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Acceptance Speech for the 1993 V. M. Goldschmidt Award
Acceptance Speech for the 1993 V. M. Goldschmidt
Award
S.Ross TAYLOR* I thank Brian for his kind words. It is a great honor to receive the Goldschmidt Medal and I thank the Geochemical Society for this award. I am particularly pleased since Brian was a student of V. M. Goldschmidt and thus, as a student of Brian’s, I can claim to be in lineal descent from the master. My career has been influenced by many people and by a number of stochastic events. Growing up on a farm in New Zealand was a peaceful introduction to life, even if it did little to prepare me for the realities of the outside world. I was fortunate to have supportive parents, who were insistent, in the old Scottish tradition, on the virtues of obtaining a good education, and who encouraged me to seek wider horizons. I found these first at Canterbury University College, where the Geology Department staff in 1946 was Professor Robin Allan, now commemorated in the famous meteorite locality of the Allan Hills of Antarctica, and Dr. Brian Mason. Geology was presented in such an entrancing way that I was immediately converted from my chemistry major to pursue the interesting prospects that Robin Allan and Brian opened up. Brian shortly went to Indiana University, where I followed him as a graduate student. My initial task was to proofread the galleys of the first edition of Brian’s now famous text Principles offGeochemistry. It was a superb introduction to geochemistry and to the virtues of a well-written book. Brian arranged that I should learn the technique of emission spectrography in Dick Leininger’s well-equipped laboratory in the Indiana Geological Survey. Brian next departed for the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and Henrich Neumann. Mineralogy Curator at Oslo, replaced him for a term. Henrich talked me into going to Oxford. where Bill Wager and Louis Ahrens were transforming the Department of Geology and Mineralogy. Louis, then one of the leading geochemists, asked me to coauthor a second edition of his text SpectrochemicalAndysis. This had unforeseen consequences a decade later in Houston. During this period in Oxford, I acquired from Malcolm Brown and Bill Wager, insights into layered intrusions that were to stand me in good stead when I was later trying to understand the evolution of the Moon. Knut Heier was a frequent visitor from Oslo and we did a lot of work on trace elements in minerals, again a valuable exercise. Harold Urey spent a sabbatical year at Oxford in 1956. Although he was officially in the Clarendon (Physics) Laboratory, he spent a lot of time in Geology, where I suspect he found a group of people more inclined to listen to his views on the Moon, possibility that one could seriously study the Moon and the planets. long before we imagined going there.
In Oxford, I also met my wife, No&l, who was working in organic crystallography in Dorothy Hodgkin’s laboratory. 1 have been fortunate that, as a scientist herself, she has always understood why I have to spend so much time in this country. After several years in Oxford, I followed Louis Ahrens to Cape Town, where we set up a still flou~shing department of geochemistry, which was run for many years by Tony Erlank, my first student in Cape Town. By the time I moved to the Australian National University in Canberra, I was heavily engaged in the great controversy over the origin of tektites. This taught me a lot about the influence of personalities in science and that “what is revealed truth in Cambridge is only a bad joke in Oxford.” In Canberra, I developed the technique of spark source mass spectrometry and continued my interest in the whole question of accurate trace element analysis and of the critical importance of interlaboratory calibration, This was a topic of great interest to Louis Ahrens. I still have slabs of G-l and W-l that Louis gave me on my desk, but the battle is not yet over, particularly since the introduction of ICP-MS equipment. At Canberra, I began to worry about continental growth and did a lot of work on island arcs in that context with Alan White, Dave Whitford, and Jim Gill. Then the lunar samples arrived and dominated my life for over a decade. This is mostly the fault of Robin Brett, who had been on leave in Canberra in 1967, and who enticed me to Houston in May 1969. Once there, I was rather easily persuaded to stay to operate the optical emission spectrographic laboratory set up
* Department ofNuclear Physics, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT 2601. Australia. 1984
Geochemical
in the Lunar Receiving Laboratory at the instigation of Elbert King, to analyse the first samples to be returned from the Moon by Apollo 1 I. It was the most important and critical thing that I have done. It took all my physical and intellectual energy to get ready on two months notice and 1 needed every bit of experience that I had gained in the previous two decades. As Wellington remarked after Waterloo, “it was the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life.” Just as my early work with Louis Ahrens had prepared me for that event, so my association with Malcolm Brown and Bill Wager had prepared me to think about magma oceans and a super-Skaergaard model for the evolution of the Moon, that I developed with Petr Jakes, and in later work on the lunar highland crust with Ted Bence. It is my view that we now understand the composition, evolution, and origin of the Moon better than that of the Earth. Meanwhile, I kept one foot on the Earth during this time. The problem of the composition and evolution of the continental crust continued to bother me. The collect or analyse a million samples. I recalled that Goldschmidt had also addressed the same problem by analysing glacial clays. Nature has already done the sampling, if only we could interpret the record in the sedimentary rocks. Maureen Kay, who also had worked with me on the tektite problem, and Weldon Nance did a lot of the early work. Then 1 was fortunate to collaborate for many years with Scott McLennan on this problem. Scott
Society Awards
1985
is unique in understanding both the nature of sedimentary rocks, and of geochemistry, which he learnt from Bill Fyfe, who, like me, grew up on a farm in Canterbury, New Zealand. Scott and I have managed to write well over thirty papers (even one on tektites!) and a book, and we still continue this collaboration at long distance. I got another of my students, Roberta Rudnick to look at the problems of the lower continental crust, and she has now become a leading expert in that difficult topic. One minor piece of wisdom that I have acquired is to have bright graduate students. My journey though geochemistry has been made pleasant by many other colleagues and close friends. Al Levinson, Denis Shaw, and I have had a long editorial association in Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta that extended over twenty years with never a cross word. I have a host of friends in the lunar and planetary science community, a truly national treasure for this country: every effort should be made to ensure its survival. It is of course inhabited by several other members of the Taylor clan some of whom claim a doubtful relationship. The Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston has been a second home, and has provided me with unique opportunities to collaborate with many scientists in this country, where I have always been made extremely welcome. It is a pleasure to record this example of international scientific collaboration, and I thank the Geochemical Society once again for this award.
Award
S.Ross TAYLOR* I thank Brian for his kind words. It is a great honor to receive the Goldschmidt Medal and I thank the Geochemical Society for this award. I am particularly pleased since Brian was a student of V. M. Goldschmidt and thus, as a student of Brian’s, I can claim to be in lineal descent from the master. My career has been influenced by many people and by a number of stochastic events. Growing up on a farm in New Zealand was a peaceful introduction to life, even if it did little to prepare me for the realities of the outside world. I was fortunate to have supportive parents, who were insistent, in the old Scottish tradition, on the virtues of obtaining a good education, and who encouraged me to seek wider horizons. I found these first at Canterbury University College, where the Geology Department staff in 1946 was Professor Robin Allan, now commemorated in the famous meteorite locality of the Allan Hills of Antarctica, and Dr. Brian Mason. Geology was presented in such an entrancing way that I was immediately converted from my chemistry major to pursue the interesting prospects that Robin Allan and Brian opened up. Brian shortly went to Indiana University, where I followed him as a graduate student. My initial task was to proofread the galleys of the first edition of Brian’s now famous text Principles offGeochemistry. It was a superb introduction to geochemistry and to the virtues of a well-written book. Brian arranged that I should learn the technique of emission spectrography in Dick Leininger’s well-equipped laboratory in the Indiana Geological Survey. Brian next departed for the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and Henrich Neumann. Mineralogy Curator at Oslo, replaced him for a term. Henrich talked me into going to Oxford. where Bill Wager and Louis Ahrens were transforming the Department of Geology and Mineralogy. Louis, then one of the leading geochemists, asked me to coauthor a second edition of his text SpectrochemicalAndysis. This had unforeseen consequences a decade later in Houston. During this period in Oxford, I acquired from Malcolm Brown and Bill Wager, insights into layered intrusions that were to stand me in good stead when I was later trying to understand the evolution of the Moon. Knut Heier was a frequent visitor from Oslo and we did a lot of work on trace elements in minerals, again a valuable exercise. Harold Urey spent a sabbatical year at Oxford in 1956. Although he was officially in the Clarendon (Physics) Laboratory, he spent a lot of time in Geology, where I suspect he found a group of people more inclined to listen to his views on the Moon, possibility that one could seriously study the Moon and the planets. long before we imagined going there.
In Oxford, I also met my wife, No&l, who was working in organic crystallography in Dorothy Hodgkin’s laboratory. 1 have been fortunate that, as a scientist herself, she has always understood why I have to spend so much time in this country. After several years in Oxford, I followed Louis Ahrens to Cape Town, where we set up a still flou~shing department of geochemistry, which was run for many years by Tony Erlank, my first student in Cape Town. By the time I moved to the Australian National University in Canberra, I was heavily engaged in the great controversy over the origin of tektites. This taught me a lot about the influence of personalities in science and that “what is revealed truth in Cambridge is only a bad joke in Oxford.” In Canberra, I developed the technique of spark source mass spectrometry and continued my interest in the whole question of accurate trace element analysis and of the critical importance of interlaboratory calibration, This was a topic of great interest to Louis Ahrens. I still have slabs of G-l and W-l that Louis gave me on my desk, but the battle is not yet over, particularly since the introduction of ICP-MS equipment. At Canberra, I began to worry about continental growth and did a lot of work on island arcs in that context with Alan White, Dave Whitford, and Jim Gill. Then the lunar samples arrived and dominated my life for over a decade. This is mostly the fault of Robin Brett, who had been on leave in Canberra in 1967, and who enticed me to Houston in May 1969. Once there, I was rather easily persuaded to stay to operate the optical emission spectrographic laboratory set up
* Department ofNuclear Physics, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT 2601. Australia. 1984
Geochemical
in the Lunar Receiving Laboratory at the instigation of Elbert King, to analyse the first samples to be returned from the Moon by Apollo 1 I. It was the most important and critical thing that I have done. It took all my physical and intellectual energy to get ready on two months notice and 1 needed every bit of experience that I had gained in the previous two decades. As Wellington remarked after Waterloo, “it was the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life.” Just as my early work with Louis Ahrens had prepared me for that event, so my association with Malcolm Brown and Bill Wager had prepared me to think about magma oceans and a super-Skaergaard model for the evolution of the Moon, that I developed with Petr Jakes, and in later work on the lunar highland crust with Ted Bence. It is my view that we now understand the composition, evolution, and origin of the Moon better than that of the Earth. Meanwhile, I kept one foot on the Earth during this time. The problem of the composition and evolution of the continental crust continued to bother me. The collect or analyse a million samples. I recalled that Goldschmidt had also addressed the same problem by analysing glacial clays. Nature has already done the sampling, if only we could interpret the record in the sedimentary rocks. Maureen Kay, who also had worked with me on the tektite problem, and Weldon Nance did a lot of the early work. Then 1 was fortunate to collaborate for many years with Scott McLennan on this problem. Scott
Society Awards
1985
is unique in understanding both the nature of sedimentary rocks, and of geochemistry, which he learnt from Bill Fyfe, who, like me, grew up on a farm in Canterbury, New Zealand. Scott and I have managed to write well over thirty papers (even one on tektites!) and a book, and we still continue this collaboration at long distance. I got another of my students, Roberta Rudnick to look at the problems of the lower continental crust, and she has now become a leading expert in that difficult topic. One minor piece of wisdom that I have acquired is to have bright graduate students. My journey though geochemistry has been made pleasant by many other colleagues and close friends. Al Levinson, Denis Shaw, and I have had a long editorial association in Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta that extended over twenty years with never a cross word. I have a host of friends in the lunar and planetary science community, a truly national treasure for this country: every effort should be made to ensure its survival. It is of course inhabited by several other members of the Taylor clan some of whom claim a doubtful relationship. The Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston has been a second home, and has provided me with unique opportunities to collaborate with many scientists in this country, where I have always been made extremely welcome. It is a pleasure to record this example of international scientific collaboration, and I thank the Geochemical Society once again for this award.