Easier now as compared to 40 years ago?
WENDER: Yes. But making it is still difficult. Say Pakistan was taken over in a jihad or something or other. They [would] own the bomb. That’s not a great situation.

Some have suggested that the U.S. should lead the way in talks with countries which eliminate everyone’s nuclear arsenals, including those of the U.S. Of going to countries and helping them with incentives for obtaining power with alternate methods.
WENDER: But we ourselves can’t. I mean we’re starting to build nuclear plants here.

Do you think that it’s a valid approach to ask other countries like Israel, India, and China to demilitarize their nuclear arsenal?
WENDER: It’s not a possible approach. We have thousands of bombs, Russia has got a lot of bombs, China will have bombs. You just cannot do it.

Okay. So you were born in 1915?
WENDER: That’s right. I’m ninety–two.

I’m meeting with you in your office at the University of Pittsburgh. You keep office hours.
WENDER: Yes.

Has there been an area or a project that you would have liked to work on that you have not had the opportunity to?
WENDER: I was very lucky at my PhD. The subject of my PhD was very, very timely and I published a great number of papers. I would have liked to follow that up to make things like ethanol, which is very interesting to me, and continue the work of developing oil from garbage.

And was that for a private company?
WENDER: No that was working for the government. We published it. The government did build a plant in Albany, Washington. I don’t know if it was something that I really wanted to do. If you look at our publications, there are, one of the things that I really wanted to do, methanol is easily made from synthesis gas. There are now plants that make ten thousand tons a day, practically, it’s just going up a lot. So you can make methanol and I wanted to make ethanol from methanol. And so we did that and we figured out how to do that and we got to about 37% yield of ethanol. This was published in Nature and Science, two of the most prodigious journals. I looked it up and there are a hundred patents by people who followed that first paper and did not succeed any more than we did.

So you might want another crack at that?
WENDER: Well we almost did but when we looked up all of the patents on it we decide my God if all of the Japanese, Chinese, everybody followed up and they just didn’t do it it’s a bit much. That was interesting. If we could have just raised the yield and get fewer by–products, we could make ethanol like crazy.

What do you attribute your longevity to?
WENDER: A grad student asked me that the other day and I said well its pretty obvious: wine, women, and song.

So what are your plans?
WENDER: Well that’s a funny thing. People ask me when will I retired and then they say, “what would you do if you retired?” And I said at my age you don’t ask questions like that. It’s silly.

Whatever strong point I have is taking chances and going in different directions.

You won’t retire?
WENDER: Well. I have these nine granddaughters who keep me quite busy. One of them just got married, another will marry next July and there’ s probably one after that, so that’s a three ring circus. One of my sons—I have three of them—was recently President of the American Cancer Society, which is nice. Things keep going.

Are you a spiritual person?
WENDER: Not terribly, but there’s an element. I belong to a temple, but I really don’t go there, except for maybe once or twice a year.

Do you think that element has anything to do with your work? Whether decisions you have made?
WENDER: I think it has to some extent. Yes. Honesty and what you do, even the chemical or scientific work that you do, and the feeling that you’re doing it for decent purposes is always there. The only thing about the work that I do is there’s a lot of stuff that you read about. And whatever strong point I have is taking chances and going in different directions. That’s the strong point that I have. I can look at the field and decide to go somewhere and pursue it and amazingly those things work out. So there’s a feeling for that. And that has followed me throughout.

You have confidence that going off in a different direction is going to yield a positive end result.
WENDER: Yes. And most of the time it has. The feeling, however, diminishes with time — with getting older.

And you still find that true today.
WENDER: We were working on converting organic wastes to oil some 25 years ago. Today, there is a movement to replace the plastic bags, in which we buy our groceries, with biodegradable bags— good idea. I think that one company is trying to do that. You ask what did I bring to anything. I have published research papers that enabled industrial companies to make new and better products. I showed that ethanol could be made from methanol and synthesis gas. Two journals, Nature and Science, have the highest standards for publishing new and promising ideas and accomplishments. I have a number of publications in these journals. And I’m amazed at how bright the upcoming science people are.

The issues we’ve spoken of, of nuclear weapons, oil resources, U.S. foreign policy, our dependency on oil, these are not new issues. You worked on the Manhattan Project and developed the first nuclear bomb—
WENDER: not of my own volition