Nobel banners restored at Berkeley Lab

Photo: Lyn Hunter, LBNL

Nobel banners restored at Berkeley Lab
Street banners honoring nine of Berkeley Lab's Nobel Prize winners, originally installed along Telegraph Avenue in 2003, have been mounted on poles on Cyclotron Road leading to Berkeley Lab in honor of its 75th anniversary. Uncovered recently in storage, the deteriorating vinyl banners were restored by the Lab's Vic Haskett of the paint shop.

The original installation of 66 banners, sponsored by University of California, Berkeley, and Telegraph Avenue merchants, celebrated the Berkeley campus' 18 Nobel Laureates–13 for scientific achievement, four for economics, and one for literary success.

When John Hickey, design director for UC Berkeley's Public Affairs office, began work on the 2003 Telegraph Avenue project, he said he had no idea what kind of an endeavor it would be. "We had to work with some pretty old photos of Berkeley laureates," he said. "Some were postage stamp-sized images that had been dug up from old department files." A few, fortunately, were top quality, having been shot by Berkeley portrait photographer Paul Bishop; others had been shot more recently by his son, Paul Bishop, Jr.

Ernest O. Lawrence (1939) was the first of Berkeley's Nobel Laureates in Physics. Other Physics Laureates: Owen Chamberlain and Emilio G. Segre (1959); Luis Alvarez (1968); Donald A. Glaser (1960); Charles H. Townes (1964), and current Berkeley Lab Director Steven Chu (1997). Chemistry Laureates: Wendell M. Stanley and John H. Northrop (1946); William F. Giaque (1949); Glenn T. Seaborg and Edwin M. McMillan (1951); Melvin Calvin (1961), and Yuan T. Lee (1986). Economics Laureates: Gerard Debreu (1983); John C. Harsany (1994); Daniel L. McFadden (2000), and George Akerlof (2001). Literature Laureate: Czeslow Milosz (1980). 

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