William Nierenberg

William Aaron Nierenberg (February 13, 1919 – September 10, 2000) was an American physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project and was director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography from 1965 through 1986.

Nierenberg was born on February 13, 1919, at 213 E. 13th Street, on the Lower East Side of New York, the son of very poor Jewish immigrants from Austro-Hungary.

He went to Townsend Harris High School and then the City College of New York (CCNY), where he won a scholarship to spend his junior year abroad in France at the University of Paris.

In 1939, he became the first recipient of a William Lowell Putnam fellowship from the City College.

Also in 1939, he participated in research at Columbia University, where he took a course in statistical mechanics from his future mentor, I. I. Rabi.

He went on to graduate work at Columbia, but from 1941 spent the war years seconded to the Manhattan Project, working on isotope separation, before returning to Columbia to complete his PhD.

In 1948, Nierenberg took up his first academic staff position, as Assistant Professor of Physics at the University of Michigan.

From 1950 to 1965, he was Associate and then Professor of Physics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he had a very large and productive low energy nuclear physics laboratory, graduating 40 PhD’s during this time and publishing about 100 papers.

He was responsible for the determination of more nuclear moments than any other single individual.

During this period, in 1953, Nierenberg took a one-year leave to serve as the director of the Columbia University Hudson Laboratories, working on naval warfare problems.

Later, he oversaw the design and construction of the “new” physics building at Berkeley.

Much later (1960–1962) he took leave once again as Assistant Secretary General of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in charge of scientific affairs, where he oversaw many international studies on physics and advanced defense technologies.

In 1965, Nierenberg was asked to be director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO).

Nierenberg was director of SIO for 21 years, the longest serving director to date.

During his tenure, five modern research vessels joined the Scripps fleet and the institution’s budget increased fivefold.

He was also elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1965, the American Philosophical Society in 1975, and the National Academy of Engineering in 1983.

He oversaw the Deep Sea Drilling Project (1966–1986), which produced scientific advances such as the discovery of deep-sea hydrocarbons, the finding that the Mediterranean Sea had once been a closed basin and even a dry seabed, and confirmation that present ocean basins are young.

The project became the first multi-institutional, international collaboration in science and a model for later projects.

Nierenberg gained national recognition for his contributions to science.

This work was cited when he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1971.

He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1971 and to the governing Council of the Academy in 1979.

In 1971 he was appointed chairman of the National Academy of Sciences National Advisory Committee on Oceans and Atmosphere and served on this committee until 1977.

He served on various panels of the President's Science Advisory Committee.

He was a member of the National Science Board from 1972 to 1978 and was appointed for another term from November 1982 to May 1988.

Nierenberg was a consultant to the National Security Agency, and served on many military-related panels.

In 1976 he was appointed one of two senior consultants to the newly formed White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP).

He was a member of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Advisory Council from 1978 to 1982 and served as its first chairman.

In October 1980, during the Carter presidency, an Act of Congress was passed requesting the National Academy of Science to review what was known about climate change.

Nierenberg was appointed by the Academy to chair the committee to produce this report.

The committee was made up of prominent physical scientists and two economists, William Nordhaus of Yale and Thomas Schelling of Harvard.

Schelling and many of the scientists had served on committees for two previous reports for the Carter administration, which had highlighted global warming as a potentially major problem, and Nordhaus was developing a new model for growth in emissions, the first which did not assume linear extrapolations.

In 1981, Nierenberg became a founding member of the World Cultural Council.

He was a co-founder of the George C. Marshall Institute in 1984.

He was Chairman of the OSTP Acid Rain Peer Review Panel, whose report "Acid Rain" was published in 1984.

The report encouraged the administration to curb acid rain emissions.

Nierenberg took a strong interest in the problem of global warming.

Under his predecessor at Scripps, Roger Revelle, Scripps had begun a program of monitoring carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

Nierenberg supported this work and intervened personally when research funds for the program were threatened.

In 1987, he was awarded the Delmer S. Fahrney Medal from the Franklin Institute for outstanding leadership in science.

Nierenberg served on a large number of panels and advisory committees, primarily after he returned from NATO.