Faculty
Leonard M. Rieser '44, Vice resident and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, was installed as president-elect of the American Association for the Advancement of Science at its annual meeting in Philadelphia, and will head the 124-year-old organization in 1973.
A physicist whose special scientific interests have included experimental nuclear physics, biophysics, and the reflections of x-rays. Dean Rieser is the first member of the Dartmouth faculty named to lead the influential association, which today has a membership of nearly 150,000 scientists and scholars.
Dean Reiser succeeds Dr. Glenn T. Seaborg, former chairman of the U. S. Atomic Energy Commission now with the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory of the University of California at Berkeley, who moved up to the presidency. The succession is completed with elevation in the third year to chairmanship of the association's board of directors, a post now held by Dr. Mina Rees, president of the graduate center of the City University of New York.
In being named president-elect, Dean Rieser joins a distinguished company of scholars, statesmen and men of letters who have headed the association and its parent organization reaching back in a direct link to Daniel Webster, who with John Quincy Adams, John C. Calhoun, Henry Clay, and Edward Everett founded in 1916 the Columbian Institution for the Promotion of Arts and Sciences. That institution later was merged with organizations that in 1848 came together to found the American Association for the Advancement of Science, first permanently successful effort to establish in the United States a truly national scientific society embracing all the sciences.
At the same time, Louis Morton, Provost and the Daniel Webster Professor of History, has been appointed a member of the National Archives Advisory Council for a term of three years, beginning January 1. As a distinguished military historian, Professor Morton has been a consultant and adviser to government agencies and the military services for many years. At the recent meeting of the American Historical Association in New York he participated on a panel on The Pentagon Papers along with Ernest R. May, director of the Kennedy Institute of Politics at Harvard; Leslie Gelb, who was in charge of the Pentagon Papers; and Daniel Ellsberg, now under indictment in connection with the release of the Pentagon Papers to the press.
Also honored in her field is Dr. Marie Louise Johnson, Associate Professor of Medicine (dermatology) and coordinator of continuing medical education at the Dartmouth Medical School, who recently was elected a trustee of the Dermatology Foundation.
Dr. Johnson, who following World War II served in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki as chief of dermatology for the medical service of the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission and examined approximately 13,000 A-bomb survivors, is also a consultant to the United States government for the National Health Survey. She is the wife of Dr. Kenneth G. Johnson, chairman of the Department of Community Medicine at the Medical School and associate dean for community medicine.
Meanwhile, Dr. Thomas P. Almy, chairman of the Medical School's Department of Medicine and the Nathan Smith Professor of Medicine, testified in Washington recently in behalf of a separate National Institute of Health for gastroenterology. The former president of the American Gastroenterological Association reported that stomach aches, both common and uncommon, are costing the United States hundreds of millions of dollars each year through losses in productivity, while digestive diseases in general cause an annual debit of approximately $10 million in this country.
The proposed trans-Alaska pipeline system from the rich oil deposits on the northern slope of Prudhoe Bay to Valdez will prove great aid to archaeologists tracing the migrations of the North American continent's earliest human dwellers from Asia across Alaska. This is the report which Prof. Elmer Harp Jr., chairman of the Anthropology Department who doubles as chairman of the Arctic Archaeology Project Committee of the Arctic Institute of North America, brought back after spending two weeks surveying the 800-mile proposed pipeline route. His committee is serving as consultant to the Bureau of Land Management and is charged with preventing the destruction of possible archaeological sites in the path of the pipeline.
"Undoubtedly, the most important aspect of this archaeological project derives," he said, "from its linear geographic spread across the state, from Beaufort Sea to the Gulf of Alaska. The New World was originally occupied by hunters who passed from northeastern Siberia across the Bering land platform into Alaska, beginning perhaps as early as 40,000 years ago. As their descendants spread farther eastward and southward through ensuing generations and centuries, they had perforce to cross through country now transected by the pipeline route."
For a January Alumni College seminar at Princeton, N. J., a rare husband-and-wife professorial team were the leaders. Jonathan Mirsky, Associate Professor of Chinese and History, and his wife, Rhona Mirsky, Assistant Professor of Biochemistry at the Medical School and a member of the Women's Faculty Caucus, presented the seminar on "Alien Cultures: Men. Women; China." Prof. Jonathan Mirsky, who joined the Dartmouth faculty in 1966, lived in Asia from 1958-1961, much of the time on Taiwan as a teacher, and has revisited the area, eluding southeast Asia, four times since.
Richard Eberhart '26, the Class of 1925 Professor Emeritus and poet-in-residence, has returned to the University of Washington until June as visiting professor of English where teaching two courses similar to the modern poetry and poetry writing-class classes he has conducted at Dartmouth. The Dartmouth poet, whose honors include the Pulitzer and Bollingen Prizes, was invited back to the University of Washington by Prof. Robert B. Heilman, chairman of the English Department there, who first convinced Professor Eberhart to leave his business career and made him a full professor in 1952. Professor Eberhart, who has been a member of the Dartmouth faculty since 1956, has continued to teach full time since his very active retirement in 1969, and in the future will teach one term each academic year.
Further indication of how active Professor Eberhart's retirement has been is the fact that a new book of his poems will appear in London and New York next fall. Meanwhile, Twayne Publishing Company is scheduled to publish a critical book on his poetry by Bernard Engel in the spring.
Snow time is a very busy and happy time for Art Professor Robert L. McGrath. In addition to his academic teaching role, the former Williams College skiing star is a member of the Ford Sayre Ski Council for Hanover, supervising the Alpine racing program, which he does by regularly challenging the junior "jet stick" speedsters to beat him in giant slalom. He usually has a dozen racing hopefuls chasing after him whenever he's on the Skiway or Oak Hill slopes.
Three more members of the Dartmouth Medical School faculty have received awards for five years of research related to air pollution, the heart, and the lungs.
The awards to the Medical School's Department of Physiology were made by the National Heart and Lung Institute of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the American Heart Association (AHA) and will enable their recipients to conduct research in the field.
Commenting on the awards, Dr. S. Marsh Tenney, chairman of the Physiology Department, said, "Both the NIH Research Career Development Awards and the AHA Established Investigator Award indicate national recognition of the scientific achievements and promising future of the recipients. They have been won in a highly competitive field and reflect excellence in both the professional qualifications of the individuals and in the research programs in which they are engaged."
Winners of the NIH awards are Dr. Donald Bartlett Jr. '59 and Dr. John E. Remmers '59, both Assistant Professors of Physiology. Recipient of the AHA award is Dr. Reed L. Detar, also an Assistant Professor of Physiology.
As defined by NIH, the purpose of the Research Career Development Award "is to foster the development of young scientists with outstanding research potential for careers of independent research in the sciences related to health."
Dr. Bartlett's five years of research will focus on "tracing the factors that influence the development of the lung after birth." Dr. Detar will study the way oxygen effects the function of the smooth muscle lining of the walls of blood vessels, as they constrict and dilate, while Dr. Remmers will study the "motor control of breathing."
Professor Albert S. Carlson, who has been teaching geography to Dartmouth students since 1929, heads toward retirement in June a happy man, the proud possessor of a Dartmouth game football inscribed "Al Carlson—All Ivy-League Professor" and signed by all 27 students in his Geography 71 Class, who this past term included five members of the championship football team, five members of the hockey team, a member of the basketball team, and the tennis team captain.
Sports have never been far from Professor Carlson's life. Earlier in his Dartmouth career he coached freshman soccer and assisted coaching in other sports, and for ten years, 1960-69 HE was accredited as a soccer referee by the New Hampshire Soccer Official Association. He has enjoyed his continued association with athletes in his classes, and quite clearly they have enjoyed his geography courses.
Prof. Albert S. Carlson's geographyclass at Mt. Washington. In front are(l to r) Bob Monahan '29, Joe Dodge,Sherman Adams '20 Ellen Teague,Prof. Carlson, and Gifford Foley '69.
