At Victor McElheny Luncheon, Luminaries Reflect on KSJ Founder’s Life and Legacy

This month, in a sun-filled room in MIT’s Samberg Center overlooking the Charles River and Boston, the Knight Science Journalism Program gathered MIT leaders and faculty, former KSJ directors, and journalists including current and former fellows to celebrate the life and legacy of Victor McElheny. There were dozens in attendance, including three generations of McElheny’s family.

It was a chance to reflect on how much McElheny had done for MIT, for the field of science journalism, and for the Knight Science Journalism Fellowship Program he founded 43 years ago. It was also a chance to recount the many lives he touched as a colleague, mentor, and friend. Many speakers remembered his relentless intellectual energy and his continued focus on how science and technology impact humanity.

“I really think of him as a transformational figure at MIT,” said Agustín Rayo, the Kenan Sahin Dean, of MIT’s School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS). “He really believed that technology could shape society for the better if we did it right, and that MIT had a role to play in helping us figure out how to do it right.”

Deborah Fitzgerald, the former dean of SHASS and an emeritus professor of MIT’s program in Science, Technology, and Society (STS), called the creation of KSJ “Vic’s great gift to MIT” and said she had never seen someone so adept at maneuvering through a bureaucratic system to get things done.

“He was a master at figuring out the angles of things,” she said. “Vic was a political player of the highest sort and knew from long experience what it took to proceed in a bureaucratic environment.”

The program included comments from former director Boyce Rensberger, and former acting directors Wade Roush and David Ansley.

Rensberger credited McElheny, and the KSJ program he created, with modernizing and strengthening our field. “The program turned science journalism from an often-naive back of the book enterprise to an essential part of any news organization,” he said.

Roush, who met McElheny while a graduate student at STS, said he felt he had shared a lifelong conversation with him, and that speaking with McElheny was like “spontaneous time travel.” He added: “I would just get whisked away to whatever time period Victor was talking about.”

McElheny’s commitment to — and love of — KSJ shone through in everything he did. “He was never very far from this program. He never really let it out of sight,” said Ansley. “Which was why he was still writing those emails (about KSJ) up until the end.”

In honor of Victor’s fascination with the scientist and inventor Edwin Land, we set up a station so guests could take Polaroid photos and keep them as a memento of the day.

The tribute continued with words from current STS professors, who noted his prescience, and his ability to link the work of science and technology to the people behind discoveries, often people he knew personally.

“It became clear that over this long and really remarkable career, McElheny had known, interviewed, and studied people who we only knew from history books,” said David Kaiser, professor of physics and Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science at STS. “He would do this not to name drop or take pride but to remind us that all of these now fabled developments in science and technologyhad been done by people … and no matter how those developments might look to us today, they were once uncertain, and risky, and far from inevitable.”

It became clear that over this long and really remarkable career, McElheny had known, interviewed, and studied people who we only knew from history books.

David Mindell, professor of aeronautics and astronautics, and Dibner Professor of the History of Engineering and Manufacturing at STS, had known McElheny for 35 years. He shared a number of personal stories about McElheny and McElheny’s wife Ruth, including the time she, with no fuss, cooked an impressive dinner for Julia Child. Mindell said he learned early on that McElheny had an impeccable memory and could recall almost any fact almost instantly — with the speed of some of today’s generative AI tools.

“Before Claude, there was Victor McElheny,” Mindell said. “And I must say Claude is a poor substitute.”

I shared my experience with having McElheny — or Victor, as I think of him — as director when I was a fellow and as a cherished mentor when I reconnected with him last year as I discussed my plans for KSJ as its next director. As usual, his eyes were twinkling, and he was full of ideas and enthusiasm — and a curiosity about the world that remained undiminished.

The tribute included a fascinating discussion on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the human genome project — something we know he would have enjoyed participating in, since he spent much of his career reporting on human DNA. “This afternoon, we are fortunate to be having what I think Victor would have considered the right kind of conversation, about a technology that has been revolutionizing human life,” said KSJ Associate Director Ashley Smart as he introduced a panel that included leading figures in the world of genomics: former Whitehead Institute leader Lauren Linton, Broad Institute researcher Alicia Martin, former National Human Genome Research Institute historian Christopher Donohue, Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics assistant professor Daphne Oluwaseun Martschenko, and award winning STAT reporter Megan Molteni.

The tribute also featured a newly produced video with more remembrances of McElheny, statistics about the program and his massive archive now held by MIT, and photos of fellows from over the years. In both the video and comments at the tribute, people referenced with fondness McElheny’s trademark loquaciousness. Rensberger may have said it best, and most succinctly: “The man could talk.”