Two University Scientists Receive National Awards

Two Harvard scientists will be among the 12 recipients of the National Medal of Science for 1967. The medal, awarded annually since 1959, is the government's highest award for outstanding achievement in mathematics, science, and engineering.

Francis Birch '24, Sturgis Hooper Professor of Geology, and George B. Kistiakowsky, Abbot and James Lawrence Professor of Chemistry, will receive the medals from President Johnson at a ceremony in the White House early this year.

Edwin H. Land 30, president of Cambridge's Polaroid Corporation, was also named to receive a medal. He developed the Land Polaroid camera, studied color vision, and contributed to color television.

Kistiakowsky, a member of the Harvard Faculty since 1930, is known for studies in the mechanics of chemical reactions. During World War II he devised a system of conventional explosives to trigger the first atom bomb.

Birch, who has taught at Harvard since 1932, is an authority on the structure of the earth's interior. In particular, he has studied heat-flow in the earth's core and the effects of high pressures and temperatures on the minerals that compose it.

Government Advisor

Kistiakowsky, born in Russia, was Special Assistant to President Eisenhower for Science and Technology from 1959 to 1961. In 1961-65, he was appointed the first chairman of the Committee on Science and Public Policy of the National Academy of Sciences.

During World War II, he became chief of the Explosives Division of the National Defense Research Committee. He established and ran the Explosives Research Laboratory at Bruceton, Pa., and helped to establish a second laboratory, for underwater explosives research, at Woods Hole.

In 1944 he became chief of the explosives division of the Los Alamos Laboratory of the Manhattan Project, which produced the atom bomb. For this work he received the President's Medal for Merit.

Birch, who got his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1932, was elected president of the Geological Society of America for the year of 1964. In addition, he is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society.