Revelle to Receive National Medal of Science

Roger Revelle, a UC San Diego founder and one of the originators of the idea of a global greenhouse effect, has been selected to receive the National Medal of Science.

Revelle, 81, said his notification of the award told him he was being honored for his work in oceanographic exploration, atmospheric science and population biology.

Revelle was one of five graduate students at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in 1936, when it began moving from coastal studies to long scientific voyages on ships at sea.

He became director of the institution from 1950 to 1964, and during that period became one of the strongest lobbyists before the Board of Regents for establishing a UC campus in San Diego. Later, he founded and headed the Harvard Center for Population Studies until returning to UC San Diego.

He is now director emeritus of Scripps and a professor of public policy at UCSD. He has been ill since February, however, when he had cardiac surgery.

Three decades ago Revelle and Hans Suess, now a UCSD professor emeritus of chemistry, wrote a paper about what Revelle calls “mankind’s great geophysical experiment.” They theorized that increasing amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere might heat up the globe by trapping the sun’s energy in a “greenhouse effect.”

The National Medal of Science will be presented by President Bush sometime later this summer. It is awarded to scientists nominated for presidential approval by a special committee of the National Science Foundation.

Revelle will become the fifth UCSD faculty member to receive the government’s highest scientific award.

Others at UCSD who have received the medal are oceanographer Walter Munk; astronomer Margaret Burbidge; mathematician Michael Freedman and cell biologist and Nobel Prize winner George E. Palade, dean of scientific affairs in the UCSD School of Medicine.