harrison brown

n a t i o n a l a c a d e m y o f s c i e n c e s

Any opinions expressed in this memoir are those of the author(s)and do not necessarily reflect the views of the

National Academy of Sciences.

h a r r i s o n B r o W n

1917—1986

A Biographical Memoir by

roger revelle

Biographical Memoir

Copyright 1994national aCademy of sCienCes

washington d.C.

HARRISON BROWN

September 26, 1911-December 8, 1986

BY ROGER REVELLE

HARRISON SCOTT BROWN WAS born in Sheridan, Wyoming,on September 26, 1917, the son of Harrison H. Brown,

a rancher and cattle broker, and Agnes Scott Brown, a pi-ano teacher and a professional organist. His father diedwhen he was ten years old, and mother and son moved toSan Francisco, where Mrs. Brown suplemented her incomeas a dental assistant by teaching music and playing pianofor silent movies. Young Harrison grew up to be a compe-tent pianist, who organized his own jazz orchestra. He playedentirely by ear; apparently, his mother had never taughthim to read music.

After graduating from Galileo High School in San Fran-cisco, where he is said to have built his own chemistry labo-ratory, he entered the University of California at Berkeley,and received a B.S. in chemistry in 1938. One of the facultymembers who influenced him was the chemist, G. E. Gibson,who did research on stable isotopes and their separation bymass spectrometry and gaseous thermal diffusion. AnotherBerkeley professor, Robert D. Fowler, also interested him innuclear chemistry. When Fowler moved to Johns Hopkins

Roger Revelle died on July 15, 1991. This memoir was reviewed and revised insmall part by Edward Goldberg, Claire C. Patterson, and George Tilton.

41

42 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS

University, Harrison followed him there as a graduate stu-dent. Before that time, Harrison had married Adele Scrimger,and they had a son, Eric Scott Brown, who later became amarine biologist. For his doctoral studies, Harrison devel-oped mass spectrometric techniques for studying the isoto-pic composition of cobalt as part of the development ofknowledge concerning relative stabilities of nuclides, andof the more general case of occurrences of nuclear speciesin solar nebula formed from nuclear reactions in stars. Withthe discovery of nuclear fission in 1939, Brown and Fowlerdevoted their attention to the diffusion properties of ura-nium hexafluoride. Within a year they found themselveswith the largest gaseous uranium fluoride generating ca-pacity in the United States and they were soon major sup-pliers of uranium tetrafluoride and hexafluoride to embry-onic atomic fission projects initiated at Columbia Universityand the University of Chicago.

In 1942 Harrison was asked by Glenn Seaborg to joinhim in the Metallurgical Laboratories at the University ofChicago, to work on the use of the chemistry of plutoniumto separate it from uranium where it had been generated infuel rods of atomic reactors. He and his colleague, OrvilleHill, discovered at the University of Chicago that pluto-nium could be separated from uranium by gaseous evapo-ration of fluorides prepared by dry fluoridation. Harrisonmoved with other members of the Chicago group to OakRidge, Tennessee, where, at the Clinton Engineering Works(wartime code name: X-10), he worked with a small groupto continue development of procedures that might be usedfor isolating gram quantities of plutonium from its traceoccurrences in metallic uranium fuel rods. These proce-dures, involving dry volatilization of fluorides, were intendedto serve as an alternative fall back, if needed, to liquidchemical separation procedures that were being concurrently

HARRISON BROWN 43

developed in the Oak Ridge pilot plant for isolation of plu-tonium. These latter methods later served as the chemicalengineering framework eventually used at Hanford to pro-duce kilogram amounts of plutonium used in the bombexploded over Nagasaki three years after Harrison has startedhis postdoctorate work concerning plutonium at the Uni-versity of Chicago.

After the two atomic fission bombs were exploded andthe war with Japan ended, Harrison joined other Manhat-tan Project scientists in expressing their grave concern aboutthe future, for no matter what strong justifications for theirinvolvement in the bomb project may have been during thewar, they felt powerfully committed to do things that wouldhelp rectify existing social evils. By December 1945, Harrisonhad completed a 160-page book, Must Destruction Be OurDestiny? (Simon and Schuster, 1946), warning about the ex-treme dangers of nuclear weapons. It was typical of him notto be satisfied with simply writing a book. He was concernedthat it should have the maximum possible political impact,and for this purpose he gave 102 lectures within three monthsthroughout the United States. He used royalties from thebook sales to support the work of one of the organizationsof atomic scientists that later became part of the Federa-tion of American Scientists whose aims and efforts weredirected to proper regulation of atomic power and weap-ons.

In 1946 Harrison returned to the University of Chicagoas assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry andthe Institute for Nuclear Studies, where some of his facultycolleagues were also former members of the ManhattanProject. Both he and they were driven by powerful urges tofocus their attentions on new concepts for developing sci-entific knowledge in fields as far from military applicationsas possible. These concepts had been nurtured to fruition


in their minds as outgrowths of insights generated from theengineering developments they had devised during workon the atomic bomb, and some of these ideas led to theircreating at the University of Chicago a new scientific field:nuclear geochemistry. Research developments in this arenaexerted an enormous impact in the fields of Earth andplanetary sciences and revolutionized them during the nextseveral decades. Methods for measuring paleotemperatureswere developed by Harold Urey, Samuel Epstein, HeinzLowenstam, Mark Inghram, and their student colleagues.Methods for measuring C14 ages were developed by WillardLibby, James Arnold, and their student colleagues, whilemethods for measuring potassium/argon ages were devel-oped by Mark Inghram, Jerry Wasserburg, and John Reynolds.The concept of the nuclear shell model was developed byMaria G. Mayer, who used nuclear mass abundance dataprovided in part through studies carried out by HarrisonBrown, Hans Suess, and their colleagues.

During this same period Harrison's outstanding intuitiveability as a scientist became focused on problems in threemajor fields: estimating relative elemental abundances inthe solar system by determining the composition of meteor-ites; determining the temporal progress of magmatic evolu-tion of the Earth's crust by measuring uranium/lead agesof common igneous rocks; and determining the age of theEarth by measuring the isotopic composition of lead in ironmeteorites. He had developed these concepts through ear-lier doctoral studies in measuring isotopic abundances bymass spectrometric techniques in collaboration with col-leagues who worked in fields of neutron activation analyses,in fields of elemental solar abundances coupled either withnuclear stabilities and structures or with the chemical com-position of the proto-earth, and in the field of geology.

As part of his aim in dealing with nuclear reactions and

HARRISON BROWN 45

stabilities of end products in evolving stars, relative abun-dances of nuclear species in solar nebula, chemical compo-sition of condensed planetary material in evolving solar sys-tems, and evolution of planetary atmospheres, he stimulatedand focused the interests of his student, Edward Goldberg,into developing and applying the first neutron activationanalytical methods used in the Earth sciences to studies oftrace occurrences of gallium, gold, palladium, and rheniumin meteorites. The correlation between Ga and Ni inGoldberg's study led to the first grouping of iron meteor-ites based upon geochemical data. These data formed partof a larger context Harrison developed of occurrences ofelements in solar nebula resulting from nuclear reactions,which helped his colleagues Hans Suess and Maria Meyerformulate concepts concerning shell stabilities of the atomicnucleus.

Another of his major aims dealt with the development ofnew uranium/lead dating methods which could be used torevolutionize geological knowledge of the chronology ofthe evolution of the crust of the Earth. Previous studies ofscattered, ore-grade occurrences of uranium minerals, us-ing chemical and mass spectrometric techniques that re-quired tens of milligrams of samples of lead, uranium, andthorium for measurements of isotopic compositions andconcentrations, had established, through measurements ofparent-daughter occurrences within those gram-sized min-erals, a mere handful of geologic ages in the Earth's crust.Harrison stimulated and focused the interests of two stu-dents, George Tilton and Claire Patterson, to develop newmethods that could operate on micro scales to performsimilar measurements on micro minerals that occurred gen-erally in igneous rocks throughout the crust, which in turnallowed uranium/lead geochronometric measurements tobe made ubiquitously within the entire scale of geologic


strata, with no requirements for special occurrences as macrominerals. This allowed a large amount of geochronometricdata to be generated that enabled geologists to developsophisticated chronological interrelationships among geo-logical evolutionary features that described the history ofmaturation of the Earth's crust. His student, George Tilton,developed a new isotope dilution mass spectrometric methodfor determining trace amounts of uranium in micro quanti-ties of igneous rock minerals. To do this Tilton had to trackdown, evaluate, and eliminate ubiquitous sources of ura-nium contamination that existed in the laboratory he wasusing at Argonne National Laboratory, in order to properlyutilize the ultra-sensitive IDMS analytical method for ura-nium he had developed. His student, Claire Patterson, de-veloped new ultra-sensitive mass spectrometric methods formeasurements of abundances and isotopic compositions ofmicro amounts of lead in micro quantities of igneous rockminerals. He too had to solve serious lead contaminationproblems in order to properly utilize the new IDMS methodhe had developed for lead. Harrison's colleague, EsperLarson, Jr., of Harvard, provided the samples of rocks andminerals used by Tilton and Patterson in their work. Theysucceeded in establishing a foundation of knowledge con-cerning how to determine the ages of common igneousrocks and how to use lead isotopes to trace chemical path-way origins of crustal magmas and rocks. They and otherinvestigators developed and expanded investigations basedon this foundation to build our present large body of knowl-edge concerning the geologic evolution of the Earth's crust.

Another of Harrison's aims involved determining theEarth's age. The Earth is older than its minerals, so it's agecannot be measured by direct radiogenic measurement.However, it can be obtained from mathematical combina-tions of decay parameters, and isotopic composition of ura-

HARRISON BROWN 47

nium today with isotopic compositions of the Earth's lead,today and at the time it was formed. All of these had beenmeasured and were reasonably well known except the lastitem, the isotopic composition of primordial lead. Harrisonconceived the idea from his studies of nuclear abundancedata in meteorites that it could be measured in iron mete-orites, which were reported to contain traces of lead butessentially no uranium, because the latter had been seques-tered in silicate meteorites.

Harrison encouraged Patterson to isolate lead from aniron meteorite and determine its isotopic composition. Todo this Patterson had to spend many years discovering andsolving difficult lead contamination problems that had notbeen encountered before, not only because the amounts oflead involved in the measurements were thousands of timessmaller than any studied previously, but also in part be-cause the amounts of lead he found in iron meteorites weremuch less than had been reported by previous investigatorsto be present. Harrison obtained financial support and fa-cilities for Patterson throughout the years of this work, whichfinally yielded, in combination with the determination ofthe isotopic composition of lead in silicate meteorites, thefirst close approximation of the age of the solar system andof the Earth, of 4.5 billion years.

Harrison suggested that it might be possible to extendthese concepts to determine the age of formation of theelements themselves by making use of extinct radioactivenuclides such as iodine 129. He also carried out theoreticalstudies with his University of Chicago faculty colleagues topropose features of the secondary origin of the Earth'spresent atmosphere, using differences between relative abun-dances of noble gases in solar nebula source material at thetime of Earth formation and relative abundances of thegases in the present atmosphere. Working with faculty col-

48 BIOCxRAPHIOAL MEMOIRS

leagues Patterson and Mark Inghram, Brown generated astriking series of findings linking the chemical and isotopiccomposition of meteorites with those of the Earth, the otherplanets, and the Sun.

The concentration of scientific talent in the Institute forNuclear Studies at the University of Chicago in the early1950s was unprecedented. Fifteen members of the facultyand graduate student bodies became members of the Na-tional Academy of Sciences. Harrison Brown was elected tothe Academy in 1955 at the unusually early age of 37. Hehad moved several years before, in 1951, to the CaliforniaInstitute of Technology as professor of geochemistry. Earlier,Harrison and Adele had gotten a divorce, and Harrison mar-ried Rudd Owen. Rudd worked as a colleague with Harrisonin his humanitarian writings and social endeavors.

In his geochronometric studies as Brown's sttident, GeorgeTilton discovered that most of the uranium in granitic rockscould be leached out of the pulverized rock with diluteacid. Harrison seized on the concept that here was an enor-mous potential source of uranium fuel for atomic powerreactors. The energy available from utilizing in this mannerthe uranium and thorium recovered from one ton of gran-ite would be equivalent to that contained in about 15 tonsof coal, making it possible to operate an energy-rich worldpowered by breeder reactors for millions of years. He stimu-lated his geologist postdoctoral student, Leon Silver at theCalifornia Institute of Technology, to develop sophisticatedknowledge of occurrences and stabilities of uranium andthorium containing micro minerals in rocks (related to de-velopment of knowledge concerning magmatic origins ofthose rocks using lead isotopic tracers), which Harrison usedto promote the recognition of the existence of potentiallyunending supplies of energy that might become availableto society in the future.

HARRISON BROWN 49

At Caltech, as at Chicago, he gathered graduate studentsand colleagues around him, collaborated with JesseGreenstein and other Caltech astronomers, brought Pattersonwith him from Chicago, attracted Bruce Murray from MIT,helped initiate the field of infrared astronomy, introducednew types of telescope instrumentation, and greatly bol-stered the involvement of Caltech and its Jet PropulsionLaboratory in NASA's early missions of planetary explora-tion.

Starting in 1949, Harrison Brown went frequently to Ja-maica where he first came in contact with the problems ofrapid population growth and technological backwardnessin the Third World. From this experience he wrote his mostfamous book, a monumental survey of the human prospectentitled The Challenge of Man's Future, published by the Vi-king Press in 1954 and reprinted in 1984.

In this book he contended that the division of humansociety into a set of industrialized, relatively prosperous na-tions containing a minority of the world's population, anda set of primarily agrarian nations containing an impover-ished majority, is not only unsatisfactory from a humanepoint of view but is fundamentally unstable and cannot per-sist. Either the agrarian nations would become industrial-ized, he argued, or the collapse of machine civilization wouldproduce a mainly agrarian world of virtually universal pov-erty and misery. Whether the first outcome would material-ize would depend on mankind's achieving a stable humanpopulation size, a sustainable agriculture and industry, har-mony with its environment, peace, and freedom.

Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein proposed in 1955an international conference of scientists, including scien-tists of the two great antagonists in the Cold War, the SovietUnion and the United States, to discuss the dangers andthe possible control of nuclear weapons and problems of


international cooperation across the Iron Curtain that sepa-rated the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe from the West.The first of these conferences was held in July 1957 inPugwash, Nova Scotia, the birthplace and country home ofindustrialist Cyrus Eaton.

The series of annual conferences held ever since, to-gether with many specialized smaller meetings, have beencollectively named the Pugwash Conferences. From the be-ginning Harrison was one of the leaders in organizing anddirecting these conferences. His protege, John P. Holdren,has been for several years chairman of the InternationalPugwash Council and of the American sponsoring commit-tee. The agenda was soon broadened to include problemsof Third World development, European security, and cer-tain environmental problems. For example, the InternationalFoundation for Science, which supports research by youngThird World scientists in their own countries, is a directoutcome of the Pugwash Conferences.

In 1957, Detlev Bronk, president of the National Acad-emy of Sciences, asked Harrison to organize a new commit-tee on oceanography (actually the fourth Academy commit-tee on the subject). Bronk chose Harrison to be chairmanof the committee (usually called NASCO for short) becauseof Brown's skill in dealing with temperamental, often ego-tistical leading scientists. The directors of the three majoroceanographic institutions—Woods Hole, Lamont, and theScripps Institution—were all members of NASCO, as wasFritz Koczy of Miami, Dixie Lee Ray of University of Wash-ington (later governor of Washington), Gordon Riley ofYale, Benny Schaefer of the Inter-American Tropical TunaCommission, and Athelstan Spilhaus, the inventor of theBathythermograph and at that time dean of engineering atthe University of Minnesota. Harrison succeeded beyondany reasonable expectation in harnessing these disparate,

HARRISON BROWN 51

highly competitive individuals into a cooperative workingteam. Within less than two years they had produced a fa-mous report entitled "Oceanography 1960," which describedmany opportunities for oceanographic research and advo-cated a ten-year program of large-scale expansion of scien-tific research and teaching about the ocean.

One of the reasons NASCO was successful was thatHarrison made sure everyone enjoyed himself. Sumner Pike,former member of both the Atomic Energy and the Securi-ties and Exchange Commissions, was an original memberof NASCO. Beside being a gifted raconteur with a wonder-ful down-east accent, Pike was the senior member of thefamily that had settled and largely owned Lubec, Maine,the farthest east and northern town in the United States.NASCO used to meet every summer in this Pike familyfiefdom and practically lived on Maine lobsters while theywere there.

George Kistiakowsky, President Eisenhower's science ad-visor, decided to use the NASCO report as a demonstrationof what a presidential science advisor could do in organiz-ing and influencing the federal government. This suitedHarrison very well, because as usual he was determinedthat the report should not sink into oblivion, but shouldbecome the basis of political action. Both the House andthe Senate were persuaded to create permanent commit-tees or subcommittees on oceanography, and the federalbudget for support of oceanographic research was greatlyincreased in real terms. Later the NASCO report was widelyemulated by groups of scientists in other fields, who foundtheir own opportunities for research and justified expan-sion of their budgets.

In 1962 H. P. Robertson, foreign secretary of the Na-tional Academy of Sciences, died suddenly. President Bronkasked Harrison to fill in Robertson's unexpired term. He


agreed, and then was repeatedly reelected as foreign secre-tary for a total of twelve years. Before Brown's tenure theOffice of the Foreign Secretary had been a small, low-keyoperation, concerned with communicating with academiesof science in other countries. Harrison converted it par-tially into a development agency, concerned with fosteringscience and technology in the Third World countries ofAfrica, Asia, and Latin America. For this purpose he as-sembled a competent and dedicated staff, including WiltonDillon, Michael Dow, Julian Engel, John Hurley, VictorRabinowitch, Theresa Tellez, Murray Todd, Noel Vietmeyer,and others. Interested scientists were organized in a seriesof regional science boards for Latin America, Asia, and Africa.After a few years these were consolidated in the Board onScience and Technology for International Development, whichis now the Academy's leading agency for technical assistanceto Third World countries. With strong support from the Ford,Rockefeller, and Kellogg Foundations, and the U.S. Agencyfor International Development, some fifty workshops andstudy groups on aspects of science and development in a dozencountries resulted in educational, research, and industrialprojects as well as in the creation of scientific bodies andinstitutions. These were described in a book published in1973 by Harrison Brown and Theresa Tellez, InternationalDevelopment Programs of the Office of the Foreign Secretary.

As foreign secretary, Harrison was equally interested infostering East-West exchanges and collaboration. He helpedorganize the Committee on Scholarly Communication withthe People's Republic of China, a joint venture betweenthe National Academy of Sciences, the Social Science Re-search Council, and the American Council of Learned So-cieties. He promoted a variety of other exchanges with theSoviet Union and European countries, both East and West.He played a key role in founding the International Insti-

HARRISON BROWN 53

tute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Laxemberg,Austria, in which the Soviet Union, the United States, andten other nations joined together in cooperative researchon large-scale problems of energy, water, ecosystem model-ling, and regional planning. One of IIASA's recent accom-plishments is the work by W. C. Clark and R. E. Munn onthe nature and requirements of indefinitely sustainable ag-riculture. Brown was a member of IIASA's first executivecommittee and chairman of its finance committee.

Harrison Brown also focused his concerns on the Inter-national Council of Scientific Unions, linking academies ofscience in some sixty countries, plus international scientificunions in seventeen fields. He worked hard to increase thecouncil's effectiveness in scientific development in the ThirdWorld and in global collaboration on problems of agricul-tural productivity, environmental degradation and hazards,and climate change. In 1974 he was elected president ofICSU for the two-year term of 1974-76.

Even after his task as foreign secretary was completed in1974, Harrison continued to make major contributions tothe Academy. In 1975 he was asked to chair a large-scalestudy of world food and nutrition and to make recommen-dations as to what the United States might reasonably do tohelp improve the situation. The study was completed in1977. Its principal conclusion was that sufficient food andan adequate level of nutrition could be provided on a sus-tainable basis for a human population of ten billion, pro-vided successful research efforts were undertaken and uti-lized on increasing yields per hectare and on nitrogen fixationby leguminous and cereal plants. The principal problemwas to insure the use of research results by poor and igno-rant farmers in the Third World. Late in his career, Harrisonand Rudd were divorced and Harrison married TheresaTellez, anthropologist from New Mexico.


After a number of years as professor of geochemistry atCaltech, Harrison received a joint appointment both as aprofessor of science and government and as a professor ofgeochemistry. In this new role he undertook a series ofstudies of human population problems in collaboration witheconomist Alan Sweezy. However, Harrison became increas-ingly dissatisfied with the pace of development of the socialsciences at Caltech, and in 1977 he accepted the appoint-ment as director of the newly created Resource SystemsInstitute at the East-West Center in Hawaii. There he as-sembled a team of analysts, including energy and environ-ment specialist Kirk Smith, geologist Richard Sheldon, ma-rine scientist John Bardach, and energy economists FereidunFesharaki and Corazon Siddayo. They concentrated on in-ternational comparative studies, mainly with Asian colleagueswho were brought to the institute as visitors.

Harrison retired from the East-West Center in 1983 andmoved to Albuquerque with his wife, Theresa. By this timehe was confined to a wheelchair as a result of progressiveparalysis caused by irradiation of his spine during therapyfor an earlier bout with lung cancer. Despite his disabilitieshe was persuaded to become editor-in-chief of the Bulletinof the Atomic Scientists. He attained thereby a highly appro-priate platform to express his life-long concerns about thenuclear arms race. In a monthly series of editorials he pro-posed many ideas for cooling off and eventually eliminat-ing the arms race. He continued to produce these editori-als until shortly before his death on December 8, 1986. Hewould have been the first to rejoice at the events of 1989which made his ideas largely irrelevant in the growing at-mosphere of cooperation between the United States andthe Soviet Union.

Harrison Brown was the author or editor of ten books,including one work of science fiction, The Cassiopeia Affair,

HARRISON BROWN 55

written in cooperation with Chloe Zerwick, which supposedthe arrival of a message from the stars.

In the March 1987 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Profes-sor John Holdren published an eloquent memorial toHarrison. I will conclude this memoir by quoting part ofHoldren 's final paragraph. "Harrison Brown was a warm andwitty man, cheerful, always a twinkle in his eye, and surprisinglymodest. . . . I visited him in the hospital a week before his death,and the twinkle in his eye was still there. His friends will miss thattwinkle as well as the extraordinary mind behind it. The worldwill miss his insights and the energy he devoted to making it abetter place."

harrison brown

Documents