In the Beginning...

...there was the word. Or there were no words. There were not enough words, or there were too many words. Too many words to choose from, and circumstances words just could not describe. So, in the end, there was writer's block.

In all seriousness, though...

I am starting this blog in the hope that it may sustain me for the next few months as I finish revising the already written chapters of my dissertation and write the two chapters that remain. I'm thinking that if I write down what I am trying to do on a daily basis, as well as what I am accomplishing, this will help me to survive this intense period of writing that I'm entering. The goal is to have a complete and mostly revised draft of the entire dissertation by the end of July. It's by no means an impossible task, but it is going to require me to push through those parts of the dissertation that have been giving me trouble, abandon some of my pesky perfectionism, and just get words on paper!

So what is this thing? Why the reluctant biographer? Why the New Prophet?

I never planned on writing a biography or a biographical dissertation, and I'm pretty sure that most academics would have advised me against it. (And maybe in a future post I'll share some of my thoughts about the pleasures and pitfalls of academic biographies, but, well... not right now.)

I came to this Ph.D. program with the plan of writing a dissertation about the history of planetary geology as a discipline. I didn't want it to be a dry, technical history, but rather a social/cultural history of the enterprise. What I wanted it to be, however, is beside the point; I am not writing that dissertation.

Somewhere along the way I discovered and became fascinated by the American chemist Harold C. Urey. At first it was my interest in planetary geology that drew me to Urey. When I was writing my Masters Thesis on Mars exploration at ASU, Urey's name popped up here and there as a harsh critic of the hard rock geologists whose stories I was following. Urey was a pioneer in the field of isotope geochemistry -- applying the methods of nuclear chemistry to questions in the earth and planetary sciences -- and he didn't really like the competition of the more traditional mappers and stratigraphers of the USGS and the Army that NASA employed. I knew that if I was going to write a Ph.D. dissertation about planetary geology then I would have to learn more about Urey.

When I arrived at UCSD for my Ph.D. work, I was happy to find that Urey's papers were held in the UCSD library. So I started going over to our Special Collections library on a regular basis to start combing through his papers. (Over the years the librarians there have been very good to me -- I like to think they've become my patrons -- in addition to helping me with my research, they've employed me as a part-time rare book cataloger, as an oral history interviewer, etc.)

I recently found a picture of the Urey papers on taken on the day that his wife Frieda donated them to the library; it's kind of nice to see them as they once were, before the archivists cleaned them up and organized them:



Now, if anyone who is reading this has ever done archival research, you know that there is a sort of Stockholm Syndrome that takes over when you've spent days, weeks, or even months in someone's papers. Unless the person was despicable, you become attached to them and their life. You might, for example, find a folder of friendly correspondence between them and one of their peers -- a folder that represents several years' worth of conversations between the two of them -- and start to feel like you are a part of the conversation. And a strange thing happens to time in the archives. You might go from 1951's Christmas card to 1952's -- separated by maybe 25 letters that took you an hour or so to read -- and think to yourself, my gosh, is it Christmas again already? In short, if you let it, you can get sucked into the archives.

Alas, this happened to me. Urey -- who lived from the late 19th century into the penultimate decade of the 20th century -- seemed like the perfect surrogate through which to view the rise of American science in the 20th century. The fact that he was a Nobel Prize-winner and had participated as a scientist in WWI, the Manhattan Project, the rise of nuclear geochemistry and cosmochemistry, and NASA's early efforts at lunar and planetary exploration seemed to make him even more interesting. I started describing him as the Forrest Gump of 20th century American science (although he was a much more witting participant).

Then things got wonderfully complicated. While writing a paper for a research seminar, I discovered Urey's public speeches and found that during the Cold War he had become very insistent that American society needed both science and religion. This was not necessarily a novel statement in itself. However, it was the way that he framed the ideal relationship between science and religion in a democratic society that interested me. Urey insisted that science needed to be understood and applied in the context of the traditional moral teachings of the great religions of the world.

But his was not a conservative view of religion -- he was not invoking the "moral teachings" of the Bible in the way that we might see them invoked today in support an anti-gay marriage law. He had grown up in a very conservative religion and it was just this sort of abuse of scriptural authority that had led him to leave the faith. While he never openly declared himself to be an atheist, he certainly was not a believer (one of his former secretaries reported to me that he once told her that he believed there was some higher power, but that he couldn't speculate on what it might be).

In coming to the conclusion that society needed religion in order to make sure that science was not misused, I am now fairly convinced that Urey was affected by the trauma of his own wartime work on the atomic bomb, by the revelation of the Holocaust, and by the prospect of a Cold War nuclear holocaust. In his speeches he identified Nazi Germany and Communist Russia as examples of societies that have either "gone pagan" or atheist and where science had lost its moral compass. Shortly after the end of WWII, he reported that the clock had been reset; the world was living in the year AB 1 (Atomic Bomb 1), and more so than ever before the decisions of a few could determine the fate of the entire world.

But if science needed religion, religion was in just as much need of science. Urey advocated a modernization of religion -- a movement away from literalism and toward understanding religious texts as, for lack of a better term, moral poetry. He told his audiences that what the world needed was a "New Prophet" who could take the moral teachings of religion and combine them with the grand view of the universe that science was producing. Religion, if it was to remain an influential force in modern life, had to become less static.

Urey knew that he was not the new prophet he described. He felt that the only thing scientists could do in order to help the situation was to pursue scientific projects that would contribute to an inspiring view of the universe and human history. I believe that Urey took it as his own task to pursue such inspiring work, and that this was one thing that led him to his work in geochemistry and cosmochemistry during the 1950s and 60s. It certainly wasn't the only reason that he went into these fields, but it seems like it may have been one of the main reasons that he became so personally invested in them.

And this is how my dissertation became biographical. I want to be able to tell an important story about science and religion during the Cold War, and I want to use Urey's life story in order to do it.

Why am I a reluctant biographer? Because often it feels like an impossible task. Even with all of the time I've spent in the archives, talking to his surviving colleagues and secretaries, and interviewing his adult children, he still eludes me. He's enigmatic -- and his colleagues would have said this about him even when he was alive -- and his ideas and opinions were famously unpredictable. I feel hesitant to try and verbally pin him down on the page.

But. I must. And this blog will chronicle the attempt over the next few months to bring the story of Harold C. Urey to life on the page. (Or to at least give it as much life as a biographical dissertation can hold.) I will try to make posting here a morning writing exercise. I can't promise that I will always make sense. I can't promise that this blog will always (or ever) be worth reading. I can promise that there will be errors, complaints, and probably a lot of unattractive, mostly unedited prose.

And that's that.

Here's one picture of Urey, towards the end of his life. This photo was taken in 1980, the year before he died, at a party held in the honor of Urey's colleague, James Arnold. He could no longer really read at this point (and hadn't been able to for a while) because of macular degeneration, and he could no longer get around very well either because of advanced Parkinson's, but he still enjoyed a good party.



Note: Both of the images in this post belong to the UCSD library. Check out their 50th Anniversary History of UCSD website for more great photos: http://libraries.ucsd.edu/historyofucsd/digital.html#picmain