Conant, James president

CONANT, JAMES BRYANT (1893-1978). An American chemisi and educator, bom in Boslon, who received his doctorate in chemisiry from Harvard in 1916 and was president of Harvard for 20 years (1933-19531. His major scientific activities included pioneering research on chlorophyll and importanl contributions to the Manhattan Project. Perhaps his greatest achievements lay in the educational field, in which he exerted a strong liberalizing influence at both the collegiate and secondary school levels. He also was ambassador to postwar Germany and educational adviser to Berlin. He wrote many books on science and education, including basic chemical tests, and received a number of scientific and educational awards. 

The 1950s saw the rise of the research university. The U.S. was its breeding ground Science, the Endless Frontier, the report to the President by Vannevar Bush (1945) had urged such support by the federal government, to which chemist James B. Conant, then president of Harvard... 

Throughout this book I have liberally quoted the monograph (c) on chemistry, which W.A. Noyes, Jr. edited. In the Foreword of Noyes book, pages xii and xiii, James B. Conant, Chairman of the National Defense Research Committee and President of Harvard University, and Roger Adams, member of National Defense Research Committee, stated their opinion as to the major achievements of the chemical divisions of NDRC ... 

In Washington after the invasion of Poland the Carnegie president gathered with a group of fellow science administrators—Frank Jewett, president of Bell Telephone Laboratories and the National Academy of Sciences James Bryant Conant, the young president of Harvard, a distin-... 

The National Defense Research Council immediately absorbed the Uranium Committee. That had been part of its purpose. Briggs was a cautious and frugal man, but his committee had also lacked the authority of a source of fimds independent of the military. The white-haired director of the National Bureau of Standards would continue to be responsible for fission work. He would report now to James Bryant Conant, Harvard s wiry president, boyish in appearance but in practice cool and reserved, whom Bush had enlisted as soon as FDR authorized the new council. 

No document Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed authenticates the fateful decision to expedite research toward an atomic bomb that Vannevar Bush reported in his October 9 memorandum to James Bryant Conant the archives divulge no smoking gun. The closest the record come to a piece of paper that changed the world is a banality. Bush personally delivered the third National Academy of Sciences report to the President on November 27, 1941. Roosevelt returned it to him two months later with a note on White House stationery written in black ink with a broad-nibbed pen, a note that would communicate only a commonplace of the housekeeping of... 

Dr. James B. Conant, professor of or nic chemistty at the time Caroldiers, was an instructor flater President of Harvard and the first head of the Atomic Energy Commission), extolled the contributions in his short stay at Harvard. 

After obtaining his Ph.D. in 1912, Adams spent two years in Europe on a Parker Traveling Scholarship in the laboratories of Emil Fisher and Otto Diels in Berlin and with Richard Willstatter at Berlin-Dahlem. He returned to Harvard for a few important years. He became friends with Elmer Keiser Bolton (1886-1968) (later of DuPont), Farrington Daniels (1889-1972) (later of Wisconsin), Frank C. Whitmore (1887-1947) (later of Penn State), James B. Sumner (1887-1955, Nobel 1946) (later of Cornell) and James Bryant Conant (1893-1978) (later President of Harvard). 

Charles W. Eliot, who taught chemistry at both Harvard and MIT between 1858 and 1869, was president of Harvard University from 1869 until 1909. James Bryant Conant, an organic chemist, presided over Harvard from 1933 to 1953. 

The following year, the president established the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), with the NDRC as one of its units. Bush moved from the NDRC to head OSRD and was replaced by James B. Conant, who served as the NDRC s chairman until 31 December 1947, at which time its activities were taken over by the newly established Department of Defense. During its exis-... 

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