Jerome Bert Wiesner (May 30, 1915 – October 21, 1994) was an educator, a Science Advisor to the President for Eisenhower and (more formally) Kennedy and Johnson, the President of MIT, an advocate for arms control, and a critic of anti-ballistic-missile defense systems. He was also an outspoken advocate of the exploration of outer space using only unmanned satellites, most notably in his consistent denunciation of Project Mercury, Gemini and Apollo.
He was associated with MIT for most of his career, joining the MIT Radiation Laboratory in 1942 and working on radar development. He worked briefly at Los Alamos, returned to become a professor of Electrical Engineering at MIT, and worked at and ultimately became director of the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT (RLE). He became Dean of the School of Science in 1964, Provost in 1966, and President from 1971 to 1980. He was also elected a life member of the MIT Corporation.
Wiesner served on President John F. Kennedy’s Science Advisory Committee. His MIT news obituary described him as “A leading voice for decades in international efforts to control and limit nuclear arms, he was a key figure in the Kennedy administration in the establishment of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, in achieving a partial nuclear test ban treaty, and in the successful effort to restrict the deployment of antiballistic missile systems.”[1] Kennedy directed the Science Advisory Committee to investigate the controversy surrounding the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. Wiesner conducted hearings, and on May 15, 1963 published a report titled “The Use of Pesticides”. This document led to the demise of the widespread use of DDT, as well as legislation to protect the environment.
During the Watergate scandal, it was disclosed in June 1973 that Charles W. Colson, counsel to President Nixon, had prepared on September 9, 1971, a short list of 20 people deemed “hostile to the administration.” What became popularly known as “Nixon’s enemies list” was discovered to have been expanded to include Wiesner, among twenty other academics. According to an issue of Science journal reprinted in the Boston Globe and Washington Post, a White House memo discussed a Nixon order to “cut back on MIT’s subsidy in view of Wiesner’s anti-defense bias.”
He was awarded the Delmer S. Fahrney Award in 1980. In 1993 Wiesner was awarded the Public Welfare Medal from the National Academy of Sciences.
Weinreb received his PhD degree in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1963. While he was still a graduate student at MIT, he developed the world’s first digital autocorrelation spectrometer which he then used to place a new upper limit to the Galactic deuterium-to-hydrogen ratio. With Barrett, Meeks, and Henry, he detected the hydroxyl molecule (OH); this was the first radio observation of an interstellar molecule. His autocorrelation spectrometer technique is now in use at virtually every major radio observatory throughout the world and has been crucial in the subsequent explosive growth of interstellar molecular spectroscopy.
In 1965 Weinreb went to the U.S. National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in Green Bank, West Virginia where he became Head of the Electronics Division and later Assistant Director of NRAO. During his 23 years at NRAO, he pioneered the use of low-noise, cryogenically cooled solid state amplifiers which greatly enhanced the sensitivity of radio telescopes. He was the architect for the electronic systems design for the NRAO Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico and led the group which developed the novel receivers and the data transmission, acquisition, and monitor and control systems for the VLA.
Subsequently, Weinreb worked firstly at Lockheed Martin Laboratories and then at the University of Massachusetts where he developed various millimetre wave devices. He has also been a Visiting Professor at the University of Virginia. Most recently he has been a Faculty Associate at Caltech and a Principal Scientist at JPL where he has continued his work on low noise amplifier devices. He played a leading role in the electronics design for a new Deep Space Network (DSN) space tracking array, and he has been active in developing wideband feeds and front ends as well as investigating cost effective designs for modest size antennas, all of which will be important for the next generation of radio telescopes such the Square Kilometre Array (SKA). In addition he has been working with the Goldstone Apple Valley Radio Telescope (GAVRT) program to develop a 34-metre radio telescope at Goldstone for use with schools around the globe.
‘For nearly five decades Sandy’s innovative contributions to radio astronomy have paved the way for an amazing array of new and exciting discoveries about the nature and evolution of the Universe’, said Dr David Jauncey of the Australia Telescope National Facility in Australia.
