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Jerome Wiesner (Jerome Bert Wiesner) (May 30, 1915 – October 21, 1994) was an educator, a science advisor to U.S. Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy, an advocate for arms control, and a critic of anti-ballistic-missile defense systems. He was also an outspoken advocate for the exploration of outer space using only unmanned satellites, most notably in his consistent denouncement of Project Mercury and its follow-ups.
Career He was associated with MIT for most of his career, joining the MIT Radiation Laboratory in 1942 and working on radar development. He worked briefly at Los Alamos, returned to become a professor of Electrical Engineering at MIT, and worked at and ultimately became director of MIT's Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE). He became Dean of the School of Science in 1964, Provost in 1966, and President from 1971 to 1980. He was also elected a life member of the MIT Corporation. He held numerous positions as a government policy advisor on science and technology. During the Watergate scandal, on June 28, 1973 it transpired that Charles W. Colson, counsel to President Nixon, had prepared an "enemies list" of people deemed "hostile to the administration," while a memo from John Dean discussed "how we can use the available Federal machinery to screw our political enemies." This "enemies list" included Wiesner among twenty-one academics. Other memos indicated that Nixon had ordered that MIT's subsidy be cut "in view of Wiesner's anti-defense bias." Three MIT associates — Noam Chomsky, Daniel Ellsberg, and Edwin Land — were also on the list, giving MIT more names on the list than any other single organization. Wiesner was portrayed by Al Franken in the 1998 HBO miniseries From the Earth to the Moon. Education Categories | ||||||||
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