Jerry Wiesner, Scientist, Statesman, Humanist: Memories and Memoirs

Citation

Rosenblith, W.A. (2006), "Jerry Wiesner, Scientist, Statesman, Humanist: Memories and Memoirs", Kybernetes, Vol. 35 No. 3/4, pp. 589-591. https://doi.org/10.1108/03684920610653836

This is a very substantial tome to be devoted to the life and achievements of an individual, but it is fully warranted by the remarkable career of Jerry Wiesner. One of his claims to fame is that he directed the Research Laboratory of Electronics of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology during the time that it was a focus for development of the new ideas that came to be christened cybernetics. Significant though that is, however, it is just one reason among many for interest and respect.

The book has had a troubled emergence. It is partly based on an autobiography that was begun but not completed, partly because of a stroke suffered by Wiesner. He was assisted, especially as his health finally deteriorated, by his son Joshua who collected much material but did not feel competent to consolidate a biography. Joshua approached Walter Rosenblith, who had been a friend of Jerry Wiesner since the late 1940s, and who took on the task and approached the many other authors who have contributed. An early association of Wiesner with Rosenblith was when they both participated in a series of supper discussions initiated by Norbert Wiener.

A setback to the project was Rosenblith's death before it was completed, and the final stages of preparation have been supervised by his wife Judy. In her introduction she suggests, apologetically, that the result may lack some polish, for instance, in having overlap of content between chapters. There is, however, no need for apology since the presentation, even if it may suffer slightly from that defect, is of a very high standard, with a comprehensive subject index as well as literature references and a useful chronology, and biographical notes on many of the individuals who feature.

The first part of the book is headed “Memories” and has contributions from no less than 24 friends and colleagues. The next part is “Memoirs” or “Jerry in his own words”, and then there is a collection of speeches and papers and another of letters and documents. The speeches and papers are fourteen in number, most of them quite lengthy and including very thoughtful speeches for occasions such as his inauguration as president of MIT. The letters and documents are sixteen in number, all significant and including five addressed to presidents of the US.

The first of the “memoirs” has the heading: “A random walk through the twentieth century” and is the start of the intended autobiography. In it, Wiesner mentions that one of his professors warned him against taking on too much and ending as a Jack‐of‐all‐trades. The wide range of his passionate interests makes it clear that he ignored this advice, but he nevertheless became a master in all three of the descriptions in the title.

As a scientist, Wiesner worked in the wartime Radiation Laboratory, particularly on airborne radar. Developments are described at what might be termed a nuts‐and‐bolts level, with particular emphasis on the development of TR (transmit/receive) cells that are essential in a radar. It goes without saying that the work of the Laboratory was of supreme importance, but there is something engagingly laconic about the statement on page 212 that, among other things, the projects “literally saved the American fleet in the Pacific”.

At a later stage, Jerry was seconded from the Radiation Laboratory to Los Alamos and had a hand in development of the atom bomb. He refers to the dismay of many of the people involved when bombs were dropped on Japanese cities, rather than on an offshore location where their effectiveness might have been demonstrated without loss of life. His own concern found expression in later efforts to halt the international arms race.

Wiesner's best‐known activities as a statesman began when he was seconded from MIT, in 1961, to be “special assistant for science and technology”, to President Kennedy, though prior to that he had served on a panel established by the Eisenhower administration. He later had dealings with Presidents Johnson, Nixon, Carter, Reagan and Clinton and was an early member of the international Pugwash organisation dedicated to nuclear disarmament. He travelled very widely and participated in negotiations at the highest level, invariably operating in the interests of peace. Many of the negotiations were of enormous significance and these memoirs are bound to be a mine of information for historians of the Cold War era. His travels included numerous visits to the Soviet Union and one of the speeches reproduced is a posthumous appreciation of the physicist and dissident Andrei Sakharov with whom he collaborated.

The statesmanlike capabilities also showed themselves in his presidency of MIT, for instance, in his handling of student unrest. He approached militant students with undoubted courage but also with understanding that defused situations. His humanist side found expression in a number of contexts besides that of nuclear disarmament. He was involved in a scheme to improve the educational opportunities of Afro‐American city dwellers, and one of the invited contributions has the title: “Giving women a break where few men did”, indicating his opposition to sex discrimination.

Actually, the last‐mentioned contribution is largely a reminiscence, by a lady doctor who was appointed dean of student affairs at MIT, of a scandalous occurrence when a student magazine published a set of girl students' “ratings” of the sexual performance of specified males. Like other crises this was handled skilfully and tactfully by Jerry Wiesner (with, though not mentioned in the book, some involvement of Jerry Lettvin of the former McCulloch group). Drug abuse was also a matter of concern, and here an initiative taken by Jerry Lettvin is referred to on page 482.

The book also gives a picture of the man himself and his family life and lighter preoccupations including music and sailing. It should also be emphasised that there is a great deal of very profound material, especially in the speeches, that amounts to a systems view of society and of the place of science and communication within it. There is particular concern with matters of energy generation and utilisation and for example the still‐controversial question of whether nuclear power generation should be discontinued because of its undoubted drawbacks, or should be extended because of the also undoubted drawbacks of fossil fuel exhaustion and carbon dioxide emission.

The book is a worthy tribute to a very fine person as well as providing reference material and much food for thought. There is an error on page 493, where there is a reference to the arrival of the McCulloch group in MIT, but with the name Wall (for Pat Wall) misspelled as Wald. This is unfortunate since the name Wald also appears in literature on neurophysiology. (George Wald, of Harvard, worked on vision and received a Nobel prize in physiology and medicine in 1967.)

Another relatively minor criticism is that a chapter by a former colleague on: “The Search for Soviet Cybernetics” may be misleading. It is an account of a visit to the Soviet Union in 1964, when there were rumours that work on cybernetics, and its application in automated industry, had put the Soviet Union in a position to dominate world trade. The conclusion by the visitors that advanced automation was practically nonexistent was pretty certainly correct, but of course this is only one facet of cybernetics. At the 1960 IFAC Congress in Moscow, attended by Norbert Wiener, it was clear that work on control theory was well advanced in the Soviet Union, and relevant research with a biological slant was also in progress. Soviet cybernetics was up and running, though without finding much expression in industrial automation.