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Perhaps most notable of all are the scientists: Physicist John Bardeen, who shared a Nobel prize for perfecting the transistor; Astronomer James G. Baker, inventor of a satellite-tracking camera; Chemist R. B. Woodward, synthesizer of quinine and reserpine; Physicist Ivan A. Getting, World War II radar pioneer and now a vice president of Raytheon; Physicist James B. Fisk, president of Bell Telephone Laboratories and the West's chief expert on atom-test bans in the Geneva negotiations with the Russians.
Ideal School. Society Chronicler Brinton is quick to concede that the Fellows might have done just as well without going to Harvard, and nobody can be sure if the twice-weekly lunches and once-weekly dinners (preceded by scholarly sherry) in Eliot House have really broadened the minds of already brilliant men. "Frankly, the society does not turn out Renaissance polymaths," says Brinton. "But something rubs off from one Fellow on another." The mixing of many disciplines avoids the free-form excesses of latter-day academic brainstorming, remains a memorable experience to most former Fellows. Says one J.F., now a Defense Department political analyst: "The society as a body would be an ideal school for those who are to serve the country well."
At the same time, it is an ideal school for men who would have no other chance to deal with the furtive gleams of their own minds. There is a breath-taking charm in a system that allows a young mathematician like English-born David Mumford, 22, now at Harvard, to pursue this kind of private passion: "At present I am working on ruled surfaces. These offer an accessible but nontrivial example of the pathology of moduli of higher dimensional varieties—a subject whose development is strikingly neglected."