Victor McElheny

Victor King McElheny (September 8, 1935 – July 14, 2025) was an American science writer, journalist, and biographer. Quotes The performance record for interdisciplinary gatherings of superstars addressing themselves to world problems is not especially formidable. But quite possibly a new record for chaos and non achievement was established 29 August–2 September in this mountain resort at an international conference on "Technology: Social Goals and Cultural Options," participated in by some 69 scientists, science policy "statesmen," writers, and assorted hangers-on. The proceedings were characterized by anarchic wrangling in which Murray Gell-Mann, Nobel laureate in physics at Caltech, took an exuberant lead in his role as conference cochairman. Aspen Technology Conference Ends in Chaos Science 169 3951 1970 1187 0036-8075 10.1126/science.169.3951.1187 Watson could so easily have been brushed aside as a crazy kid and an arrogant pest, whose great discovery was a fluke based on others' data. But after much agonizing over what he would do for an encore, he settled for a career of getting things goings. He became an intellectual manager on a vast scale without showing the fatherly instincts of a Niels Bohr. Watson and DNA: Making a Scientific Revolution 2003 New York Perseus Books 2004 pbk edition Basic Books xi https://books.google.com/books/about/Watson_And_DNA.html?id=gUkBMctzM2gC&pg=PR11 The march of genomics is taking place alongside a background of ethical and spiritual anxieties. Would the information, particularly the theories of evolution that are the core of all biology and medicine, assault people's religious faith? ... Would the information be misused by employers or insurers—or by people wishing to design their offspring? Drawing the Map of Life: Inside the Human Genome Project 2010 New York Basic Books 2012 pbk edition https://books.google.com/books?id=6z-mNS3H2w8C&q=spiritual#v=snippet&q=spiritual&f=false My own “take” on my career is that I was driven to, or striving for, the job of witness to an age of technological change. The main intellectual quest was to grasp history, in the sense of people as different as C.P. Snow and Fernand Braudel and Garrett Mattingly of The Armada, the stumbling and contingent story of how we got where we are. The motto is, “We are fated to survive.” The smart aleck formulation could be: “Nothing so interesting as Armageddon will happen.” My 2017 essay in the 60th anniversary book of my class of 1957 (pages 683-692) at Harvard is entitled, “So We Decided Not to Blow Ourselves Up." 29 December 2019, as quoted by David Brown in the comments section of: Fernand Braudel and Global History - Alan Macfarlane 1996 7 March 2013 Prof Alan Macfarlane - Ayabaya YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sITo2ABottE See also Edwin H. Land External links Category:1935 births Category:2025 deaths Category:Science authors from the United States Category:Journalists from Boston Category:Biographers from the United States Category:Harvard University alumni