Word: wald
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...George Wald is not a Harvard institution. He is an aberration. Despite the 43 years he has spent here Wald, Higgins Professor of Biology, does not have the mannerisms of an Oxford don, nor does he long for the days when practically all Harvard students were white, male and wealthy. One of Wald's friends says the decade that Wald longs for most is the 1960s, when science concentrators and students in general were more concerned with social issues than with their medical school applications. A biologist, teacher and social activist, Wald has distinguished himself by setting trends in each...
Coming to Harvard during the depression years of the '30s, Wald started as an instructor and tutor in Biochemistry, receiving tenure in 1948. He was named to the Higgins chair in 1968. Wald had isolated Vitamin A in the human retina before he came to Harvard and eventually won the Nobel Prize in Physiology for his vision research. Today, Wald says it is his dedication to and understanding of science, rather than belief in any specific political philosophy, that has compelled him to become a social activist. He admired Salvadore Allende's Marxist government but says, "I don't know...
...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...
Amos got his backing from show biz cookie freaks, notably Marvin Gaye and Jeff Wald and his wife Helen Reddy, who jointly put up $11,000. Says Wald: "We invested in it for love, but as it turns out, it will probably be a better investment than any we ever made. It could be worth a few million in a couple of years." Amos is in the chips (his two-year-old company grosses more than $1 million a year), but he frets incessantly about costs (pecans and chocolate have more than doubled in price in two years...