16 



center because he really was a demographer and not an 

 amateur like me. 



Sharp: It sounds like you depended quite a bit on demographers. 



Revelle: Well, demography is the only real science of population 

 studies. It's essentially a mathematical subject, has a 

 mathematics of its own. 



Sharp: And yet population studies have a certain interdisciplinary 

 nature, much like oceanography. I mean, people studying 

 small specialties, and then putting the information 

 together. 



Revelle: That's right. ## 



We had a good deal of problems toward the end because 

 Jack Snyder retired, and a new dean was appointed, I mean 

 Howard Hiatt [spells it], from the medical school. He was 

 quite young and quite vigorous and very ambitious and wanted 

 to really revolutionize the science of public health and to 

 get more scholarly people into the act, more good 

 scientists. 



We had a professorship, the John Rock Professorship, 

 and he insisted that the man to fill this would be an 

 ecologist named Lovins who was a mathematical ecologist, 

 didn't know a damn thing about population problems. The 

 John Rock Professorship was, if anything, the one thing 

 where we really were concerned was human reproduction. 

 Lovins never was interested at all in human reproduction, 

 but he was an innovative ecologist, more or less. 



Anyhow, Howard rammed this appointment through, and it 

 has turned out very badly. Lovins never worked with anybody 

 else and never has produced anything since he went to 

 Harvard. He was a pal of a guy named [Dick Lewontin] who 

 came in at the same time to one of the Harvard departments 

 of biology, who distinguished himself, as far as I'm 

 concerned, by turning down a membership in the National 

 Academy of Sciences . 



Sharp: I thought those were pretty coveted. 



Revelle: Well, they are for the most part, but this man is a 



Communist, or I think he is . He's certainly a Marxist. His 

 argument for turning down the election was that every now 

 and then the academy did some classified work for the 

 government, and this was bad business. 



Anyhow, Lovins and he were pals, and I think Lewontin 

 influenced Hiatt to get him. 



Then Howard chose as my successor a man named Bill 

 Alonso. 



Sharp: That was your successor. That memo that you wrote him, 

 remember that, that I sent to you?* 



