Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
before getting involved in multi-disciplinary policy work. He feels strongly
that traditional scientific training is an irreplaceable foundation for innova-
tive work on environmental issues.
In 1983, Socolow participated in a Pugwash Conference in Venice. His
motive was to meet the physicist Evgenie Velikhov, a senior officer of the
Soviet Academy of Sciences, who was seeking collaborations with Ameri-
can scientists. Socolow was concerned about the demonization of the
USSR during the early Reagan era and saw science as an arena to build
communication and to address common aims. In Moscow in 1984 at
Velikhov's invitation, Socolow worked with Russian counterparts to launch
a collaboration between Soviet and US scientists in the general area of
energy efficiency, ultimately involving the National Academy of Sciences in
the United States as well.The collaboration continued for a full decade.
In 1984, at the 25th-year reunion of his Harvard class, Socolow met
someone else of importance in his life. His first marriage had ended 2 years
earlier, and at the reunion he was introduced to Jane Ries Pitt, widow of a
former classmate and herself a Harvard alumna.They married in 1986, and
Socolow became stepfather to her two children, Jennifer and Eric. Jane Pitt
Socolow, a physician and a professor at Columbia University, directs a
research program in perinatal and pediatric HIV infection. She shares her
husband's commitment to use science to solve society's problems.
One of the societal issues that concerns Socolow is the relationship
between technologies used in countries of the Earth's northern hemisphere
and those used in less industrialized countries of the southern hemisphere.
Thanks especially to the regular visits of Amulya Reddy (from Bangalore,
India) and Jose Goldemberg (from Sao Paulo, Brazil), CEES conducts much
original research on technologies that support the industrialization of
developing countries in environmentally responsive ways. In
Perspectives in
Energy
( January 1991), Socolow wrote: “To solve the problems of the
South, there is no reason to confine attention to those technologies and
policies that have worked in the North. Indeed, one of the great stimuli to
innovation over the next decade will be to confront the problems of the
South as new problems, and to devise original solutions for them.”
Socolow, Williams, and their colleagues and students have been explor-
ing a number of technologies for transportation and electricity tailored to
the needs of developing countries. Working against a widely held assump-
tion that technologies should be deployed in such countries only after they
have been fully tested in industrialized societies, Socolow and his colleagues
