Renowned Harvard Scientist Dies at 95

Clifford Frondel, a pioneering minerologist who was part of the team that first studied the moon rocks brought to earth by Apollo 11, died last Tuesday in Winchester, Mass., from complications due to Alzheimer’s disease. He was 95.

Frondel, who taught at Harvard from 1939 to 1977 and served as chair of the geological sciences department for four years, was one of the preeminent minerologists of the twentieth century. His subjects ranged from moon rocks to kidney stones, and he was credited with discovering 48 minerals.

“He was a giant in the field of minerology, which was an area that Harvard used to excel in and has kind of gone away now,” said John A. Wood, a researcher in the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Among students and colleagues, Frondel was well-known for his quirky sense of humor and many practical jokes.

“He had an immense number of very devoted students who were both interested in the topic he taught and attracted by his personality,” said Ursula B. Marvin, a researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

“He had a tremendous sense of humor, and a kind of New York style about him,” Wood said.

“One of his favorite sayings was, ‘Make every half-hour count,’” Marvin said.

Marvin recalled presenting Frondel with a piece of wood streaked with paint, on which she had constructed a molecular model. Frondel, an art collector, had the wood framed and hung it in his home, convincing his wife that it was a work by Jackson Pollock.

Frondel later revealed the truth to his wife during a lecture on methods he had developed for detecting art fraud.

Gerry J. Wasserman, a visiting scholar in the earth and planetary sciences department, worked with Frondel on the lunar rocks project.

“It was exciting as hell,” he said. “Nobody had any clue what to expect. The only sound information you had was looking at it through a microscope.”

After coming into contact with lunar dust from Apollo 12, Frondel was quarantined for two weeks along with the astronauts because of fears that alien organisms might have infected them.

Occasionally, Frondel’s sense of humor and professional insight came together, as in his coining of the term “zap craters.”

Wasserman said Frondel made reference to a ray gun possessed by a popular comic strip hero of the day to explain strange glass formations in the lunar rock samples, saying, “They’re zap craters, like in Buck Rogers!”

The glass formations were the result of particles striking the surface of the moon at high speed.

In addition to the minerals he discovered himself, Frondel was the honorary namesake of two others: Cliffordite and Frondelite.

During World War II, Frondel worked with the Army Signal Corps to improve the quartz oscillating plates used in walkie-talkies. He was president of the Minerological Society of America in 1956, and spearheaded a project to revise a set of textbooks known as the “data volumes” used widely by minerologists.

Frondel was born in New York City. He attended the Colorado School of Mines, and went on to earn a master’s degree at Columbia University and a doctorate degree at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology.

Frondel’s wife, Judith, a fellow minerologist and frequent collaborator, said that he maintained his sense of humor even as he struggled with Alzheimer’s disease. She said that in his final days he was visited by a steady procession of workers from his nursing home, coming to say goodbye to “their professor.”

“Even in his last stages he was able to make people happy,” she said.

Clifford and Judith Frondel would have celebrated their fifty-third wedding anniversary today.

“We were married 53 years, and we laughed all through those years,” Judith Frondel said.

Frondel is survived by his wife, a daugher, Barbara, who resides in Israel, and a sister, Martita van Ness.