- Person
- John Polanyi
- Lived
- b. 1929
- Field
- Chemical physics
- From
- German-born Canadian
The story
John Polanyi knows from childhood what war does. Born in Berlin in 1929, he left Germany with his family in 1933, a move driven partly by the Nazi persecution of Jews; his father, the chemist and philosopher Michael Polanyi, had been born Jewish. When John was eleven, his father sent him from England to Toronto for three years to keep him safe from German bombing. He later became one of Canada’s leading scientists at the University of Toronto.
Alongside his research, Polanyi became involved in public affairs in the 1950s, above all the danger of nuclear weapons. In 1960 he founded the Canadian group of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, the international movement that brings scientists together across political divides to reduce the risk of nuclear war, and he chaired it until 1978. The Pugwash movement as a whole received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995.
He has written around a hundred articles on science policy, arms control and the effect of science on society, many of them as opinion pieces and letters in Canadian newspapers, and in 1979 he co-edited the book The Dangers of Nuclear War. He was a founding member and president of the Canadian Committee of Scientists and Scholars, a founding member of the Royal Society of Canada’s committee on scholarly freedom, and an adviser to the Canadian Centre for Arms Control and Disarmament. He has also served on the advisory board of an American arms-control research centre.
In 2022 the American Physical Society gave him its Andrei Sakharov Prize, named for the Soviet physicist and human rights campaigner. The citation honoured seven decades of activism for a nuclear-weapons-free world, his defence of human rights and freedom of speech around the globe, and his public education about the essential role of science in society. Polanyi has continued to speak and write about peace, social justice and nuclear proliferation.
Why it matters
Polanyi’s decades of advocacy helped keep the dangers of nuclear weapons, and scientists’ responsibility for them, before the public.
About John Polanyi
Toronto chemist who watched chemical reactions release energy as infrared light, work behind the chemical laser, and who has campaigned for seven decades against nuclear weapons. Nobel Prize 1986.
More about John Polanyi
Sources
- John Charles Polanyi The Canadian Encyclopedia
- John C. Polanyi, Biographical NobelPrize.org
- John Polanyi Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.