This doctoral dissertation project funded is by the Science, Technology, and Society Program. It is a social and biographical study of the life and career of the American physical chemist Harold Clayton Urey (1893-1981). It focuses primarily on the public work Urey did as an American Nobel Laureate to negotiate the respective roles of science and religion in society. Although he was a dedicated atheist from a young age, Urey eventually became a public advocate of the importance of religion for public and scientific life. From the Depression of the 1930s to the height of the Cold War, his public positions on science and religion evolved in the midst of changing social and political contexts. They also evolved as he moved between research projects from the isotope chemistry that won him the Nobel Prize in 1934, to the Manhattan Project, to geochemistry, and finally to cosmic chemistry and planetary exploration. This project uses oral histories, archives, and published sources from the periods in question to put Urey's public positions in context and to examine the relationship between Urey's experiences as scientist and citizen from WWI to NASA's Apollo program and his ideas of the relationship between science and religion. It also examines Urey's inability to act on these ideas or to gain acceptance for them among the majority of his peers.
Urey's evolving discussions of science and religion are important for two principal reasons. First, the dominant narrative of the 20th century is one of secularization, with science and scientists billed as the primary forces of secularization. Urey's story will thus give us an interesting perspective from which to question and add some needed nuance this narrative. Second, Urey's ideas of science and religion, while shaped by social and political contexts, also reflected the role that he felt science and scientists should play in society. Studying Urey's ideas more closely in the context of his scientific work will give us insight into Urey's motivations for engaging in Big Science projects such as the Apollo program.
This project relies upon several archives and libraries: the papers of Harold C. Urey at the University of California, San Diego Mandeville Special Collections Library; the oral history collection and journal collection of the Chemical Heritage Foundation; the archives of the Conference on Science, Philosophy, and Religion (1939-1968) at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America; the papers of Linus Pauling at the Special Collections Library of Oregon State University; the archives of the Atomic Scientists of Chicago at the Special Collections Library of the University of Chicago; the oral history interview with Harold C. Urey at the Columbia University Library; and the oral history collection of the American Institute of Physics.
