Abstract
Over a 14-day period this year, the world lost three distinguished scientists, Nobel laureates all, and all associated in some way with the Bulletin.
Henry W. Kendall, 72, died February 18 while scuba diving in Florida's Wakulla Springs State Park with a mapping team from National Geographic magazine. Glenn Seaborg, who led the research team that discovered plutonium, died February 25 at his home in California. He was 86. And Gerhard Herzberg, one of Canada's greatest scientists, died March 3 in Ottawa at the age of 94.
Starting in the late 1960s, Henry Kendall, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, worked with Jerome I. Friedman and Richard E. Taylor to better understand the nature of protons and neutrons, then thought to be the basic building blocks of matter. They discovered that protons and neutrons were actually composed of “quarks”; for that, they shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1990.
In 1969, Kendall became a founder of the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS). He served as chairman of UCS from 1973 until his death.
Today UCS focuses largely on environmental and resource issues; but during the 1970s and 1980s, it was a prominent voice warning of the dangers inherent in the nuclear arms race. Kendall was a leading critic of the “Star Wars” scheme announced by President Reagan in 1983.
In 1992, Kendall wrote the “World Scientists' Warning to Humanity,” endorsed by 1,700 of the world's leading researchers. In an eloquent introduction, he summed up the problem:
“Human beings and the natural world are on a collision course. Human activities inflict harsh and often irreversible damage to the environment and on critical resources. If not checked, many of our current practices put at serious risk the future that we wish for human society and the plant and animal kingdoms, and may so alter the living world that it will be unable to sustain life in the manner that we know. Fundamental changes are urgent if we are to avoid the collision our present course will bring about.”
Glenn Seaborg pointing to seaborgium as it appears on the periodic table.
Kendall, a former member of the Bulletin's Board of Directors, was on the Bulletin's Board of Sponsors when he died.
Glenn Seaborg–the principal discoverer of plutonium, a Nobel laureate (chemistry, 1951), former head of the Atomic Energy Commission, and a member of the Bulletin's Advisory Board at its founding–was the most prominent of the many chemists who made major contributions to the Manhattan Project.
By tradition, the symbol for plutonium should have been “Pl”; but Seaborg named it “Pu” instead. “We were just having a little fun,” he said later. After his team discovered Pu in 1941, he and his co-workers went on to discover nine more atomic elements–americium, curium, berkelium, californium, einsteinium, fermium, mendelevium, nobelium, and seaborgium. (Seaborg was granted patents on two of these substances–americium and curium–making him the only person in history to patent an element.)
At the Manhattan Project's “Met Lab” in Chicago during the war years, Seaborg worked feverishly to find an efficient technique for isolating large quantities of plutonium. At one point, he later recalled, a shelf collapsed, breaking a small vial, and “a quarter of the world's supply of plutonium soaked into the Sunday Tribune.”
Seaborg was as famous for rearranging the periodic table as he was for his work on the bomb. He realized that Dmitri Mendeleev had put uranium in the wrong place, which led other chemists to place other new elements incorrectly as well. Today, Seaborg's revised periodic table is the global standard.
Seaborg's interests and accomplishments were remarkably wide-ranging. He served as chancellor of the University of California-Berkeley from 1958 to 1961, and he was a great supporter of the school's football team. He also wrote the rules for the Pac 10 Conference.
A strong believer in the future of nuclear power, he said that the major accomplishment of his term as chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission (1961 to 1971) was the expansion of U.S. nuclear power from two to more than 70 plants.
Seaborg served as president of the American Association of Science in 1972 and as president of the American Chemical Society in 1976.
Gerhard Herzberg, who won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1971, was Canada's foremost living scientist, said John Polanyi, a fellow Canadian and Nobel laureate.
Herzberg, a member of the Bulletin's Board of Sponsors, was the “father of molecular spectroscopy,” a science in which optical instruments measure the characteristics of light emitted by or absorbed by molecules and atoms.
His ground-breaking work provided basic analytical tools for physicists, chemists, medical researchers, biologists, and astronomers. The Nobel jury said his Ottawa laboratory had become the world's foremost center of its kind.
In addition to his achievements in chemistry, Herzberg was widely regarded as Canada's most articulate and influential spokesman for the value of pure research.
A refugee from Nazi Germany, he came to Canada in 1935. In 1948, he joined Canada's National Research Council, remaining there until his formal retirement in 1994. Although government budget-cutters continually chipped away at funding for pure science, he fought back.
Pure science, he said–often, publicly, and sometimes in a booming voice–was as fundamental to culture and national character as music, literature, or art. Canada had to support pure science, he said, in part to “give young people the freedom to wander along the path of curiosity.”