Oesper Symposium Draws National Audience

The 2004 Ralph and Helen Oesper Symposium, hosted by the department of chemistry, is a national, as well as local and regional, event that is made possible by a bequest from Ralph E. Oesper and his wife, Helen Wilson Oesper.

This year’s symposium honored George M. Whitesides, Mallinckrodt professor of chemistry at Harvard University, who is the recipient of several awards in the field and has served in numerous advisory positions that include work with the Department of Defense, the National Science Foundation, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Over 200 students, scientists, and engineers attended the day long symposium that included poster sessions by regional companies and students from UC and other universities, as well as presentations by speakers from Northwestern and Stanford Universities; the Universities of Toronto, Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and California-Berkeley; Lucent Technologies; and the Scripps Research Institute.

The Oesper gift fulfills several needs. It funds a faculty position in chemistry education and the history of chemistry, a yearly departmental colloquium on the history of chemistry, and scholarships for outstanding high school chemistry students. It is also used to purchase additions to the Oesper Collection of Books and Prints in the History of Chemistry. The collection currently contains almost 3,200 books and journals and approximately 1,800 photographs and prints relating to the history of chemistry.

Ralph Oesper joined the department of chemistry in 1918 and remained active after retirement until his death at the age of 91. A prolific writer, he published more than 300 papers and countless articles. He also used his mastery of German to translate almost two dozen books on analytical, organic, and colloid chemistry and the history of the discipline.

According to Joseph Caruso, acting head of the department, Oesper is remembered by colleagues as “dedicated to his science. He felt that a university should not only advance the frontiers of science, but should preserve the records of the scientists who have advanced those frontiers in the past. His interest in this ‘chemical history’ often extended into the personal lives of scientists and the ways the events of the times in which they worked affected their ideas."