cc
at the Lab. >We do this every Wednesdaye
night, 50 times a year, here at the University
of Wisconsin-Madison. Tonight, it's a great pleasure
to have two presenters who will help share the story of the
75th Anniversary of the saga
Our two speakers tonight are: of Tom Link, who is the sonn.
of Karl Paul Link;
You may notice that Dave and Dave Nelson.
because just yesterday the is particularly relieved tonight
textbook came off the press. 5th Edition of his Biochemistry
takes a lot... So if you think having a baby
He's a much relieved person. ( laughter and applause )
to introduce to you both So it's my pleasure to be able
Professor of Biochemistry and Chronicler of the
Department of Biochemistry, and Tom Link,
son of Karl Paul Link for the "75th Anniversary
of the saga of Warfarin." Thank you.
( applause )
like this. >> Out on a cold night
with Karl Paul Link, My connection
goes back a long time. and my connection with Tom
presentation for about 30 years. We've been working on tonight's
Tom and I went to graduate ( light laughter )
And I first met his dad, school together.
when he used to come out Karl Paul Link,
He would always come with an armload of PNAS Journals
to bring Tom. And I can remember seeing him
come down the hall, barely able to keep from tipping over
from all the journals.
that we were going to be in the same town here some years ago,
we started plotting to get at some of the wonderful materials
about Karl Paul Link
some instruments that I had tsaved and that Tom had saved,--
a lot of the papers that
himself, some of the books Karl Paul Link had saved
really felt that this is a life that is worth talking about.
And tonight happens to be a wonderful occasion to do that.
It's the anniversary of the discovery of Warfarin.
I actually went back and tried
day the anniversary fell on. to kind figure out exactly what
that doesn't nicely fit. And this is one of those things
But I looked enough to find out that tomorrow is your dad's
birthday, so we could celebrate that if we wanted to, too.
Okay, so I'm going to talk
side of K.P. Link, and about about sort of the professional
and primarily about the science the sthat had to do did,
with blood clotting, because
most famous. that's what probably made him
K.P. Link's personal life, Tom will tell you more about
he knows pretty well. And we will begin by just
reminding you that the time that Link came here,
in the early part of the 1900s, was a time when the place
had a collection of heroes
The first member of the Department of Agricultural
Chemistry, housed in this old building called Agricultural
Chemistry, which is of course still across the street where
it has been for all these years.
Hart, McCollum, Tottingham, who was Link's teacher.
Peterson, Steenbock,
Elvehjem, Phillips-- Link himself,
of heroes. The list, of course, goes on
that bracketed Link's own time But I tried to use those
an idea of what he walked into of arrival here to give you
The place was famous when he came.
of vitamins here, which had been by that time for the studies
by Hart, McCollum, Steenbock, done Elvehjem, and others.d out
And in fact, those of you who are familiar with the building
across the street know that there is in it a mural
that depicts the social benefits
which was painted during WWII oby John Steuart Curry.,
I guess that's probably not very easy for you to see here,
but the mural actually depicts, on the left, children
and animals that have suffered
Here is a boy over here with the bowed legs of rickets..
On the right, are people
And across the back here and animals who are healthy.
who have done the work. are This I think probably ists,
Stephen Moulton Babcock for example.
So there were these traditions
work with a clear advantage, already of people who were doing
to their public. a clear social value
of a land grant university then. And that was the notion
since about five years ago, Iyou see these brass plaquess,
scattered around that announce, or remind us, of what went on
during that period. Here is one that talks about
the general idea
to Agriculture, which began of early on here underoach
the deanship of Harry Russell.
you'll see a plaque here And as you walk around,
the discoverer of Vitamin A. for Elmer McCollum,
by Harry Steenbock For the process developed
that would cure rickets. for producing Vitamin D
by Hart, Elvehjem and Steenbock For thefor treatingeloped
Iron Deficiency Anemia. The process for curing,
the means of curing the very serious disease Pellagra,
endemic in prisons
during this period of history, and orphanages
Niacin that was discovered here. by simply feeding the Vitamin
and Harry Steenbock Here in preventing goiterHart
by iodizing salt. Here is what we're here
to talk about tonight.
that commemorates the work This is the plaque
with his laboratory group on that Karl Paul Link did
And it is there that I want the coto begin with youotting.
to talk about his work. Here he is.
This picture, and many of the other pictures that Tom
and I will show you tonight were recovered, either from
personal photo manuals
or from the university archives. that Tom has
of stuff, 30 boxes full of Link's professional things,
including a lot of photographs
Anybody who's interest in those tshould talk to us.
We're glad to share them. This picture, I take it
probably is Link, either as an
a very young graduate student. undergraduate or certainly as
of the people that influenced Herehis career the most.one
Link got his degree here at Wisconsin in Chemistry in 1922.
He stayed on for a Master's and got his PhD in 1925.
That work was done
a professor in Biochemistry. with Tottingham, who was then
And so Link became He was a carbohydrate chemist.
After finishing his work here, a carbohydrate chemist.
and wandered a little bit. he went to Europe
things that he did there But one of the most important
of Fritz Pregl in Graz. was tPregl, at that time,tory
was in the process of winning the Nobel Prize for his
development of techniques for microanalysis.
Techniques that allowed one to look at very small quantities
of a chemical compound
and therefore its identity. and tAnd while he was inucture
Fritz Pregl's lab,
And he brought back with him Link learned these techniques.
the microanalytical apparatuses that ever came back
to this side of the ocean.
I'd give anything to find now. It's an apparate that
exists someplace in Madison. I don't know whether it still
I'd love to hear about them. If anybody has any clues,
The other part But it's dropped out of sight.
is this microanalytical balance, of that apparatus, however,
that he has at home now, which that Tom brought in
And the combination of these came from the Link laboratory.
in those days to isolate things allowed a scientist
to determine its structure, and in some cases then,
to improve on its structure by chemical synthesis,
to make another compound
or a stronger effect. And that's where Link began.
He started his career looking at onions,
found a compound in onions
from fungal infections, identified it chemically
and was well on his way towards being a world class
carbohydrate chemist
that really changed his life, which is that he became involved
in the study of blood clotting. And before I talk about how
he became involved personally,
for those of you let me just say a few words
of blood clotting, or that who are not up on the idea
Is there a way to see haven'that screen better much.
with less light on it now?
Pardon? ( inaudible )
Yes, I think so too.
is a way, Tom, to dim the lights Well, I'll go on, but if there
This is the picture taken from a bit, that might be good.
And here it is, that's the bore the inof the blood vessel.ssel.
Over here, is a tear
Something has happened in the blood vessel.
the vessel, the blood has started to leak out of there.
And without such mechanism
for clotting the blood for repairing,
continued to lose blood, this individual would have
suffered the consequences. and before long, would have
and it carries our oxygen from the lungs to the tissues
and our waste products out, and our nutrients to the tissues.
And without that continual flow of blood to all the tissues,
heart and brain particularly, we're in deep trouble.
So anything that prevents blood from flowing, or allows it to
leak out of the system is bad.
as it was before-- That's not as good
is a little picture of what I'm going to describe.
What happens at the site
What happens is that proteins, of a wound that closes it.
in your blood, get the signal thathat there's trouble.ime
And they go to that place,
transforms proteins that are normally soluble
into things that form long, thin fibers
and that close over that wound. They enclose blood cells,
red blood cells.
of a thick, tough, fibrous And the result is the formation
and prevents any further blood mat that closes over the vessel
Now, we live in a sense on a knife's edge
with blood clotting, because
then any kind of a wound if your blood doesn't clot,
You can bleed to death. If your blood clots
just a little too soon, or
too, because a blood clot, a little too much, that's bad
let's say in the leg, can pass no matter where it forms,
and hit a critical place through the circulatory system
or the heart, and you have in the lungs, or the brain,
and it's curtains. a heart attack or a stroke
that the process So, it's critically important
be perfectly well controlled. And when it is not,
there is medical trouble. Here is a picture, a close up
of a blood clot.
is two things. And what I want you to see
that accumulate at the point These are the blood cells
And more importantly, the yellow fibers are fibrin,
which is the end product of the process of blood clotting,
the stuff that really closes
This slide is not intended the clot.
a way to show you that the blood clotting process
is actually pretty complicated. Each of these squares represents
a separate protein that is
all of the time. circulating in your blood
poised to clot, but they don't And those proteins are all
normally. When the signal comes, one of
them activates the next,
which activates the next, the next, the next, the next,
the next, and a clot forms. Down here near the bottom is
a protein called Prothrombin, which has to be active
for a blood clot to form. So we're going to talk about
Prothrombin as the major thing here.
But I want you to also remember that in the blood there are
a number of other factors,
have to function normally if proteins, all of which
In 1943, the Nobel Prize the blood is to clot properly.
Henrik Dam, who was a dean was awarded to these two,
who was at St. Louis University, and Edward Doisy,
discovered the role of Vitamin K in blood clotting.y
And Vitamin K, it turned out, is one of those Vitamins which
had originally been uncovered here on campus by McCollum
when he discovered that you can separate the classes of vitamins
into the fat soluble vitamins,
and the water soluble vitamins which were A, D, E and K,
and so on. which were B1, B6, B12,
of Vitamin K actually had So an origin in Madison.sue
But the role of Vitamin K in blood clotting was worked
through by these two elsewhere. An idea of how critical
blood clotting is can be had by looking at what
happens in a family where blood clotting doesn't work right.
You all know the story
and the Romanov family. Queen Victoria up here was
a carrier for hemophilia. And that simply means that she
had a mutation that knocked out the function of one of those
many proteins I showed you
And her blood therefore didn't clot properly.
She had a genetic tendency
She didn't actually show it, not to clot.
the full gene dose. She passed it on to children,
her daughter. And her daughter passed it on
to another daughter.
to see here, but one of these Andbranches is the Romanovs,hard
the dynasty that ruled Russia up until 1917 or 1918.
One of those Romanovs, Alexi, the son of the Czar Nicolas
turned out to have full-blown hemophilia.
He was continually sick.
he bled and was in danger Everyof losing his life.self,
This actually had an impact,
but on the country because it turned out that Alexi's mother,
Czarina Alexandria
who was a disreputable, dirty, had as a consultant, Rasputin,
very powerful personality, big, crude, but apparently
He convinced her that he who somehow got her ear.
deal with Alexi. and only he could properly
his advice, which she passed on Ato her husband the Czar,d
and the result was not good for the Romanovs or the country.
So much for what can happen if your blood doesn't clot.
( laughter )
and back to Wisconsin. But back to the Link story
especially in northern In the 1920s, farmers here,
their cattle, very often, sweet clover which grows well
up there. It's a good food.
It grows well in poor soil
It can grow places where so it's actually economical.
be able to grow feed. yIt has a sweet smell.e
That sweet smell is attributable
which is fairly rich to a compound called coumarin,
And cows like it. And they thrive on it,
and they flourish.
is stored improperly, it becomes infected with fungal
pathogens that degrade it in a way that converts this
nice harmless, nice smelling
that's very bad for them. And it is the acquired disease
called Hemorrhagic
It was not new Sweet Clover Disease.
It had already been worked when Link came across it.
was understood in some detail. through fairly well, and
in the Dakotas and in Alberta. In the 1920s, it showed up
not long after. It came to be attributed to the
Hemorrhagic bleeding agent in improperly cured sweet clover.
And it affected, primarily, cattle, although sheep,
rabbits and other animals were susceptible as well.
The result was that over time,
lost their ability the cattle affected by this feed
And they got to the point where if they cut themselves
on a piece of barbed wire,
A very serious disease. thIt occurred at a timeth.
when farmers were going through the Depression.
They couldn't afford
It was therefore economically of to lose their cattle.
It was known then, too, that tremendously great importance.
in cattle by either you coulof two thingss disease
if you did them fast enough.
to good feed. For a farmer in the Depression
who only had one kind of feed,
You couldn't just throw away this wasn't practical.
of sweet clover and start over your whole barn full
The other thing you could do was again with somebody else's.
with blood from healthy cattle if you transfused your cattle
But neither of these things was really economically feasible
for farm people in the middle of the Depression
when nobody had any money.
a disastrous disease. Link became involved in this
one Saturday. He's told the story 1,000 times
in print and elsewhere, and I think the story probably grew
in drama with the re-telling. But the basic story seems to be
that one Saturday in the middle of the winter a farmer
from Deer Park, Wisconsin,
in a blizzard, down to Madison drove from up there,
heifer dead in the back witand a bucket of bloodh a
that wouldn't clot. He came, actually,
to the State Hygiene Lab, but they were locked on a Saturday.
He therefore sort of stumbled across the street
into Biochemistry and bumped into Link.
And said, you know, "You've got to help me.
My cattle are dying.
And this appeal apparently Their blood won't clot."
to the point where he decided to change substantially the
direction of his own research and to take off
after this problem. It's very hard when you
look back at the way
to reconstitute a show it really happened.ops
And very often, it's more subtle
this case, but it's pretty clear than what I just described in
in Link's career. thatAnd it had the effectevent
of changing what he did.
and I'll let you read. He quoted this guy,
suspected of a little doctoring, And this quote has been
pretty nicely. but it covers the ground
to get involved in the study So, that was the motivation
sweet clover on the health of the effect of spoiled
Link developed, in his and disease of cattle.
pretty good assay, laboratory, a simple and
whether a certain food or a solution derived from that food
contained the stuff that they called the Hemorrhagic Factor,
that whatever it was
He developed a way to do this. that caused animals to bleed.
they found very early on, I think maybe it was known
before Link entered,
affected the animal's ability to make one of those proteins,
that I said had to be in the
to the clotting process, blood, and that was crucial
The same protein that the people prothrombin.
said depended on Vitamin K. wSo he used a measure
of how fast the blood clotted.
exposed them to the food that was bad and then to extracts,
to more and more purified extracts of the food,
asking can we reach the point where we have in hand
the pure stuff
And this was a formidable problem at the time, but he was
well-equipped to tackle it, because he had the training
of Pregl, he had the equipment
that was available that was built, rare equipment
to analyze chemical compounds just like this and to determine
their structure.
with a lab full of people. And so he set to work on this
eventually purify completely And they did, over time,
from the sweet clover. the Hemorrhagic Factor
because there is relatively Itsmall amount of this stuff,ort
and their techniques require
amount of material to see it. that yoHere is Link.a large
I don't know, I suppose, Tom, is he 40 years old here?
35 years old? So this is probably
fairly early in his career. This is Mark Stahlman.
This is the Link Laboratory.
of a laboratory at that time. And iEvery single thingarks
that everybody is doing in this picture is illegal now.
( laughter )
they were able to finally purify But as a result of this work,
Let's see, this paper is dated the material.
It was actually submitted then, so it probably was published
in 1941.
Here is the microscopic view Here is the paper.
the compound, which was called of the purified crystals of
or dicumarol. That's the stuff, when given
to an animal that caused
The stuff took a little time. It's not like cyanide, where
you give it now and the animal
It needed to be ingested is dead in two minutes.
And it becomes clear why over a period of time.
of the mechanism. wheBut what it was doing,ils
we know now, was preventing the animal from making prothrombin
properly, so that the animal
in the blood at a steady state. didnAnd when the time camembin
for the blood to clot, there
That's what caused it. just wasn't enough to do it.
that this compound or compounds like it, had the possible value
as rodenticides.
animals, as their test animals. ThThey knew that the dicumarolr
killed them,
And he recognized-- But by this time, Steenbock
had already established the Wisconsin Alumni Research
Foundation, and had established the pattern of a UW Scientist
patenting a compound
So, when Link approached in the name of WARF.
what to do with it. thisHe patented this witheady
his several co-workers. The proceeds, like the proceeds
from Vitamin D went to WARF.
now has a bank balance One of the reasons that WARF
So, he called the compound of a billion dollars is this.
Research Foundation "and the last part of the namei
of Coumarin.
number one rodenticide. It beAnd as far as I know,rld's
today it still is.
for this. TAnd with the exception ofus
those places where rats have become Warfarin resistant,
it still is a huge public health
that are so devastating aid to public health.rats
I don't want to delve into
kind of detail, but just for the chemistry of this in any
let me show you a bit thof what is going on here.s,
Here is the compound Warfarin.
of the protein prothrombin Here is a small part
What happens is that a certain as it's being matured.
slightly changed from glutamate smto gamma carboxyglutamate.s
It doesn't matter what the names are.
And that small change converts inactive prothrombin
to active prothrombin.
can't take place, the blood will eventually not clot.
And that small change requires Vitamin K.
The Vitamin K gets converted
back into that, and converted and recycled.
So you have to constantly be regenerating the Vitamin K
to make this process
and Warfarin blocks this step. continue to go,
regenerate the stuff you need And to make prothrombin, andan't
the animal feels the effects. That's how Warfarin
kills animals.
Link promoted this Warfarin as a rodenticide
very actively himself.
to WARF, but he was out there Hepitching with the farmerser
and the legislators, developing simple, cheap, effective methods
of exposing animals to the bait.
he was a perfect example of a scientist who really took the
land grants charge seriously. He went out there and he did
what the state paid him to do.
of farmers learn how to use this drug, this compound, and
saved a lot of crops this way.
"Kill Rats!" he says. ( laughter )is.
So, he was famous by this time. He was bringing a lot of money
into the coffers of the UW, to WARF rather.
He was well known in the world. He had made a major contribution
to public health. And he actually won, I've
forgotten the year, the Lasker
the last thing you win award, which is very often
One of these is the Lasker Award before you get the Nobel Prize.
improvement in public health. At the time that he was dealing
with this drug as a rodenticide,
about using it in any other napplication, because it wasy
assumed something so poisonous
for people. foBut it became widely usedood
for rats. And once, in 1951, a sailor
tried to kill himself with Warfarin.
He took a huge overdose of rat poison and he lived.
And people looked at this and said, hey wait a minute
here, this is interesting.
and it doesn't kill people. But it blocks blood clotting.
So, Link began to think immediately about the
possibility of using this in human medicine.
And over time in collaboration
places including the people, with clinicians in various
and at the Mayo Clinic. II'm not very familiars
with this part of the story.
into clinical use. They brought the drug
that it was available and useful It became widely known
when President Eisenhower, in this respect in 1955
had a physician who actually with a heart attack,
and treated Eisenhower with it, asked fsuccessfully.rom Link
We just talked earlier, before the talk tonight about
a book that came to K.P. Link,
Paul W. White, the physician and then to you, from
thanking for the stuff. So, it became clear that there
was a second, very important use
Warfarin came into use for this drug.
deep vein phlebitis, to treat patients who had
happens in lower extremities. tPeople who had any valve
problems with their hearts. People who had a cardiac
arrhythmias, and others who were
And it is still widely, atvery widely used.g.
I bet that there are at least five people, maybe 10 people
in this room who take the compound
or one of its derivatives.
( laughs ) And I'm one.
getting famous killing rats. So, here's Link
saving presidents. Here's Link becoming famous
President Harry Truman. And if anybody in the room knows
who the other person here is, I'd like to know.
I've never been able
I've had some people guess, but I don't know who it is.
But in any case it shows you
really rolls all the way that the medical benefits
So these famous Warfarin up to the White House.
sailor who got the stuff recipients included the suicidal
President Eisenhower, and othen we learned more recentlye,
that maybe Joseph Stalin was
Stalin died a kind of a reca mysterious death. too.
He had dinner with four of his
Khrushchev-- henchman, Beria, Molotov,
Bulganin-- I've forgotten the fourth--
supper, excused himself, went Hto bed and sort of dropped
out of sight for two days.
on him he was on the floor, Whenot looking good at all.ed
So, he had last had the meal
and competitors it turned out, with his friends
to kill people, Beria. one of them who was qualified
actually gave Stalin Warfarin, And the suspicion is that Beria
He died of stomach hemorrhage. that he bled to death.
confirmed in the 1990s. TWell, Khrushchev, actually, in
his book, "Khrushchev Speaks,"
in 1980. already kind of hinted at this
Molotov wrote his memoirs. And in the early 1990s,
had told him, "I did him in." AnSo, it may well beia
that Warfarin had an effect on Russian history again.
I can't push the button hard enough
to make it work here--
to antagonize the people Link had a tendency
He seemed to enjoy doing this, around him.
in Biochemistry and and administrators here.gues
In fact, anybody that he thought
a little bit on. he could jerk his chain
to do this. He He was bringing in moneyion
hand over fist
They couldn't very well criticize him too seriously,
or certainly couldn't can him.
where he wanted them. This is a picture of him with
E.B. Fred on his right
Conrad Elvehjem on the right. It's amusing to me
that he is smiling with them, because in his personal papers
his description of his
is not written with a smile. interactions with them
apparently feeling that he was He called Fred, "Old Smoothie,"
And he had his problems a littlwith Elvehjem too,oozing.
as I understand it. ( inaudible )
Well, let's go back.
Anybody here who remembers I don't think so.
No, definitely not. Okay, so let me just close
a little bit of the scientific
that Link was widely recognized, part of the picture by noting
in the country, not but in the world.state
He was elected a member of the
at a very young age. National Academy of Sciences
and this is not common. He won the Kovalenko Medal of
the National Academy of Science,
These are several medals he won. a very high honor in 1967.
I don't believe I've ever heard As farof anybody winningique.
the Lasker Award twice. The first one was for
the public health benefits
The second was for the heart of Warfarin as a rodenticide.
He left behind a lot of benvery interesting problemsne.
when he retired in 1970 or 1971,
the real target of Warfarin. one of which was
and his colleague who has just And John Suttie, my colleague,
a long career in Biochemistry, very recently retired after
He wasn't Link's student, but he picked up the problem
and made major advances in trying to understand exactly
how Warfarin and Vitamin K
of blood clotting. worked on the enzymes
many cases where one So this is another of those
from a very practical issue can actof agricultureproblem
or health, human health from the animal, to the organ,
to the tissue, to the cell, to the genes.
We now have people
working on the genes around the campus who are
at the most fundamental level. and trying to understand things
campus that can't, in some way, be traced back to a precedent
that was more physiological,
or more applied. or more agricultural,
just go through a couple Now before I quit, I want to
one more fact about Link that many of you know, and probably
came here to hear about.
something of a showman. And I said earlier that he
liked to yank people's chains,
push him around. and he didn't let people
strong minded about a lot of things.
That brought him into conflict
people around here. with theThis is notng minded
one of the examples.
of how he was able to publicize Thihis work in a wayple
that was good for everybody.
we scientists actually That's something that
We don't tell the public need to learn to do better.
And Link did that, what we have to offer them.
He also, however, got into that's for sure.
every so often. I'm not going to talk about
any of these things I'll show you in any kind of detail,
but just read the headlines.
of a headline! Well, that's not much
fist-fight over this. Link, all of his life,
called himself, "Ratter." He always was proud of the fact
that he was one of those people who did in a lot of rats,
and this made him a "ratter." This telegram is a small tip
of an iceberg that somebody could profitably investigate.
There was a longstanding
Karl Paul Link and Mark Stahlman disagreement between
the major contributions ato the work on Warfarin.
And this spilled over into the
for example had an article press when "Reader's Digest,"
an exchange of opinions between the author of the article
and Link, and others, about who should be cited.
I want to leave you with the
somebody here who was idea tremendous scientist.out
Nobody has any question about that.
He was one of the first people
the first people in the country to really get to straddle
the chasm between the university
and industrial or commercial academic research,
Not just on the farms, applications of that research.
And now of course, but I mean drugs and big money.
Scientists as a rule, an we take this for granted.
in some way or the other with awpatenting things and money.ed
So we probably spend some of
and lawyers, when we should ourbe thinking about science.ts
But he was one of the first who got into this situation.
And I think his life would be interesting to look at
from the point of view
I've always thought that there of its effect on his science.
This is a fascinating wpersonality to write about,.
a colorful, fascinating,
who left behind a lot of clues about himself.
He left behind many many pages
of his longhand memoirs that he never got past the stage
of just notes.
of information about him. BSo, with that I wante
to make the conversion here,
of his science the change from my discussion
of his personal life. And perhaps of the way his
personal life interacted with and affected his science.
Now Tom, I have this picture, I have the thing of the car
and the corn, which I can either show now,
or if you want me to, I'll show it later.
Do it now, okay.
about it. I think this was some kind of
a controversy with WARF.
we've got the computers rigged here, it will be easier
for me to show you something
Tom found an old piece that he'll talk about later.
Paul Link in a characteristic, of 8mm film that showed Karl
state of mind. "don't push me around"
This is all staged, okay.
He's throwing corn
Foundation headquarters. at the Wisconsin Alumni Research
Ed Ward Ross, who didn't The first man you saw was
This is Ed Ralston. And these lanterns represent
the search for truth, I think.
Corn means many things. Perhaps here it has
something to do with money, but this is my speculation.
1964. ( laughter )
A patent log, is that what that says?
Joey--
This is at home in his study.
( laughter )
( inaudible ) I wasn't around.
I don't know what was going on. Will the lights
go back up again? Will this go back on?
I don't know
At any rate, it is with great honor and respect that I come
here to speak about my father,
He married my mother, Elizabeth Feldman, and by 1930
they had three boys,
and my brother Paul in 1953. Jon 1937, myself 1941,
of our father obtained PhDs. We all, I suspect in emulation
myself in biochemistry, my brother Paul in geology.
And, yeah, put that slide up. Okay here we are in 1958.
I'm the one there.
and my little brother Paul, Thatborn in 1953. Jon
And like I said, I think we all went into science
in emulation of my father.
compelling personality. And when we went out, I became
transformed from this shy,
somebody who was all of a sudden rather average child into
I was his helper and it made me just feel wonderful.
Quite honestly, Karl had very little time for parenting.
He was preoccupied with his promoting Warfarin dicumarol.
And for his teaching, and also with his encounters
with university administrators. He'd be up early in the morning
rehearsing what he was
( laughter ) going to say...
So, we boys, I don't know if and whatever it was.
We were basically helpers. we can get that sixth slide up.
So here I am. And the Go back., yeah.
Here I am being directed
( laughter ) how to rake leaves.
did teach us how to work And of course he certainly
Now if we go back in time ahere a little bit, actually.
it was exactly 56 years ago,
I have ever experienced. it was the coldest day
tonight, the record temperature If in 1951 was -26 F.per
And this was the day after, I assume.
We were out at a farm on Highway
the farmhouses on one side 14 near Cross Plains, with
And he was doing experiments and the barn on the other side.
And I'm the one in the back there, and the farmer
and the farmer's kids.
slides shown of that. Maybe tAnd here he ise more
preparing the bait. I'm not sure if he was giving
them both solid Warfarin
but there's another slide. and a liquid,
the bait box. And the reason thatg
there are these photographs is that reporter John Newhouse
came along on the trip, because it was kind of a special
occasion, and as I said,
so cold as that day. I never remember ever being
Here is the farmer ( laughter )
I think that must be a bait box up there on the wall
of the corn crib, so the rats could get directly,
didn't have to travel too far to get the bait.
And at any rate,
in a place called the Highlands. we grew up on the west side
and a garden. There was something about it.
My father needed help.
my associates, we had a den, And I had these friends,
And after the Cub Scout thing was over, there was work
to be done. And so, the boys would work
and they would be paid with a bottle of beer after the work.
And so the kids would flock to my house for the rewards
from this work. And you know, one can speculate
today what might happen to someone if he were to offer
13-year-old boys beer.
it was a special time. But anyway,
about this period, Another thing I remember
We had these cages in the yard I was probably 10 or 11.
with wheels. of 8 x 4 x 10 or 8 x 6 x 10
in there, and he was feeding There were all these chickens
And it was my job to make sure that these chickens--
the cages were moved. Depending on how big
the chickens were, they would eat all the grass up
within a matter of a few hours
Once the chickens were when they got to be big.
off. full grown, they were shipped
there on Pheasant Branch Road There wasin Middleton.ouse down
And they were frozen, and we of course ate them.
Now what I didn't know was
with Warfarin. that he was trying to kill them
But he couldn't, because of, ( laughter )
because of the amount aof Vitamin K they were eating,
you could give them any amount of Warfarin
and the effect of that
by the Vitamin K. So, the chickens did just fine.
We ate them and we did just fine.
( laughter )
I'll tell you of this period. This was in Spring of 1957,t
I'd come back-- It was a beautiful spring day.
I'd come back from
And I come into the house, track practice.
a shot of Bourbon and he says "C'mon drink up!"
Joe McCarthy died.
Of course, the irony here is that Joe McCarthy
died of Cirrhosis of the liver, and I developed a taste
for bourbon.
And then a year later, '58, I was on a football team.
Pete Combs had already left,
in Edgerton at night. Somehow, my mother convinced
my father to come to the game.
and everything. Then later that night he
developed wet pleurisy again. This would have been the third
time in his life that he had
So he spent the last year seriousthat I was at homeulosis.
and in high school
And so, his life in the hospital, the sanitarium.
There were three times was kind of punctuated.
In Europe, then in '45, wand then again in 1958..
And when he was young,
when he was two years old I gfrom pneumonia.died
So at any rate, I will digress
and talk about his family, now a little bit
he was highly impacted because I think that
surrounding his father by some of the events
The family came over-- and his father's death.
get over to that slide there. I doYes, this is it.can
The family came over from,
the one in the middle with the beard.,
Yeah, the wife. How many pointers do I need?
This is the grandfather and the wife.
I suspect they came over
Karl was born in 1863. from Europe in Germany in 1848.
the grandfather, And they said of the father,
There are three George's, but this is George one.
This is George two. And this one here
is Karl's father. They said of George "one,"
he was one of the best known
of the Missouri Synod and held some of the highest
charges in the district.
was born in Lebanon, George Link, Karl's father,
in 1863. in Dodge County, Wisconsin,
in St. Louis in 1876-1878. Concordia Academy
in Fort Wayne, 1879-1882. He studied Hebrew, German,
Greek, entered Concordia
and studied the theological and practical theology
and pertaining sciences:
In 1887, he married philFrederica Moore and theycs.
produced 11 children
Karl was number eight, in 18 years.
Now this Reverend Link, number "two," this one.
I don't know, maybe we have another slide.
He got a job then in LaPorte, Indiana
as the minister there.
This is George, Senior. And this is George Junior,
my father's older brother.
in LaPorte, Indiana, In 13 years there
confirmed 638, he baptized 767 people,
buried 389 people and carried out 242,030
Holy Communions.
that's over eight per day. If you do the numbers,
It seems physically impossible. How h( laughter ) don't know.
At any rate, beginning in 1899
which caused his congregation he develmuch uneasiness.ndition,
Worrying about his condition
a serious nervous trouble. brought about
the ministry In fall of 1902, he gave up
In 1904 he became elected the Clerk of the Circuit Court
as a republican, and he had a highly successful year there.
However, in 1910, he fell ill again,
survived six operations for colon cancer,
died at age 50 in 1913. And then there's this article.
Let's go on and see the article.
the children. ThThere's one more,
of the good man dies, that one. This is interesting,
just because it kind of,
of saying things here. it's certainly a historical way
I'll read you. This is one sentence
of citizenship. "A A man of integrity, honor,pe
and uprightouesness,
of St. John's Lutheran Church Gand also two terms
Clerk of County Courts, passed away at 1:30am
this morning at his home
during the greater share after an illness of three years
untold agony and endured of which he suffered
with Christian fortitude the most excruciating pain
Conscious almost to the last, he's ready to go,
prepared to meet his maker
of eternal joy and happiness, which is promised to all those
who lived lives of righteousness."
Well, we don't really know
The story was that he had some throat whatever.
But you know I think, basically there must have been some kind
of cognitive dissonance.
were not defined in those days. AndAnd so we don't know.ses
And there's no indication that he broke in any way
during this, it would have been almost 13 years of suffering.
He always looks like this.
no smile. He alAnd so we don't knowern,
what went wrong.
all that suffering that he might One would think that with
some humility, something, have gbut that didn'tmanity,
seem to have happened.
that there was a member Anof the congregationry
who sold life insurance.
"Please, just don't preach He went to George and begged him
and I'll give you this free $100,000 policy."
But of course, Reverend Link, being incorruptible
turned him down.
he left seven minor children. AHe left a house, a piano
that his wife's parents had bought for him from Europe,
a number of good books
So I don't know if you can see and no money.
If we go back. a picture of the family.
That's it. It's an interesting family.
This is probably a few years So here we are.
Here is the father before he died in 1910.
This is Karl. He had an older brother,
George Link, who got a PhD
career at Chicago, in Botany, had an illustrious
There was another brother, translated Greek.
I'm sorry, that's not him. Theodore.
another brother. This is, at any rate
in LaPorte, Indiana. Perhaps this one was a judge
Another brother, Theodore, Alfred had quite a career there.
And they tell the story of him. I don't know when it was,
in the '50s.
to the Sahara Desert They wanted him to go
And he said, to see if there was some oil.
They said they'd give him, "I don't want to go there."
and he said okay. whSo, he goes to Paris,0,
looks at the samples and says "Yeah, there's oil there."
and he went back home.
and he collected his $50,000. ( laughter )as oil
So then there's this fellow who's also an oil geologist.
So of the ten of the six boys here, five of them
were highly successful. You wonder how this could be,
you know, basically growing up
And you see kind of the wigenerational divide here.
that the women, the three older women
did not go to college, and
take care of the family. basically stayed home and helped
was profoundly affected by his At any rate, I think Karl
He reports that he was in danger father's illness and death.
when he came here in 1918. of flunking freshman English
littered with misspelled words, broke all the rules of grammar
and were deemed "unfit to read."
In one entitled,
he was indescribably sad. "Three days before my father's
death..." I'm quoting.
"I cried so much that on the day
could be produced. of the funeral, no more tears
was asked to get me. My dear sister Agnes
She was crying. I couldn't.
And what did that sweet innocent girl tell me?
'You will go to hell
I said, 'Go away, if youleave me alone.'ray.'
I had undergone a transformation.
I cannot remember anything from that day until nine months later
when I was confirmed
So, then he went to high school in LaPorte, Indiana.
Here's a picture of the kids. I don't know which one he is,
probably this one.
He grew up in LaPorte, Indiana. And that's just a curious
kind of a time photo there. What's the next one we've got?
Here is, he's the one in back,
and his sister, wand another one there.r
Here he is again. That's him there with--
I don't know
And maybe that's the brother. So any rate, he went to
school in LaPorte, Indiana. And from his yearbook,
he did a number of things which were of interest.
He was the president
which raised crops valued of tat $700 under the callden,
"Food Will Win the War."
for a competitive exam Karl also was sent to Chicago
the exams in history and German. on May 10, 1918, where he took
in track, German/English club Heand basketball.ted
There's one more picture
This was a play and he had the lead role.
I think this is him.
"The Country Gentleman." It was a play called
a theatric bent early on. AIt's obviously a huge cast,d
and he had the lead role. So then he came to Wisconsin
in 1918 and he wrote. He did a very unusual piece
called "The Dances
And this, I'll just read you for Seven Years."
it gives you a flavor of the man some of this, because
anywhere else. that you wouldn't really get
born and raised in poverty "To those fortunate ones
was inspired by them whose early life and training
and the search of truth. with the ideal of toil
are dedicated." ThAnd he goes on here, ands
I don't know how much of this I should read to you.
This is a fore note.
since the dances of seven years started upon the journey
into this book form.
when I came under the influence of the shadows of this great
university, all the beauty
and constructive policy was crushed to the ground
by the mania of patriotism. The environment seemed cold
and cruel to me.
inclined towards the theoretic I was, by nature, a youth
Hence, I naturally turned away than to the active life.
of the cold environment, from the influences
individualistic life followed. a lonesome,
the difficult art of knowledge, I found my greatest friend
in nature: the trees, the waves,
the clouds, tall seemed to touch me
with a kindly hand. Some the impressions received
in my contact with nature, and
that ran through my mind many of the numerous thoughts
held communion with her, which I hold,
in verse and in prose. I reproduced here in the dances
thought to make I knew not what, In the dances, I originally only
I did not undertake hereby to make something
with the finished book. I did it of mine own selfe
to gratify which the dances danced in the booklet form.
The joy and happiness seemed to lie in the making
rather than the finished book.
no thought of a reader. I haI just made it to make."er,
I don't know, I could go on,
to talk about. but we've got other things
that is perhaps most interesting So, one of the things
wanted to make a difference, about Karl is that he really
to limit that to science. He was willing to take
political stands. And over the years, he has been
criticized by some for that.
little bit about that. And I'll say a
of the Biochemistry here, wrote a great autobiographical review
of Karl.
Link was a superb teacher, In summary, Burris states
in the department, ran one of the best labs
and installed them trained many excellent students
the acquisition of valid data, with an honest concern for
have had a global impact and he and his co-workers
Burris goes on to say, on medicine and rodent control.
as a great liberal and defender "Peoof unpopular causes.l up
In my opinion, Link did not really embrace, or actively
promote the radical causes, but he was happy to serve
as a frontman." I very strongly disagree
with this.
What else have we got there? I'll just read you one thing.
Here he is. HerHe went to Europe, as Davee.
mentioned, and here he is dressed as Uncle Sam.
This is in Edinburgh. This is some kind of a holiday,
and he's dressed here as you can see.
We've got another one here. Here he is, I think, after
he came back from Europe. He sported a beard.
His mother refused to kiss him, and so then of course
he entered the faculty. I don't know what else
we've got here. We'll show you some pictures.
Here he is in his canoe.
transporting something, they probably went to visit
the family in LaPorte.
I don't know Here they are posing.
Here he is, yes. if we've got one more there.
to the political bent here. He wrote this in 1946 while
he was interned in the hospital.
would not sign... If the government becomes too
offensive, he would not hesitate
to restore the original form to take up arms against
He then, in those years, or order."
for certain left winged groups. was The one was John Cookes'sor
discussion club from '47-'50
Communist Organization and then another student
He claimed he did this from 1950-'56.
And I suspect that's true. because no one else would do it.
to what Burris is saying. I remember both my parents
were profoundly distressed
that occurred after WWII. The cold war was launched
and as we know as children
and the Vietnam War have cost unfathomable human suffering
and resource depletion. My parents knew that these
imperialist ambitions were
the military industrial complex. driven, as Eisenhower said, by
of this historical drift, Andyou can see howars
in the current situation, how the administration
has lied us into a war
Basically, in my opinion, to control Middle East Oil.
Now approaching 50% of the Iraqi
has been killed, population of 25 million
lives in extreme poverty forced into exile,
a different location to live. or has beNow, is this move to
what you call democracy?
he believed very strongly Atthat it was anybody's rightl,
and everybody's right to speak their mind.
And he said to the Wisconsin
of 1955, "...to oppose any High School graduation class
mind of man." fIn 1956-'57, he joinede
Linus Pauling and 9,000 other scientists
and signed a petition against asking the United Nations
to halt atmospheric testing as the beginning
of general disarmament. He also joined Pauling
in a suit against-- in the International Court
of Justice, seeking to enjoin the United States Government
and the Soviet Governments
Karl was also involved in an effort to save Bascom Woods
that was destroyed to build the Social Sciences building.
In 1964, he was named chairman
for Johnson Humphrey," of the group "Scientists
of the living Nobel Laureate's which included 75%
In May of 1965, he joined protests against HUAC.
And in '68 he gave $400 to the Regents as a trust fund
to defend students against
from their Vietnam protests. legal problems resulting
photographed or carry an ID card In '69 he refused to be
of all UW Students and Staff. He wanted to know
what they were going to do
( laughter ) with this information.
article in the "Daily Cardinal In 1973, in a rather candid
he characterized Richard Nixon Summer Edition,"
a bas--- , a slippery eel..." as "a( laughter )son-of-a---,
"To think this guy had the guts to run on law and order.
What a crook."
So, you know, I don't know if we got in the
light of the political tradition
in '03 I hung this banner on an apartment building that
my brother and I own downtown.
sent me a letter and said, And within one day, the city
It's a code violation." And I persisted for 56 days and
eventually removed the banner got a lawyer.
And a week later, the attack on Iraq began.
And if you don't mind,
( laughter ) I'll quote myself.
to the "State Journal," "I have this image of
the demented cowboy from Texas
he is taking. He is flaunting world opinion,
United Nations and
This is the ultimate the Rule of Law.
I hope the horror of this unilateral invasion
will show us finally
are no longer options." At any rate, my father
may have been photographed
and he may have contributed with a$20 million,ident,
or his products made of Warfarin
that much money for WARF, but he never got his picture
on the front page of "New York Times."
( laughter )
( inaudible ) >> I'd like to ask of Dave,
what was the impact of--
Did the Warfarin research here ( inaudible )
or were other ways help manage that disease,
There was no way to manage to manage the cattle?
except change your feed. the disease,
possible in most cases. And So what developed wasally
was a realization that if you fed them Vitamin K-rich food,
or injected Vitamin K,
So it had a huge impact you on agriculture.this.
( inaudible ) >> Well, at first he had
a heart event.
congestive heart failure. Then eventually,
he died of a stroke.
Warfarin at the time. I do( laughter ) was taking
Other questions?
to them afterwards, If not, come on down. to talk
Otherwise, thank you all
( applause very much for coming.
)