Caryl Haskins, 93; Scientific Renaissance Man
Caryl P. Haskins, a biophysicist who was president of the Carnegie Institution of Washington from 1956 to 1971 and a scientific advisor to government officials, died of cardiac arrest Monday at a hospital in Westport, Conn. He was 93.
Strictly speaking, Haskins was a biophysicist--a scientist who uses physics to study biological structures and processes. But he was regarded as a scientific renaissance man with a restless desire to explore the natural world through genetics and entomology--the study of insects.
An author of several scientific books and hundreds of papers, he co-founded Haskins Laboratories, a private center that studies the biological bases of speech, hearing and language, in 1935.
During the 1940s, he did extensive research work on radar, the proximity fuse and other key matters for a wartime defense agency, the Office of Scientific Research and Development. He continued to advise other governmental and military bodies, including the President’s Science Advisory Committee.
Haskins Laboratories, now based in New Haven, Conn., became the central laboratory in a research program to rehabilitate soldiers and others blinded during World War II. The lab, then based in New York City, developed a supersonic guidance device and a photoelectric scanning device that Haskins described as a reading machine.
In 1956, he was named president of the Carnegie Institution, a private, nonprofit scientific research organization.
When the foundation conducted studies of the Earth’s age, the structure of chromosomes or new telescopes to explore space, Haskins announced the findings to the public.
He was respected beyond a scientific coterie, partly because of his five books.
His first, “Of Ants and Men” in 1939, attracted wide attention after Clifton Fadiman’s positive review in the New Yorker. The book, which likens ant culture to human civilization, with cities, governments, war and slavery, was translated into French, Italian, Spanish and Swedish and also published in Braille.
His other books included “The Amazon: The Life History of a Mighty River” in 1943 and “Of Societies and Men” in 1951.
Haskins was known for an eloquent and sometimes elegiac turn of phrase, even when arguing for basic funding or the societal value of scientists.
“It is the gifted unorthodox individual in the laboratory or the study or the walk by the river at twilight who has always brought to us, and must continue to bring us, all the basic resources by which we live,” he once wrote.
Haskins, a native of Schenectady, N.Y., was a 1930 graduate of Yale University. He received a doctorate in physiology from Harvard University in 1935.
He joined General Electric Co. after leaving Yale and by the mid-1930s was doing independent research on radiation’s effects on living material.
First working from a garage, he soon found research space at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Union College in Schenectady. He also taught at those schools.
He was a trustee emeritus of the National Geographic Society and a trustee of the Carnegie Institution. He was on the board of the Rand Corp. and was a former board member of the Smithsonian Institution.
Haskins has no immediate survivors.
