Acceptance of the 2015 Roebling Medal of the Mineralogical Society of America

Abstract

Ladies and Gentlemen, Colleagues and Friends. My thanks to Peter Burns for his very kind words and generous citation. Two hundred years ago the Swedish chemist, Jons Jacobs Berzelius (1815), first described the physical and chemical properties of what would come to be known as metamict minerals. Ninety-nine years passed before A. Hamberg (1914) correctly proposed that these properties were the result of radiation damage. Fifty years ago, Professor Adolf Pabst received the Roebling Medal, in part, for his classic work on the metamict state (Pabst 1966). Pabst’s citationist was Ian Campbell, the namesake of the Ian Campbell Medal of the American Geoscience Institute. Pabst’s acceptance bears reading, particularly his reference of H.L. Menken’s concept of “messianic delusion” that Pabst applied to young scientists, as compared to his own “limited objectives” in his research. When I was a graduate student at Stanford and left without an advisor by the death of Colin Hutton, Pabst became a distant mentor from across the San Francisco Bay. Pabst and Hutton were among the few in the world with an interest in metamict minerals, a tradition that I have tried to carry forward. Over the course of my career, I have been able to expand an early interest in the metamict state in many different directions. I have been able to do this, not out of cleverness, but rather through collaborations. Today, I want to take just a few moments to recognize these collaborators—a number of them graduate students and post-doctoral fellows, as well as colleagues at universities and national laboratories—by describing and citing the published results of our collaborations. After receiving my Ph.D. at Stanford in 1974, my scientific career got off to an extremely slow start. The world was certainly not waiting to know more about the metamict state. At …