Waldo Cohn Passed Away 8/27/99

[Susan Gawarecki <loc@icx.net>]

Apparently the passing of this luminary of nuclear science has gone
unnoted on Radsafe.  Following is his obituary from the Aug. 30 Oak
Ridger.  Our community will certainly miss him.

--Susan Gawarecki

Waldo Cohn dies at age 89 
OR pioneer renowned as scientist, musician 

Waldo E. Cohn, world-renowned biochemist and pillar of the scientific,
civic and cultural life of Oak Ridge for all of the city's first
half-century, died Friday afternoon, Aug. 27, at Methodist Medical
Center of Oak Ridge. He was 89.

Cohn came to Oak Ridge in late September 1943 from the University of
Chicago, where the year before he had joined the Manhattan Project, then
in its earliest months. Within weeks of his move to the new community he
had organized what became the Oak Ridge Symphony Orchestra, now the
longest continuously performing symphony orchestra in Tennessee.

Within the next two years he would not only contribute in major ways to
the crash effort in World War II to develop a nuclear bomb, but pioneer
what is considered by many of his peers as the most significant
peacetime application of nuclear science-the development, production and
distribution of radioisotopes.

He was a pioneer of Oak Ridge city government also, elected to the
Advisory Town Council in 1951, re-elected in 1953, named the council's
chairman and then subjected to a recall election in February 1954. The
recall petition was in reaction to a council resolution he had sponsored
calling for the immediate desegregation of Oak Ridge schools. The recall
failed, a majority voting for his removal but not a two-thirds majority
as required. Just three months later, in May 1954, the U.S. Supreme
Court ruled school segregation unconstitutional and Oak Ridge schools
began desegregation in September 1955.  After the recall vote, Cohn
voluntarily stepped down as the council's chairman but served out his
term until September 1955.  

Cohn has been in poor health for several years but it was only after the
1996-97 symphony series that he gave up his cello chair in the
orchestra. He was conductor of the orchestra for 11 years, from the
first concert in November 1944 until 1955. In 1983 he was named
conductor emeritus. The coming Oak Ridge Symphony concert series is
dedicated to him with special and, now, memorial remembrances planned at
the opening concert on Saturday, Oct. 23. There will be a memorial
service earlier that day at 2 p.m. at the United Church, Chapel on the
Hill. 

Cohn was also the founder of the Oak Ridge Civic Music Association. In
1947, after earlier financial support for the symphony had been
withdrawn by the Manhattan Engineer District, he called together a
committee to organize a subscription concert series. This group became
ORCMA and ultimately the sponsor of not only the symphony concerts but
also Oak Ridge's well-known chamber music series.

Cohn was one of the first to foresee the value of radioisotopes as
tracers and was influential in starting their production at reactors
here and then setting up a system for radioisotope distribution to the
scientific community.  He was also acclaimed for his development of ion
exchange processes for fission products and rare earth separations and
also as a leader in nucleic acid research. In 1963 the American Chemical
Society cited him for his "pioneering work in ion exchange
chromatography which has made possible much of the progress that has
been made in two completely different fields of chemistry since World
War II."

Alvin M. Weinberg, former ORNL director and a close personal friend,
says of Cohn's work at what was then known as Clinton Laboratories: "The
main task (in 1943) was to produce gram quantities of the nuclear
explosive, plutonium. The techniques developed there were transferred to
the huge plutonium-producing nuclear reactors at Hanford, Wash. 

"To manufacture plutonium, one had to 'cook' uranium in an atmosphere of
neutrons in the nuclear reactor at Clinton Lab. In this process uranium
atoms were split to create radioactive 'fission products.' Cohn set
about to identify the chemical species of fission products. He applied
to this process a technique known as 'ion exchange chromotography.'

"After the war Cohn realized that this technique could be applied to the
characterization of the components of the nucleic acids, DNA and RNA.
Cohn's technique ultimately led to Crick and Watson's structure of the
genetic materials, DNA and RNA. For this achievement Cohn received the
Chromotography Award of the American Chemical Society and he was named a
fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

"Cohn was also the first to organize and promote the use of radioactive
radioisotopes produced in nuclear reactors. The widespread use of
radioisotopes is perhaps the most important scientific byproduct of the
Manhattan Project."

Cohn was politically involved both nationally and locally. He was one of
the organizers of a petition signed by a large number of scientists
urging that a nuclear bomb first be detonated in a test blast before
being used on human targets. Immediately after World War II he became
active in urging international control of nuclear weapons.

Locally he was one of the leaders of a group of local Democrats who
worked to make basic reforms in the organization and operation of the
party in Anderson County.

He was a strong proponent of the development of nuclear power and often
spoke out against what he thought were exaggerated fears about the
dangers of radioactive materials to the public.

Born in San Francisco on June 28, 1910, the son of the late Max and Rae
Cohn, Waldo Cohn received all of his higher education at the University
of California at Berkeley: his bachelor of science degree in chemistry
in 1931, his master of science degree in 1932 and then, after a period
as a plant chemist and supervisor in two West Coast chemical firms, his
doctorate in biochemistry in 1938.  He continued at Berkeley as a
teaching fellow for another year and then joined Harvard University as a
tutor in the biochemical sciences and a research associate in the
medical school. In 1942 he was recruited for the Manhattan Project at
the Metallurgical Laboratory at University of Chicago. He came to Oak
Ridge Sept. 30, 1943.

Less than two months after joining the staff at Clinton Laboratories, he
placed a small notice in The Oak Ridge Journal, weekly newspaper
published by the Manhattan Engineer District, inviting all Oak Ridgers
interested in playing in an orchestra to a meeting. Nine other musicians
responded, two other strings and seven woodwind players. In a 1983
interview he told Juanita Glenn of The Knoxville News-Sentinel, "I
didn't want to join an orchestra, I was just looking for someone to play
duets."  Cohn had studied the cello since age 11, although at first he
hated carrying the large instrument. Before his 16th birthday he had
been invited to join the Berkeley Community Orchestra.  

That initial group of interested early Oak Ridge musicians grew into a
string orchestra of 19. At first they rehearsed in the Cohn living room
but soon moved to the auditorium of the original Oak Ridge High School,
which was located on the knoll off Kentucky Avenue overlooking
Blankenship Field and which, before it was demolished, had become
Jefferson Junior High School. The early musician group named him their
conductor and gave their first concert as the Oak Ridge Symphonette in
June 1944. Then, within weeks, they became the 65-member Oak Ridge
Symphony, which gave its first concerts on Nov. 3-4, 1944. 

Besides the Symphony and his service on the early Advisory Town Council,
Cohn was a regular reader for Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic,
reading primarily scientific texts. In more recent years he also
volunteered regularly at the Oak Ridge Convention and Visitors Bureau,
where he would answer visitors' questions about the wartime atomic bomb
development and the later research at the ORNL Biology Division, from
which he had retired in 1975.

Originally Cohn had been with the Biology Division but in 1944 moved to
the Chemistry Division. Then, in 1947, as his research became
increasingly involved with genetic materials, he returned to the Biology
Division. For years after his retirement he served ORNL as a consultant,
going to his office virtually daily.

Cohn was a prominent scientific editor, most recently as founding editor
for a series of monographs detailing the progress in nucleic acid
research from the mid-1960s to the late 1980s. He also served as a
supervising editor for the Nomenclature Committee of the International
Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, which worked to codify new
biochemical compounds. He published scores of papers in scientific
journals and lectured widely at scientific meetings and on university
campuses. He was also a fellow of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science and served on the Scientific Advisory Board of
St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis.

He was honored with numerous awards including two Guggenheim
Fellowships, the first in 1955 for a year's study at Cambridge, England,
and in anticipation of which he stepped down as symphony conductor that
year. The second Guggenheim award was in 1962 and he was also awarded a
Fulbright Research Scholarship, also for study abroad.

He is survived by his wife, Charmian. She is the former Charmian Edlin,
of New York City. They met while he was at Harvard and they were married
in Chicago soon after he went there with the Manhattan Project. Also
surviving are his son, Marc Cohn, and his wife, Francine, of Hood River,
Ore.; another son, Don Cohn, and his wife, Linda, of St. Louis, Mo.;
four grandsons, Ben Cohn, of St. Louis and Barton Cohn of Hood River,
sons of Marc and Francine, and Jesse Cohn and Gabriel Cohn, both of St.
Louis, sons of Don and Linda .He is also survived by Jesse's wife,
Darlene, and a brother, Roy Cohn, of Berkeley, Calif. The body was
cremated. McMarty-Martin Oak Ridge Funeral Home handled the
arrangements. The family requests that memorials be contributions to Oak
Ridge Civic Music Association, P.O. Box 4271, Oak Ridge, TN 37831-4271.

-- 
==================================================
Susan L. Gawarecki, Ph.D., Executive Director
Oak Ridge Reservation Local Oversight Committee, Inc.
136 South Illinois Avenue, Suite 208
Oak Ridge, Tennessee  37830
Phone (423) 483-1333; Fax (423) 482-6572; E-mail loc@icx.net
VISIT OUR UPDATED WEB SITE:  http://www.local-oversight.org
==================================================
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