Stanley Deser is emeritus Ancell Professor of Physics at Brandeis University and a Senior Research Associate at Caltech

Background
Prior to Supergravity’s (SUGRA’s) inception, the ideas in the air came from two new, quite different realms.  One realm was supersymmetry (SUSY); the other arose from the emerging difficulties in achieving consistent interactions between gravity and higher (s > 1) spin gauge fields.

Indeed, the Western discoverers of SUSY, Julius Wess and Bruno Zumino [1], would frequently visit Boston from NYU to spread the SUSY gospel, which did get even our blasé attention after a while, especially since the simplest SUSY multiplet pattern (s; s + 1/2) linking adjoining Fermi-Bose fields had no obvious reason to stop at the s = 0 and s = 1/2 models that had been studied thus far.
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