Acceptance of the R.A.F. Penrose Gold Medal for 2001

Abstract

Fellow geologists and friends: First, I am very pleased that Hiroshi was willing to be my citationist and I thank him for his kind observations. That is an appropriate role for him as a decades-long colleague and a Silver Medalist of the Society of Economic Geologists. I remain astonished that our Society has chosen to present the Penrose Medal to me. Perhaps you also wonder at this surprising situation and some reminiscing might help account for it. I have been the beneficiary of a fantastically advantaged career. After the quantitative undergraduate imprint of M.I.T., the only job I could find in the depressed economy of that time was as the mining geologist of a small company in the Hanover district of New Mexico. There were two prime benefits: the duty to examine skarn ores in three dimensions, and more noteworthy, tutoring on field methods and the genetic mysteries of ores by Harrison Schmitt, the company’s superb consultant and father of U.S. Senator Jack Schmitt. That stimulation led to my entering graduate school at Columbia University. By fortunate coincidence, I joined an extraordinarily talented class that was destined to lead in many different directions while advancing our science. Those majoring in economic geology subsequently included two Penrose Medalists, William C. Kelly and Paul …