Leaders of research and industry will discuss the legacy of instant photography inventor and Polaroid founder Edwin Land at 7pm on Thursday, Oct. 22 in Rm 34-101 as part of the "authors@mit" series. Event next week will feature talks by MIT Professor Robert Weinberg and architect-poet John Hejduk.
The Land tribute marks the publication of the first full-length biography of Dr. Land, Insisting on the Impossible by Victor K. McElheny, a senior lecturer in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society. Published by Perseus Books, Insisting on the Impossible is part of the Sloan Technology Series.
The moderator for the evening will be Stephen A. Benton, pioneer in holography and a longtime associate of Dr. Land's. Scheduled speakers include Kenneth Olsen, founder of Digital Equipment Corp.; Nobel Prize-winning biologist David Hubel of Harvard; Laurence R. Young, the Apollo Program Professor of Astronautics at MIT, who is working on a biography of the aerodynamics pioneer Ernst Mach; and Mr. McElheny, a former science journalist and former director of MIT's Knight Science Journalism Fellowship program.
On Tuesday, Oct. 27, John Hejduk, architect and dean of the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at Cooper Union, will read from his book Such Places As Memory: Poems 1953-1966 (MIT Press). The event, cosponsored by the Department of Architecture at MIT and poetry@mit as well as authors@mit sponsors MIT Libraries and the MIT Press Bookstore, will be in Rm 10-250 at 6:30pm. This is the first comprehensive selection of Hejduk's poems to be published outside an architectural setting.
Robert A. Weinberg, the Daniel K. Ludwig Professor for Cancer Research at MIT and director of the Oncology Research Lab at the Whitehead Institute, will speak about his new book One Renegade Cell: How Cancer Begins (Basic Books) on Thursday, Oct. 29 at 6:30pm in Rm E25-111.
"This is an engaging, understandable and accessible narrative of one of the greatest scientific stories of our time -- the struggle to understand cancer," wrote Dr. Richard D. Klausner, director of the National Cancer Institute. "It paints the gradual and impressive illumination of the mysteries of cancer, recognizing that we have a long way to go but that we seem to have found the roads upon which we must travel."
For more information about the event, call x3-5249 or e-mail authors@mit.edu.
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on October 21, 1998.
