Mary Lowe Good To Receive 1997 Priestley Medal
Mary Lowe Good has been selected to receive the 1997 Priestley Medal, the American Chemical Society's most prestigious and oldest award given in recognition of distinguished services to chemistry. It has been awarded 61 times since it was first presented in 1923 to Ira Remsen. It must be noted - although Good dislikes the very mention - that she is the first woman to receive the award.
With that out of the way, it must also be said that it's hard to think of anyone of either sex who has been of more service to chemistry - in all its permutations and aspects - than has Good. She has been characterized by colleagues as "bright, shrewd, articulate, fearless, wise, fair, insightful, very personable." All in all a "truly amazing" person, the possessor of "formidable energy."
Good's career is truly amazing. She followed a distinguished career in the groves of academe - in her case certainly not an ivory tower - with an impressive stint as an industrial research manager, beginning as vice president for research at UOP Inc. and rising ever higher despite rounds of mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures, ending up as senior vice president of technology for AlliedSignal.
During those years, she was also a very active, effective participant in and leader of the American Chemical Society and the International Union of Pure & Applied Chemistry, to name just two of the many organizations to which she belongs. She served three U.S. presidents - Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and George Bush - in a number of very visible science advisory posts. Now, she is working full-time for a fourth, having served for the past three years as the Commerce Department's undersecretary for technology in the Clinton Administration.
Where did this dynamo come from? To be literal: Grapevine, Texas, but Good grew up in Arkansas where her father was a superintendent of schools and her mother a schoolteacher. As a teenager, Good had a darkroom in the cellar and found the process of photo development "fascinating," but that was as close as she got to the science of chemistry. The local high school was so small that it offered neither chemistry nor physics, says Good.
When she went to college, her father wanted her to major in something useful. So, Good says, she chose home economics because in those days home economics teachers got extra compensation. They came under the agricultural extension program and so were considered professionals.
But as often happens with the best laid plans, things went awry, or rather right in this instance. "In my freshman year, I took my first chemistry course," Good explains. "My teacher was an elderly professor who was absolutely fantastic. He loved his students and he loved his subject. I had a ball. The upshot was that by the second semester I had changed my major to chemistry. I loved working in the lab, particularly wet chemistry, the qualitative analysis lab."
Good received a B.S. degree in chemistry in 1950 at the age of 19 from the University of Central Arkansas. "I graduated in three years, going summers as well as winters. Part of it was there were four of us to educate and just seven years difference in our ages," she explains. "I needed to get through and out so the younger ones could go to school." She immediately went on to graduate school at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, which offered her a fellowship from the first day and where she studied inorganic chemistry and radiochemistry. She received an M.S. degree in chemistry in 1953 and a Ph.D. degree in 1955.
Despite offers from industry, Good decided on an academic career. She had married a fellow graduate student, Bill J. Good, who was studying physics, in 1952. But at that time, the University of Arkansas didn't offer a Ph.D. degree in physics, so "we needed to find a place where Bill could get his doctorate. The Louisiana State University [made me an] offer [that] was really too good to turn down," she says. "If I took the LSU offer, Bill could get his doctorate. Plus, I had a nine-month-old child at the time, and in those days an academic schedule offered more flexibility than an industry job would have."
From 1954 to 1980, Good remained on the faculty of the LSU system, beginning as an instructor and assistant professor of chemistry at LSU, Baton Rouge, and rising through the ranks to become Boyd Professor of Chemistry at the University of New Orleans in 1974, and Boyd Professor of Materials Science in the division of engineering research at LSU in Baton Rouge in 1978. One of Good's enduring memories of her early years at LSU is teaching a quantitative analysis lab in the middle of a Louisiana summer, with all the ovens going, all the Bunsen burners on - in a building with no air-conditioning.
During her years in academe, Good published 15 invited review articles; one book, "Integrated Laboratory Sequence: Volume III - Separations and Analysis" (1970); and a total of 92 research papers. But "what I really enjoyed," Good says, was "working with the students, particularly my graduate students. There were close to 20 who worked with me over the years, and I keep in touch with many of them."
Several of her graduate students chose to pursue careers in industry, and, in 1980, Good chose to do likewise - accepting an offer to become vice president and director of research at UOP Inc. "I couldn't turn it down," she recalls. "It was so challenging and so interesting, I had to see if I could succeed." Plus, she says "at the time, I had pretty much accomplished all I wanted to at the university." And her research in metal catalysts was a good fit with the areas UOP was interested in pursuing.
While she was at LSU, Good was very active in ACS affairs. Among other early positions, she was councilor for the Louisiana Local Section, 1967 - 71, and director from Region IV, 1972 - 80. During her terms as a member of the board of directors, she was elected chairman in both 1978 and 1980. She served on the board's Executive Committee from 1975 to 1980, and was elected president of the society in 1987.
"When I was first interviewing at UOP, the question came up of what experience I had had in handling budgets," Good says. Her ACS activities provided her a positive answer. "I was just finishing my second term as chairman of the ACS Board of Directors where I had had ultimate responsibility for a $150 million budget." As she explains, the ACS Board is an actual management board, not an advisory board. It was an active manager of Chemical Abstracts Service and all ACS products. "I learned a lot from that experience and it made a difference," she says.
By the time Good joined UOP in 1980, it was one of the Signal companies, "which were all pretty much stand-alone operations," she says. In addition to UOP, Signal owned Mack Truck, Garrett - an aerospace company - and 49% of the California Angels baseball team. That didn't last long. The '80s, "if you'll remember," she says, "was the decade of buyouts, mergers, and acquisitions." In the early '80s, Signal merged with Wheelabrator-Frye, "which was much more oriented toward hands-on management," notes Good. "There was even a lot of argument about whether UOP should continue to do research, but we managed to convince them that, without research, UOP was not a company. The big merger with Allied in 1985 led to even bigger changes."
Good managed to survive and prosper through all the changes, although "there were some interesting days," she allows. She was president and director of research for Signal Research Center Inc. in 1985 - 86. In 1986, she was named president of engineered materials research for AlliedSignal Inc., a $12 billion industrial corporation with sectors in aerospace, automotives, and engineered materials. In 1988, she was promoted to senior vice president for technology when AlliedSignal merged the lab for engineered materials with its old corporate labs. Good held that post for five years.
Asked if there was anything in her background or training that had prepared her to meet the responsibilities and challenges she faced in these positions, Good answers succinctly: "No."
She explains: "It's more a question of learning as you go ... a willingness to take on whatever challenges are there and of using the people you have working with you to help you succeed. It's a question of being able to rally the troops to help you and of making them sincere believers in what they are doing."
George R. Lester, a colleague and senior research fellow at AlliedSignal, credits Good with devising and executing strategies that kept her unit viable and in the corporate mainstream during this period of acquisitions, mergers, and divestitures.
These strategies, Lester says, were based on the simple principle that the corporation and its business units are the customers of research and that the goals of the corporation are best served when these customers are provided consistently with credible research and marketable products. Good's area of responsibility evolved into a 500-person, $70 million to $80 million research and technology organization with facilities in Des Plaines, Ill., and later Morristown, N.J., and Buffalo, N.Y.
Noting that the company has recently decided to decentralize its research operations, Good says she "is a firm believer in doing at least a reasonable amount of research at a corporate research facility. That is the only way to get longer term R&D done. When research is decentralized, it's very difficult to build synergy among different fields. It makes it very difficult to develop emerging and enabling technologies." On the other hand, she believes, "work to improve a particular product line should be decentralized."
The need for the U.S. to actively support and nurture development of enabling and emerging technologies is a theme Good has repeatedly championed since being nominated by President Clinton to her Commerce Department post in 1993. But it is not a new theme for Good. In her Jan. 5, 1987, ACS President's Message, Good wrote:
"The question of our international competitiveness has become a national issue, and the debate has accelerated since the early 1980s. The issues of low-cost natural resources in their countries of origin and the realities of cheap labor in the developing countries are now well understood, and the consensus has arisen that technology-based products and services are our hope for remaining a leader and major player in world markets in the next few decades."
However, Good didn't immediately jump at the government's offer - which she attributes to the good offices of ACS - of the undersecretary's post. "I had a very good job that I had held for five years. Bill still thinks I was crazy [to move]. But it was a very high-pressure, high-profile job," Good notes, adding, "I'm not sure you should hold that kind of job for more than five to seven years, so the timing wasn't bad."
Plus, the undersecretary position offered "an opportunity to focus on critical civilian technologies, technology that is very important to the country's economic competitiveness. It was very clear that this Administration understood that and intended to focus on development of civilian-sector technology." At first, things went swimmingly. The Administration greatly expanded the fledgling Advanced Technology Program in the Department of Commerce, turning it into a national initiative. It launched, in conjunction with U.S. automakers, a Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles with the aim of developing technologically advanced "clean cars." Good is in charge of that effort. And the Administration initiated a program to foster development of dual-use (civilian/military) technologies.
Then Congress changed hands. Good says that nothing in her advisory work for two Republican Administrations, including membership on President Bush's Council of Advisers on Science & Technology, prepared her for the Republican onslaught on civilian technology development. "Not one of us who came in early in the Administration ever dreamed civilian technology would be such a lightning rod," says Good. "There's that idiotic phrase that is now in vogue - 'corporate welfare.' We're not supporting precompetitive and emerging technologies because we believe in corporate welfare. We're doing it because it will enhance the country's well-being.
"I firmly believe that we should not be funding product development. It's up to a company to decide what products it wants to produce. But we do need to get involved in generating and developing new technological ideas and putting them out there for industry to choose from. Other governments are doing so, and if we don't, we will go into the 21st century without a technology base and find ourselves falling ever further behind."
Good says the two most frustrating things she has had to deal with in the last year and a half are, first, having spent "so much time defending what we are doing that it has been very hard to get progressive kinds of things done. We fought to defend the budget positions of these programs. We even fought to defend this office itself. People seem to think that just because we have a Technology Administration in the Department of Commerce, by definition that is industrial policy."
Second, she says, she finds current attacks on federal employees very disturbing. "My experience has been," she explains, "that the federal workforce looks like all the others. There are a few leadership folks who work very hard, do very good things, are very imaginative and creative, who keep things going. There is a huge group, who - if they have good leadership and are inspired to do things - work very well, put out a solid day's work. And there is a small fragment who are not very good. I have seen exactly the same in my other two careers.
"But the whole idea of attacking one's government, of attacking the people who work for one's government, is difficult because it challenges who we are as a country. The last thing we want to do is fragment the U.S.," and that's what these attacks do, she maintains.
Over the years, Good has been one of the most visible and active leaders in the field of science. In addition to her contributions to ACS governance, she was president of the inorganic division of IUPAC from 1980 to 1985 and a member of IUPAC's Governing Bureau from 1985 to 1993. She served on the Industrial Research Institute's board of directors from 1982 to 1987. In addition, she served on federal advisory boards too numerous to list, including an 11-year stint on the National Science Board. Good is the recipient of at least 26 scientific and professional awards, including the ACS Garvan-Olin Medal and Charles Lathrop Parsons Award, and 20-plus honorary degrees.
And she has found time for other activities. She has been a member of Zonta International, a service organization for business and professional women, since 1965 and served as chairman of its Amelia Earhart Awards Committee from 1978 to 1988. Earhart was a member of Zonta, and after her disappearance in 1938 the organization put together a program of scholarships in her memory. And "this is what is really interesting," says Good: "The award is for women going to graduate school in an area of aerospace science."
In the early days, she notes, it was next to impossible to find anyone with the necessary credentials for the award. It went from that stage to a point in the mid-1980s "when we had 300 to 400 absolutely superb candidates from all over the world. It's been a real mirror of how opportunities for women in education and science have changed. There have just been some extraordinary folks in that program. It was a fun program to be associated with. We moved it from about 10 to 30 awards annually under my watch. I was very pleased with that."
But when asked to identify her legacy to the fields of science, industry, and government, Good replies, "I don't know that I have a huge legacy. I just wanted to be part of the ongoing scene. You do what you have to do, accepting and meeting the challenges that come your way."
After further thought, she allows, "I'm very proud of my two sons, who are very good citizens and are now doing very good and interesting work. But I'm proudest of my four grandchildren. In terms of a legacy, they are my best legacy."
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