Wonderful Sense Research Articles

Lawrence Grossman (1924-2006)

The nucleic acids research community lost one of its true pioneers with the passing of Larry Grossman on January 13 at the age of 81. Larry was born and raised in New York City where he dropped out of high school to help support his family and then enlisted in the Navy as a fighter pilot. He was shot down at the age of 19 or 20 and spent two days alone in a life raft in the Pacific prior to being rescued. Larry liked to point out that, while it was commonly believed that George H. W. Bush was the youngest naval pilot to be shot down during World War II, Larry was younger, though he would concede that the ex-president may have been the youngest Republican to have been shot down. Larry left the Navy at the end of the war with two Distinguished Flying Crosses and, having witnessed the death of one of the Japanese pilots whom he shot down, a dedication to anti-war activities. Thanks to the GI Bill, Larry obtained his high school diploma followed by a Bachelor's degree in biology and chemistry from Hofstra University and a Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the University of Southern California. He began his independent research career at Brandeis University in 1957, moving in 1975 to Johns Hopkins where he was Chair of Biochemistry in the School of Hygiene and Public Health. Larry was among the very first to introduce enzymology into the study of DNA repair. He is probably best known for his characterization of the E.coli UvrABC excision complex, the individual components of the complex and the functional interactions of the complex with UvrD and DNA polymerase I. His laboratory also characterized the UV-dimer DNA glycosylase of M.luteus, discovered the human Damage DNA Binding Protein, DDB, and characterized several other DNA repair enzymes from M.luteus and human placenta. Larry then became interested in DNA repair capacity and its relation to cancer susceptibility and aging. He developed a test for DNA repair capacity, and then collaborated with epidemiologists and oncologists to pursue these studies. Larry published numerous articles in Nucleic Acids Research and served as an Executive Editor of the journal in 2000 and 2001. He often started his seminars with the same joke: “In a previous talk I asked whether everybody can hear me and a voice from the back said, ‘I can hear you, Dr. Grossman, but I would be happy to change seats with someone who can't.’” We will miss hearing Larry, his incisive comments, his jokes, and his political insights. However, he will remain present as an inspiration to all of us who knew him not just for his science, but also for his sailing, skiing and poker prowess, and of course his wonderful sense of humor.

A Sense of Wonder: Samuel R. Delany, Race, Identity and Difference (review)

Reviewed by: A Sense of Wonder: Samuel R. Delany, Race, Identity and Difference Ikechukwu Okafor-Newsum A Sense of Wonder: Samuel R. Delany, Race, Identity and Difference By Jeffrey Allen TuckerMiddletown: Wesleyan UP, 2004. 344 pp. Jeffrey Allen Tucker's analysis of the writings of Samuel R. Delany reminds us that black identity politics is a narrative constructed to critique, resist, and transform the essentialized and subordinated blackness constructed by the essentialized whiteness of western modernist hegemony. According to Tucker, Delany's Hugo Award-winning memoir, The Motion of Light in Water (1988), "demonstrates not only the constructedness of identity but also what Robert Reid-Pharr calls 'the essentially permeable and thus impure nature of all American identities'" (3). The discourse of black identity politics emerged out of the social movement for racial justice and human rights. Historically, the movement for racial justice in the United States has marginalized black homosexuals as an act of image control and conformity within the conventions of American heterosexist masculinity. The transformative power of identity politics—to move in-between grand narratives as well as beyond them—thus became bracketed within the politics of race. In order to give moral and political legitimacy to the movement of racial uplift, this "bracketing" strategically excluded gay male identity, choosing rather to focus on the necessity to critique and resist the dominant hegemonic discourse of white supremacy. Tucker's analysis of Delany's writings suggests that the discourse of critique and resistance of early black identity politics merely substituted one (Eurocentric, sexualized) essentialized blackness for another. The antirace discourse of Black social movements challenged Eurocentric notions of race and critiqued prevailing notions of white (heterosexual) masculinity, which had at once sexualized and emasculated black men, but did not, in the end, challenge either the partriarchal or the heterocentric leanings of hegemonic masculinity. Black identity politics of the Civil Rights Era, as today, was dominated by an image controlling black officiati and the worldview of religious fundamentalism. There is no more room for Delany's fluid, black gay identity discourse today within "official" black identity politics than there was in the Western hegemonic discourse that it historically critiqued and resisted. This is how Tucker challenges prevailing critiques of Delany as being "anti identity politics." Tucker asserts that Delany's writing offers up multiple identities that are also black. As Delany himself notes: I am black. Therefore what I do is part of the definition, the reality, the evidence of blackness. [. . .I]f you're interested in the behavior of redheads, and you look at three and think you see one pattern, then you look at a fourth and see something that for some reason strikes you as different, you don't then decide that this person despite the color of his hair isn't really red-haired—not if you and yours have laid down for a hundred years the legal, social and practical codes by which you decide what hair is red and what hair isn't, and have inflicted untold deprivations, genocide and humiliations on those who have been so labeled by that code. (qtd. in Tucker 13) [End Page 153] Tucker prefers to see Delany's identity as "at once multiple and locatable" (3). As Tucker points out, Delany's quote above suggests a degree of race consciousness and awareness of the history and politics attached to race in America (14). Like Frederick Douglass, James Weldon Johnson, W. E. B. DuBois, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Delany is an antirace humanist. However, the antirace humanism of the nineteenth and twentieth century stays safely within the boundaries of heterocentrism. As a black gay-male science fiction writer who seeks to recover the social and sexual voices between the contesting master narratives of race, Delany removes the brackets around the transformative possibilities of black identity politics. In so doing, Delany is a part of and apart from this site of struggle. Jeffrey Allen Tucker's A Sense of Wonder is an honest discussion of the contradictions and limitations of black social movements around the question of sexuality. Tucker's lengthy analysis of the writings of Samuel R. Delany and the question of racial authenticity is an...

Preserving a Sense of Wonder: The Integration of an Ego–Supportive Psychodynamic Approach to Supervision in an AIDS Psychiatry Fellowship

The challenges of working with medically and mentally ill persons with a paucity of resources, inadequate networks of social support, and multiple stresses and losses maybe daunting to even the most seasoned of caregivers. A psychiatric trainee may be overwhelmed by the despair, sorrow, and desperation en-countered in the day-to-day care of the complex severely ill patient with lethalmedical and lethal psychiatric diagnoses. Individuals who are infected with HIV and hepatitis C, who are polysubstance users, and who are benzodiazepine dependent present with inordinate demands for prescribed substances to use or to sell in the street. The trainee needs to become comfortable with both limit-setting and harm reduction in order to keep the patient engaged in both lifesaving medical and psychiatric care. Nurturing and supportive supervision enables the trainee to integrate skills and work toward an understanding of countertransferences. An ego-supportive psychodynamic approach to supervision in an AIDS psychiatry fellowship facilitates conflict resolution and improves the care of patients with complex and severe medical illness.

Translating Science and Restoring our Sense of Wonder

Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature still stands as an exemplary case of environmental journalism in the way it translates complex scientific ideas into an accessible form and engenders a deep sense of wonder about the natural world. Nonetheless, this article suggests that McKibben’s core claim that we have reached the end of nature (as a human experience of the wild; as an independent, creative force and identity-fixing force; and as a reasonably predictable and reassuring force) is overstated and contradicted by his prescriptions for the future. If nature has come to an end and we humans have taken over nature’s role as the all-powerful force, as McKibben argues, then how can we follow his advice and choose to become nature’s creatures again? And whose idea of nature should count? McKibben appears to have mistaken decline for death and unintended human impacts for God-like control.

Stanley J. Korsmeyer

Stanley J. Korsmeyer

The Ko Festival of Performance (review)

Reviewed by: The Ko Festival of Performance Kermit Dunkelberg The Ko Festival of Performance. Amherst, Massachusetts. 1107– 08082004. For the past thirteen years, the Ko Festival of Performance (produced by Ko Theater Works) has brought innovative new theatre to audiences in the western Massachusetts town of Amherst. The company and festival are named for the forty-ninth hexagram of the I Ching, "Ko," which describes revolution as a shedding of skin. The festival strives [End Page 117]to shed conventional approaches to the creation and presentation of performances. This year the festival was organized around the theme of "The Document, the Documenter, and the Documented, celebrating the preservation of knowledge, and lamenting its loss." As the facilitator of postperformance conversations between artists and audiences, I was able to track this theme through the various works of the festival. Sources for the performances included ancient texts, twentieth-century political history, autobiography, and biography. Beyond the preservation of knowledge and its loss, the performances raised issues of the manipulation, falsification, and untrustworthiness of documents. In all of the performances, the performers, directors, and designers were documenters. In some cases, they were also the documented. As is traditional at Ko, the festival opened with a performance on the Amherst College Observatory Lawn by Ralph Lee's Mettawee River Company (Salem, New York). This year's piece, The Heroic and Pathetic Escapades of Karagiozis, centered on the title character: a trickster figure of a Mediterranean shadow puppetry tradition dating back to the fourteenth century. Like Arlecchino in the commedia dell'arte tradition, Karagiozis is an Everyman with insatiable appetites for food and mischief. Lee had been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to research the surviving Karagiozis puppetry tradition in Turkey and Greece. Setting a precedent for the use of documentation throughout the festival, Lee chose not to reproduce the style of this folk tradition, but to adapt two tales from the Greek tradition to Mettawee's own style. Rather than shadow puppets, we were treated to whimsical masks, puppets ranging from finger-size to twelve feet tall, and crazy dragon contraptions, all accompanied by a three-piece jazz combo. Evan Zes as Karagiozis demonstrated remarkable physical comedic skill, and a wonderful sense of scale. A gesture (or Brechtian gest, in its most popular form) might begin in his belly, travel to a finger, and then become a full-bodied run around the playing area. The festival next moved indoors, to Hampshire College's Emily Dickinson Theatre. Ko Theater Works' Out of the Garden: A double bill of Eve and Exilebrought together two pieces written and performed by actor-dancer Lesley Farlow, both based on ancient source materials. Exile, directed by Mitchell Polin, filtered the story of Medea through the contemporary stories of convicted child murderers Susan Smith and Andrea Yates. The juxtaposition of a figure from Greek myth and tragedy with contemporary figures known primarily from journalistic accounts (an episode of the television program American Justicefocused on Smith played in the lobby) humanized the archetype, while bringing a sense of tragic distance to the acts of Smith and Yates. Exilebegan with the sound of water—evoking Medea's exile, the act of childbirth, and the fate of Susan Smith's children. (The sound score was by Polin.) Hieratic gestures reminiscent of Greek vase paintings gave way to a more quotidian movement vocabulary as Farlow slipped us into the contemporary. In a long, affecting passage, Farlow first sat listening to a Johnny Cash rendition of Roberta Flack's "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face." Then, evoking pregnancy, labor, and childbirth, she lugged four plastic bags (the number of Andrea Yates's children) filled with Styrofoam peanuts to separate locations, covered them with a blanket, and "put them to sleep." The bags, it turned out, were the insides of bean bag chairs—quintessentially suburban domestic objects. Farlow navigated between Medea's and Smith's feelings of betrayal, between the archetypal and the hyper-real. In the last moment, she transcended the creepy banality of the desperate acts of Smith and Yates by reaching back to Medea's cry of anguish, uttered in Euripides' ancient Greek. Eve, directed by Janna Goodwin...

A sense of wonder: Samuel R. Delany, race, identity, and difference

Samuel R. Delany is one of today's most interesting writers. African-American and gay, Delany crosses boundaries - generic (science fiction, memoir, theory, pornography) and academic (literary studies, cultural studies, African-American studies, gay and lesbian studies). Critics both black and white have read Delany as a writer who downplays his racial identity in order to aspire to universal values. In contrast, A Sense of Wonder shows how Delany's works participate in African-American cultural traditions. The book begins with an analysis of Delany's Dhalgren (1975), using the novel's links to black cultural traditions as the key to unlocking its puzzling content. Jeffrey Allen Tucker's reading of the four-volume Return to Neveryon series places Delany's explorations of semiotics in dialogue with Frederick Douglass's 1845 Narrative and social histories on slavery in America. From there, Tucker moves to Delany's ground-breaking autobiography, The Motion of Light in Water, his experimental novella Atlantis: Model, 1925, and to his pornographic novel, The Mad Man. Tucker's aim is to advance a reading of identity that acknowledges its multiplicity and permeability without emptying it of socio-political efficacy and meaning.

A Message From the Editor.

A Message From the Editor.

Indian Heart/White Man's Head: Native-American Teachers in Indian Schools, 1880–1930

Two teachers at Haskell who had a profound impact on my life were Ella Deloria and Ruth Muskrat Bronson. They stood apart from the others as far as I'm concerned. Ella Deloria was Standing Rock Sioux and a graduate of Columbia…. She taught girls' physical education and drama. Ruth Muskrat Bronson was Cherokee and a graduate of Mount Holyoke. She taught English. They both had such a wonderful sense of humor. They taught non-Indian subject matter but had a very strong respect for Indian culture, and they were clever enough to integrate it into the curriculum. They taught their students to have a healthy respect for themselves as individuals and a pride in their heritage. They taught us about Indian values and kept them alive in us. They respected and encouraged us to voice our opinions in and out of the classroom, and they had the ability to draw out our creativity. When Ruth would tell us to have pride in who we were, she'd say, “Indians are people too. Don't forget that.”

Letters

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article LettersFull AccessLayton McCurdy, M.D.Layton McCurdySearch for more papers by this author, M.D.Published Online:1 Oct 2004https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ps.55.10.1180AboutSectionsView EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InEmail To the Editor: It has been my good fortune to know John Talbott for 40 years. He has been a great contributor to our field, especially in regard to patients served in the public sector. His contributions have made a huge impact on the way patients are cared for and cared about. John brings many personal qualities to any encounter. He is intelligent, slightly irreverent, with a wonderful sense of humor. Perhaps his greatest asset is his wife Sue. I will miss his steady hand at the journal, but I will look forward to seeing him in different places, perhaps even on the streets of Paris.Dr. McCurdy is Dean Emeritus and Distinguished University Professor at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston. FiguresReferencesCited byDetailsCited byNone Volume 55Issue 10 October 2004Pages 1180-1180 Metrics History Published online 1 October 2004 Published in print 1 October 2004

Christianity in Canada. Historical Essays (review)

Reviewed by: Christianity in Canada. Historical Essays Elizabeth Smyth Christianity in Canada. Historical Essays. John Moir. Edited by Paul Laverdure. Yorkton, SK: Redeemer's Voice Press, 2002. Pp xix, 188. $14.95 Christianity in Canada is, according to editor Paul Laverdure, 'the best of Moir.' The volume contains a dozen essays written by historian John Sargent Moir during his four-decade career at Carleton University and the University of Toronto. Moir's scholarship on the role of religion in Canadian history led to his well-deserved reputation as a scholar who redefined a field. Yet Moir the scholar is only one aspect of this exceptional [End Page 552] man. He is an outstanding and generous teacher and a highly sought after mentor. The collection, edited by one former student and introduced by another, gives the reader insights into the multi-dimensional nature of John Moir. Before the reader is introduced to Moir through his own words, we meet him through the words of his students. Editor Laverdure's preface and Mark McGowan's foreword set a fine tone for the rest of the volume. Laverdure explains that the essays have been gathered from a variety of sources - some reprinted from elsewhere, some unpublished talks, and some previously unpublished materials - to create a collection that is accessible (add affordable) to students and scholars alike. Mark McGowan's foreword provides a fine scholarly and personal context that enables the reader to gain a sense of Moir the scholar and Moir the mind behind the pen. The first of Moir's essays is a 1980 address, 'Religious Determinants in Canadian History.' It is a first-rate choice for an opening piece for it is an excellent introduction to Moir's scholarship. In it, Moir argues that 'centrality, mission, indigenization, churchliness and activism' (1) rather than their opposites (secularism, parochialism, catholicity, sectarianism, and withdrawal) are the five religious determinants in Canadian history. Using a critical lens (mediated with a wonderful sense of humour), Moir provides a series of examples to illustrate that one cannot understand the history of Canada without taking into account the role of religion in our past and present. The rest of the collection's essays can be viewed as analysing the roles of these determinants. In 'A Search for a Christian Canada' (1991), Moir traces the multiple influences of religion on Canadian legal, social, and political life from New France to the present, explaining, by example, the Judeo-Christian roots of 'the Just Society.' Moir then delves into the numerous sects that contributed to the Christian mosaic in the 1960 essay 'The Sectarian Tradition in Canada,' arguing for 'a Canadian sectarian tradition of religious egalitarianism in a semi Erastian state' (38). Two papers written in 1966, 'The Canadianization of the Protestant Churches' and 'American Influences on Canadian Protestant Churches before Confederation,' and one previously unpublished paper, 'Towards the Americanization of Religion in Canada' (1980), explore Moir's cross-border comparative analysis of Protestantism in North America. The three essays dealing with the churches and political issues - 'Loyalism and the Christian Churches' (1976), 'Egerton Ryerson, the Christian Guardian and Upper Canadian Politics 1829-1840' (1984), and 'The Canadian Baptist and the Social Gospel Movement 1879-1914' (1979) - allow Moir to look at the intersections among local and national [End Page 553] political events and organized religion. In 'The Problem of a Double Minority: Reflections on the English-Speaking Catholic Church in Canada in the Nineteenth Century' (1970) and 'The Origin of the Separate School Question in Ontario' Moir turns his attention to the Roman Catholic church in Canada, and calls more scholarly attention to under-researched topics and themes such as the ones examined in the two essays. Moir's work is not uncritical of the development of the field of Canadian religious history. The penultimate essay in the collection is one of the most provocative. In 'Canadian Religious Historiography - An Overview' (1991), Moir challenges the field to move beyond its present status. In his delivery before the American Theological Library Association, Moir argues that 'the writing of Canadian religious history has developed no discernible schools and few identifiable trends' (149), citing regionalism as a dominant cause of the former, and...

Robert T. Simpson (1938–2004)

Robert T. Simpson (1938–2004)

Moving Upstream: NEPA and the Golden River

NEPA practitioners are keenly aware of Title I, Section 102 of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), especially its references to using a systematic, interdisciplinary approach to environmental assessment. Most NEPA practitioners are also knowledgeable about Title I, Section 101, which stresses the importance of preserving historic, cultural, and natural resources, and of achieving a balance between population and economic growth and resource use. Few of us, however, are aware of the nobler aspects of Section 101 that emphasize our responsibility as trustees “to create and maintain conditions under which man and nature can exist in productive harmony,” not only for the present, but “for succeeding generations.” This article has three objectives. First, it traces the evolution of our environmental awareness by describing the social and cultural motivations that led this country to enact NEPA and other federal environmental laws. Second, the article assesses where our profession is today after 30-plus years of NEPA—for example, its effectiveness in protecting the environment and maintaining diversity of species. Third, the article looks ahead into the new century and speculates what will be required of us as environmental stewards, not only technically but also socially and emotionally, to meet environmental challenges—for example, the challenge of natural disaster impact assessment. The article suggests in part that there is a resonance in the natural world that can strike a chord within our beings that not only enlivens our spirits, but also stirs our imaginations and stimulates our highest creative efforts. To achieve the above objectives, the article journeys through 30 years of literary writings—from Roethke's The Far Field (1964) and Carson's Silent Spring (1962) and The Sense of Wonder (1965), to Oliver's American Primitive (1978), House of Light (1990), and West Wind (1997), and Steingraber's Living Downstream: An Ecologist Looks at Cancer and the Environment (1997).

Mickey and the Tramp: Walt Disney's Debt to Charlie Chaplin

In 1928, made film history when his studio released Steamboat Willie, the first animated talkie and the first cartoon to feature Mickey Mouse. Although proved to be forward-thinking with regard to sound and later groundbreaking cinematic technologies, his greatest influence rooted firmly in the past: Chaplin, the master of the silent era. In 1964, by which time Chaplin's Tramp and Disney's Mouse had become two of the most recognizable icons of the filmmaking industry, Frank Rasky wrote in the Toronto Star Weekly that [WaIt] and are the only two authentic geniuses that Hollywood ever spawned (10). By understanding the connections between these two filmmakers and their works, one can better grasp how influenced and how they both reflected and affected American culture and audience sensibilities in the twentieth century. Like most children growing up in America during the early years of filmmaking, fascinated with Chaplin. By the time twelve, he competing in impersonation contests in Kansas City. As he told reporter for Ladies' Home Journal in 1941 interview, get in line with half dozen guys . . . I'd ad lib and play with my cane and gloves. Sometimes I'd win $5, sometimes $2.50, sometimes just get carfare and Mrs. Disney 146). Once he and his childhood friend Walter Pfeiffer performed Charlie and the Count for amateur night at local theater with Disney, as Chaplin, wearing his father's derby, pants, and big work shoes and sporting mustache; they won fourth-place prize of twenty-five cents (Thomas 38). Disney's sister Ruth, quoted in 1932 issue of Silver Screen, confirmed that her brother's ambition in life was to be another Chaplin. Up and down the alley he'd swagger, with bagging trousers, derby hat, floppy shoes, and cane, while one of his pals turned the crank of his new movie camera (qtd. in Syring 8), which he acquired at the age of seventeen. Disney's brother Roy offered succinctly: [HJe always very taken with so he Chaplin (Hubler, Roy int. 50). Disney's impersonation came to be ranked as the second best in Kansas City, and while his Kansas City acting days were limited, his practice of imitating continued after he founded his own movie studio. As animator Ward Kimball recalled, Walt great admirer of Chaplin. always showing us how did certain gag. We thought just as good as Chaplin. Of course, if you asked to do any acting, he'd get little self-conscious, but when he would get carried away with story or gag situation and start imitating something, he just as great as Chaplin (qtd. in Green and Green). As his career progressed, would frequently act out scenes for his animators, punctuating his conversation with expressive gestures and facial contortions (Mr. 146). Disney's performances became mainstay of his studio's story meetings. Calling them a potent force during story discussions, animator Dick Huemer noted that Walt could have been great actor or comedian. . . . would take stories and act them out, kill you with laughing they were so funny. And there it would be. You'd have the feeling. You knew exactly what he wanted (qtd. in Canemaker 27). Animator Marc Davis concurs, saying of Disney, He would act out the parts . . . better than you were able to do it. had wonderful Chaplinesque sense of timing and being able to perform something ... an action ... little idea . . . the way he saw it in pantomime. marvelous at this. You'd go out of your mind if it something you were going to work on (Hubler, Marc Davis int. 15). Just as Disney's acting style inspired by Chaplin, so too his approach to filmmaking. Trained in Chaplin's pantomimic style, approached movies visually rather than verbally, his studio being the first to develop and adopt the use of the storyboard to plan out the visual progression of film. …

Kenneth Melvin Evenson

Kenneth Melvin Evenson

Peter Meyer

Peter Meyer

McGrath, The Re-Enchantment of Nature: Science, Religion and the Human Sense of Wonder

McGrath, <i>The Re-Enchantment of Nature: Science, Religion and the Human Sense of Wonder</i>

Drug arrests at the millennium

People of conscience perforce agonize over the growing racial disparities in drug arrests and incarceration in the United States. One is forced to view with alarm the tendency of this nation to become increasingly a carceral society. That this tendency most strikingly characterizes drug offenses and more specifically the drug offenses of African Americans, should be troubling for us all. The drug war is being fought in earnest, we realize, and its enemy, it seems, is the black community. One first confronts the racial disparities in the War on Drugs with a sense of outrage, a feeling that gross injustice is afoot in its prosecution. One concludes with no less a sense of outrage, but with the feeling that the injustices we observe begin at a much more basic and possibly more intractable level than the racial intent of the architects of the drug war. One also concludes with a sense of wonderment over how deep, how ramifying, and how abiding racial inequities in American society are, and how ineluctably they play themselves out in all corners of social life. In short, one shifts one’s sense of outrage from the part to the whole. Much of the drug policy debate centers around whether and to what extent the War on Drugs is racist. The charge can mean many things, of course, but one of its possible meanings is that African Americans are targeted for arrest specifically because they are black. However, unless we find a smoking gun, it’s unlikely that we will ever be able to locate direct, overt racist motives in the drug war. What we do have is a number of nearly iron-clad processes that both suggest inadvertence and are intricately intertwined with what used to be called institutional racism—that is, the structural reasons why identical factors and dynamics will produce very different outcomes for whites and blacks. In DRUG ARRESTS AT THE MILLENNIUM

Herbert Maxwell Strong

Herbert Maxwell Strong, a pioneer in the development of processes for synthesizing diamond from baser forms of carbon, died in Schenectady, New York, on 30 January 2002 of pneumonia, following a long period of declining health.Strong was born on 30 September 1908 in Wooster, Ohio, the youngest in a family of a sister and two brothers. He graduated from the University of Toledo in 1930 with a BS degree. He earned his graduate degrees in physics at Ohio State University: an MS in 1931 and a PhD in 1936. His PhD adviser was Harold P. Knauss.Strong began his career as a physicist with the Kendall Co in Chicago, where he worked on the physics and chemistry of adhesives. In 1946, he joined the General Electric Research Laboratory (now part of GE’s Global Research Center) in Schenectady, New York, as a research associate. He spent the remainder of his career at that lab.In his first major project at the GE lab, Strong dealt with the hot supersonic exhaust flames from rocket motors on test stands. Using our training in spectroscopy, he and I explored many of the details of velocity, temperature, pressure, and so on in rocket exhaust flames. Strong’s second notable research project at the lab involved the development of a thin, evacuated, flat-panel thermal insulation for use in refrigerators, freezers, and other cooling devices. The main outcome of this work was a classic publication in the Journal of Applied Physics (1960) about the physics of heat transfer through thin, evacuated thermal insulation panels.The third and most important project that Strong and his colleagues at GE undertook, beginning in 1952, was to find ways to synthesize diamond from baser forms of carbon under physical–chemical conditions in the thermodynamic region of stability for diamond. The basis guiding the experimental work was thermodynamic theory; this was new, unknown territory experimentally.Success—the reproducible synthesis of diamond in the GE lab with a “fair” understanding of the process—came in early 1955, and Strong’s name appears on the first patent and publications of the results. GE began marketing Man-MadeTM industrial-grade diamond abrasive in 1957. Although GE was developing the commercial and technical applications of Man-MadeTM industrial diamond, scientists there still needed to give attention to the many related basic scientific problems and also to the possibilities such as thermistors, transistors, windows, and heat sinks. Strong derived phase, temperature, and composition diagrams at high pressure (approximately 55 kilobars) of the carbon-iron, carbon-nickel, carbon-cobalt, carbonalloy, and other systems.In 1969–70, Strong perfected methods for growing large, single-crystal, high-quality diamonds—some more perfect in the crystallographic and purity sense than the best of natural diamonds. Those achievements made it possible to experimentally investigate various properties—such as electrical and optical properties, heat conduction, and isotope effects—of nearly perfect diamond crystals.Strong received numerous awards, among them the International Prize for New Materials (now called the James C. McGroddy Prize for New Materials) from the American Physical Society in 1977.After his retirement from GE in 1973, Strong remained active. In cooperation with other local physicists, he participated in a popular “Fun with Physics” program for schoolchildren at the Schenectady Museum. Through this program, children participated in simple demonstrations of gravity, optics, magnetism, conservation of momentum, and other basic physical phenomena.In a memorial service held for Strong in February 2002, one of the earlier directors of the GE Research Laboratory, Roland Schmitt, summed up Strong very well: “Herb was a superb scientist and an exquisite experimentalist. He also was a wonderful human being and a courteous gentleman with a wonderful sense of humor.” Herbert Maxwell Strong GE GLOBAL RESEARCH CENTERPPT|High resolution© 2002 American Institute of Physics.

Dilip Kumar Das-Gupta

Dilip Kumar Das-Gupta, an eminent applied physicist in the field of dielectric materials, died on 5 January 2002 in Bangor, Wales, following a brief illness.Das-Gupta was born on 16 September 1928 in Barisal, India. In 1949, he graduated from the University of Calcutta with a first-class honors BSc degree in physics. That same year, he obtained an MSc degree in radio physics from the university and then subsequently emigrated to England, where he worked as an electronics engineer, research engineer, and deputy chief instrumentation engineer for industrial companies in Cambridge and London until 1960.From 1955 to 1960, in parallel with his job in industry, Das-Gupta pursued research at the University of London’s Birkbeck College, where he earned his PhD in nuclear physics in 1962. From 1960 until 1965, he was a full-time research fellow in Birkbeck’s physics department and worked on an absolute determination of internal-conversion electron energies of thorium B (lead-212).In 1965, Das-Gupta was appointed lecturer at the school of electronic engineering science of the University College of North Wales in Bangor (UCNW). There, he immediately started research on the dynamics and heat transfer in fluidized beds (freely supported solid particles in a fluid). During the 1970s, he began research on the physics of dielectric polymers. Within a few years, he became a leading expert on charge trapping and conduction in insulating polymers and on piezo- and pyroelectric polymers—a new field that had begun only a few years before. In a seminal 1977 paper in Applied Physics Letters, he reported changes in the x-ray diffraction patterns of polyvinylidene fluoride caused by corona charging. This work led to the discovery of a new electric-field–induced crystalline phase of this semicrystalline ferroelectric polymer. The findings, as well as his systematic use of corona poling and structure analysis, resulted in seminal publications on the link between the morphology and the ferro-, pyro-, and piezoelectricity of polyvinylidene fluoride and its copolymers. Starting in 1979, Das-Gupta engaged in a series of highly successful research visits to several foreign laboratories. He became a consultant to the department of electrical engineering at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where he worked on conduction mechanisms in insulating polymers. During the decades that followed, he collaborated closely with colleagues in Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Israel, Italy, Portugal, Russia, Spain, and the US. In his collaboration with colleagues from industry, independent laboratories, and universities, and in his own work, Das-Gupta—a true applied physicist—maintained a good balance between the fundamental and engineering aspects of research and technology.In 1982, Das-Gupta was promoted to reader at UCNW. During 1980, together with one of us (Lang), he introduced the laser intensity modulation method (LIMM), a nondestructive pyroelectric technique for probing space-charge and dipole-polarization distributions in dielectric films. Several laboratories around the world now use this low-cost, high-resolution technique. Das-Gupta continued to refine the LIMM, in particular through careful direct comparisons with related experimental methods.Das-Gupta’s outstanding scientific achievements were acknowledged through many honors. In 1989, he was elected as a fellow of both the UK’s Institution of Electrical Engineers and Institute of Physics. In 1994, he was elected a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. Das-Gupta formally retired in 1993, but was subsequently appointed honorary research fellow by UCNW (now called the University of Wales in Bangor). He continued and even increased his very fruitful research—in particular, his dedicated work with young talented scientists from all over the world. During the 1990s, he became one of the leading experts on polymer-ceramic composites and contributed often-quoted review articles to journals and books. His advanced materials characterization group at the university’s school of informatics continues to study materials for high-energy storage, smart ferroelectric-polymer composite sensors, electrical and dielectric properties of chemically treated polymers, dielectric spectroscopy of polymers and ceramic-polymer composites, and AC-field aging of power cables in humid environments. Das-Gupta’s unexpected death left much of this promising research only partly completed.Das-Gupta consistently supported and encouraged students and young colleagues. For many years, he was involved in a European Socrates/ Erasmus network and hosted, in his laboratory, students from all over Europe. His deep understanding of philosophy and culture and his sensitivity for others’ feelings and thoughts were as important as his scientific excellence in making him a very successful teacher and promoter of students and scientists worldwide. Many of the students later had the privilege to become his friends and colleagues. Many of them will continue to promote science in research and teaching in his style, and will remember his generous and open personality with fondness.Das-Gupta had the rare gift of combining scientific excellence and exactness with personal warmth, deep understanding, and a wonderful sense of humor. We all miss him and offer our sympathy to his family. Dilip Kumar Das-gupta PPT|High resolution© 2002 American Institute of Physics.