Carl Sagan

Carl Sagan

A true scientific hero

Carl Sagan posing before the Boston Town Hall holding the Pioneer Plaque circa 1973.

Carl Sagan's story:

Carl Sagan was born in Brooklyn, NY on November 9, 1934.

His father, Samuel Sagan, was an immigrant garment worker from Kamianets-Podilskyi, then Russian Empire,in today's Ukraine. His mother, Rachel Molly Gruber, was a housewife from New York. Carl was named in honor of Rachel's biological mother, Chaiya Clara, in Sagan's words, "the mother she never knew."

Sagan recalls that one of his most defining moments was when his parents took him to the 1939 New York World's Fair when he was four years old. The exhibits became a turning point in his life. He later recalled the moving map of the America of Tomorrow exhibit: "It showed beautiful highways and cloverleaves and little General Motors cars all carrying people to skyscrapers, buildings with lovely spires, flying buttresses—and it looked great!"

Sagan had lived in Bensonhurst where he went to David A. Boody Junior High School. He had his bar mitzvah in Bensonhurst when he turned 13. The following year, 1948, his family moved to the nearby town of Rahway, New Jersey for his father's work, where Sagan then entered Rahway High School. He graduated in 1951. Rahway was an older industrial town, and the Sagans were among its few Jewish families.

Sagan attended the University of Chicago, which was one of the few colleges he applied to that would consider admitting a sixteen-year-old, despite his excellent high school grades. Its Chancellor, Robert Hutchins, structured the school as an "ideal meritocracy," with no age requirement. The school also employed a number of the nation's leading scientists, including Enrico Fermi and Edward Teller, along with operating the famous Yerkes Observatory.

From 1960 to 1962 Sagan was a Miller Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. Meanwhile, he published an article in 1961 in the journal Science on the atmosphere of Venus, while also working with NASA's Mariner 2 team, and served as a "Planetary Sciences Consultant" to the RAND Corporation. Sagan is one of those discussing the likelihood of life on other planets in Who's Out There? (1973), an award-winning NASA documentary film by Robert Drew After the publication of Sagan's Science article, in 1961 Harvard University astronomers Fred Whipple and Donald Menzel offered Sagan the opportunity to give a colloquium at Harvard, and they subsequently offered him a lecturer position at the institution. Sagan instead asked to be made an assistant professor, and eventually Whipple and Menzel were able to convince Harvard to offer Sagan the assistant professor position he requested. Sagan lectured, performed research, and advised graduate students at the institution from 1963 until 1968, as well as working at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, both located in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Sagan's TV-series "Cosmos" was, and still is, a huge success. In 2014 there was a remake of the series, hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Carl Sagan was a prominent book author. He wrote many best-selling books on science subjects. It was his way to populize science on to the general public.

The movie "Contact", which is based on his novel with the same name, was also e huge hit, starring Jodie Foster and Matthew McConaughey.

After suffering from myelodysplasia for two years, and receiving three bone marrow transplants from his sister Cari, Sagan died of pneumonia at the age of 62, at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington, in the early morning of December 20, 1996. His body was buried at Lakeview Cemetery in Ithaca, New York.

Carl may no longer be with us today, but his work and essence will live forever.

Read more about him in his dedicated Wikipedia entry.

carl sagan