Howard Schachman’s career at the University of California has spanned over 60 years––a period that has seen many changes in the world and also in Howard’s field of biochemistry. The field of molecular biology did not even exist when Howard arrived at Berkeley. In 1948, the year that Howard joined the faculty at Berkeley, biologists had not yet recognized that DNA was the genetic material. O. T. Avery, C. M. McLeod and M. McCarthy published their landmark discovery in 1944 showing that it was DNA, not protein, that was responsible for bacterial transformation. Those results did not convince everyone and the oft-cited Hershey-Chase experiment showing that only the DNA of the bacteriophage need enter the bacterial cell for phage replication was not published until 1952. In the early 1940s, although most scientists agreed that proteins consisted of amino acids linked together in a linear array, how they were synthesized and their threedimensional complexities were unimagined. This oral history on Howard Schachman’s scientific career joins a previous oral history focusing on his contributions on behalf of free speech, academic freedom, and free scientific inquiry.