James Bryant Conant

Background

James Conant was born on March 26, 1893, in Dorchester, Massachusetts. He was the third child and only son of James Scott Conant and Jennett Orr Bryant. His mother was deeply involved in transcendental religious movements. His father was a photoengraver who had a shop laboratory that he used to master the chemical procedures in this new field. In his own words, Conant was raised by "a regiment of women," including his mother, several aunts and cousins, and his two elder sisters.

Education

As a young child Conant was fascinated by chemistry; and, sensing his son’s interest, the elder Conant built a home laboratory where James was able to conduct experiments. In 1903 Conant was admitted to the highly competitive Roxbury Latin School, a private school founded in 1645 by James Eliot. Roxbury Latin had achieved an outstanding reputation as a college preparatory school particularly strong in both the sciences and the classics. Roxbury Latin was the only high school in Greater Boston that had laboratories for the teaching of chemistry and physics. More important than the laboratories was the instructor Newton Henry Black. Conant's performance in high school earned him the Harvard Club Scholarship and graduation in 1910 near the top of his class of twenty-one students.

Conant graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard in three years and managed to find enough time away from the classroom and laboratory to write for the Harvard Crimson, join Delta Upsilon, and develop a friendship with his rooming house neighbor, novelist J. P. Marquand. Conant's graduate school plans included study with physical chemist Theodore W. Richards, the first American-born winner of the Nobel Prize in chemistry. In his third year of undergraduate studies, he did some special research with organic chemist E. P. Kohler, a new arrival to Harvard from Johns Hopkins University. This project resulted in Conant's becoming Kohler's graduate assistant in advanced organic chemistry for two years. Ultimately, Conant wrote a double thesis in physical and organic chemistry for his Ph.D. degree in 1916.

Career

During World War I, Conant was a major in the Chemical Warfare Service. From 1919 to 1933 he was a member of the Harvard chemisiry department. His research career ended in 1933 with his unexpected selection as president of Harvard.

An innovative leader, Conant created new types of scholarships and professorships, and new procedures for appointments, promotions, and tenure to ensure faculty excellence. He fostered coeducation by eliminating separate classes for Radcliffe and Harvard students and by admitting women to the law and medical schools. Following World War II he ordered the cessation of all classified research as inimical to the mission of a university. The 1945 Harvard report General Education in a Free Society addressed itself to the need to maintain a general liberal education at the college level and proposed a required common core of courses in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences that stressed general relationships and values. Conant himself taught in the natural science part of the program for three years and developed the case history method of teaching science. He was the general editor of the Harvard Case Histories in Experimental Science (1948; reissued 1957). In 1950 he was a principal advocate before Congress for federal support of science and the formation of the National Science Foundation.

Conant intended to follow Theodore W. Richards into physical chemistry. In 1912, however, Elmer P. Kohler joined the Harvard faculty. Through Kohler, Conant became enchanted with organic chemistry and did a double doctoral dissertation under these men. His major interest thereafter was organic chemistry from the viewpoint of physical chemistry. His two major influences were physical chemists: the Dane Johannes N. Brønsted and the American Gilbert N. Lewis. Conant transferred their conceptions in thermodynamics, acids and bases, the transition state, and the shared electron-pair bond to organic chemistry. During his fifteen-year research career (1919–1934) he was a major contributor to the flourishing of physical organic chemistry in the United States; his many gifted students became leaders in several areas of the field.

Conant also applied Lewis’ ideas to the triphenylmethyl free radicals discovered by Moses Gomberg in 1900. He made reactivity studies of them and introduced a new method of preparing them by reduction of the corresponding carbonium ion by vanadous chloride (1923). Conant’s papers on free-radical chemistry showed that bulky aliphatic groups in themselves cannot make a free radical stable, but they can enhance the stability of an already stabilized radical.

Among Conant’s most important studies were those using the ideas of Brønsted on acids and bases. In 1927 he demonstrated the existence of "super-acids," revealing that acids in a nonaqueous solvent may have an acidity enormously higher than in similar concentrations in water. This discovery provided a useful means to titrate bases that could not otherwise be titrated, and led to a deeper understanding of acids and bases in nonaqueous solvents. Conant utilized this method in his last researches on chlorophyll (1929–1934). He revealed that chlorophyll is a dihydroporphyrin, found the site where phytol is attached to the carbon skeleton of the molecule, and determined the relativebasicities of the four pyrrole-nitrogen atoms, using potentiometric titration with the superacid perchloric acid in glacial acetic acid.

Although his career as a chemist was over by 1934, Conant’s influence on American science continued, especially during World War II, when he was a major organizer of scientists. He was a member of the National Defense Research Committee, a science policy group formed in 1940 to mobilize scientists for the war effort. In 1941 he went to Great Britain to establish the exchange of scientific information with the British; there he learned about radar and established a London NDRC office, and the trickle of information soon became a flood.

From 1941 to 1945 Conant was chairman of the National Defense Research Committee, responsible for thousands of projects, including explosives, smoke generators, microwave radar, electronic countermeasures, and uranium fission. He also served as an adviser to the successful synthetic rubber program. As the uranium fission project increased in size and variety, he devoted more and more time to it, overseeing its transformation from an energy development program into a weapons program. As a member of the cabinet-level policy group supervising the project, he favored the use of the atomic bomb.

Conant was an architect of postwar atomic energy policy. In 1945 he went on a mission to Moscow, where he advocated international control of atomic weapons, with free access to all information and the right to inspect; he served as an adviser to the American delegation at the United Nations that presented the plan for international controls vetoed by the Soviets at the end of 1946. President Truman offered Conant the chairmanship of the Atomic Energy Commission, but he declined because of the need to concentrate on his duties at Harvard as well as his awareness of the opposition of some scientists because of his approval of the bombing of Japan and his support of the May-Johnson Bill (to create the Atomic Energy Commission) in Congress.

After leaving his post at Harvard in 1953, Conant was named President Emeritus. He went on to serve as United Ststes High Commissioner and then Ambassador to West Germany from 1953-1957.

Achievements

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  As a chemist, educational reformer, head of a major university, and advocate of federal support for science, Conant played a major role in the rise of American science to its postwar position of prestige and high accomplishment.
  
  Conant's admiration for the German university system fueled his belief that Harvard could be transformed from a New England university with a national reputation to a world-level institution. He initiated graduate degrees in education, public policy, and the history of science. His innovations included faculty appointments unattached to any specific department so as to strongly encourage interdisciplinary thinking and collaboration. At Harvard, as at other institutions, the budgetary effects of the depression were felt, and Conant found it necessary to keep the faculty ranks spare. He managed to do this without sacrificing quality by eliminating many of Harvard's inbred hiring policies and instituting the practice of opening position vacancies internationally.
  
  Conant later received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from John F. Kennedy. He also went on to receive the Atomic Pioneers Award (along with Vannevar Bush and General Leslie Groves) "For his exceptional contributions to the national security as Chairman of the National Defense Research Committee in overseeing the successful development of weapons systems, including the atomic bomb, during World War II and for his pioneering leadership in the Nation's atomic energy program after the war as Chairman of the Committee on Atomic Energy of the Joint Research and Development Board and as a member of the General Advisory Committee to the Atomic Energy Commission."
  
  James B. Conant High School in Hoffman Estates, Illinois, and James B. Conant Elementary School in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan are named after him.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Two modes of thought: My encounters with science and education

    (The book presents Dr. Conant's discussion of the two mode...)

    1964
  • The Chemistry of Organic Compounds 1933
  • Our Fighting Faith 1944
  • Education in a Divided World 1939
  • Education and Liberty 1953
  • The growth of the experimental sciences 1949
  • Science and Common Sense 1951
  • Education and Liberty 1953
  • The American High School Today: a First Report to Interested Citizens 1959
  • Slums And Suburbs: A Commentary On Schools In Metropolitan Areas 1961
  • Thomas Jefferson and the Development of American Public Education 1962

Religion

Both Conant's parents were members of the Swedenborgian Church, an organization devoted to exploring the entwinement of religion, nature, and life. His mother's interest in the church waned, however, and Conant later referred to himself as a Unitarian.

Politics

Conant was forced to begin thinking not only about campus issues and politics, but also about contemporary world events: the Great Depression, the rise of Nazism in Germany, the eventual establishment of the Third Reich, and the foreboding threat of World War II. Conant's presidency would be broken into three distinct eras: 1933 to 1940 was a period of innovative policies at the institutional level and pleas for military and civilian preparedness at the national level; 1940 to 1946 was marked by long absences from Cambridge as Conant became closely involved with the organization and administration of scientific research funded by the federal government; and 1946 to 1953 as postwar equilibrium was achieved and the debates over atomic energy policy and the manufacture of thermonuclear devices heated up.

As the war in Europe seemed imminent, Conant supported the Roosevelt administration's quest for peacetime military conscription legislation, an action that was not warmly received by the undergraduates at Harvard. Following Germany's invasion of her European neighbors, Conant's attitude crystallized; he sought ways that scientists and scholars could mobilize to defeat Hitler.

Views

Conant’s interest in reaction mechanisms was evident from his first studies and in the 1920’s grew into a series of important studies on the relative reactivities of quinones and organic halides. By 1924 he had established quantitative relationships between the thermodynamic and kinetic factors in these reactions and had shown how changes in structure affected the reaction rate. His work with organic halides also refuted the theory of alternating polarity along the carbon chain. Before Lewis’ idea of the shared electron-pair bond (1916), dualistic theories of valence prevailed. The alternating polarity theory claimed that the carbon atoms in a saturated chain were alternately more and less positive. Therefore, the reactivity of alkyl halides should rise and fall with the lengthening of the carbon chain. Conant measured the reaction rates of organic halides and found no support for the theory. Instead, Lewis’ theory with its possibility of partial charges due to the degree of sharing in the electron-pair bond, served as a means to predict the relation between structures and reaction rates in the organic halide series.

Conant’s studies on carbonyl addition reactions were important as a means to learn about reaction mechanisms. The Lewis electron-pair sharing theory of valency suggested that the carbonyl group had a polar character.

Conant saw that this dipolar character could explain various carbonyl addition reactions, and he successfully explored the idea in several such reactions. His 1932 paper on semicarbazone formation from carbonyl compounds, written with his student Paul D. Bartlett, became a classic example of acid-base catalysis and of the way in which the distinctive thermodynamic and kinetic factors control the intermediate reactions and the products.

Although Conant later affirmed that use of the bomb was "correct," he was also one of the first advocates of nuclear control. In a speech shortly after the end of the war, Conant asserted, "One thing has been as clear as daylight to me ever since I first became convinced of the reality of the atomic bomb: namely, that a secret armament race in respect to this weapon must at all costs be avoided." Conant would briefly serve as a member of the General Advisory Committee to the newly created Atomic Energy Commission

Membership

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  Conant was a Fellow of the Royal Society.

  Royal Society , United Kingdom

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  German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina , Germany

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  Phi Beta Kappa , United States

• 

  American Association for the Advancement of Science , United States

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  Delta Upsilon

Personality

As an educator, Conant was indifferent to the pressures of politics and consensus. He would cling obstinately to his opinions if he thought them right. On the wall of his office at Harvard he kept framed cartoons with the caption: "Behold the turtle, he makes progress only when his neck is out."

Connections

On 17 April 1921, James Conant married Grace Thayer Richards, the daughter of Theodore William Richards, Harvard’s leading chemist and Nobel laureate; they had two sons.

Father:

James Scott Conant

Mother:

Jennett Orr Bryant

Acquaintance:

Konrad Adenauer

Wife:

Grace Thayer Richards

Student:

Paul Doughty Bartlett

mentor:

Newton Henry Black

mentor:

Theodore William Richards

mentor:

Elmer Peter Kohler

Acquaintance:

Dwight Eisenhower

When Dwight D. Eisenhower, former president of Columbia University, was inaugurated as president of the United States in 1953, one of his first appointments was the choice of Conant to become the United States high commissioner to Germany.

Acquaintance:

Winston Churchill

References

• Man of the Hour: James B. Conant, Warrior Scientist From the White House to Los Alamos to Harvard University, Man of the Hour is based on hundreds of documents and diaries, interviews with Manhattan Projects scientists, Harvard colleagues, and Conant’s friends and family, including her father, James B. Conant’s son. This is a very intimate, up-close look at some of the most argued cases of modern times - among them the use of chemical weapons, the decision to drop the bomb, Oppenheimer’s fate, the politics of post-war Germany and the Cold War - the repercussions of which are still affecting our world today.
  2017
• The Teacher and the Taught: Education in Theory and Practice from Plato to James B. Conant
  1963
• James B. Conant: Harvard to Hiroshima and the Making of the Nuclear Age James B. Conant (1893-1978) was one of the giants of the American establishment in the twentieth century. President of Harvard University from 1933 to 1953, he was also a scientist who led the US government's effort to develop weapons of mass destruction, and his story mirrors the transition of the United States from isolationism to global superpower at the dawn of the nuclear age. The book is not only an insightful narration of Conant's life, it is also a brilliant and important account of the making of the nuclear age, a chronicle that contains much that is new.
  1993