Everett I. Mendelsohn, a longtime Harvard professor who as a scholar of the history of science explored how the evolution of science was influenced by historical and cultural trends and vice versa, died June 6 at his home in Cambridge, Mass. He is 91.
His wife, Mary B. Anderson, said the cause was a stroke.
Professor Mendelsohn’s long association with Harvard began in 1953, when he was a graduate student in biology, and continued for more than half a century. In 1960 he earned a Ph.D. in the history of science at the university, and after a year as a junior fellow, he began teaching. He retired in 2007.
Over time, he became known for teaching a variety of subjects — genetic engineering, the environment, the making of the atomic bomb — and encouraging students to examine how science influenced world events and everyday life.
“Everett is one of a new generation of social historians of science who insist that not enough attention is paid to the inner intellectual story of science,” Anne Harrington, the Franklin L. Ford professor of the history of science at Harvard, via email. “The field must also attend to how science is shaped and also help shape the conditions of the social world.”
“There was a strong ethical dimension to that work, at least for Everett,” added Professor Harrington. “For many years, he taught a course to undergraduates called ‘Science and Its Social Problems.’ Using historical methods to focus on some of the ethical challenges and ambiguities of science seems an obvious step to take; It wasn’t obvious at the time.”
Professor Mendelsohn has a particular interest in the relationship between science and warfare and, as a lifelong pacifist, is active in groups such as the American Friends Service Committee and the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Committee on Science, Arms Control and National Security (of which he is a founder). In February 1968, shortly after returning from a month-long trip to Cambodia, Thailand and South Vietnam during the Vietnam War, he painted a dark view of the military situation at odds with the official American government line.
“I think we are conducting a very bad shellacking in the military,” he told The Boston Globe, “until every one of the defenses is pierced, from one end of the country to the other.”
In an extensive interview with The Harvard Crimson that same month, he also described the impact of war on civilians, something he saw during a visit to a hospital in Quang Ngai.
“When we went beyond the medical ward to the severe injury ward, you saw the full horror of war itself,” he said.
A team of physicians sent to South Vietnam last year by President Lyndon B. Johnson reported seeing only a few cases of civilians burned by napalm (“The greater number of burns appeared to be caused of careless use of fuel in stoves,” the group’s report said). But Professor Mendelsohn said he had seen dozens of napalm victims at the hospital.
More recently, Professor Mendelsohn has focused on encouraging dialogue that can lead to lasting peace in the Middle East. His family, in a prepared obituary, said he considered the lack of progress in that area “his greatest failure in life.”
Everett Irwin Mendelsohn was born on Oct. 28, 1931, in New York and grew up in the Bronx. His father, Morris, was a salesman for a company that imported candy from Europe, and his mother, May (Albert) Mendelsohn, was a secretary in the New York City public school system.
After graduating from Brooklyn Technical High School in 1949, Professor Mendelsohn studied both biology and history at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, earning a Bachelor of Science degree in 1953.
In 1955, while doing graduate work at Harvard, he studied for some time at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., where he worked under biologist Clifford Grobstein on a project involving the acquisition of hormones from the eyestalks of lobsters. That method left the lobster alive and well, and edible too.
“I have many friends,” said Professor Mendelsohn a 2013 video interview for an archive devoted to the history of the laboratory, “because they all wanted to go while we had to remove the lobsters, which meant cooking them on the beach.”
In 1968, Professor Mendelsohn founded the Journal of the History of Biology.
“Biology, in particular, must be studied in terms of its relations to other sciences and to the intellectual currents of its time,” he wrote in an introductory essay to the first issue of the journal. “It can also be analyzed for its interaction with the social institutions that produce it.”
Whatever branch of science he writes or teaches, he is concerned with making sure the subject is not arcane.
He told the doctoral students that they should go out into Harvard Square and explain their dissertations to people in the street. In a 2013 interview at Dartmouth College, he spoke about the scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries, the Industrial Revolution and the recent digital and biological revolutions, and concluded by wondering whether advances are in danger of be so complex that the general public will not be able to understand them or make informed decisions about their applications — a prospect he does not welcome.
“Scientific revolutions require more fully developed citizen participation, something that is difficult, because the level of knowledge can be high, and one of the challenges is how you can cross that gap, ” he says.
He added, “Science, I think we can say, in some ways, is certainly too important to our lives to be left to experts alone.”
Professor Mendelsohn’s 1954 marriage to Mary Maule Leeds ended in divorce. He and Dr. Anderson, an economist and author, married in 1974. In addition to her, he is survived by a sister, Bernice Bronson; three children from his first marriage, Daniel, Sarah and Joanna Mendelsohn; Son of Dr. Anderson from previous marriage, Marshall Wallace; six grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.
“In the classroom,” says Professor Harrington, “Everett has a gift for gathering the threads of a discussion, fixing any incoherence and clearing up deeper insights. ‘Let me see if I can put together what I’m hearing here,’ he would say. Then he would present the students with a highly and elegantly synthesized version of their contributions, so that they could all marvel and marvel at their own collective thinking.”
