PERSONAL NEWS

Eugene Garfield (1925–2017)

‘To strive, to seek, to find, and not to cited an earlier work. It became useful name of the newspaper distribution com- yield’ for retrieval, for research on the of pany of his father. –Ulysses by Alfred, Lord Tennyson and for science policy. Today it As he was good in math and scored a is a powerful tool for the historical and 100 in the Regent’s Exam, he was admit- Eugene Garfield, the celebrated informa- sociological study of science. It is this ted to the prestigious Stuyvesant High tion scientist and inventor of the Science idea which later led to the development School, known for excellence in math , died on 26 February. He of . Indeed, and Sergey and science. But after a year or two, Gar- Brin, founders of Google, have cited Gar- was 91 and lived in Brynmawr, a suburb field left this school for a combination of field in their academic work. of . reasons: he wanted to learn many foreign

The impact of his work was felt in aca- languages but the school curriculum did demia and policymaking bodies through- not encourage it; he had no real mentors out the world and in science, technology, there; and he had to commute all the way social sciences, and humanities. from the Bronx to 14th Street in Manhat- Belver Griffith, his long time friend, tan every day. He joined the DeWitt attributed Garfield’s success to ‘early Clinton High School, which was near his and deep insights regarding the struc- home in the Bronx and where he could tures of scientific literatures and the na- learn Spanish and German. By this time ture of scientific communication’. the family had moved to West Bronx He rose from humble beginnings to where there was a branch of the New reach the pinnacle of fame, but his life York Public Library across the road. He was one of ups and downs. It was by used to go into the library not to read sheer persistence and the force of his books in the children’s section but to ideas he made it a success. He was a scan the titles of books in the library’s modern day Ulysses who had enjoyed adults section. By the time he finished greatly, had suffered greatly, and be- school, he had scanned the titles of al- come a name; for always roaming with a most all the books. They were all in his hungry mind much had he seen and head and he was wondering how to make known. He was constantly yearning to sense of it all. Years later he knew the follow knowledge like a sinking star. Another great idea that occurred to answer: classification. Garfield in the early 1960s was to have a Garfield had to work hard when not in Simple ideas daily newspaper for science that would school. When he was 9, he was deliver- deal with ‘the business of science: those ing groceries, and working in a laundry The databases he created were based on matters that are relevant to professionals for a meagre fee; later on he worked in simple ideas, but had far reaching impact working in the scientific arena – bench his uncle’s garment shop. and tremendous utility. For example, scientists, professors of science, science Early on Garfield imbibed his work Current Contents is basically a weekly administrators, and laypersons who for- ethic and doggedness from his mother collection of the contents pages of hun- mulate or monitor science policy’. If whom he called a ‘speed demon.’ She dreds of journals along with author ad- businessmen have Wall Street Journal was pretty fast in everything she did – dresses and a subject index. The actual and Financial Times, why not scientists reading, writing, crocheting, cooking, number of its users far exceeded the have a paper of their own? Eventually and housekeeping. He learnt from her combined readership of Nature and Sci- The Scientist came out as a monthly in that one should never stop till the job at ence. And it provided him a platform to October 1986 and a biweekly since 1987. hand was finished. air his views week after week on a range Since 2002 it is a daily and is accessible Garfield also came under the influence of topics to a worldwide audience. free on the net. Science and Nature of his five maternal uncles, three of (SCI) was based started devoting more space to non- whom were Marxists and the other two on the simple idea that ‘if two items are original research items, after Garfield were capitalists. There was constant tur- connected because one mentions the started The Scientist. moil in the family, but the young Gar- other, they are likely related’. Garfield field acquired business acumen, made a big leap from there: by gathering radicalism, atheism, and a love for clas- and putting together all the references in Early life sical music. One of the Marxist uncles all the papers in all the important jour- nals he made it possible for us to perform Born in 1925 in ’s East gifted him a copy of J. D. Bernal’s Social prospective as well as retrospective Bronx borough into a family of European Functions of Science when he was just searches of the literature. With SCI and immigrants, Eugene Garfinkel was raised 14, and the book left a lasting impression other citation databases, one could move by his mother with the support of her on him. Bernal became his hero, whom back in time to locate previously pub- eldest brother. His father had left his he met years later at the International lished papers as well as move forward in mother even before he was born. His un- Conference on Scientific Information time to determine who has subsequently cle changed his name to Garfield, the which was held in Washington, DC.

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Collegiate education and becoming In 1953 Garfield organized the ‘First ployee, Beverly Bartolomeo, as his sec- an entrepreneur Symposium on Machine Methods in Sci- retary. She stayed on with the company, entific Documentation’. On learning became a senior director, and retired in After finishing school, Garfield joined about the symposium, a former vice 2005. An exemplar of loyalty! In 1960, the University of Colorado in 1942 for a president of Shepard’s Citations, Wil- Garfield renamed his company Institute B S in chemical engineering. The war in- liam Adaire, wrote to Garfield about the for Scientific Information or ISI, so it terrupted and he later joined the Univer- interest evinced by some engineering so- would sound like a non-profit organiza- sity of California, Berkeley as a premed ciety in using their methods. Garfield tion. His idea was to do with a small staff student, but after two years decided to looked up Shepard’s Citations and he all that VINITI, the Soviet Union’s mega return to New York. Subsequently he immediately realized how he could link institute, was doing. earned a B S in chemistry from Colum- bibliographic references to build the cita- Garfield had always been interested in bia University in 1948. tion index for science, as he had been chemistry and was not happy with the Soon he got to work as a lab assistant looking for that kind of structure. indexes produced by Chemical Abstracts to Louis Hammett at Columbia and he The Welch Library project was com- (CA) as they were several years late. even had a paper with him in Journal of ing to a close and Garfield was advised With the he had developed he the American Chemical Society. He was to take a degree in library science if he could index chemical compounds much not good at lab work and after a few ex- wanted to remain in the field. With the faster, and thus was born Current Ab- plosions, he left Columbia. He got a con- help of references from leading informa- stracts of Chemistry & Index Chemicus. sultant position with Smith, Kline and tion scientists whom he had met while at This product could not win expected French, who needed a pharmaceutical the Welch Library, he got into Columbia market response, as CA was an estab- documentalist. In order to give the im- University. He completed his M S in one lished product. It lost money for twenty pression that he was not just a lone self- year and topped the class. He had even years, but Garfield did not close it down employed person, he adopted the busi- submitted a paper on the preparation of as he had invested his ego; besides, there ness name Eugene Garfield Associates. printed indexes by automatic punched- was a very loyal staff of chemists whom At a meeting of the American Chemical card techniques to American Documenta- he would not like to lay off. He sup- Society, he met James Perry, a pioneer in tion even before the degree was awarded ported it with the money earned by Cur- the field of chemical literature, and real- in 1954. He decided to pursue doctoral rent Contents. ized that one could get paid for searching work in machine translation. Garfield brought out many other great the literature. Perry arranged for him to It was also around that time he wrote products such as Citation Classics, Atlas be hired by Sanford Larkey of the Welch his seminal paper on citation indexing of Science and the software HistCite. In Medical Library at Johns Hopkins Uni- which appeared in Science in 1955. 1979, he wrote a book on citation index- versity to work on the application of ma- Subsequently he went to the Univer- ing. He had also collected all his essays, chine methods for indexing the medical sity of Pennsylvania to work with a pro- originally published in Current Contents, literature, a project funded by the Army fessor of linguistics for his Ph D. He into 15 volumes of Essays of an Informa- Medical Library, what would later be- developed an algorithm which proved tion Scientist. All these essays are avail- come the National Library of Medicine. that a computer could convert chemical able at his home page. He not only strove It was this project which eventually led names directly into a molecular formula. and sought like Ulysses, but was also to Medical Subject Headings or MESH. Before then, chemists had always drawn keen to share what he found with others! Garfield believed that practically every- structural diagrams from the names and He was a quintessential people person. thing he had ever done at ISI was in then arrived at the molecular formula some way or another attributable to the from the graphs. Meanwhile his advisor thought processes that went on in this left for Europe on a long trip handing A people person basic research. him over to another professor. He wrote It was while he was with the Welch his dissertation all in 10 pages! His in- When the Soviet Block was disintegrat- Library project that Garfield started pub- terim supervisor said it would not do. He ing, he helped a number of scientists visit lishing Current Advances, a compilation then wrote a 100-page document on a the West. It was he who made the works of the contents pages of all the library transformational analysis of Geneva of the philosopher mathematician Nali- and documentation journals. Later on, he nomenclature. Again, the degree was mov known to the English-speaking produced one such service for manage- nowhere in sight. It was then he found world. Indeed, ISI published English ment called Current Contents of Man- out that they were waiting for his origi- translations of some of Nalimov’s books. agement and Social Science. Bell Labs nal supervisor to return from Europe! He With a view to helping to preserve the was interested in this service and they wrote him a stern letter stating that he memory of a vanishing way of life, he were ready to buy 500 copies, but under would not brook any further delay and supported the Huichol tribe of southern the title Survey of Current Management soon he got his degree in 1961. He re- Mexico by buying as well as commis- Literature. These two subscription prod- ported his work in Nature the same year. sioning a number of their yarn paintings. ucts were produced in a converted He always had a very high proportion of chicken coop with loans from Household minority employees at ISI and there were Finance companies! These were the fore- ISI many women holding senior positions. runners of Current Contents which was The company allowed the staff to adopt published much later by ISI in seven dif- In 1958 Garfield moved his office to flexible working hours long before others ferent editions. Philadelphia and hired his first em- did. ISI had an affordable child care

CURRENT SCIENCE, VOL. 112, NO. 6, 25 MARCH 2017 1283 PERSONAL NEWS centre right from when the company He had a great sense of justice and fair Any description of Gene's India con- moved to their own building in the play. nection would be incomplete without a University City Centre, Philadelphia. He Immediately after he heard about mention of his great admiration for Shi- found it extremely difficult to sack his Shepard’s Citations from Adaire, he yali R. Ranganathan, whom he had met employees. He was unhappy when in called him and requested him to write at the 1957 Dorking conference on clas- 1988 ISI’s new management closed about it so he could give him credit in his sification and retrieval and whose por- down several unprofitable products own paper on citation indexing for sci- trait he had included in the mural within four months of acquiring the ence, and as an Associate Editor of ‘Cathedral of Man’ adorning the ISI business resulting in layoff of many em- American Documentation he invited him building. Indeed, on one of his visits to ployees. to write. And he quoted Adaire’s paper India he delivered the sixth series of He had met and corresponded with in his 1955 Science paper. He always Ranganathan Memorial Lectures at Ban- thousands of people from around the gave credit where it was due. galore and unveiled a portrait of Ranga- world. He often had house guests and For a very long time SCI was in the nathan at the University of Madras. guests he put up in hotels near ISI. He red, but he would not close it down. One During that visit, he also spoke at the received and honoured requests for funds of the reasons, he told Tony Cawkell, Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biol- for travel or education, and for informa- was of course he was after recognition, ogy, Hyderabad. On another visit, he tion. Here are two unusual requests for which was much stronger than his need gave talks at the Indian Council of Medi- information from eminent chemists. for money or power; another was his be- cal Research and CSIR’s Publications & Joel Hildebrand, whose freshman lief that SCI could be a vehicle to trans- Information Directorate. classes Garfield had attended at UCal, form an informal system of recognition He had paid tributes to Ranganathan called him after he saw SCI and asked into an explicit reward system for sci- and Sambhu Nath De, the great cholera him if he could use citation indexing to ence and help people who are passed researchers, in the form of essays detail- prove that the physical chemistry litera- over in the formal reward system of sci- ing their accomplishments. Many years ture had become too mathematical. Gar- ence. ago Current Science brought out a special field did not have an answer, but, in any issue on Sambhu Nath De who till then case, he himself was a bit skeptical about Garfield’s India connection remained an unsung hero in India. It all the math that we see in a lot of fields started with a letter Joshua Lederberg these days. He thought that ‘the world is, Garfield was in India for the first time in had written to Garfield about his nominat- obsessed, or carried away with the the last week of 1974 to take part in a ing De for the Nobel Prize more than once. mathematics that’s behind all these classification conference held in Bom- Despite his great accomplishments, things, that they lose the forest for the bay. The Indian Academy of Sciences, Garfield remained simple. His friends in- trees’. Bangalore, where I was the Secretary- cluded many distinguished scientists and The second is from Woodward of Har- cum-editor of publications, invited him scholars including Nobel laureates, writ- vard University, who in 1959 wanted to to spend a few days as their guest. He ers and statesmen and also many others have an article by a German competitor, agreed to alter his travel plan. When he less known, but he treated them all alike. which he had seen listed in Current Con- arrived in Bangalore, there was a general Garfield was a patron of art, music, thea- tents. He told Garfield, ‘We don’t have strike and disruption of services in the tre and museums. He liked to travel and this article in our library, yet.’ In those city. But, to our great relief, Gene took it he was a connoisseur of good food. days, it was not customary to receive in his stride. With a view to maximizing Garfield is survived by his wife, Meher, journals by airmail as it was expensive. the benefits of his presence in Bangalore, three sons, a daughter, a step-daughter, However, ISI received journals by air- I arranged talks at the Indian Institute of two granddaughters, and two great- mail. Garfield offered to send him a Science, National Aeronautical Labora- grandchildren. copy, but Woodward answered, ‘I have tory and elsewhere. As a result, he was SUBBIAH ARUNACHALAM to know now!’ Fortunately, the article talking from morning till late in the eve- was very short, just one or two pages. So ning, addressing large audiences. On top DST Centre for Policy Research, Garfield read it to him on the phone be- of it, he was reading and writing or play- Indian Institute of Science, cause he knew German. The service ing on his saxophone whenever he was Bengaluru 560 012, India could not have been faster than that! on his own. e-mail: [email protected]

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