The Ideals and Ideas that Led to MRS
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As the Presidents See It...
The Ideals and Ideas that Led to MRS RustumRoy, 1977MRS President My year as official President, 1977, started in 1976 and differed little from the decade 1967-77, which was, in materials science terminology, the nucleation phase of the Materials Research Society. Who we are today is stamped with the structure of the nucleus that eventually survived and reached critical radius. I will write about our ideological roots, if not our space group and symmetry. Max de Pree, CEO of Herman Miller, which is consistently rated as one of the best-run corporations in America, has written in his widely respected book, Leadership is an Art, that every successful organization and its people must be thoroughly imbued with that organization's own vision and "story." What was the common vision of the Materials Research Society founders? Where did they acquire that vision? How did they bring it to fruition? Bringing the story of MRS to its members is the focus of this short essay. Although, as the reader can see in my article on page 74, the beginnings of the Society are linked, for 16 years, to the Materials Research Laboratory at Penn State, the existence of the Materials Research Society (MRS) is one more proof of Margaret Mead's wonderful admonition: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed it's the only thing that ever has."
This article is about such a group and their vision. People
MRS was brought into being by a small group of "conspirators" who were committed to changing the world of professional meetings and society affiliations. They were committed to genuinely engendering, fostering, and sustaining interdisciplinary interaction. They knew that something new had to be done because, by the late 1960s, in spite of rhetorical lip service and massive "incentives" by the federal government, most of the university world had hardly budged from its disciplinary moorings. Many of the names of these early founders of the Society will appear in this article and, with due apologies to some of them, I believe that Harry Gatos, Ken Jackson, Mark Myers, I. Warshaw, and I were the
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key players in creating MRS. I served as host and facilitator of the group. Two institutions provided most of the (not inconsiderable) bootlegged support for several years: Penn State's Materials Research Laboratory (which I directed) and the Bell Telephone Labs, via Jackson, backed by Bruce Hannay, vice president, and, of course, Bill Baker, president.
MRS was brought into being by a small group of "conspirators" who were committed to changing the world of professional meetings and society affiliations. Vision In the early phases (1967-83), during most of which the Society and its precursor activities were administered out of our lab at Penn State, the vision which guided those involved with the Society had certain key elements. First, the Society was to focus exclusively on interactive factors in three dimensions of materials research: • Interdisciplinary research, with
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