UCSD Collection : Library Gets Papers of Scientist
In a major boost to the prestige of UC San Diego, the university’s research library has acquired the papers of the late Leo Szilard, the emigre nuclear scientist who in the 1930s postulated the laws governing nuclear chain reactions and in postwar years worked strenuously to promote arms control.
In addition, the library expects in the near future to receive on permanent loan the papers of Jonas Salk, the renowned scientist and philosopher who developed the polio vaccine.
These papers will add luster to a special collection being nurtured by UCSD in the field of science and public policy, a collection that university librarians hope to develop into a center of nationwide significance for researchers.
“Given the scientific work on this campus (ranked fifth nationwide among universities in terms of federal research grants), science collections are an absolute natural,” Lynda Claassen, head of the UCSD library department of special collections, said in an interview.
The library already is home to the papers of the late Harold Urey, the Nobel Prize-winning chemist who pioneered research in the 1930s on deuterium, ultimately a key element in making hydrogen weapons; to the papers of the late physicists Joseph and Maria Mayer, the latter a Nobel Prize winner, and to those of Roger Revelle, a multidisciplinary scientist who headed Scripps Institution of Oceanography and helped create UCSD in the early 1960s.
“We have so many prominent scientists on campus as a nucleus,” said Claassen, who came to UCSD from the Library of Congress, where she worked on special projects. Claassen has contacted such prominent UCSD professors as astronomer E. Margaret Burbidge, who last month received the prestigious National Medal of Science, and Hebert York, another physicist with a longtime involvement in arms control issues.
Claassen acknowledged that querying prominent persons on whether they have thought about the future of their notebooks and journals can be touchy.
“Sure, you are bringing up the issue of their mortality,” Claassen said. “But you do it in the context of their legacy, of the need to document the intellectual history of the university and of important scholars.
“And what is often of interest to a future researcher will not be the end product of a scientist or writer, but more of what serendipities occurred in the creative process, or what ideas were discarded, or when the proverbial light bulb went off--to see how the scholar’s mind works.”
Claassen said that many scientists are unaware of the importance that their working papers can have for future researchers. The exceptions are people such as Jonas Salk, she said, “who well realizes the research value of such papers and wants them preserved for other people to look at. And his knowledge and friendship with other scholars can also be of benefit” in obtaining other papers.
But the process of acquisition is often slow, requiring months of informal contacts as well as formal approaches, and involving questions of whether a collection will be given as a gift or sold to a university. In addition, universities sometimes compete for the papers of prominent individuals, especially for collections of scholars unaffiliated with specific institutions.
In the case of the Szilard papers, the voluminous collection had been stored on deposit at the UCSD library since the death of his widow, Dr. Gertrud Weiss, in 1981. Szilard died in 1964, shortly after taking up residence at the Salk Institute, which adjoins UCSD in La Jolla.
The deposit procedure means that the university can make the papers available to researchers, but title is still retained by the author or the author’s estate. Claassen explained that the procedure has evolved, in part, because of tax considerations. A living person can obtain no tax benefit from donating a collection, but the estate can receive the benefit following the author’s death. Many living scholars, therefore, will place their papers on deposit with the understanding that they will be given to the university following their death.
However, sometimes the estates of authors hope to sell the collections, Claassen said. “From the university’s point of view, we always prefer to receive something as a gift,” she said, “especially if someone has been on the faculty for a long time. But it’s natural that an estate might want to realize a profit from a collection.”
Claassen said that UCSD has made purchases of distinctive collections more often than better established libraries at Harvard or Yale or UC Berkeley, in large part because it needs to establish a strong library foundation.
The university is paying about $60,000 for the Szilard papers, which were appraised at $125,000 recently. The remaining portion is being donated by the estate, which is now controlled by Szilard’s brother-in-law, Egin Weiss, librarian at the United States Military Academy at West Point.
Szilard’s widow had tentatively explored the possibility of selling the collection to either Columbia University or the University of Chicago, both places where Szilard did research, Claassen said. But she said that Egin Weiss intended from the outset to keep the papers permanently at UCSD.
“It then became a question of whether it would be a gift, a purchase or a combination of both,” she said.
Claassen said that manuscripts such as those of Szilard are unique and therefore difficult to appraise unless the appraiser has a strong background in the author’s field.
“Who is to say that something isn’t worth a half million dollars?” she said. Individual documents within the Szilard collection may have great value, such as correspondence between Szilard and Albert Einstein. Einstein and Szilard collaborated on much thinking from their days together in Berlin in the 1930s to research in America into the mid-1950s.
But Claassen said the preeminence of Szilard’s work is in its research value as a complete collection of documents dealing not only with science but with politics as well.
Szilard was a senior member of the scientific group, including Enrico Fermi and other physicists, at the University of Chicago which created the first nuclear chain reaction. He then became part of the Manhattan Project to build the first nuclear bomb.
But Szilard felt strongly that the bomb should be used only against Nazi Germany because of the nature of Hitler’s threat to America and the world. Szilard felt that any other use of the bomb against any other enemy was morally indefensible, according to the writings of Mildred G. Goldberger, a scientist who worked with Szilard.
As a result, Szilard initiated the first petition among Manhattan Project scientists to President Harry S. Truman after Germany surrendered in 1945 before the bomb was completed. Szilard wanted the United States to do all it could to convince the Japanese government of the awful consequences of continuing the war. The petition never reached Truman. Szilard later lobbied in Washington against nuclear proliferation and was instrumental in setting up the Pugwash Conference, a series of ongoing meetings in Nova Scotia where Soviet and American scientists have met face to face to discuss life-threatening political issues.
Already, researchers have been able to use wartime correspondence between Szilard and physicist Edward Teller to reconstruct a portion of Teller’s papers, many of which were accidentally shredded in the late 1940s. Teller is the so-called father of the hydrogen bomb and a strong proponent today of the Reagan Administration’s Strategic Defense Initiative, popularly known as Star Wars.
“There is an important public relations benefit from having such collections,” Claassen said. Not only will the papers attract researchers, she said, they will be a lure for new faculty members by substantiating the university’s growing resources.
