Gerald and Naomi Wasserburg, George Brimhall, Yu-Ye and me in 2009, Portland, Oregon. Also present was Roberta Rudnick, Doug and Robyn Morton, my parents, Mark and Christian, Emily Chin and Bing Shen.
Lava Cap wines from one of my geology and birding mentors, David Jones (1930-2007)
I learned this morning from my good friend and fellow Berkeley undergrad David Shuster that Gerald “Jerry” Wasserburg died two days ago (June 13, 2016). He was 89 years old. Wasserburg (I have never dared to call him by his first name), as we all know, revolutionized Earth sciences by showing that any true understanding of geologic processes must be firmly grounded in math, physics and chemistry and that all theories must be driven by ideas. He led the charge in making geology a quantitative field, with groundbreaking research in mass spectrometry, cosmochemistry, astrophysics, high temperature geochemistry, low temperature geochemistry, petrology, mineralogy, and geodynamics. He played a key role in the Apollo missions. There is not a single earth scientist alive today that hasn’t been influenced, directly or indirectly, by Wasserburg’s contributions.
As I
was walking in to work today, I started to recall all my experiences with
Wasserburg. I spent a year and half with him as a Caltech post-doctoral fellow,
back in 2001. I had arrived from Harvard
in March, 2001, having just turned in my PhD thesis to my advisor RobertaRudnick. Wasserburg had hired me on before I had officially received my
PhD. Until I officially graduated that
May, he would always refer to me as “Doctor-to-be”. I came to work with Wasserburg by introducing
myself, initially by email, in the fall of 2000. I really was not sure what I wanted to
do. I suggested working on U series
isotopes to date the time when the northern tip of the Gulf of California was
severed by the Colorado river delta to generate the land-locked Salton trough,
or ancient Lake Coahuila. He seemed very
interested in this, but I had never worked on U series isotopes, so I was quite
unsure of myself. I suggested then a
second project that would take advantage of some expertise I had developed at
Harvard. During my last two years at
Harvard, I became a close friend and collaborator of Qing-zhu Yin, then a post-doctorate
with Stein Jacobsen. Together, we developed the chemistry and mass spectrometry
for Re-Os isotopes, leading to two interesting papers (1, 2), coauthored also with our
advisers Roberta Rudnick and Stein Jacobsen, on the origin and evolution of
continental lithospheric mantle in western North America. Qing-zhu and I had joined forces. I had
traveled around the country learning more about different wet chemistry
techniques (mostly Carius tube and Ni-sulfide fire assay) from Berhard
Peucker-Ehrinbrink, John Chesley, Steve Shirey and Rick Carlson, and Qing-zhu
had the mass spectrometry expertise, so we had complementary knowledge, which
allowed us to forge a very productive collaboration.
In the process, we had made our own
Osmium standard so that we could calibrate our Os spike. After the development of negative thermal
ionization mass spectrometry as the method of choice for measuring Os and Re
isotopes (on paper, Rob Creaser and Wasserburg were the first to lay this out),
the main limitation of using Re-Os isotopes as a chronometer was the lack of
well-calibrated spikes, which in turn was limited by how accurate your standard
was. And for Os, getting a good standard was not trivial. Typically, one
generates a calibration standard gravimetrically by weighing out known
quantities of a pure metal and dissolving it. The challenge, however, is that
dissolving Os metal requires aqua regia, a dangerous caustic mix of nitric and
hydrochloric acid, and during such a digestion, Os is oxidized to its highest
valence, making it volatile in the form of osmium tetraoxide, a known
carcinogen. So one has to digest the
metal in a sealed glass vessel, then find a way to open it without losing any
osmium before getting it back into a stable solution. On top of all this, even though one can buy
metal standards from various chemical companies, the purity is hard to
guarantee because carbon or oxygen could be dissolved in the metal, so what you
weigh is not what you get. And then
there is the issue of calibrating the spike, which one does by mixing the Os
standard solution with the spike solution in known proportions and then
measuring the isotopic ratio of this mixture to invert for the concentration in
the spike. But if the speciation of Os
in the spike and in the standard are not the same, then one must insure
spike-standard equilibration, again not a trivial task. For one year, Qing-zhu and I worked on this
project, purchasing several different types of Os compounds (metals and salts),
heating them up in thermogravimetric analyzers to drive off any adsorbed
volatiles, so that we could be more confident in the accuracy of our weights
and stoichiometry. Qing-zhu came up with
the clever idea of using the high temperatures of a plasma to equilibrate, in
real time, the spike and standard.
Multiple collector inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry had just
recently arrived on the scene. A few
groups had been working on the P54, but a new player had arrived on the scene
and that was the Micromass Isoprobe. Roberta and Bill McDonough got one of the
first Micromass machines, and that summer, while everyone was away, Qing-zhu
and I performed our experiments on the machine.
To this day, it was one of the most exciting projects I’ve worked on. Once
we showed that this would work, I went ahead and developed standards and spikes
for other platinum group elements, Pt, Pd, Ir, and Ru.
I felt that Wasserburg would
appreciate our efforts in this because Jim Chen and Wasserburg were one of the
first to recognize the difficulties in calibration and had gone through great
pains to develop a gravimetric standard.
I suggested to Wasserburg that I would bring the platinum group element
methods, standards, and spikes to Caltech and work on characterizing their
abundances in marine sediments, mainly to understand marine redox conditions
through time. He seemed very keen on
this, and by March, I had an office down in the basement of Arms, sitting
alongside Damien Lemarchand, who had come from Claude Allegre’s lab, Ben
Reynolds, who had come from Alex Halliday’s lab, and Natasha Kristina and Oleg
Bogdanovski, both of whom came from Emil Jagoutz’s lab. Damien
and Ben were working on Ca isotopes in low temperature geochemistry. Natasha was looking for presolar oxygen
isotopes in meteorites. Oleg was working on Cr isotopes (Several years later,
Oleg passed away suddenly). We were all
post-docs. No students. I took American Airlines (Flight 11) from Boston to Los
Angeles, hand carrying all my spikes and standards in teflon bottles as carry
on. At that point in time, you could still bring liquids onto airplanes.
Wasserburg welcomed me with open
arms. I was of course nervous at first because I had heard all sorts of stories
of how tough Wasserburg was. In fact,
before I left Harvard, one faculty member there pulled me aside and told me
that this would be the worst decision of my life. I decided not to follow his advice because he
had said something similar to me shortly after I arrived at Harvard, but I
turned out just fine. Wasserburg didn’t
seem anything like what people had warned me of. I had wondered if it had anything to do with
my history. As it turns out, my father Tien
Chang Lee got his PhD from the University of Southern California working with
Tom Henyey. They were heat flow guys.
Henyey was one of Wasserburg’s first students at Caltech, back when
Wasserburg was trying to determine the age of the Earth and trying to quantify
how much potassium and other radiogenics were in the Earth. This was, of
course, a Harold Urey quest that Wasserburg was taking to the next level.
Wasserburg was interested in solving this one question and would explore any
method that he thought would get him there. Henyey ended up in his later years
doing seismology and was deeply involved in the Southern California Earthquake
Center (SCEC). My dad ended up as a
geophysicist and a hydrologist, developing inverse methods for quantifying
fluid flow in porous media, reconstructing gravimetric studies, and so forth.
Wasserburg’s influence clearly extended well beyond geochemistry. I had already been influenced by Wasserburg
before I stepped into his office.
It turns out, I had met Wasserburg earlier.
It was the 9th Goldschmidt Conference, which was held at Harvard in
1999. The grad students were all rounded
up to help with the conference. One of
my jobs was to handle the slides for the talks. We were still in the days of
overhead projectors and slide projectors.
Wasserburg was giving one the plenary lectures and I was supposed to
handle his slides. I introduced myself to him briefly and he handed over his
slides and made it clear to me that I better not mess up. I put them in
one-by-one into the round carousel.
Everything was perfect, but as my luck would have it, just as he walked
on to the stage, I somehow knocked the carousel over and all the slides fell
out onto the table. Wasserburg didn’t
know and started his talk as I frantically searched the pile of slides for the
appropriate slide. I quickly found the
title slide, manually slid it in as he was speaking, all the while trying to
pay close attention so that I could anticipate what his next slide was. And so
I did that for thirty slides. Somehow, I managed to get every slide right.
Afterwards, Wasserburg went out of his way to tell me that I did a good job,
but I don’t think he ever connected me, as a post-doc in 2001, to that
terrified student back in 1999. I never felt the need to remind him.
I have a number of vivid memories
of Wasserburg. At the time, he was
already retired or close to retired, so he would spend much of his time at his
house on the Oregon coast. He would come down to Caltech every couple weeks and
all his people would be expected to meet with him. In between his visits, we would be busy in
the Lunatic Asylum, working in the clean lab or on one of the Lunatics. Most of my work was actually done on a
single-collector magnetic sector ICP-MS (Finnigan Element I) in Ken Farley’s
lab as we were basically measuring platinum group element concentrations in
marine sediments, after processing the samples through Carius tube digestions
up in the Lunatic Asylum. As the meeting day would approach, all of us would
converse with each other and try to figure out who had the best results to
present. The one with the best results
would go first, though nobody wanted to go first. I remember one of my first
meetings involved us trying to focus my research. I was sitting outside his office, next in
line. One of the other post-docs was
inside meeting with Wasserburg. All I
could hear was Wasserburg screaming, quite a feat because his door was
padded. And while Wasserburg was
screaming, his secretarial assistant was sitting across from me, lifting her
leg making loud trombone-like noises. It
was such a weird feeling. On the one hand, I was terrified of what was behind
the door. On the other hand, I was trying so hard not to laugh. Then the door
swung open and out came the post-doc with a very red face. Clearly, he had been
crying or was on the verge of it. This
was not good news for me, I thought. “You’re
next”, Wasserburg said. I walked in, sat
down, and began to hear a long, f-word laced tirade about something I didn’t
understand. I remember sitting quietly, listening
to him and every once in a while looking around the office. There were various
paintings around the office, including one Georgia O’Keefe style painting by
Hal Helgeson on the ceiling. I had TA'd Helgeson's geochemistry class when I was an undergrad at Berkeley in the late 1990s, so I was familiar with his artwork (Helgeson passed away in 2007). I found
that very odd, but tried to remain focused.
Eventually, Wasserburg calmed down and proceeded to talk about my game
plan. I started to explain my research
plan, but I was so stressed that only gibberish came out of my mouth, which
only accelerated the frequency of f-words coming out of his mouth, which then
made me sound even dumber. Wasserburg was not a patient man. I told him I
wanted to study redox evolution of the oceans with the platinum group elements,
but he seemed to think that was too large of an undertaking. Moreover, he told
me that the system is not yet understood enough for us to do that. We needed a
pilot project. And then, in his genius,
he suggested that I focus on something we know something about, and that was
the platinum group element signal at the Cretacous-Tertiary boundary (KTB). “Look at that and see if we can use this
spike to understand PGE behavior during diagenesis.” I was not convinced, but I was willing to go
with the flow. Within a week, I was on the phone with Frank Kyte at UCLA, one
of the leaders in investigating Iridium in KTB sediments using, at the time,
instrumental neutron activation analysis (INAA). And within three weeks, Frank
and I would make a visit down to Scripps Oceanographic Institute in San Diego to
collect samples from the Deep Sea Drilling Program. We went straight to DSDP 577 and 596. I also obtained samples from Stvens Klint in
Denmark.
That summer, I worked endlessly on
developing the methods and generating data.
It was a tough time because, in the beginning, many things didn’t work
out. But I was having fun. I was essentially setting up a new component
of the lab, which would become useful for me when I started at Rice
University. I was also able to
participate in the petrology reading group at Caltech, listening to Paul
Asimow, Ed Stolper, John Eiler, Peter Wyllie and George Rossman discuss
science. Celal Sengor was there as a visiting scientist. I had opportunities to
interact with Jason Saleeby and I met a number of stimulating post-docs and
grad students. Caltech was a very
special place as I was surrounded by so many bright minds, providing inspiration
every day.
One of my most vivid memories was
when Celal Sengor gave a talk in the snake pit. It was on continent formation,
specifically the role of island arc accretion in Eurasia in crustal growth.
Sengor, one of the great synthesizers of our time, staying true to his
reputation, showed figures of geologic maps, some modern, some historic. It was
truly fantastic to watch and listen to.
I was sitting way in the back, up high, next to Wasserburg. I remember
watching Wasserburg muttering under his breath throughout most of the talk,
cursing at each slide because he couldn’t see the slides clearly. I found this all very amusing, which made it
difficult for me to focus on the talk. After the talk ended, Wasserburg took
Celal and me to dinner to talk about continent formation. We found ourselves at
an Italian restaurant. The two were
trying to decide what type of wine to order.
Not being a wine drinker, I stayed out of the discussion, but I noticed
on the menu a Lava Cap wine, one of the few wine labels I actually knew because
it was owned by David Jones, one of my geology professors at Berkeley (he
passed away in 2007). I pointed out the
wine and both Jerry and Celal decided that was the one they would get because
it would fit the theme of the night. The
wine came and the discussions began with Celal roaring about how continents
form, Wasserburg questioning him, me listening. I say “roaring” because Celal
has a deep, outsized bellowing voice that can be heard from a mile away. And
each time Celal would make a statement, his arms would flail outwards, knocking
over the wine bottle, but each time Wasserburg would somehow catch the bottle
with lightning speed. I found this very amusing. After three near disasters,
Wasserburg had enough and furiously blurted out, “if you don’t stop knocking
the bottle over I’m going to walk out of here!”
The bottle didn’t fall again, but the discussions got more heated and
louder. Customers left until we had the restaurant to ourselves. Spit was
flying everywhere, with one little spitlet from Celal arcing around the bottle
and finding its way behind my glasses and landing in the corner of my eye. I got shot, but I forced myself to stay
calm. We ended the evening with each of
us signing the bottle. Unfortunately, we
forgot to bring it with us.
September 11, 2001. I woke up to a
phone call at about 7 AM. The phone call came from the father of one of my
friends. He was in Taiwan, she was in Boston. He told me to turn on the
television. Everything changed that day.
American Airlines Flight 11 had been hijacked. This was the flight I would take every month
or so to go back and forth between Los Angeles and Boston. Caltech shut down. It was quiet. Eerily quiet. Nobody knew what to do. Emotions were running wild. Wasserburg, himself, was at Harvard when this
all happened. He kept saying “this is bad, this is bad… it’s a hell of a mess”. We all knew that the world was going to be
different. But then we stopped talking
about it. It was too traumatic and most
people just internalized it.
At about this time, I had already
begun writing up my results of the PGES in the KTB. I already had a first draft and felt very
proud of myself. I emailed him the
paper. The next morning, Wasserburg
called me and said he wanted to go to breakfast with me and talk about the
paper. I was stunned that he had the
time to read my paper so soon. In fact, when I look back, I think Wasserburg
felt that everything his students or post-docs were doing was highest priority
or at least he sure made you think so.
So we met, early in the morning. He was wearing a baseball cap and what
looked to be something like pajamas, but I’m not sure. I didn’t ask. As we walked to the Athenaeum for breakfast,
he said, “The introduction is very good.
You write very well.” I was
stunned by the compliment, but then he went quiet. An awkward silence as we
continued our jaunt to breakfast. We
placed our orders and then he spoke again, “But the rest is shit.” I don’t know why I didn’t get mad, but when
he said that, although I was shocked, my eyes just widened. Nobody had ever told me that. And over the next hour or so, he walked me
through my paper and showed me how to lay things out logically and
clearly. What was important, what was
not important. How to focus on the key
points, keep models simple, and ignore second order details. I came out that breakfast a very different
scientist, much improved. It was like I
had been introduced to a whole new world of how to think.
I remember saying one of the issues
I was dealing with was how to make sure we don’t make reviewers mad, so we had
to find a way to cite everyone. He told
me this story of when he was back at Harvard, sitting on a bench along the
Charles River, thinking about an astrophysics problem. Along comes a man, walking
his dog. The dog takes a shit
(Wasserburg’s words) and the man, being responsible, pulls out a plastic bag
and bends over to pick it up, placing it into a trash can. They continue on but it turns out the dog
wasn’t actually finished, so the dog squatted again and let another one out. Only
this time, the man didn’t have a plastic bag.
The man looked around and moved on.
Wasserburg concluded his story with, “You can’t pick up all the shit in
life”. To be honest, I wasn’t exactly
sure what Wasserburg was trying to say to me, but I interpreted it as an odd
way of telling me, write the paper and worry about the references later. If that was what he was trying to say to me,
he indeed was right.
I started as an assistant professor
at Rice University in Houston, Texas in the late spring of 2002. I drove with my mother from California to
Houston in early May, stopping briefly in Arizona to look at a Flame-colored
Tanager, stopped at the halfway point in El Paso, TX and then onwards to
Houston. From that point on, I was on my
own. My first step was to buy a house. I
had just come in after Tropical Storm Allison, which devastated Houston,
flooding many of the homes in the area. Enron, the energy company had just
collapsed. Economy was down. I found a beautiful townhouse not too far
from campus, which was at a remarkably affordable price, largely because it had
flooded during Allison. Coming from
California, the concept of floods hadn’t sunk in with me. I sort of thought
these were one hundred year floods, so this renovated townhouse would be just
fine. I was able to buy the house with 10% down. I remember one conversation
with Wasserburg over the phone. I told him what I had just done and he turned
around to say I was crazy. He had never heard of 10% down and he urged me to
get a lawyer. I wasn’t able to afford
one, so he told me he would pay for my lawyer. Obviously, I was not going to
allow him to do that, but I was moved by his generosity. Somehow, Wasserburg foresaw the whole housing
crisis that would hit the US economy in the next year. The banks were giving out way too many loans
to people who could barely afford to buy a house, like me.
Seven years later, I got tenure at
Rice. I had maintained in contact with Wasserburg in the interim, asking him
for advice on various issues, bouncing ideas off of him. So on tenure day, I called my advisors,
Roberta and Wasserburg, to thank them for their support. With Wasserburg, I was
trying to figure out the best time to call him.
For some stupid reason, I thought that he probably gets up very early in
the morning. So I called him at about
630 AM his time. I dialed him up and after several rings, he picked up. I said hello, but before I could say anymore,
he said, “Who the f--- is this? Why did you wake me up.” I quietly hung up the phone, terrified, but
hoping he did not realize it was me. Ten
minutes later, I receive an email in his characteristic all upper case font,
saying “NEVER WAKE UP AN OLD MAN FROM HIS BEAUTY SLEEP. YOU CAN CALL NOW.” I
called again and we had a nice chat, he told me about the birds in his yard,
asked me about what I was working on, and just as we were about to hang up, he
said to me, “Now that you have tenure, you should start doing something useful.”
It would be many years before I
would see Wasserburg again. This happened
back in the fall of 2014 at gathering at Harvard to honor Rick O’Connell, a
geodynamicist who defined the field in mantle convection among many other
things. O’Connell was on my thesis
committee. He was partly responsible for failing me on my oral exams, but at
the same time, he was essential to my success as he pulled me aside that day,
when I was contemplating quitting, and told me that he had failed me because he
knew I could do better. I stuck it
out. O’Connell was one of Wasserburg’s
first students. His first papers were on analytical solutions to the
destabilization of the lithosphere undergoing thickening and eclogitic phase
changes. This was before the plate tectonic revolution, but that work still has
relevance today in all the research being done on delamination. O’Connell had cancer and we all knew his end was
near, which is why we all gathered at Harvard, basically to say goodbye. Wasserburg was there and gave the most
heartfelt and eloquent tribute I’ve ever heard anyone give. We had come full circle. We were all
there. My thesis committee, Roberta,
Stein Jacobsen, Rick and Adam Dziewonski were there. That was the last time I saw Rick, who passed
away in 2015, and Adam, who passed away this year (2016) and Wasserburg.
Wasserburg was tough, but behind
that façade, he genuinely cared and would bend over backward to help one learn.
He was truly generous in his willingness to share his ideas, his science, and
just advice about life. When he talked to you, you would have 100% of his
attention. As he would say himself, he had discovered the elixir of life, which
was to continue being curious about the world. His wit, clarity of mind, unbridled
enthusiasm and vision, immense breadth of knowledge, coupled with a child-like
curiosity and a truly creative mind, took Earth sciences to new dimensions. The
world will never be the same. His memory lives on in all of us.
Cin-Ty Lee
June 15, 2016
June 15, 2016
Rice University, TX
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