William Rutter is a biochemist and the co-founder of the biotechnology company Chiron Corporation. He received his PhD from the University of Illinois in 1952 and went on as a postdoctoral fellow to the University of Wisconsin and the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm. From 1955 through 1969, he held faculty positions at the University of Illinois and later the University of Washington, and in 1968 he became the chairman of the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco. He remained in that position until 1982, and founded Chiron in Emeryville in 1981. In this interview, Rutter discusses his education and early academic career, his administration and strategy during his tenure as chairman of the UCSF biochemistry department, and molecular science research throughout the 1970s and 1980s.