The Odyssey of Yuan Tseh Lee: “Should Be All Right”

It is a privilege and a pleasure to write about Yuan Lee. For me, as for a host of his students and colleagues, Yuan is inspiring for his “beautiful life as a wonderful human being, his dedication to science, his selflessness and idealism,” and his earnest devotion to teaching and public service. The words in quotes are from his own description1 of Madame Curie (with “her” f “his”). As a boy, Yuan read Eve Curie’s biography of her mother and decided to become a scientist. I hope that many young people who learn of Yuan’s splendid odyssey will likewise decide to pursue science. A 60th birthday has long been accorded particular honor, especially in Asian traditions. Completing five cycles of the zodiac, it is a time to celebrate mystic harmonies of life, to venerate ancestors, and to think of the generations to come. In service of this tradition, when tracing Yuan’s career, it seems apt to emphasize here early portions of his trajectory, including a few special collisions, some fateful, some just fun.2 These antecedents to his remarkable accomplishments offer much for young scientists to emulate. As in collision dynamics generally, initial conditions are often as important as the forces encountered. Yuan Tseh Lee was born on November 19, 1936, in Hsinchu, Taiwan, the third of nine children. His father, Tse Fan Lee, was a professional artist, and his mother, Pei Tsai, an elementary school teacher; their ancestors had moved to Taiwan from mainland China in the sixteenth century. When Yuan started school, Taiwan was still under Japanese occupation, and during World War II his family was relocated to the mountains to avoid bombing by Allied Forces. Only after the end of the war was he able to attend classes regularly, in the third grade. He was quite active in sports, becoming a little league champion in PingPong and playing second base in softball.3 (Much later, he was tempted to try to play professional baseball.) In high school, Yuan was on the tennis team and played the trombone in the band. All along, he was an avid student; on his own initiative he read widely, including many literary works and social science as well as natural science. Yuan entered the National Taiwan University in 1955, admitted without the usual entrance examination by virtue of his excellent performance in high school. By the end of his freshman year, he had decided to major in chemistry. Under Professor Hua-sheng Cheng, Yuan carried out a research project on the separation of Sr and Ba by paper electrophoresis. He recalls fondly a “free and exciting atmosphere, the dedication of some professors, and camraderie among my fellow students”, but also notes conditions were “less than ideal” for studying science.1 For instance, Yuan once told me that in his student days in Taiwan he had to grind his own stopcocks. Such a start was poetic, for a man destined to construct so many elegant and intricate scientific instruments; it also links Yuan to Galileo and Newton, who ground their own lenses to make telescopes. After receiving his B.Sc. degree in 1959, Yuan undertook graduate study at the National Tsinghua University. Under Professor H. Hamaguchi, he determined the radioisotopic composition of a mineral found in hot spring sediments, completing his M.S. degree in 1961. He continued another year with Professor C. H. Wong, conducting X-ray structure determinations as a research assistant. In 1960 Kenneth Pitzer from Berkeley visited Taiwan to give a series of lectures, providing Yuan his first opportunity to meet a professor from the West. Although just a first-year graduate student, Yuan was asked to prepare, from audio tapes, translations of the lectures for publication in the Journal of the Chinese Chemical Society. This was an arduous task, since his English then was spotty; he recalls that in trying to decipher some words and phrases, he had to replay the tape so often that it would break from wear. Engaged in such linguistic grinding, he did not dream that someday his own lectures would be translated into many languages. In 1962, having decided to come to the United States for further graduate study, Yuan enlisted help in sounding out possibilities. His older brother, Yuan Chuan, then pursing a Ph.D. in biochemistry at the University of Iowa, wrote to Berkeley asking about prospects if Yuan Tseh applied. The response was discouraging; it said, emphatically, that Berkeley had no way to evaluate a foreign student applicant. However, Professor Wong, who had done his Ph.D. at Caltech, wrote to Leo Brewer at Berkeley, testifying that Yuan was as good as Caltech graduate students Wong had known. Highly respected both as a scientist and as a keen judge of talent, Brewer interceded to good effect, and Yuan was admitted to Berkeley. Blossoming at Berkeley. Early that fall, Yuan came to my office to ask if he could join my research group. What ensued was a misunderstanding, but with lucky consequences. Then and since my policy was to accept any student who wanted to work with me, but only after they have a clear idea about difficulties as well as optimistic prospects. Also, I want the student to choose their own project. My approach is to describe several possiblities, offer my assessments of pros and cons, but not tell anyone what to do. Habitually I say, “You might want to consider ....” Although the year before my group had nice success with crossed molecular beam studies of alkali atom reactions with alkyl iodides, since then we’d had a miserable time trying other halogen compounds that poisoned our surface ionization detector. When Yuan came, I told him of these frustrations and suggested he might want to consider a safer project, involving microwave spectra of a beam rather than reaction. It was easy for him to miscontrue that, and he showed good judgment in joining instead Bruce Mahan’s group. However, the next year Yuan took my quantum mechanics course and also a seminar course I gave for the first time on molecular collision theory. It was also the last course I taught at Berkeley, as my group moved to Harvard that fall. The quantum course was the first taught in the Pitzer Auditorium of Latimar Hall, which was still under construction and the lighting was not fully installed. This led to an episode that Yuan told me aided his linguistic education. Because of the dim light, we kept the side doors open. A dog wandered in that had a markedly bent tail. I’d been talking about perturbations, a word Yuan did not know. He said it became immediately clear when I pointed out that the dog’s tail must have suffered a perturbation. 6341 J. Phys. Chem. A 1997, 101, 6341-6344