Dr. Gordon's Serious Thinkers

Nature is a vast, diversified farm and factory. Its growth and manufacturing processes have fascinated man for thousands of years, and he has tried repeatedly to mimic what he has observed. Sometimes he has succeeded to a degree that has astonished himself.

Most people are not yet aware that there is a new world to be discerned out on the far frontier of science. But research pioneers in the world’s institutions of learning and the far-flung empires of industry are probing and peering into the misty fringes of a wholly new and probably more fantastic era of discovery than any other that man has known. The shape of that era is already visible on the horizon that stretches out before the Gordon Research Conferences.

Nobel Prize-winners of world renown … meet and mingle here, an unbroken week at a stretch, with bright young apprentices in thirty-six different realms of sci- ence during the summer. They go about the three host campuses, spaced thirty-odd miles apart–Colby Junior College, the New Hampton School, Kimball Union Academy–without neckties, in gaudy open-collared short-sleeved shirts, shorts, and sneakers, arguing from dawn to dawn, secure in the Gordon Conference guarantee that they will never be quoted and that anyone they encounter in their perambulations will be a fellow scientist intent on common problems.

The Italian-born father of A-power, the late Enrico Fermi, described his now-famous slow-neutron process of atomic disintegration to a Gordon Research group in 1936, a decade before the A-bomb. Early work on the vitamins was advanced by Gordon Conference discussions a quarter-century ago.

Improvements in carbon black, which the carbon black makers laughed at when they originally heard the notion at a Gordon Conference, have transformed the auto tire from a 3,500-mile frailty to a puncture-proof reliability that can be made to last 100,000 miles.

And now, after having learned how to start and stop the growth of polymers, scientists gathered for the Gordon meetings this year have finally reported discovery of the precise mechanics by which Nature controls that growth at ordinary “room temperature” in the open air. The method is the same one that regulates the growth of hair, grass, and trees. From this it seems inevitable that man will have the cheapest clothing in history, along with plastics of incredible strength, revolutionary types of films and glass, and probably subtle new medicines derived from the enzymes which keep us all alive and growing.

“Anyone would be honored to be invited to talk to a Gordon Conference on any subject,” a British atomic scholar told the meeting where he appeared this summer. Like sentiments have been expressed to us by scientists in England, in Europe, in Africa, in India and Japan, in Australia, and in South America. At no other place than the Gordon Research Meetings are conferees afforded the leisure for camaraderie which exists in these graceful, green hills. From Sunday morning to Friday night there are only nine formal sessions, and each of the nine occupies about two hours. Roughly one hour is staccato with discussion, and the speaker in the first hour can be interrupted at will by any of his listeners. Argument goes on throughout the rest of the week, while the conferees climb mountains, swim and sail the lakes, explore nearby caves, watch for birds in the early mornings, bang sporadically on an old piano and sing songs together in the middle of the night, play in every conceivable fashion from tennis and golf to ping-pong and bridge, from string quartets and square dances to table-stakes poker.

The scientists growl each other awake at breakfast, swap tablemates repeatedly to rotate shop talk at lunch and dinner, lie in wait for famous companions after meetings, and even accompany departing speakers to the airport thirty-four miles away in order to get in a few more licks during the taxi ride.

The Gordon Conferences have been so secluded that they have gone on for twenty-five years without being known to the lay public or even to many scientists. Strictly an invitation affair, they are rigorously limited in size to assure the utmost communication of advanced ideas. No other meetings are allowed on the host campuses throughout the summer, so that any conferee may talk freely to anyone he meets without fear of violated con-fidence. All discussion is off the record. Reporters are barred.

[The] late Dr. Neil E. Gordon, the Johns Hopkins University chemistry professor … realize[d] far better than many more brilliant and gifted contemporaries that growing specialization was gradually cutting science up into small, isolated bits and that something had to be done to fit those fragments to the increasingly complex problems of human society.

It was the fashion then to be concerned with applied science, with the practical use of past discovery. Dr. Gordon moved in the opposite direction, out to the frontier of the future.

Formal papers were discouraged from the very beginning. Open, free discussion was the purpose of the meetings, and the subject matter was circumscribed to research in progress, incomplete experiments, new theories not yet boiled down onto paper for publication. Gibson Island became a scientific testing ground, a place where daring young minds could throw offbeat ideas at older heads crammed with experience and skepticism. Only two meetings were held each day, one in mid-morning, one after dinner at night. The rest of the time was spent in sporadic discussion on the golf course, on the tennis courts, in the swimming pool, on the bayshore with fishing pole in hand, or out on the water under sail. The trumpet vines, the mockingbirds, the osprey’s nests, and the mint juleps were just about as far from the conventional conception of a test tube as can readily be imagined. Yet the island was in constant ferment with original thought. Charles Allen Thomas, now president of the Monsanto Chemical Company, recalls how he as a “struggling young research chemist” was invited to a session and returned to his lab “with renewed vigor… to my work.”

Dr. Gordon’s rule for dress on Gibson Island was “No jacket, no necktie, shorts if you want to wear them.” This shocked the staid members of the Gibson Island Club, even after the Gordon Conferences moved from the club lounge to the boathouse.…A climax arrived when one conferee overheard an exchange between two Baltimore aristocrats ensconced on the club verandah, in rocking chairs. “Who are those people who have invaded our island?” the one lady inquired. “Oh,” the other replied with a sniff, “they’re Doctor Gordon’s serious thinkers.”

The seriousness of the thinking has not been lessened since the Gordon Conferences shifted from the muggy Chesapeake to the cool, pond-dotted undulations of New Hampshire in 1947. But the natives of the White Mountain foothills are proud of it. “When,” they ask me each spring, “will the scientists come this year?”

Editor's Note: The late W. george parks was the director of the Gordon Research Conferences from 1947 to 1968. This abridged essay has been reprinted with permission from the 4 August 1956 issue of Saturday Review (pp. 42-49). Permission was graciously donated by Bob Guccione, who congratulates the Gordon Research Conferences on its 75th anniversary.