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Professor Spotlight: O Chem’s William Dasher

Professor William Dasher, known as “Dasher” to anyone who is remotely familiar with him, teaches one of the hardest courses at Puget Sound: Organic Chemistry. On the days when there is a test in O Chem, Oppenheimer gets ready early so that students can get their caffeine fix before the 7:30 a.m. start time. The average grades on the tests are shockingly low for a Social Science major. Despite teaching such an intimidating course, Dasher does not take himself, or anything else for that matter, too seriously. He is a laid-back guy who waxes poetic about the merits of his generation’s music over ours. (Hint: His generation wins in almost every category.)

Throughout this interview, I got to hear about the young Dasher’s scholastic exploits, which began when he rode the rails with his O Chem book in his backpack, and end this year after 32 years at Puget Sound.

Even as our conversation went beyond his academic interests (he explained to me how quinine, a malaria cure that comes from tree bark, was used to control the world), he expressed his ideas using chemistry terms. (For example, students go through “fluxal” stages as they mature and react to their environment.)

This is a condensed version of that conversation. You will be spared the details of my study abroad experience, our bonding over the trials and tribulations of living communally and what process he used in his own research. If these or any other topics interest you I encourage you to go sit down with Dasher. He’s a no-holds-barred kind of guy, and his favorite thing to do is talk with students.

Can you tell me a little about your background and about how you ended up at Puget Sound?

Well, I think we should go back a little further than that. I was born in Fircrest, at St. Joe’s. It’s a little suburb down the street. My dad was a minister who came out here from World War II (he’s a Georgia boy) and started the Redeemer Lutheran Church. And my mom was the organist choir director, a classic Southern thing. So his job was to start churches because we’re rather heathen out here and he was paid by the missionary fund, which is the same place as the missionaries in Africa get paid from, which should give you an idea. And then he started a church in Portland, and then in ’59 he started a church in Seattle and we stayed there until I graduated in ’65 from Cleveland High School.

So why chemistry?

I always knew I wanted to do some kind of science. I went to junior college in Bremerton and just took the basic science classes, and I took an organic class that I just loved. It was taught by this guy John Mandake, who was really just a great older guy. It was a tight, small class and in fact we enjoyed it so much we talked him into doing an extra summer quarter. At that time I was still hitchhiking around and riding the rails, so I would be riding rails with my Organic book in my backpack, studying on the side of the highway while I was trying to hitch a ride. So, I went up to Western in ’72 and did my last two years there in Bellingham. Then I went to UW, and graduated in ’80 with a Ph.D in Chemistry and ended up down here.

What was it like riding the rails? How far did you get?

I rode the rails all up and down the West Coast, into Arizona. I tried in Canada but they lock the cars, I couldn’t do it. I had a girlfriend in Alberta. I was in the service and when I got out of the service, I did a lot of that. Maybe a rite of passage, becoming normal, getting back into society.

That was right during Vietnam, right? Did you go over to Vietnam?

It was. I was there a year, and on your way over you got a nice glossy magazine called “Tour 365.” All the pictures in there were of the natives in the villages, and it was best characterized as being a juxtaposition of absurdity and insanity. There is no other way of looking at it.

You’re retiring soon.  What will you do?

I’m trying to adopt the mindset of some of our seniors who are not going on [to graduate school]: with the excitement of total freedom, all doors are open, no decisions have been made, the freest time in your life; except I don’t have to live in my parents’ basement. I’m excited about that, a little bit of trepidation since I can certainly be as lazy as anybody. I have a lot of ideas, there’s some traveling, I have a little woodshop and I may get back into doing that. I have some friends that volunteer out at the VA so I might do that too.

If you were given a plane ticket, round-trip, to anywhere in the world, where would you want to go?

That’s a really good question.  There are a lot of places I would like to travel. I would have to break it down by continent. If it was South America, it would have to be Peru. As far as South East Asia, been there, done that, but I wouldn’t mind going back to Australia. If it was Europe, I’m intrigued with Spain and Prague and I don’t know why. Istanbul is also intriguing because that is such a center of culture and so much of the natural products that I teach in my class trace back to that part of the country. Africa is kind of a tricky one, maybe Northern Africa in Morocco.

Oh, really?  I studied abroad there last spring.

You know, I’m a big fan of the study abroad program, because I think part of the process of going to college is that formative, young adult becoming a full adult. And, maybe the best part of teaching is seeing students go through that phase. They come in, and they’re adults but they’re really forming their own selves. By the time they leave, instead of looking around at people whose opinions they might adapt to, because they admire them, they create their own worldview.

The study abroad is a great part of that because it throws you outside your comfort zone and that’s how you learn about yourself. You can have all these ideas about who you are but you don’t really know until you have an encounter and see your reaction. There’s an inner core of who you are, and so when you’re faced by all these situations that are outside your comfort zone, you really grow, you really become your own person. I see people come back from study abroad and it is not that they are a different person but there is a greater sense of self and confidence. Now you can do a better job of contributing, and loving and caring, and with some perspective.

One of the classes that I’m interested in is your Natural Products course.

If you took Natural Products at a state university, as a graduate [student] it would be a very different course. It would be more biochemical engineering, because that is the state of the field of natural products—creating enzyme packages that create custom kinds of things. I touch on that a little bit but we really look at plants, the history of plants, their usage, and more and more now the biological rationale.

I’ve also heard it called “the drug class.” Do you look at it that way as well?

I’m going to give the last seminar of the Thompson Hall Seminars series [on April 26th] and the title is the “The Rise of The Schedule Ones.” In Schedule One drugs [the highest level of controlled substances, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency] there is a significant potential for harm and absolutely no medicinal use. So it would be cannabis, heroin, LSD, all your basic hallucinogens and a handful of others. So Oxycodone would be a Schedule Two, because it has a medicinal use.

I’m going to look at how Schedule One is very difficult to do research on. It’s extremely tough to get approval, there are all these guidelines on usage of subjects, which makes it almost impossible to do any sort of research. I would argue that there is huge potential in advances in brain chemistry and neurobiology from some of these Schedule Ones. I’m not as interested in cannabis, because everyone is looking at that. But there is a lot of other things going on too, one of which being treatment of Post-Stress [Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder], which I am kind of personal to. For people in hospice or with severe depression, there are a lot of areas that we don’t understand brain chemistry-wise that might unlock some of the secrets of how the brain works.

I remember hearing about a study at John Hopkins a few years back that found that psilocybin mushrooms could help people with issues like depression.

It is something that carries on long past the initial dosage. I don’t want to give the whole thing away, but one of the things I dug up looked at the idea of openness. So apparently there are five psychological areas of personality definition and openness is one of them. Extrovert, aggressiveness, agreeableness are other categories. But openness was one that really responded to these types of treatment and seemed to have almost permanent shifts, which is very interesting.

They’ve even discovered that some of the effects are not even increasing brain activity, but that they dampen activity in the part of the brain that communicates and rationalizes everything. So the “expand the mind” saying: when you look at your brain it’s actually almost the opposite.

What sort of independent research have you done?

So in the last decade or so I’ve been doing stuff on quinine, a natural product. It’s a substance from the bark of a tree that was the malaria cure. So historically there is a lot of interest because it is really hard to exploit Africa if you can’t deal with malaria. So who controlled quinine is who controlled the economic development of the world in the sixteen- and seventeen-hundreds. I was trying to develop reagents for asymmetric synthesis using quinine as a base molecule.

So what do you think is the next big thing in chemistry, and particularly with natural products?

First of all, natural products are the feed stalks for the development of new drugs. The statans [anti-cholesterol drugs], rose from isolation of a Japanese or Chinese plant. So, what the drug companies will do is work with it and then throw a methyl on it so they can patent it. That’s an area that is always very vibrant. I think the area of Schedule Ones is going to be very exciting, some pretty prestigious places like the Mayo Clinic are being associated with doing this research. So we shall see.

There are a number of fundamental processes that are getting unraveled. For example, all the work that is being done on cancer has increased our knowledge of cell division. AIDS looks at how we respond to the immune system; there are all these wonderful things that come out of studying that terrible disease. The analogous on for the Schedule Ones is depression and brain chemistry. These diseases have an upside, when you start throwing money at them you start unraveling some fundamental things. How does the brain work? How do we dream? What is memory? What is the nature of consciousness?

After 32 years here, what advice do you have for students?

Students struggle with the idea of what they’re going to become.  When I do talk to students who are having some thoughts, they’re struggling with envisioning themselves in the future. I would adhere to the idea of, you don’t have a chance of understanding that. That isn’t the way that life works. You’ve got to have faith in yourself and you just have to follow your heart, even though that sounds kind of silly. The better you know yourself, the better you are able to follow that, things more often than not work out.

But, life is not fair. Life doesn’t owe you anything. I think you have to understand the variances of life, but if you can have faith in yourself and enjoy the journey, where you end up is beside the point.