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This Is Not an Obituary

April 23, 2014

This Is Not an Obituary

By Pam Frost Gorder, Assistant Director, Research and Innovation Communications

Given the thousands of researchers who spend long and distinguished careers at Ohio State, and given that I’ve written about research for nearly 20 years, it stands to reason that, occasionally, a researcher whom I’ve written about will pass away.

It’s not my job to write obituaries. But I do get to know the people I write about, especially if they have a unique personality, like the chemist Sheldon Shore did. He died on April 4 at age 84.

This isn’t an obituary, so I won’t tell you that Sheldon ’s 57-year career here was unusual—sometimes comically so. I only wrote about him when he received various honors, like when he was one of only three Americans ever named to a prestigious academy of sciences, or when he set a record for receiving National Science Foundation (NSF) funding for 44 years straight. In that context, there was no reason to mention how his first “office” in 1957 was really just a chemistry bench in a west campus Quonset hut. Which burned down. Under mysterious circumstances.

This isn’t an obituary, so I won’t mention that Sheldon only wanted to do basic research, particularly regarding the element boron and its associated molecules. Or how, when his NSF program manager told him that his funding would run out if he didn’t start working on viable commercial applications of boron, he devised a plan to choose collaborators who would worry about the applications and leave him to think deeply about basic issues in chemistry. And his plan worked for decades.

Neither will I mention that he was a man whose quick humor belied the dour expression he often held in photographs (he hated having his picture taken). Or how he was fond of drawing chemistry-themed Snoopy cartoons, such as one about streaking naked through the chem lab, which he asked me not to print. Here it is:

There’s also no reason to mention that his colleagues nicknamed him “The Red Boron” during his years as an amateur pilot. I won’t describe the handmade Red Boron pennant that hung on his wall, above the piano that he smuggled into his office “annex”—that is, the former utility closet next to his permanent office in Evans Lab, which he annexed. Exercising his carpentry skills on evenings and weekends, he actually burrowed a hole through the wall that separated the two rooms, installed a door, and retreated behind it when he wanted peace and quiet, or music.

He made me promise never to write about that last part, but now I don’t suppose he’d mind. Especially since this isn’t an obituary.