The science family is a concept familiar to all scientists. It refers to the layers upon layers of connections that develop, from generation to generation, as professors teach students, who then become professors and collaborate with their previous professors while teaching their own students. Projects beget more connections, which lead to other projects and new relationships. New people enter the group, and generations overlap, linking all in a broad extended scientific family under the wide roof of shared interests. Some science families are, of course, actual blood families, and those are rife not only with intermingled scientific pedigrees, but also with echoes of legacies, lookalikes, and apples falling close to trees. A talk with UC Santa Barbara Distinguished Visiting Professor Frank Bates yields such fruit. 

Bates, who has been a professor at the University of Minnesota since 1989 and is now spending a quarter of his time at UCSB, is the father of materials professor and Materials Research Laboratory associate director, Christopher Bates, who, like his dad, is an expert on polymers. The two men bear a striking resemblance, right down to the pitch and timber of their voices. Both think and speak clearly, calling to mind genetic and intellectual legacies, thoughts of apples and trees. Frank also spent some years at Bell Laboratories, which in the 1980s and early 1990s, served as the “bloodline” for many faculty members who came from there to UCSB. COE publication manager, James Badham, explored the peregrinations of this family-minded scientist when he caught up with Frank Bates in June.

JB: What brought you to UCSB initially?
Frank Bates: I first came to UCSB with my family on sabbatical during the 1996-’97 academic year — Chris was in sixth grade then — and I still work with colleagues from that time.

JB: How did this arrangement to spend a quarter a year at UCSB come about?
FB: With family in Santa Barbara and considering the boundary condition of life — you have only so much time — my wife and I began thinking about how we could spend part of our time here. After speaking with colleagues at both campuses, I  was able to arrange it, so, for the next five or six years, I'll come here for the winter quarter, or a little more, and then be back in Minnesota. I’ll teach a course here, pitch in with fundraising, and do whatever contributes to the department and the college mission.

JB: You spent some years at Bell Labs. Can you talk about that?
FB: I was at Bell Labs from 1982 until 1989. The 1984 federal antitrust suit mandated the breakup of the “Ma Bell” AT&T monopoly into a collection of regional “baby Bells” and, eventually, to the end of Bell Labs as it had been constituted, but during its prime, it was probably the science center in the world. I would argue that it was, in fact, the most remarkable research facility ever.

JB: As someone who knows — and who also knows many of the Bell Labs scientists who would play instrumental roles in developing UCSB into a globally recognized engineering program — what made it so special?
FB: When I arrived there in 1982, AT&T was a regulated monopoly that controlled the entire telephone communication business. They were giant. I think they had 1.4 million employees, and they owned everything — long distance, local, everything. They had their own manufacturing arm, Western Electric, which they used to produce almost all of their own stuff. They did their own software development. They employed thousands of the world's best physicists, chemists, mathematicians, computer scientists, etc. I was at a place in New Jersey called Murray Hill, where there were basically a thousand PhD scientists pursuing pretty much what they wanted. The attraction was that you could really build a career there. For years, Bell Labs would bring in young people, get the best seven or ten years out of them, and then send them off to universities to become professors. It was incredibly competitive, but you could do incredibly interesting things. Bell Labs ended up pushing the frontiers of science in many, many ways.”

JB: As a polymer scientist, what did you do there?
FB: AT&T coated all of their own cables in those days, and those were made of polymers. Your old rotary-dial telephone that sat in the house was made of plastic, and Western Electric made the dials that spun around and all the other materials they needed for that. The idea was that a phone would last for fifty years. Those phones were nearly indestructible. A lot of them got thrown at walls.
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JB: What led you to the University of Minnesota, and did the fact that materials and chemical engineering are in one department there affect your research trajectory? 
FB: I left Bell Labs in 1989, not because I was concerned about its viability, but because I wanted to be a professor. In our program, we do almost all our own synthetic chemistry. I'm not an organic chemist, and I don't want to be, but if you're in the materials game, you have to be able to make stuff. So early on, I realized we have to be in a position to make state-of-the-art polymers. So we do a lot of our own synthesis and then carry that all the way through structural analysis. I do a lot of X-ray scattering, neutron scattering, and electron microscopy, and then use rheological and mechanical-properties studies to examine physical properties. I also work with theoretical people, for example, [UCSB chemical engineer) Glenn Fredrickson, who I knew from Bell Labs. 

JB: So will your activities look like during the quarter you’ll spend at UCSB each year?
FB: I’lI be anxious to collaborate and interact and participate in research at UCSB. I don't envision starting my own group here, because I still have my group in Minnesota, but I can see collaborating with colleagues or maybe co-advising graduate students and postdocs. I’d be happy to be involved as a co-PI on a proposal, but my primary independent lab access will still be in Minnesota for the next five or six years. 
We'll see how it goes. 

JB: Assuming that at this point in your career you could probably go to many places, why did you choose UCSB?
FB: In addition to having family here, one important reason is that the collaborative culture at Santa Barbara is very much like what we have at Minnesota. Ever since I went to Minnesota, UCSB has been a place I’ve looked at. It's not an accident that I took a sabbatical here in 1997. From both research and teaching points of view, the two institutions are like cousins. We share, I think, a similar value system. Of course, it was an incredible coincidence that my son ended up here, which just made the opportunity to come here part-time all the more compelling. I've been very fortunate that this could happen.

JB: You started your career in polymers and are still working in polymers. What specifically are you doing in that area now?
FB:  Lately I’ve been working in the area of “green,” or sustainable polymers. As important and as useful as plastics are, it would be hard not to recognize that we're throwing so much plastic away and that there are a lot of single-use plastics. One of my postdocs in the mid-nineties had come to me from the Caltech lab of a [the late] Robert Grubbs, who ended up winning the Nobel Prize in 2005 [for his work with olefins]. The postdoc whom he had sent me then became a professor of chemistry at Minnesota. When I asked him about the direction his research would take, he said, “Sustainable plastics.” I told him, “That's the dumbest thing I ever heard.” It didn't take him too long to persuade me that I should get into this. So he's a great colleague, and ironically, Robert Grubbs’s son, Bob, did a postdoc with me from 2099 to 2002. And my son, Chris, did a postdoc with Robert Grubbs at Caltech.

JB: Is it application or discovery that most excites you about polymers?
FB: It might be serendipity, which always plays a role. Anything I've ever discovered has been the result of what I call “informed serendipity.” You're playing in a cool sandbox. You know that maybe there’s something valuable in there, and when you see it, you recognize it as being different and interesting. In my group, we’ve been working with a class of polymers that we knew had something. We tried a new molecular structure, and we ended up doing studies on mice and discovered more. That's sort of the way experimental science really works. I love that aspect of science. And I think the public might not understand this. The idea that I sit down and cogitate and think of something and, boom, it's a discovery, is not how it goes. You work in areas that have some combination of fundamental intrigue and interest and may have some potential application. I think that’s what keeps most of us going in this business. A lot of so-called “useless” science is really interesting as a sort of counter to the kind of applied science in areas like recycling, polymers, medical applications. There is such a wonderful spectrum of types of research that you can do, and polymers turn out to be a very interesting platform for that sort of work. So, you know, every few years, I have told myself, “OK, I have to get out of polymers,” but I've never been able to, because it's always burped up some interesting discovery. You build on that, and off you go.”