In Honor of Chandler Davis, Clement Markert, and Mark Nickerson

Senate Assembly Response

Chandler Davis was well known as a science fiction author in his youth. At the same time he was a mathematics student at Harvard, earning a Ph.D. in 1950. He was an instructor at the University of Michigan, 1950-1954. In 1962, he achieved tenure at the University of Toronto. He was Vice-President of the American Mathematical Society (1991-1994). He also served as an editor of The Mathematical Intelligencer. Professor Davis’s scientific pursuits took him on many travels to Poland during the martial law of 1982; to both the USA and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam while those countries were at war; to China during the Cultural Revolution; to both Israel and the occupied West Bank. Often along with the scientific work he was able to stand up for free speech of scientists (some of whose speech he does not at all endorse). In 1954, while an instructor at the University of Michigan, Chandler Davis was called to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. His fellows on the stand in Lansing were his colleagues Mark Nickerson and Clement L. Markert, and his student friends Edward Shaffer and Myron E. Sharpe. All were “unfriendly witnesses, refusing to confess” their political dissent. Davis, unlike the others, based his refusal to answer only on the First Amendment, waiving his protection under the Fifth Amendment. Thereby he deliberately invited a citation for Contempt of Congress, so as to give him standing to argue in court that the Committee’s proceedings were unconstitutional. He got the citation, all right, but he did not prevail in court; his appeals were exhausted in 1959 and he served prison time in 1960. Meanwhile, he and Professor Nickerson had been dismissed from their positions at the University. This action of the University administration drew censure from the American Association of University Professors. He wrote about those days in “The Purge” (A Century of Mathematics in America, American Mathematical Society, 1989). A selection of his prose writings, not including his mathematics but including some science-fiction is It Walks in Beauty (ed. J.Lukin, Aqueduct Press, 2010).

Clement L. Markert was Professor of Biology at Johns Hopkins University (1957-1965), the Henry Ford II Professor of Biology and Chair of the Department of Biology at Yale University (1965- 1986) and Distinguished University Research Professor of Animal Science and Genetics at North Carolina State University (1986-1993). His research interests were focused on developmental genetics, reproductive biology, and biotechnology. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and served as co-chair of the Developmental Biology Interdisciplinary Cluster for President Ford’s Biomedical Research Panel in 1975. Professor Markert was elected to the Presidency of the American Institute of Biological Sciences, the American Society of Zoologists, the Society for Developmental Biology, and the American Genetics Association. Markert began his academic career as an assistant professor of zoology at the University of Michigan in 1950 after earning his bachelor’s degree from the University of Colorado, his M.A. from the University of California at Los Angeles and his doctorate from Johns Hopkins University. He died on October 1, 1999, in Colorado Springs, Colorado. In 1954, Clement Markert was called to testify before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee. He invoked Constitutional rights according to the Fifth Amendment and refused to answer the Committee’s questions concerning his political associations. Consequently, he was suspended from the University of Michigan. He was later reinstated with the support of the Faculty Senate, his department and his college, and he eventually achieved tenure.

Professor Nickerson made major contributions to the field of pharmacology, in part through his seminal research on the adrenergic blocking drugs that are used to treat high blood pressure and other major medical disorders. He was awarded the John Jacob Abel Award in Pharmacology in 1949 and served as president both of the Pharmacological Society of Canada and of the American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics. He chaired the Canadian Federation of Biological Sciences and was the author of more than 250 scientific publications. In 1954, Mark Nickerson was an associate professor of pharmacology at the University of Michigan, with tenure. He was called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee and chose to invoke the Fifth Amendment in response to the Committee’s questions. He was immediately suspended by the University as a result. Professor Nickerson’s reinstatement was supported by the Faculty Senate but not by his departmental chairman or by the dean and the executive committee of the Medical School. He was subsequently dismissed from the University despite his tenured appointment. Mark Nickerson was born on October 22, 1916, in Montevideo, Minnesota. He graduated summa cum laude from Linfield College, earned his Sc.M. from Brown University, his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University and an M.D. from the University of Utah. Nickerson married Elizabeth Ilene Smith (Betty). They had three children, Steven Paul, Michael Thomas and daughter, Marki.