Caltech branches into ... olive oil

Take 130 trees dropping olives on campus walkways. Add in students seeking prankish respite from their studies. Mix in a French-born university president with a taste for Mediterranean cuisine.

That's the formula for making olive oil at Caltech.

The institution better known for rocket science is launching its own brand of the golden kitchen condiment, produced from the trees on its Pasadena campus. A minor flood -- upward of 300 gallons -- is expected this fall.

"We are here to educate students, but we are also there to give them an opportunity to experience different things in life," Caltech President Jean-Lou Chameau, an engineer who loves cooking, said in explaining why a school without a botany course is embracing a project that seems more suited to a farm college than a Nobel Prize factory.

The olive trees, which average 80 years of age, provide the science-and-engineering campus a canopy of shade from the San Gabriel Valley heat. But those trees drop so many olives in autumn, staining walkways black and felling skateboarders, that the school sprayed them to retard fruit growth and even considered replacing them with fruitless varieties.

In October, the ripening crop snagged the attention of students Ricky Jones and Dvin Adalian. They began an exercise that might date to Socrates' pupils in ancient Greece: whacking olive trees with a stick (in this case, a plastic pipe) and collecting what falls.

"I was just trying to relieve the stress from being inside and busy all the time. I wanted to go outside and do something else," recalled Jones, 21, a talkative biology major from Minnesota who wants to be a physician.

"As a physics major, I'm supposed to be working on a chalkboard or something," explained Adalian, 20, who is from Virginia. "But it's nice to go out and do something physically and show I can do something useful besides physics work."

The two proposed an experiment: Could Caltech's trees produce olive oil?

"We want to figure out stuff people haven't done at Caltech yet," Jones said. "There is always this feeling at Caltech that you want to find something new to do."

Good timing intervened. Recently arrived from being second in command at Georgia Tech, Chameau and his wife, Carol Carmichael, noticed the pair at work with tarps and buckets on the aptly named Olive Walk. Told of their plans, Chameau issued a challenge: If they actually made oil, he would cook them dinner at the presidential residence.