Portrait Of A Scientific Patriot

James Bryant Conant, a name that is known to any chemist conscious of history and over the age of 45, called himself "not a committed man but a restless soul." So reports historian James G. Hershberg in his biography of Conant: "James B. Conant: Harvard to Hiroshima and the Making of the Nuclear Age." Conant's self-assessment forms kind of a leitmotif quietly playing throughout this biography of one of the 20th century's greatest scientific figures who died debilitated in 1978 at the age of 84. Conant, president of Harvard University from 1933 to 1953, was tireless in service to the country and to higher education. Yet he lived his final years disabled from cardiovascular ailments and eventually a stroke, ruing the worth of his life. Hershberg's biography is an unbalanced one. It is skimpy on the texture of Conant's period as a research chemist at Harvard. It contains almost nothing concerning the technical ...