Acceptance speech for the Leonard Medal of the Meteoritical Society, July 16, 2009

Abstract

First, I want to thank Munir for the kind words, all those who took the time and effort to write letters nominating me for the Leonard Medal and, of course, the society’s Leonard Medal Committee for awarding me this great honor. I also want to express my appreciation to all the members of the Meteoritical Society, just for being such a fascinating group of smart scientists that provided such a vibrant and enjoyable research forum for so many years. It might seem strange to many of you that a kid who grew up on the city streets of Toronto, Canada, a country not particularly noted for its meteorite research, is standing before you today to receive the Leonard Medal. Let me try to convince you that it may not be so strange after all. I owe thanks to many institutions and people along the way whose advice and direction steered me toward this point in time. To my parents (Fig. 1), who instilled in me the importance of learning, despite their having less than a high school education themselves; to the Toronto public school system of the 1950s and 1960s, where success was rewarded and failure was an option; to the Toronto public library system (Fig. 2), where a young person’s extracurricular scientific interests could be satisfied; to the Royal Ontario Museum (Fig. 3), its Junior Field Naturalists, and the Walker Mineral Club, where a young mineral collector’s imagination could run wild; to Bay Street (Fig. 4), where a young boy lacking transportation to mineral collecting localities could go on a field trip by subway, collecting rare minerals by walking from office to office of many of Canada’s mining companies, headquartered in its skyscrapers; to Terry Seward (Fig. 5), a boyhood friend and fellow mineral collector, who steered me away from most Canadian universities whose geology programs were focused on the practical aspects of mineral exploration; and instead toward McMaster, my undergraduate university (Fig. 6), which was more oriented toward theoretical geochemistry; to my professors at McMaster, especially Jim Crocket, Bob McNutt, and Henry Schwarcz (Fig. 7), who all stressed the importance of physical chemistry, and directed me toward American graduate schools for pursuit of my interests in geochemistry; to all those faculty (Bob Gordon, Phil Orville, Brian Skinner), post-docs (Tom Brown, Jack Corliss, Lou Fernandez, Jiba Ganguly, Amitai Katz, Dinkar Kharkar), and graduate students (Don and Sharon Baschinski, Gary Brass, Julius Dasch, John Grover, Mark Kritz, John Morse) at the Kline Geology Lab at Yale University (Fig. 8), who combined to create what became a completely mind-expanding experience during my Ph.D. studies; and especially to my thesis advisers there (Fig. 9): Karl Turekian, a chemical oceanographer with extremely broad scientific interests, who was the first to introduce me to meteorites and was bold enough to supervise a Ph.D. thesis on chondrites; and Syd Clark, who taught me that there is usually a simple way to calculate a good first approximation to almost anything. Condensation calculations have come a long, long way from the days when I rode the New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railway between Yale and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in Manhattan, carrying multiple boxes of computer punch cards. I owe thanks to every Canadian university, each of which rejected my application for an assistant professorship in 1972, as my interest in meteorites probably would not have survived the scientific and funding priorities of the Canadian research scene; to Edward Anders, who politely listened to my expression of interest in a postdoctoral position in his lab at Chicago, and then gave me the biggest break of my career by suggesting that I apply instead for an assistant professorship at the same institution; to Joseph V. Smith (Fig. 10), who resurrected my appointment as assistant professor at Chicago just when all seemed lost; to the University of Chicago in general and the Department of the Geophysical Sciences (Fig. 11) and