Robert Emerson came to Illinois in 1946 with
a Ph.D. in Botany from Harvard and a unique
history. He was the grand-nephew of Ralph
Waldo Emerson, and his father was a medical
doctor in Boston who taught him strict self-discipline.
In fact, aside from tending his garden, Emerson
allowed himself a single hobby: ice skating.
At Illinois he chaired the Ice Skating Club.
Emerson also followed his father's example
of holding strong morals and seeking justice.
During World War II he advocated for the rights
of interned Japanese-Americans, and continued
to speak for their rights following the war.
This same sense of social justice informed
his perspective on science and the obligation
he believed science had to humanity. He once
scrawled on a notecard: "Does science have
a responsibility toward man or only toward
his personal comfort, (and) pride...?" And
he answered himself: "Science can be one of
the ways, like music, poetry, painting in
which man discovers his spiritual limitations,
learns to put down his vanity & selfishness,
makes himself and his fellows, into higher
rather than lower forms of life..."
Emerson came to Illinois in 1946 as a research
professor of botany on the condition that
a physicist or physical chemist would also
be hired. In fact, he had a famous scientist
in mind -- Eugene Rabinowitch, a photochemist
who was already nearby at the University of
Chicago. One year later, Rabinowitch joined
the Illinois faculty. Together, Emerson and
Rabinowitch made discoveries that proved the
chemical processes behind photosynthesis.
Their work led to the creation of the field
of biophysics.
Emerson was distrustful of planes and preferred
to travel by train. When the train from Indianapolis
to New York was discontinued, Emerson was
forced to fly by plane. In 1959 Robert Emerson
died in a fatal air crash.
Eugene Rabinowitch was already a world renowned
chemist when he accepted the offer to join
Emerson as a co-director of the Photosynthesis
Project at Illinois. Rabinowitch was born
in Russia and educated at the University of
Berlin, where he took Albert Einstein's class
on relativity and participated in a physics
colloquium that featured Nobel laureates Enstein,
Max Plank, and Max von Laue.
With Hitler's ascendancy to the Chancellorship
and anti-Semitism growing in Germany, Rabinowitch
accepted an offer to join Niels Bohr at the
Institute for Theoretical Physics in Denmark,
where he built the first difference absorption
spectro-photometer [foe-TOM-uh-tur]. In 1938
he came to the United States and accepted
a position at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology, but his work at MIT was interrupted
five years later when he joined the Manhattan
Project and the race to develop nuclear weapons.
Rabinowitch would spend the rest of his life
warning of the dangers of nuclear proliferation.
Rabinowitch was quite the opposite of Emerson.
Where Emerson was tall, thin, and refined,
Rabinowitch was short, round, and easy-going.
Quick to laugh, Rabinowitch loved writing
poetry and could accurately be described as
a Renaissance man. Both men, though, deeply
cared about their students.
