Melvin Calvin Quotes

In 1961, Frank Drake hosted the first SETI conference at Green Bank. There were only eleven in attendance, including Philip Morrison; Carl Sagan; Melvin Calvin (who, during this conference, received a call awarding him a Nobel Prize!); astronomer Su-Shu Huang, who invented the notion of habitable zones around stars; and neuroscientist John Lilly. Swept up in optimism and camaraderie, the participants formed a whimsical organization called the Order of the Dolphin, after Lilly’s work toward communicating with these sleek, bright creatures who seemed to encourage our hope for conversing with other intelligent species.

Keen to progress the work on photosynthesis, Lawrence hired Melvin Calvin, a colleague from the Manhattan Project, immediately after the war. The story has it that on the day of the Japanese surrender Lawrence told Calvin that ‘Now is the time to do something useful with radioactive carbon.