Caltech News, Vol. 31, No. 2, 1997
Caltech Alumni Album Profiles'50s, '60s, '70s and '80s
Moshe Arens, MS ’53
As Israel’s defense or foreign minister for much of the turbulent 1980s and early 1990s, Moshe Arens had a reputation as a hard-liner who nevertheless tried to ease tensions with the Palestinians. He reached out to Arab leaders on the West Bank, prohibited soldiers and Jewish settlers from using excessive force in controlling hostile crowds, and was the first Israeli defense minister to attend Christmas Eve festivities in Bethlehem. In a region where agreements are regularly broken, Arens was known as a man of his word. Shortly after his appointment as foreign minister in 1988, Time magazine quoted a U.S. official as saying, “It (is) tough to strike a deal with Arens. But if you have a deal, it sticks.”But before Arens was a government minister, he was an engineer. Born in Lithuania in 1925, Arens immigrated with his family to the United States in 1939, fleeing the Nazi Holocaust. The experience fueled his interest in Zionism, starting when he was a teenager in New York City. After serving in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers during World War II, he received a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from MIT in 1947. Arens moved to Israel in 1948 during the Arab-Israeli war, helped organize pro-Israeli groups in North Africa and Europe, and briefly lived on a kibbutz before returning to the United States in 1951 to study jet propulsion at Caltech. He received his master’s degree in mechanical engineering in 1953 and began his doctoral studies at the Institute before leaving to work in the aircraft industry. With a wife, a young son, and another child on the way, Arens says that he couldn’t afford to stay in school.
He returned to Israel in 1957 to teach aeronautical engineering at the Technion—the Israel Institute of Technology. In 1962, Arens became vice president of engineering at the Israel Aircraft Industry, directing the development of Israel’s fighter and civil aircraft programs and the development of its missiles.
With a reputation for helping to build the Israeli Air Force into a formidable military presence, Arens was encouraged to enter politics by leaders of the conservative Herut party. Elected to the Knesset in 1974, Arens planned to serve for only one 4-year term, but then the Likud bloc, which included the Herut party, was voted into office, and Arens was named chairman of the Defense and Foreign Relations Committee.
In early 1982, he resigned from office when then Prime Minister Menahem Begin appointed him Israel’s ambassador to the United States. As ambassador, he met often with senators and congressmen, helping to persuade them to approve $550 million in military aid to allow Israel to begin producing a new generation fighter plane—the Lavi. Following the massacre in September 1982 of Palestinian refugees in Beirut’s Sabra and Shatila camps, Arens was named defense minister, serving until 1984, when he was named minister in charge of minority affairs. When the Israeli government decided to cancel the Lavi fighter program in 1987, he resigned from the government in protest. He returned the following year, however, as Israel’s foreign minister, serving until 1990, when he again was named defense minister. When the Likud party was voted out of power in 1992, Arens decided to leave government service for good. “I had been in politics for 18 years, and never intended it for my life’s work,” Arens says. “I thought I’d do it for four years and then return to industry. After 18 years, that was enough.”
Since leaving government, Arens has written a book called Broken Covenant: American Foreign Policy and the Crisis Between the U.S. and Israel, published in 1995. He also serves on several corporate boards in Israel. Arens credits Caltech with helping him to develop intellectually. “Caltech taught me analytical thinking and how to approach problems,” he says. “It was a powerful influence.”
York Liao ’67
York Liao receives Monday’s e-mail in Hong Kong; Tuesday’s, Wednesday’s, and Thurs-
day’s in Malaysia; and Friday’s in China. Yet if everything had gone according to plan, he would be securely planted in a Hong Kong university, teaching and quietly going about his research. Instead, he is Executive Director of Varitronix Ltd., one of the first—and still one of the leading—LCD (liquid crystal display) manufacturers in the world, with manufacturing facilities in all of these countries.Luckily, Liao likes disparate cultures, something he didn’t know about himself until he came to Caltech from Hong Kong for a BS in the late 1960s. It was, he says, “one of the most memorable periods of my life”: his first trip overseas, his first exposure to a foreign culture (to several foreign cultures, actually, given the international character of Caltech’s student body), and his first encounter with what he calls “frontier science.” Liao went on to receive his MA and PhD in applied physics at Harvard, where his research dealt in part with the electro-optical properties of liquid crystals—a field that, in the late 60s, was merely a “scientific curiosity,” he says. After graduate school he took a year off from research, working for the United Nations as a simultaneous translator, and then settled into what he assumed would be his life, teaching in the department of electronics at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and continuing his research into liquid crystals. “Not in my wildest dreams did I think what I did was useful,” he told Reader’s Digest in a recent article, “Asia’s Cool Companies,” that included Varitronix.
But when wristwatches suddenly began to feature LCDs, he and a colleague who had more of a business background recognized that Liao’s “scientific curiosity” did indeed have commercial applications. “It was entirely fortuitous,” he says—and not, perhaps, altogether welcome: like a swimmer entering murky waters, Liao edged into business gradually and tentatively, hanging onto his teaching position for another six years before committing entirely to the new venture. In 1978 he cofounded Varitronix, which continued to be research driven, making up in ingenuity what it lacked in production and marketing experience. The company now concentrates on manufacturing relatively small quantities of LCDs tailor-made to specific needs: airport and railway-station departure and arrival boards, navigation instruments, missile controls, and even a hand-held terminal for placing long-distance telephone bets on horse races. Liao reckons Varitronix makes an average of one new product a day, and today’s limited application is sometimes tomorrow’s industry standard. Like LCDs on wristwatches.
And Liao has become a much more savvy entrepreneur: while Varitronix is still based in Hong Kong, much of its manufacturing has moved to sites in Malaysia and southern China. Thus his nomadic existence. And thus his businessman’s sanguine attitude about Hong Kong’s imminent change in political regime, which he describes as “almost a non-event.” For businesses, he says, many of which are already entirely integrated with China, the change will be largely symbolic. “It’s like a couple who’s been living together for 20 years. When they finally get married, it’s not a big deal.”
Joseph Rhodes ’69
When Joe Rhodes came to Caltech in 1965, his goal was to become a scientist, but he left as one of the nation’s most influential student leaders—an experience that propelled him toward a career in government. Trying to change institutional policies was one of Rhodes’s interests even before college. Growing up in Pittsburgh, he refused to attend his high school football games and tried to get the school to eliminate sports altogether, since he felt that the inner-city school emphasized sports at the expense of scholarship.At Caltech, he was determined to concentrate on his studies, but his friends in Blacker House encouraged him to run for president of ASCIT during his sophomore year. To do this, the rules had to be changed, because up to that time only juniors and seniors were allowed to run for president. Rhodes won and was the first ASCIT president to be elected in successive years.
After graduating from Caltech, Rhodes was selected as a Harvard Junior Fellow, studying the history of racism in Victorian England, but his research was continually interrupted by political commitments. In 1970, because of his contacts at HEW, Rhodes became the only student to be appointed to President Nixon’s Commission on Campus Unrest, largely formed to investigate the killings at Kent State and Jackson State. Many of his friends vowed never to speak to him again if he served. “I thought, ‘People are getting shot up. I want to try to do something so no one else gets killed,’” recalled Rhodes. He immediately found himself battling Vice President Spiro Agnew when he told a New York Times reporter that his aim on the commission was to find out whether “the president’s and vice president’s statements are killing people.” Both Newsweek and Time covered this incident and reported that Agnew had demanded Rhodes’s resignation. Rhodes remained on the commission, because, according to Newsweek, the president wanted to maintain a wide range of views.
Two years later, officials from his hometown encouraged him to run for the Pennsylvania state legislature. He won and served as a state representative from 1972 to 1980. He said that two of his principal achievements in that job were the passage of juvenile protection and organized-crime laws, for which he wrote the original bills. In 1976, the Ford administration sent him to South Africa to gather information following the Soweto riots. The highlight of this trip was spending several days with antiapartheid activist Steve Biko, who was murdered by South African security forces a few months later.
In 1980, after Rhodes ran for the U.S. Senate and lost in the primaries, he decided to take a break from politics. From 1980 to 1987, he worked for Westinghouse in its corporate planning department. He served as deputy secretary of commerce in Pennsylvania in 1987 and, in 1988, was appointed to the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission where, he says, he usually found himself fighting for consumers. His term expired in 1995, and last year he formed a consulting firm focusing on the utility industry. He said he may venture back into politics again, a career that he said never would have happened without the Institute. As a Caltech student, says Rhodes, “I learned how to serve a constituency with honor, to deal with adversity, and to be disciplined.”
David Ho ’74
As Time magazine’s 1996 Man of the Year, for AIDS research that may have turned the tables on the devastating disease, David Ho has become instantly famous. But along with the accolade came the implication that he is destined to find an AIDS cure. Ho, 44, says that the recognition has been extremely gratifying, but adds, “Sometimes it feels like the weight of the world, at least in regards to AIDS, is on my shoulders.”Born in Taiwan, Ho moved to Los Angeles with his family when he was 12. Physics and mathematics were among his passions in high school and, after spending his freshman year at MIT, he transferred to Caltech aiming to study those disciplines. But he was quickly turned onto biology in his junior year when he took an introductory biochemistry course taught by then-Caltech professors Lee Hood and Bill Wood. Ho had always thought that biology was mostly about memorization, but they showed him how to learn biology through problem solving, a skill that would become invaluable in his AIDS research. He received his BS in biology in 1974.
After medical school at Harvard, Ho returned to Los Angeles to do his residency in internal medicine at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. It was there, as the chief medical resident in the early 1980s, that Ho began seeing patients, particularly gay males, who were dying from infections that would later be identified as resulting from AIDS, and began his long association with the disease.
Throughout his biomedical career, Ho has focused on how the HIV virus, which causes AIDS, works, and his research has yielded some remarkable discoveries. He was the first scientist to show that the virus grows in long-lived immune cells called macrophages, and among the first to show that it could not be transmitted through saliva. In 1990, after being named director of the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center in New York, he helped demonstrate that HIV never lies dormant but is feverishly active in newly infected individuals from the beginning. It was this discovery—which he says was made largely by using mathematical reasoning to figure out how fast HIV replicates and decays in different cells—that dramatically changed the way doctors treat their HIV-positive patients. While doctors originally concentrated on treatments in the latter stages of the disease, when symptoms are more prevalent, they now focus their attention on it early, when the immune system is still working.
Last year, Ho made headlines when he reported that by treating patients with a group of new drugs called protease inhibitors, he may have eliminated the virus from the blood and other body tissues. “We’ve been able to control replication, and I think we can extend it over two years. Next we want to see if we can eradicate it. I don’t know yet which way it will fall, but a lot of answers will come out in the next two years.”
Ho says that in some ways, being named Man of the Year is premature, since the battle against AIDS is far from over. Nevertheless, it’s gratifying to have helped improve his patients’ lives, he says, and encouraging to have a scientist, rather than the usual awardee from politics, recognized in this way. “It’s also been great from a different perspective,” says Ho. “I am an immigrant, and many people are telling me how proud they are to have another immigrant recognized in this way. Many immigrants, including scientists, contribute every day to this country. That’s something that I hadn’t considered before.”
Erik Sirri ’79
Erik Sirri grew up hearing about the space program from his father, who worked for NASA and JPL. Those seductive full-color pictures from the Mariner and Surveyor missions had him hooked, and by the time he entered college his future was clear: he would study at Caltech and he would become an astronomer. And soon he was on his way to fulfilling his destiny, earning his BS in astronomy in 1979.So why is he currently the chief economist of the Securities and Exchange Commission? Well, Sirri didn’t want to be a university astronomer, and he realized—“surprisingly late,” he says—that outside of academia the job prospects for astronomers were pretty scarce.
So after Caltech, Sirri went on to receive his MBA from UC Irvine, and his PhD in finance from UCLA. Before joining the SEC, he was an assistant professor of finance—at the Harvard Business School, from 1989 to 1995, and at Babson College from 1995 to 1996. And although he left science, science never quite left him: like many Caltech graduates who have made their careers in other fields, he notes that the problem-identifying, -analyzing, and -solving skills he honed at Caltech applied to his new career. That analytical training, he says, “has repeatedly given me useful insights into my work” as the commission’s senior advisor on major economic policy issues. Sirri also heads the Office of Economic Analysis, an independent executive agency responsible for assisting the commission in establishing regulatory policy.
Sirri is still posing and answering research questions, as an astronomer might—and as he did while a professor of finance. But for a member of a government agency, there are significant differences in how those questions are defined and answered, and in the consequences of the answers. Researchers in academia, he says, define their own problems, working alone or in collaboration with one or two others. But the SEC is more like a big company—people work within teams—and there are no laboratory conditions here. The “data” have the messy intractability of the real world.
Take, for example, the problem of how best to design a system for trading stocks. Should the transactions be simultaneous? Sequential? Anonymous? These are questions, says Sirri, that have been posed by researchers like Caltech’s Charles Plott, Harkness Professor of Economics and Political Science; in fact, Sirri remembers Charlie Plott’s Friday-evening experiments, which recruited Caltech students as players in experiments designed to answer exactly such questions. But in the real world, Sirri notes, “anonymous” traders may move in the same social circles and guess each other’s identity from subtle cues. Still, Sirri and the SEC have to make policy based on their best answers, and the effects of that policy propagate outward from the financial community to all of American society—and beyond.
It’s a lot of responsibility. Luckily, Sirri has his team at the SEC to support him. And a group of old friends, which he calls the other lasting legacy of his time at Caltech. Caltech, more than any other group of which he’s been a part, has provided him with friendships that have lasted through the years. He’s not sure what it is about the Caltech experience that forges such long-lived friendships, but he suspects it’s the shared rigors of a Caltech education—or, as Sirri jokes, “solidarity in the face of a common enemy.”
Arati Prabhakar, MS ’80, PhD ’85
When Arati Prabhakar accepted her PhD from Murph Goldberger in the spring of 1985, she became the first woman to earn a doctorate in applied physics from Caltech. Not surprising for a woman whose mother used to begin her sentences, “When you get your PhD. . .” What was surprising was that Doctor Prabhakar then veered off the path of academia, eventually accepting President Clinton’s appointment as Director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), an agency of the Department of Commerce whose primary mission is to work with industry on civilian technology that will spur economic growth.Prabhakar was born in New Delhi but moved with her family to the United States as a small child. She earned her BS and MS in electrical engineering from Texas Tech University, and had every intention of staying in academia. But during her graduate studies at Caltech she began to chafe at the tight focus of academic research, and to think for the first time of another sort of work. “My time at Caltech wasn’t happy, but it was important,” she says now; “it showed me what I didn’t want to do.” And it pointed the way toward what really interested her—technology that made a practical difference; casting a wide intellectual net rather than a narrow one. “Caltech was the crucible that formed me—professionally—in an essential way,” she says, and she credits her adviser with encouraging her in her search for career fulfillment, and with accepting her decision to leave academia. “He saw a PhD as something that should open doors, not limit choices.” And Caltech continues to respect her decision; in 1995 she was named a recipient of the Distinguished Alumni Award, the Institute’s highest honor.
When she left academia for Washington—first for the Office of Technology Assessment, then the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)—Prabhakar continued to break new ground. Her appointment as head of NIST marked a new direction both for the agency and for her personally: as the youngest person, the first woman, and the first trained engineer, to head NIST, she was expected to guide the Institute through a reorientation that would include raising the profiles of the Advanced Technology Program (ATP) and the Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP), both joint government-industry efforts that entail the forging of unprecedented collaborations. ATP funds high-risk, enabling technology projects on a cost-shared basis in companies that range from innovative start-ups to major established firms. The program’s overall aim is to facilitate promising technological efforts that are beyond the reach of individual private investment. MEP provides access to information and expertise for the nation’s smaller manufacturers, to help them make changes that will allow them to compete in the global marketplace.
Never one to shy away from challenges, Prabhakar has just recently taken on two: parenthood—her daughter was born on January 20—and a new job in California. She’s in the private sector this time, as senior vice president and chief technology officer at the Raychem Corporation, a leading materials science company, where she will direct the company’s worldwide research and development of products for electronics and telecommunications. So the installment of Prabhakar’s life as wunderkind Washington policy-maker is ending. But, as she says, “the ending is just the beginning of a new chapter.”
