Remembering IBM Researcher Dick Garwin

Summary

IBM Fellow Emeritus and longtime U.S. presidential advisor Richard “Dick” Garwin has passed away. He was 97 years old. In his seven-decade career, Garwin helped define the future of MRI machines, laser printers, touch screens, and the hydrogen bomb. He spent his life in the pursuit of science, and was awarded time and again for his contributions. Among his many accolades, Garwin received the Presidential Medal of Science, the Vannevar Bush Award, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He advised every president from Eisenhower to Obama, and Enrico Fermi believed him to be “the only true genius” he had ever met. Garwin was clearly gifted from a young age. By just 21, he had earned his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, and by 23, he began to work at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. There, he designed the first working hydrogen bomb with a team of researchers, many of whom had been involved in the Manhattan Project. In a matter of weeks, Garwin took what had been theoretical concepts from the likes of Edward Teller and Stanislaw Ulam, and turned them into the world’s first working prototype. But this was only the beginning for Garwin’s contributions to science. Around this same time, he accepted a position at IBM’s new research division that was based out of Columbia University. He moved with IBM Research to its new headquarters in Yorktown Heights, when the facility opened in 1961. Garwin had an office in the lab through to his retirement in 1993. An archival image of Garwin working on his spin-echo magnetic system.Garwin split his early years at IBM with continuing to serve the U.S. government. He spent two terms on the President’s Science Advisory Committee, advised President Kennedy on nuclear tests in 1962, worked on troop sensors for use in Vietnam, advised President Carter on potential South African nuclear tests in 1979, and later worked on nuclear nonproliferation treaties. He even helped debunk the argument that there was a second shooter in the Kenned...