Where There’s a “Will,” There’s a Way….

I‘m visiting family in the Southwest as I type this entry.  To say that I come from a family of pack rat readers is an understatement.  Every room in my parents’ three story old house has stashes of books, even the bathrooms.  In one room, I think the bed is entirely supported by books stacked neatly underneath it.  (And this is a looooong family tradition; I can remember vacations in Wisconsin where the prized activity was digging through old books and ancient Saturday Evening Posts in a cousin’s attic, to find the perfect text for reading on the screened- in porch on a rainy summer day).

This week’s discovery was an article in the Winter issue of the Journal of the Southwest, a refereed journal  published quarterly at the University of Arizona.  “The Eclipse of the Century,” tells the story of married scientists Cecile DeWitt-Morette and  Bryce Seligman Dewitt, who pursued greater understanding of Einstein’s theory of relativity. A goal was to observe one of the longest total eclipses of the sun, taking the highest-quality possible photographs in order to measure and document “bending” of light caused by the pull of gravity.  The opening paragraph of the article by University of Texas PhD candidate David Conrad hooked me:

 Cécile DeWitt-Morette sat on a roof in a sandstorm in the Sahara Desert. It was 10:30 a.m. on June 30, 1973, and nearly 100 degrees Fahrenheit. If the storm did not let up soon, all was lost. A year and a half of preparation and approximately $100,000 in grants would be for naught, and a similar opportunity would not come for another 18 years. But Cécile had no power over the wind or sand or time. She could only wait. Beneath her feet, inside the structure she and her colleagues from the University of Texas (UT) McDonald Observatory built, her husband Bryce DeWitt—head of the expedition—and five other men waited for the storm to abate. The clock ticked off the seconds, and still the sand blew. All the money and effort spent to send these people here, to the oasis of Chinguetti in the Islamic Republic of Mauritania, could not alter the forces of nature.

You may be asking, “How on earth is this a topic for the Elder Law Prof Blog,” right?  The answer comes from the fascinating start to UT’s decision to develop a top-flight team of academic researchers.  It began with a “will.”  The article continues…

The land and money for the observatory came from the estate of William Johnson McDonald, born in the Republic of Texas in 1844.  McDonald served in the Confederate army during the Civil War.  He later became a wealthy banker, traveled extensively, and collected books on astronomy and other natural sciences.  He died in 1928 … leaving no children and no spouse but over $1 million in assets.  His will bequeathed the vast majority of this sum “to the Regents of the University of Texas . . . for the purpose of aiding in erecting and equipping an Astronomical Observatory.”  UT’s dean of science likened the unexpected gift to “lightening coming out of a clear sky.”

The article makes it clear that as important as early private money was to the success of UT’s development of leading team of physicists and other scientists during the space race of the 1960s and beyond, on-going federal grant funding was also essential.  The article, subtitled “A Story of Science, Money, and Culture in Saharan Africa and the American Southwest,” is fascinating on many levels….