Remarks prepared for Under Secretary
of Energy David K. Garman
Fermi Award Ceremony
National Academy of Sciences
Washington, DC
June 21, 2006

Thank you, Ray.

It’s a pleasure for me to join with all of you today in honoring Art. He is someone I have admired for many years.

I thought I would share with you some of the story of how we got here today. The arc of Art’s life has taken him from Birmingham, Alabama, to Berkeley, California, with many stops in exotic spots along the way.

Art’s father was an agronomist and a very good one. His services were in demand around the world because of his skill at helping sugar cane growers boost the yield they got out of their land. So Art did plenty of traveling as a child to places like Louisiana, Puerto Rico and Egypt.

He spent most of his formative years, from age 6 to 16, in Cairo, where he attended British schools and he says came away with a good educational foundation.

From watching his father work, Art says he also learned the difference one person can make—a lesson he has certainly taken to heart.

Art credits Popular Mechanics magazine for first stirring his interest in science and mathematics. He skipped several grades in school, came back to the U.S. at 16, enrolled in Virginia Polytechnic Institute and graduated at the age of 18 with a degree in physics. In doing so he was carrying on a family tradition his father had started by also graduating from VPI at the age of 18.

Art served two years in the Navy as an instructor in radar and electronics before beginning his studies in physics at the University of Chicago under Enrico Fermi. When Fermi recommended Art for a job in the physics department at the University of California at Berkeley in 1954, he described him as his “second most promising graduate student.”

Art never did find out who the most promising student was, but he got the job at Berkeley anyway. He then embarked on his first professional career as a basic researcher in particle physics. As a member of Luis Alvarez’s team, he helped develop hydrogen bubble chambers—then the leading edge technology for mapping and measuring elementary particles. In 1969, Alvarez won the Nobel Prize for his work and decided to shift his focus to astrophysics.

By 1973, Art found himself in charge of Alvarez’s research team but very much distracted by the implications of the energy crisis which gripped the country at that time. He soon decided to turn his professional career toward the study of energy efficiency—a decision that set the course that brought him here today.

I will leave it to Secretary Bodman to take the story from there.

I think Art is well-known to all of us for his passionate, some would even say evangelical, commitment to the cause of energy efficiency. But work has not occupied all of his time. He had the good judgment to marry his wife Roz in 1955. They went on to have a son, Arthur, and two daughters, Margaret and Anne, who have in turn given them six grandchildren. Art has also always found time for hiking in national parks and traveling around the world.

His time working at the Energy Department in the 1990s was over before I arrived. But I can tell you his legacy lives on with many of his former colleagues who are striving every day to advance the energy efficiency work that he started.

I have come to know Art myself as a reliable and irrepressible advocate for energy efficiency who can be counted on to speak up wherever there is an open forum or an open microphone on the subject.

It is somewhat ironic that a man who is so dedicated to energy efficiency seems to have a boundless supply of energy himself. But the nation is surely better off for it.

Art, my sincere congratulations on this award.

Now it is my honor to introduce the Secretary of Energy, the Honorable Sam Bodman. Secretary Bodman brings some formidable scientific credentials of his own to his work overseeing a Department with an annual budget of $23.5 billion that includes more than $4 billion for support of basic research in the physical sciences.

After earning a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from Cornell and his doctorate in chemical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he taught that subject MIT for six years. He then embarked on a business career that began in venture capital and led to the position of CEO at Cabot Corporation in Boston. Since assuming his post last year, Secretary Bodman has distinguished himself as a strong advocate for increased federal investments in science and technology.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Secretary of Energy, Sam Bodman.