Science in Colorado:The Second Century Begins

The Johns-Manville Corporation's world headquarters, in the foothills of the Colorado Rockies southwest of Denver.

For those with a historic bent, thereare some interesting contrasts betweenthe sites of last year's AAAS AnnualMeeting and this year's. In 1848, theyear that the AAAS was founded, Bos-ton was a mature urban center of scientif-ic, academic, and cultural affairs-"thecradle of American Science," as it wascalled in the 1976 Annual Meeting pro-gram. Harvard University was morethan 200 years old in 1848, and the Mas-sachusetts Institute of Technologywould open its doors within the year.

But in 1848 there was no Denver; therewas not even a Colorado. The plainsaround the confluence of Cherry Creekand the South Platte River in the westernpart of the Kansas Territory, where theMile-High City now stands, were thehunting grounds of the Cheyenne andArapahoe. The Spanish settlement ofSan Luis, now considered the oldesttown in Colorado, would not be estab-lished until 1851.

In the summer of 1858, as the AAASmarked its tenth birthday, a party of nineprospectors led by a Georgian namedWilliam Green Russell took several hun-dred dollars' worth of gold from thesandy bed of a dry creek along the SouthPlatte. Before winter set in, a gold rushhad started and Denver City was grow-

ing up on the banks of Cherry Creek.The next year the "Fifty-Niners" startedswarming in, drawn by the promise ofinstant wealth in the goldfields. "Pike'sPeak or Bust" was their slogan, andmany of them were busted and on theirway back East within a matter of weeks,although a few found themselves veryrich very suddenly.

Eighteen years later, as the nation cele-brated its centennial, the new state ofColorado, with Denver as its capital, wasadmitted to the Union. Born in the get-rich-quick hustle of a gold rush, Colora-do soon developed a broader economicbase. Mining and railroading, ranchingand farming, and various mercantile andcommercial activities provided occupa-tions for most Coloradans. But in addi-tion to a sober majority of industriouscitizens, Colorado also produced someflamboyant folk heroes and heroines-colorful nouv'eaux riches like MollyBrown and H. A. W. Tabor and his BabyDoe who cut broad swaths through Colo-rado society and history with their easy-come, easy-go silver fortunes.The spirit of this lively era was not

conducive to the emergence of a socialand intellectual Brahmin class in Colora-do, but respect for learning was moreprevalent than might be expected, evenin those rowdy early days. A year beforeColorado was granted statehood, the cor-nerstone had been laid on a bare, wind-swept hillside in Boulder for a substan-

tial stone building, now known as "OldMain," that would accommodate thefirst matriculants and faculty members ofthe University of Colorado.Now, 100 years later, as Colorado be-

gins its second century and the nation itsthird, there is at least one striking similar-ity between sedate old Boston and brashyoung Denver: both are national focalpoints of scientific research. Along withthe multitude of research institutions andactivities along Boston's Route 128, anycomprehensive inventory of the nation'scenters of scientific research must in-clude the urban strip along the easternfoot of the Colorado Rockies, stretchingnorthward and southward from Denver,Usually called the Colorado FrontRange, for the mountains that form itswestern backdrop, this narrow strip con-tains a remarkably diversified and vigor-ous mix of government scientific facil-

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The author is information officer for the NationalCenter for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boul-der, Colorado. NCAR is sponsored by the NationalScience Foundation.

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ities, university research activities, in-dustrial research and development labo-ratories, and high-technology industry.Although the Front Range scientific com-plex includes work in a variety of scien-tific disciplines, including outstandingbiomedical research at the University ofColorado Medical School and a varietyof other solid efforts in the social and lifesciences, the area is probably bestknown, internationally as well as nation-ally, for geophysical and environmentalresearch.

Like the state itself, the Colorado sci-entific community grew rapidly from a

modest beginning, attaining its presentstature in a mere 25 years or so. But itsroots go back further. Walter Orr Rob-erts, AAAS past president and a residentof the state for more than 35 years, has a

unique view of the growth of Coloradoscience during that period. He first cameto the state in 1940 as a Harvard graduatestudent in astronomy, and has main-tained his home base here ever since,pursuing his own scientific interests insolar and atmospheric research and en-

gaging in a variety of national and inter-national scientific activities.

Roberts came to Colorado to set up a

solar observing station on the continen-tal divide, near the little mining companytown of Climax. His mentor at Harvardwas Donald Menzel, a Colorado nativewho grew up in the little mountain townsof Florence and Leadville and was gradu-ated from the University of Denver in1921. Opportunities for scientific careers

were practically nonexistent in this partof the country then, and young Menzel,who wanted to be a scientist, went eastto earn a doctorate at Princeton and tojoin the staff of the Harvard College Ob-servatory.By the time Walt Roberts was ready to

begin his dissertation, Menzel had decid-ed that Harvard should establish an ob-serving station in the Colorado Rockiesand equip it with the Western Hemi-sphere's first coronagraph. The corona-

graph, which had been developed inFrance a few years before, uses occult-

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ing disks to create an artificial eclipseand permit observation of the solar co-rona.Roberts was persuaded to take on the

job of setting up and operating the Cli-max station. He departed from Cam-bridge with his bride, Janet, and somekey components of the coronagraph in asecondhand Graham-Paige automobilethat had been offered in lieu of a trainticket by Harlow Shapley, the observa-tory director. The trip was marked by amemorable series of mechanical break-downs that began in Rochester, NewYork, and culminated in Hastings, Ne-braska, where Roberts had to wire backto Harvard for a loan to enable him tomake it the rest of the way to Colorado.Although Colorado was not a com-

plete scientific desert when Walt Robertsarrived here in 1940, the total effort inthe state can only be described as mod-est. The University of Denver had estab-lished its high-altitude laboratories onMount Evans and the University of Colo-rado had some good scientists on itsfaculty, according to Roberts, but hecould count them on both hands.

"Science at the University of Colora-do was typical of university research atthat time," Roberts says, "It was doneby faculty members who taught full timeand did a little research on the side. Theyhad to build all of their equipment, and itwas usually held together with frictiontape and baling wire."Roberts recalls the case ofJames Brox-

on of the CU Physics Department, whobuilt a chamber to measure cosmic raysand used it to discover the connectionbetween sunspots and cosmic-ray activi-ty. Where was this important piece ofbasic research performed? In the base-ment of the CU Auditorium, Robertssays, in a little workroom that Broxonhad managed to take over from the uni-versity's plumbers.World War II brought some major re-

search facilities to other parts of thewest, such as Los Alamos and Berkeley,but the wartime research effort did nothave much impact on Colorado science.It was after the war, when federal re-search support was being redirectedfrom military to peacetime concerns,that significant changes began to come tothe Colorado scientific community.Walt Roberts came down from the con-

tinental divide to head the High AltitudeObservatory, a new research institutionbuilt on the work that had been done atClimax and based at the University ofColorado. In 1950, a major federal scien-tific facility came to Colorado-the Boul-der Laboratories of the National Bureauof Standards (NBS), where research in

the fields of radio propagation and cryo-genics would be done.Over the next two decades, other na-

tional laboratories came to Boulder. TheNational Center for Atmospheric Re-search (NCAR), supported by the Na-tional Science Foundation (NSF) and op-erated by a consortium of universities,was established in 1960, with the HighAltitude Observatory as its nucleus andWalter Orr Roberts as its director. In1965, Boulder was chosen as the head-quarters for the research laboratories ofthe new Environmental Science ServicesAdministration (ESSA), which includedthe Weather Bureau and some of theBoulder-based activities of the Bureau ofStandards. When ESSA was absorbed in1970 by another new agency, the Nation-al Oceanic and Atmospheric Administra-tion (NOAA), the NOAA EnvironmentalResearch Laboratories remained in Boul-der.

During the 1950's and 1960's, as sup-port for research at universities becameavailable through grants and contractsfrom NSF, NASA, and other federalagencies, research programs at Colora-do's universities grew. The principal aca-demic research centers were the Univer-sity of Colorado at Boulder and Colora-do State University at Fort Collins, bothstate institutions, as well as the privateUniversity of Denver, whose chancellor,Maurice Mitchell, is a co-chairman of theDenver AAAS meeting advisory com-mittee.The growing Colorado scientific and

technological complex also attracted in-dustry. Martin Marietta Corporationmoved its aerospace division to Denverin the early 1950's, and IBM built a majorfacility northeast of Boulder in the mid-1960's. Boulder also had Ball BrothersResearch Corporation, established bythe Ball Corporation of Muncie, Indiana,around the nucleus of a small companythat had spun off from a research groupat the University of Colorado.

In the mid-1970's, the Johns-ManvilleCorporation decided to move its worldheadquarters and research and devel-opment center to Denver. ExplainingJohns-Manville's decision to move toDenver, W. R. Goodwin, who was presi-dent of the corporation at the time of themove, cited "outstanding educational,cultural, and recreational opportunities"in the Front Range area. He said that inthe corporation's site-selection evalua-tion, the area received a "superior" rat-ing for its telecommunications, air serv-ice and access, higher educational facil-ities, economic growth pattern, and sci-entific and technological foundation.Presumably these factors are similar to

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The Mesa Laboratory of the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

the ones that have brought other indus-trial organizations to the Front Range.Johns-Manville's current president, JohnMcKinney, is serving as co-chairman ofthe 1977 AAAS meeting advisory com-mittee.Colorado industry has played an im-

portant and highly visible role in theU.S. space program in the 1970's. Whenthe Skylab manned orbiting laboratorywas launched in 1973, it carried six solarobserving instruments on its Apollo Tele-scope Mount. Of these six, four wereengineered and built by Ball Brothers inBoulder-two for the Naval ResearchLaboratory, one for Harvard, and onefor NCAR's High Altitude Observatoryin Boulder. Ball Brothers also builtNASA's first seven Orbiting Solar Obser-vatory (OSO) unmanned spacecraft, or-bited in the late 1960's.Martin Marietta Aerospace in Denver

developed and built the two Vikingspacecraft for the 1976 Mars landings,and the camera that sent back the firstpictures of the Martian landscape alsocame from Colorado-it was designedand built by Ball Brothers engineers.

In recent years, the Colorado stategovernment has been faced with a hordeof problems that call for heavy infusionsof scientific knowledge into the public-policy decision-making process if soundsolutions are to be developed. Many ofthese problems grow from one of twocauses: population pressure and nationalenergy demands. New residents havepoured into Colorado over the last fewyears, and many of them have settled inthe Front Range area, creating many4 FEBRUARY 1977

problems of transportation, air and waterpollution, and all the other impacts ofrapid population growth. The less dense-ly populated and developed western partof the state, usually called the "WesternSlope" by Coloradans, contains rich en-ergy resources-coal, oil shale, and ura-nium. Many Coloradans, including Gov-ernor Richard Lamm, fear that the statecould become an "energy colony" forthe rest of the nation, with strip miningand other technologies for extracting en-ergy resources applied irresponsibly inways that could have devastating envi-ronmental and societal impacts.Even with the abundant scientific tal-

ent and facilities found along the FrontRange, Colorado has not been particular-ly successful in bringing those resourcesinto the public-policy decision-makingprocess by linking them with key deci-sion-makers such as the governor, mem-bers of the state legislature, and top-levelstate administrators. Efforts to establishan effective scientific advisory mecha-nism for state government have surfacedintermittently over the last several yearswithout achieving any real momentum orcontinuity.

But now there are signs that such aneffort may be about to achieve criticalmass. Frank Hersman, who holds a lawdegree as well as a doctorate in chem-istry, has been loaned to GovernorLamm for 2 years as a science and tech-nology advisor by NSF, where Hersmanheaded the intergovernmental relationsprogram. Hersman is also executive di-rector of a 50-member Governor's Sci-ence and Technology Council, which is

chaired jointly by Floyd Mann, an organi-zational psychologist from the Universi-ty of Colorado, and R. C. Mercure, Jr., aphysicist who is president of Ball Broth-ers Research Corporation.Hersman has been on the job for only

7 months of his planned 2-year tour ofduty with the state of Colorado, and thescientific advisory council held its firstworking meeting last November, so it istoo early to judge the effectiveness of thenew apparatus in linking Colorado's sci-entific resources to its policy decision-making. Hersman is guardedly optimisticabout the future of the effort, but sees itas "a substantial commitment that rateshigh on a national basis."As Colorado begins its second cen-

tury, science and technology seem cer-tain to play a major role in the future ofthe state. Research development, andhigh-technology industry will continue tobe an important part of the state's eco-nomic base, and scientific inputs willalmost certainly take on increasing im-portance in policy decision-making at thestate government level.

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Science in Colorado: The Second Century BeginsHenry Lansford

DOI: 10.1126/science.195.4277.477 (4277), 477-479.195Science 

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