Remarks at memorial service for William Munro Preston, April 22, 1989.

    Bill Preston, whose life we remember here today, served Harvard as a scientific administrator for nearly 25 years. I first met him the day after I came to Harvard. As a young Assistant Professor I turned up at the cyclotron ready to start work. He already had cleared office and lab space and had suggested that two incoming graduate students work with me. Over the next years at the cyclotron, he found the funds, wrote the reports, arranged the shops and ensured that the machine worked. Us youngsters were free to do our scientific work untroubled by these administrative chores. Bill knew one of the important secrets of administration; understand the strengths and weaknesses of everyone in the lab, and keep them to yourself. He knew what everyone was doing and all the hazards in the laboratory. One day there was a loud explosion. Bill knew at once what it was. He popped his head out of the office door. "Harold, are you alright?". It was not me exploding liquid hydrogen; it was Harold Furth destroying a pulsed magnet by running it too high.

    By 1963 the faculty's interest had moved to higher particle energies and the cyclotron was being phased out. But the physics department knew a good man when they had one. They asked him to serve as Department Chairman for 3 years, and then to serve as Director of the Physics Laboratories which position he kept till his retirement

  Then came Bill's most important contribution to science and to Harvard. Already in 1963 Bill Sweet and Ray Kjellberg, neurosurgeons from the Massachusetts General Hospital had come to use the proton beam for medical treatments. Bill received them enthusiastically. By 1967 they had treated 50 patients. But the cyclotron was being shut down.   Unfortunately, Bill Sweet and Ray Kjellberg were out of the mainstream of medical thought. In vain did Bill Preston and I try to get the hospital or the medical school to find funding. I remember a fruitless 2 hour convention with the dean of the medical school. But Bill and Andy Koehler knew better than the physicians the importance of the work. They persuaded the department of Physics to underwrite the operation financially, on a small scale. The cyclotron was kept going by Patient fees, helped by some fee for service irradiations for NASA. It eventually cost the department nothing.

    By 1976 when Bill retired the cyclotron was on a sound financial footing. Herman Suit of MGH and Evangelos Grigoudas of the Eye and Ear Hospital were bringing patients and the program was strong. Bill and Andy had created a sense of trust between the physicians, surgeons and physicists that enabled the cyclotron to treat 4,000 patients over the last 20 years. I believe the early nuclear physics at the cyclotron was good, but the medical work is outstanding and has brought Harvard and its' cyclotron a worldwide reputation as the premier laboratory in its field. The treatments are copied all over the world, including the Soviet Union.

    Bill worked with radiation all his life and knew the harm and the good that it can do. He was equally upset at those who were care1ess with radiation as with those who exaggerated its effects, and created unnecessary fear.   About 2 years ago he was particularly upset after hearing a talk by an economist who claimed to demonstrate statistically unusually large effects of radiation and that Chernobyl had increased the US death rate. He knew in his bones that this was wrong, but did not have the answer at once. He. talked to me about it and inspired one of my recent research projects; to collect such claims, to examine them, and if incorrect, show in detail what is wrong. The last time I met bill was when I presented preliminary results at a seminar at his cyclotron laboratory - which I always think of as his laboratory.

    When Bill became ill himself in 1978 it was providential that the cyclotron and MGH had the world's best treatment for prostate cancer. Although formally he was cured, it turned out only to be a 10 year remission. But for these 10 years we must be grateful.  In retirement Bill maintained his interests. He continued to be proud of the cyclotron and its achievements. Be served on the visiting committee for the Radiation Medicine Department at MGH and never missed a meeting.

    Bill was a good friend, a good colleague; a good scientist and an outstanding administrator. The world is richer from his life and we will all miss him.

Richard Wilson
Mallinckrot Professor of Physics