Abstract
THE SCIENCE AND ARMS CONTROL COMMUNITIES LOST A NUMBER OF DISTINGUISHED AND INFLUENTIAL MEMBERS THIS YEAR. HERE, FRIENDS AND COLLEAGUES OFFER THEIR RECOLLECTIONS OF A FEW OF THE DEPARTED.
RANDY FORSBERG, 64
At a dinner at my house years ago, Randy Forsberg said that she imagined a world eventually emerging–a world very different from our own–in which people would regard war as we now regard cannibalism and human sacrifice. Not as a way to achieve national glory and economic treasure, not as the continuation of politics by other means–but simply as palpably disgusting, too awful even to contemplate. Randy Forsberg's moral vocation–her unyielding devotion to the common human good–grew out of this straightforward and compelling moral vision.
After returning from a visit to the national laboratories in New Mexico, where Randy had been talking to people who were trying to find better ways to keep nuclear weapons safe, she called me one night and described their intelligence and seriousness and their brilliant and well-crafted presentations. And then she explained, in the most plaintive tone, how sad it was. Sad, she told me, because so much money and such great talent were devoted to symptoms rather than to curing the underlying disease. There was no rancor and no hostility in her voice, but there was a sense of moral shock and outrage.
This sense of outrage was a second essential element of her moral vocation. For without outrage, a moral vision can easily become disconnected from practical life and become a source of smugness and moral superiority.
But Randy had more. We all know people who combine vision and outrage but never become effective agents, because they are unable to connect with people. I experienced firsthand her ability to connect with others through her writing. Randy contributed several major articles to Boston Review, a magazine I have edited since 1991. I can't think of another writer who was so uncompromisingly devoted to perspicuous argument, accuracy of detail, and clear and unambiguous prose. Randy had a keen awareness that she was asking people, other rational adults, to change their ideas and their conduct. Her work was powerful–not always successful, but always forceful–because she respected the common reason she shared with readers.
But that was not all. When you stand outside the political mainstream, as Randy did, and try to shift it rather than simply condemn it (particularly when you are a woman writing about war), you have to put up with raised eyebrows, rolling eyes, the advice of the smart insiders who know what it takes to be a player, and the worst–the people who think that growing up means giving up. You need to persist through periods in which everything you have built seems about to fall apart. Such a moral vocation also requires great personal courage. And Randy had that, too.
A compelling moral vision of what ought to be, an animated sense of outrage at what is, an articulated respect for humankind's common reason, and a deep personal courage: Randy Forsberg had all of this. She was truly remarkable, and we will miss her.
Director, Program on Global Justice
Freeman Spogli Institute
ALEX FARRELL, 46
Alex Farrell was my colleague, a close faculty collaborator, and someone whom I was truly thrilled to have recruited to join the Energy and Resources Group at the University of California, Berkeley.
Alex and I began to collaborate on his first day at Berkeley, and since we were on opposite schedules, we often joked that our “duty cycle” permitted us to keep a project moving forward 24 hours a day. Alex very rapidly became a key player in state, regional, and international discussions on energy and transportation policy. His assessments of the energy and climate impacts of biofuels became a cottage industry in itself, gaining him many requests to talk on the issue.
His work on the larger environmental footprints of tar sands, shale rock, and other unconventional oil sources led to the defining project in Alex's career, designing the low carbon fuel standard. This standard sets a fleet-wide maximum greenhouse gas impact for transportation–measured on a life cycle basis. It has been globally influential in how we assess and regulate vehicle pollution (in addition, both major presidential candidates endorsed it).
A hallmark of Alex's approach to work was his focus on the numbers and the facts. He had a cherished sign over his desk, “Skepticism is a virtue,” which he'd point to often. Alex was a tireless adviser and mentor, working closely with both PhD advisees and with the wider set of master's students in our program. In fact, it was his loyalty and dedication that his students cite when they praise him for his assistance and the void left by his passing.
In dealing with his sudden departure, I connected in an equally sudden and intense way with his family. In them I glimpsed the more personal side of Alex's life. What was most striking in them was the same sort of admiration for him, which is so apparent in Alex's colleagues and students. Altogether his was a remarkable and intense life.
Codirector, Berkeley Institute of the Environment
JOSEPH EGAN, 53
When Joe Egan invited me to join his small law firm, specializing in environmental and nuclear regulatory law, I knew he was a good man and an excellent lawyer, with an interesting and challenging practice. I also came to learn that I had found a partner and a new brother, who came as close to a modern-day Renaissance man as anyone I've ever met. Joe possessed a mastery of the law and an imaginative ability to maximize the value of any set of facts to his client's advantage, keeping them apprised of every strategy and development of their case in clear understandable terms.
But Joe was far more than a lawyer. His education included three degrees from MIT in Physics, Nuclear Engineering, and Technology & Policy, earned while captaining MIT's varsity track team. While graduating with honors from Columbia University Law School, Joe honed his avocation as a concert pianist, a talent he maintained throughout his life. Joe justified his frequent e-mails sent at 3-4 a.m. by explaining that he did not have time for sleep and that he did some of his best thinking in the solitude of those early-morning piano practices. Joe never let his busy schedule detract from the role he cherished most–that of loving husband and doting father.
Joe represented some 19 nations on nuclear issues and was past-president of the International Nuclear Law Association. Among his many accomplishments, Joe led a campaign in the 1990s to secure the return of more than 5,000 tons of highly enriched uranium, which had earlier been spread throughout the world under the U.S. government's “Atoms for Peace” program. The late Paul Leventhal, founder of the Nuclear Control Institute, called it the greatest achievement in nonproliferation in his lifetime. While he was justifiably proud of this and his many other accomplishments, Joe never sought the limelight, instead giving credit and heaping praise on his partners and coworkers.
Managing Partner, Egan, Fitzpatrick & Malsch, PLLC
JOSHUA LEDERBERG, 82
The obituaries and eulogies for Josh Lederberg rightly highlight his extraordinary intellect and the breadth of his interests and accomplishments. I knew him as a colleague and friend during the years he was at Stanford University. In the evenings, as he left with an armful of books on space science, rocket engineering, and artificial intelligence, he would stop by my lab to chat about what I was working on and often add a suggestion or a reference to related work that I had overlooked.
During the period when the safety of recombinant DNA was in the headlines, Josh was a voice of reason and a fountain of advice. I particularly valued his support when I was trying to deal with the barrage of charges that my work produced unacceptable risks to humans and the environment.
Cahill Professor of Biochemistry, Emeritus Stanford University School of Medicine
JOHN A. WHEELER, 96
The first time I inter viewed John Archibald Wheeler, a prominent Manhattan Project physicist, he allotted time after a busy conference to talk with me in a taxicab to the airport. The conversation went so swimmingly that he escorted me aboard his plane and, had the stewardess not swept me out seconds before takeoff, I would have found myself conversing with Wheeler all the way to Houston. As I left the plane, he handed me a subway token.
IN MEMORIAM
Virologist whose work on polio enabled the development of a vaccine.
Pathologist who led baby tooth study showing the spread of nuclear fallout.
Ecologist who wrote a seminal review paper on carbon dioxide's environmental impact.
Nuclear medicine researcher who proposed the use of technetium 99m, now widely employed to detect tumors.
Swedish climatologist who was the first chair of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Member of the Manhattan Project theoretical division in Los Alamos from 1944 to 1946.
Radiological monitor during the Bikini Atoll nuclear tests who wrote No Place to Hide, and warned of the dangers of nuclear weapons.
Manhattan Project physicist who also invented the wet suit.
British climate change scientist who advocated for renewable energy as a government science policy adviser.
Former director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who expanded nanoscale research.
The chief scientific adviser to Britain's Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs who bolstered its ability to respond to an outbreak.
Former director of the National Center of Atmospheric Research who linked climate change and human activity.
North Pole explorer and glaciologist whose ice-core data informed the concept of climate change.
A Manhattan Project chemist who worked on plutonium production and its reduction to metal.
Pioneering nuclear fusion scientist who designed fusion reactors.
Manhattan Project physicist who later developed nuclear research reactors at the American Machine and Foundry Company.
Journalist who shared the Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the Three Mile Island accident.
Antinuclear and environmental activist who directed the National Environmental Coalition of Native Americans.
A remarkable human being, Wheeler was also without equal as a physicist and philosopher. In 1939, Wheeler and Niels Bohr came up with the “liquid drop” model, an explanation of atomic fission, which became the basis for building the atomic bomb. That same year, Oppenheimer and Hartland Snyder produced a theory of star death. While he first rejected the theory, Wheeler accepted it after it was mathematically vindicated and named the collapsed star the “black hole.” During the 1950s he fell in love with general relativity and spent the rest of his life trying to reconcile it with quantum physics.
Wheeler was notoriously absent minded. In 1958, as a government adviser at arms negotiations in Geneva, he accidentally left his briefcase in the headquarters of the Soviet delegation. The chairman of the delegation immediately called his U.S. counterpart and, with some amusement, sent back the briefcase.
Probably, his endless curiosity–which endeared him to his peers and contributed to his many accomplishments–had distracted him. In his autobiography, Wheeler wrote, “I have to admit that I never stop thinking about physics. I have never been able to let go of questions like … [w]hat is my relation to the universe and its laws? Can space-time be all that there is? Is there an end to time? I have not been able to stop puzzling over the riddle of existence. There is no definable point where the truly curious physicist can say, I can go only this far and no farther.”
AUTHOR, The Ruin of J. Robert Oppenheimer
ARTHUR C. CLARKE, 90
Sir Arthur C. Clarke wanted his tombstone to read: “Here lies Arthur Clarke. He never quite grew up, but didn't stop growing.”
Clarke captured his own soul superbly: The forever-optimistic Clarke never lost his wide-eyed enthusiasm for exploring the sciences, the oceans, human nature, the mind, and, especially, the meaning of the universe. As a young man serving in the Royal Air Force during World War II, he so impressed his comrades with his passion for space travel that they called him “Spaceship.”
Clarke was a prolific science fiction writer and an occasional contributor to the Bulletin. He was also a keen political observer. While I was editor of the Bulletin in the 1990s, he and I corresponded intermittently. He was especially interested in my account of the great Chicago Flood of 1992, in which the Chicago River leaked into a 60-mile-long network of service tunnels under Chicago's Loop. The leak could have been fixed for a few tens of thousands of dollars if it had been properly attended to early on, but because of bureaucratic incompetence and delay, it eventually racked up hundreds of millions of dollars in damages.
Shortly after receiving the faxed report, Clarke wrote that he “was fascinated to see on CNN a report on the whole thing, with Mayor [Richard M.] Daley looking pretty unhappy. I guess he wishes that the old man was still running the city.”
In his writing, Clarke was drawn to scientific exploration, like many Bulletin contributors. In one of his early books, he wrote: “Among the stars lies the proper study of mankind. … For the proper study of mankind is not merely Man, but Intelligence.” His insight will be missed.
Former editor, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists