Man For Caltech

The specifications were tough. California Institute of Technology, picking its first president since 1920, wanted someone who was 1) young, 2) an acknowledged "name" among scientists, 3) an able administrator. Last week Caltech triumphantly announced that it had him.

He turned out to be a former Caltech research fellow: Physicist Lee Alvin DuBridge, 44, boss of the nation's biggest wartime research plant--M.I.T.'s giant radar laboratories. DuBridge once worked under Nobel Prizewinning Robert Andrews Millikan, who put Caltech in the big time. Millikan ran Caltech for 24 years, until he retired last August at 77, but always called himself "chairman of the Executive Council," never president. At 33, DuBridge landed the chairmanship of Rochester University's physics department.

DuBridge is a radiantly friendly, free & easy lecturer who, pupils swear, can make Fermat's Principle seem as simple as rolling off a logarithm. Though he was chairman of the department, he insisted on teaching an elementary physics course, and turned an unpopular grind course into one of the most popular on the campus. Says he: "It's great stimulation to people doing research to have to restate their views each year to fresh crops of youngsters."

A nuclear experimenter from way back in 1935, he talked Rochester industries into donating money to help the University build its most glamorous possession--one of the first cyclotrons. In 1940 the National Defense Research Committee picked him to run its hush-hush Radiation Laboratory at M.I.T. For five years he spent $4 million a month of the Government's money, coached a team of 3,900 scientists and assistants.

After the war ended, the University of Rochester, much to its surprise, got him back for a while. But everyone guessed he was ready for bigger things. To lure him into sitting down, the University ordered him a new cyclotron and a bigger physics building (combined cost: $550,000). Rochester's able President Alan Valentine declared: "I'd peddle papers on the street corners to keep Lee DuBridge here." Not even peddling papers could do the trick. Last week Lee DuBridge became the third University of Rochester man in five months, the sixth in ten years, to leave the staff for a college presidency.

At Pasadena, President DuBridge intends to keep at his own lab research (he believes that Caltech was once the nation's top scientific school, is now excelled by Karl Compton's M.I.T.). But he also wants to see Caltech turn out practical-minded scientists and engineers. Says he: "There used to be a 75-year gap between the emergence of something new in basic science and its application to practical affairs. Now it's more like five years."

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