Lives they have lived
Harvard’s emeritus and emerita professors astonish by their scholarly accomplishments — and also by the lives they have lived and what they have seen. Norman F. Ramsey, a Harvard professor emeritus and the 1989 Nobel laureate in physics, was instrumental in developing the atomic clock, which will never lose a tick in a millennium. But he was also the Army officer who in August 1945, on a remote Pacific island called Tinian, supervised the assembly of the first atomic bomb ever used in warfare: Little Boy, the bulbous 8,900-pound fatal package dropped on Hiroshima. Ruth Hubbard, an emerita in biology, escaped from the Nazis as an Austrian teenager. In 1973, she was named Harvard’s first female professor of biology. Physician Bernard Lown invented the defibrillator, gave the world the drug lidocaine, and went on to organize doctors worldwide against the spread of nuclear weapons. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985. Sacvan Bercovitch,...