life of hard work and pleasurable challenge.

How are art and science related?

William C. Campbell: I think for me the thing about science and art is I like to have them overlap, I think they are different things and that we shouldn’t forget that they are different things, they are definitely different. I look for things not as an avocation or a hobby to keep them separate. I don’t look to writing as an escape from parasitology, I don’t look for one … well I don’t look at either one as a hobby. To me the great satisfaction has been being able to make them overlap so that I write quite a lot about parasites, and frequently I am writing a poem trying to look at things from the parasite’s point of view, so several of my poems are actually written from the parasite’s point of view, and there is at least one actually written as though spoken by the parasite.

I think I am so interested in parasites that I tend to think about them even when I come to write poems, because sometimes I’ve tried to say what I think they would want to say. Sometimes it’s about history, because there again I think feel that I am interested in history, so I write poems about those things in history that interests me in terms of medical history, so there is definitely an overlap. I have written some poems that are not about science, but those are few compared to the numbers that do touch either on parasites or other … or science history.

Can you tell us about one of your poems?

William C. Campbell: Well, in fact one of them is in the context of river blindness which is sort of the most talked about aspect of this all new drug ivermectin which is used to prevent river blindness in the tropics. The cause of the disease is a parasite called Onchocerca and so one of the parasites, Onchocerca, speaks, and it’s in the words of the parasite and it begins with some rather extreme language and not by the day standard, but it says ‘I don’t need your good damn eye’ and that’s because the parasite  damages the eye. But the parasite doesn’t need to, the parasite’s got lots of other places to go, the parasite gets through accidently, so here is this poor parasite associated with making people blind, but in fact most of the parasite activity is elsewhere in the body, in the skin. Some of them in the course of their migration, then of course they have to migrate, some of them end up in the eye and as they end up in the eye they cause eye problems and eventually they cause blindness. So I would like to think of the parasite, saying ‘I am not trying to do this to you, I am doing my own thing and this happens’. That’s an extreme case speaking from the parasites point of view.

What is your favorite poem?

William C. Campbell: One of the poems of William Butler Yeats that is considered one of his minor ones and I think the critics even convinced Yeats that this was not worthy of him, that this was an early poem when he was not really at his best, but it’s ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’. It happens that Yeats was born and grew up maybe 15 miles or so from where I grew up in Ireland, I don’t know if that has anything to do with it, but this particularly poem he wrote when he was in London. He certainly wrote it as, not as someone exiled as punishment or some dishonoured but neverless somebody away from his homeland. I can really identify with that, you are not there because you are forced out, you are there because you have chosen and yet you are longing for something so it’s that ambivalence I think is more subtle than people realize. At least I can, to me that is certainly my favorite poem.

What role has teaching played in your life?

William C. Campbell: Teaching has been one of my great joys and yet I spent most of my professional life not in a teaching situation. Then maybe it’s because I spent most of it not in teaching situation that I loved it when I did get to a teaching situation. Because when I retired from industry, I retired from an American company in the pharmacy industry and went to the academia, to Drew University in New Jersey, I went there actually not to teach. I went there to mentor undergraduate students, but I chose to teach as also one other person, colleague did in this institute, The Research Institute for Scientists Emeriti at Drew University, which is a wonderful wonderful institute and the emphasis is on mentoring. A couple of us chose to teach and I taught in an undergraduate biology department and I taught undergraduate school medical humanities program and I just loved that.

All along I used to teach seminars and I taught medical helminthology, I taught about parasitic worms at New York medical college for 25 years overlapping with those other jobs. So I discovered that I loved teaching and I hope to go on doing that, but now it will be largely at conferences and meetings, but especially if there are conferences were a lot of students tend to come and just this past summer I was at one such conference where it was not … it was in the place where there were not expensive hotels and were the tradition of students coming because it was accessible and I greatly enjoyed that and I hope to continue to do that.

How has your life changed since being awarded the Nobel Prize?

William C. Campbell: The way my life has changed mostly since I got that call was in sheer busyness. I have always been busy cause I chose to be busy, but now I don’t get to choose what sort of business I am engaged in. Now I am overwhelmed with messages, the good part of it is that many messages are from old friends, the bad part is that there are so many messages of all kinds and that I am now retired, I don’t have a secretary, I have my wonderful wife who helps, but still we are very much in retirement mode and so this is a major change in our lives to be called upon to answer so many questions and to respond to so many invitations to conferences all over the world. Some of them several years in advance, and at my age I think it is a bit presumptuous to make plans many years in advance. So I am trying to be careful about that and I am trying to also continue to do the things that I have been doing. I still like to go out in season and kayak an early morning and I still play ping-pong three times a week and I am determined not to give up certain things like that, but it certainly has been a challenge just to keep up with the calls on my time.

Watch the interview

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