Dyson, Freeman

▪ 2001

      While advances in genetic research made commercial trafficking in genetic material a distinct possibility, one prominent voice led the call for caution. Freeman Dyson, a British-born American physicist, issued a warning upon receiving the 2000 Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion. He speculated that such activity could lead to “a splitting of humanity into hereditary castes,” a situation that would amount to the human race's regressing back to a society of masters and slaves. “No matter how strongly we believe in the virtues of the free market economy, the free market must not extend to human genes,” he said.

      Dyson had made a career out of encouraging a symbiosis between science and religion, emphasizing the importance of having both points of view complement each other so that advances in technology could be implemented in ways that were moral and ethical. He had also advocated using technological advances in ways that would span economic and social gaps. The alternative, he said, was profit-driven research that merely created “toys for the rich.”

      Dyson was born on Dec. 15, 1923, in Crowthorne, Berkshire, Eng. He received a degree in mathematics from the University of Cambridge in 1945 after having taken time out from his studies to work as a civilian statistician for the Royal Air Force during World War II. Graduate studies at Cambridge, the University of Birmingham, Eng., and Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., followed, and he returned to Cornell to teach in 1951. From there Dyson moved on in 1953 to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., where he remained professor emeritus in 2000.

      In addition to encouraging a conscientious approach to scientific progress, Dyson was also known for having the ability to relate scientific principles to the layperson. His 1979 autobiography, Disturbing the Universe, was praised as an accessible account of the mind of a scientist. Other books included Weapons and Hope (1984), a study of nuclear weapons; Origins of Life (1985); Infinite in All Directions (1988); and Imagined Worlds (1998). He also published articles in Scientific American and other periodicals. His projections for the future offered a hopeful vision of what scientific progress could achieve, including exploration and colonization of space and the search for intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. In the 1950s he was a member of the Orion Project research team that developed a working model of a spacecraft meant to carry humans to Mars.

      A fellow of the Royal Society (U.K.) and a member of the National Academy of Sciences (U.S.), Dyson received in 1996 the Lewis Thomas Prize, awarded to scientists for artistic achievements. He had also been awarded the Wolf Prize in physics in 1981.

Anthony G. Craine

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▪ American physicist

in full  Freeman John Dyson 

born Dec. 15, 1923, Crowthorne, Berkshire, Eng.

      British-born American physicist and educator best known for his speculative work on extraterrestrial civilizations.

      The son of a musician and composer, Dyson was educated at the University of Cambridge. As a teenager he developed a passion for mathematics, but his studies at Cambridge were interrupted in 1943, when he served in the Royal Air Force Bomber Command. He received a B.A. from Cambridge in 1945 and became a research fellow of Trinity College. In 1947 he went to the United States to study physics and spent the next two years at Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., and Princeton, where he studied under J. Robert Oppenheimer, then director of the Institute for Advanced Study. Dyson returned to England in 1949 to become a research fellow at the University of Birmingham, but he was appointed professor of physics at Cornell in 1951 and two years later at the Institute for Advanced Study, where he became professor emeritus in 2000. He became a U.S. citizen in 1957.

      A longtime advocate of exploration and colonization of the solar system and beyond, Dyson studied ways of searching for evidence of intelligent extraterrestrial life. In the 1950s he was a member of the Orion Project research team that developed a working model of a spacecraft meant to carry humans to Mars. He wrote several books, including Disturbing the Universe (1979), an autobiography; Weapons and Hope (1984); Origins of Life (1985); Infinite in All Directions (1988); Imagined Worlds (1998); and The Sun, the Genome, and the Internet (1999).

      A fellow of the British Royal Society and a member of the American National Academy of Sciences, Dyson received the Wolf Prize in physics in 1981, the Lewis Thomas Prize, awarded to scientists for artistic achievements, in 1996, and the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion in 2000. In his Templeton Prize address he warned of the dangers of a “free market in human genes,” arguing that it could lead to the splitting of humanity into hereditary castes and a return to a society of masters and slaves.

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