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MN: Now I understand you incorporate this into your teaching class.

GK: Yes, I do.

MN: How do you incorporate this?

GK: Well, I teach a class in cellular physiology, and latex being a plant product, what I can do is take some guayule stems that I get from my dad, and put it in a Waring blender. The blender takes the place of the Jordan mill. Grinds up the bark and the stems where the rubber is contained, and you turn it on for about twenty minutes and you get a solution containing about fifty percent ethanol and a little bit of... sodium... no, it's not sodium. I forget the chemical. Anyway, I mix it in a special solution containing a chemical with sulfur in it. I think it has nitrogen and sulfur. Anyway, and what happens is that you mix it in a blender, and what happens is that the latex, after it's separated from the fiber, it'll float to the top. And then what I do is I'll take a little scoop, and take out the rubber, and then just press it together, press it together and just toss it and it bounces. It's like in twenty minutes you can have, you go from stem, guayule stem, to a bouncing rubber ball. Takes about twenty minutes.

MN: Now did your father's research inspire you to go into research yourself and to go into academia?

GK: No. [Laughs] He didn't want me to become a bookworm actually, and I was not encouraged. But on the other hand, I was exposed to a lot of animals, we raised all kinds of animals as pets, we had snakes and scorpions, possum, I caught a woodpecker once. Just all kinds of animals we had growing up. We had a horny toad, praying mantis. But anyway, so my twin brother David and I were always interested in animals. And we also used to collect abalone from the seashores. So I became interested in marine biology, so that was one of the things that I became interested in. And also when I was in junior high school, I was going to be an artist until I got to junior high school, first science class, and I was just fascinated by looking at microorganisms under the microscope. And I took a little Brownie box camera and took pictures with a Brownie box camera through the microscope, and that was my science project, and it won first place. So I became interested in science at a pretty early age. But the transition, key in transition was in junior high school.

[Interruption]

GK: When we grew up, my twin brother and I grew up, we were interested in raising animals. We usually had snakes of one kind or another, garter snakes or king snakes. One time we had a possum, we had scorpions and praying mantises. We would feed praying mantises by dangling a spider in front of it and the praying mantis would eat it, we'd watch it. We just did things like that.

MN: Yeah, your mother said you two were the holy terrors when you were younger.

GK: Yeah, yeah, when we were younger, yeah. We'd work together, we'd move chairs so that we could climb up to get things. People would be warned, but they would put things up high and my brother and I would move a chair to get to it and stuff like that. So we had a reputation.

MN: Now how did you get interested in your father's guayule project?

GK: One year they asked him to give a presentation, and so he asked if I would help with the presentation. And so what I did was I put together a poster. And as I put together the poster, then I became more interested in the project, and so I started to do some research on it.

MN: How old were you at that time?

GK: Oh, geez, it wasn't that... it was relatively, I guess I must have been in my forties. It wasn't when I was young. I was already a professor.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.