Word: wald
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Wald did not "prepare" for Harvard but came to the University after distinguishing himself as a researcher. He earned his B.S. degree at New York University in 1927 and received a Ph.D. at Columbia five years later. At the age of 27, on a fellowship in Europe the next year, Wald succeeded in isolating Vitamin A, which had just been discovered. He helped to complete the identification of the vitamin several months later...
...Wald's dedication to science goes from the slightly mundane--his insistence on doing all lab work himself, forgoing the use of technicians and assistants--to what Everett I. Mendelsohn, professor of the History of Science, says is some of the most inventive scientific thinking--Wald's use of biochemistry to redirect theories on the origin of the universe. At all levels of understanding, science, for Wald, is a universal language. "I am deeply glad to be a scientist because I think that human beings have always and everywhere asked the same questions," he says...
...relating specific issues and ideas to universal concepts, Wald intellectually transcends the boundary between science and politics. He juxtaposes democracy with natural selection and judges scientific work on its moral and political implications. Noting the dearth of scientist-activists, he says without apology, "The thing that gets me into those political issues is science. You cannot study nature as it goes down the drain...
...Wald's first public political act was a speech he delivered at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in March, 1969. Delivering such lines as "The Vietnam War is the most shameful episode in the whole of American history," Wald became an early and prominent academic critic of the Asian war. Vietnam was just one part of this speech, however, for Wald says it was only a "detail in a much bigger situation"--the militarization of the United States, accompanied by the increased dominance of big business. Consequently he lists as his political priorities: nuclear disarmament and the control of nuclear...
...speech changed his life "more than the Nobel prize," Wald says, turning him into a magnet for social activists interested in gaining exposure through the use of public figures. Wald says he avoids most organizations, preferring to act individually, but he is deeply involved with the American Friends Service Committee and Amnesty International in defending Soviet dissidents and opposing totalitarian regimes in South Korea and Chile. Wald also backed the presidential campaigns of Eugene McCarthy in 1968 and George McGovern...