James B. Pollack

Hi, and welcome to Queer STEM History, a podcast about queer scientists throughout the ages. Each week we look an in-depth profile of a different person and their life and their work. I'm one of your hosts, Len, and I use they/ them pronouns. And I'm your other host, Lauren, and I use she/ her pronouns.

 

And today the scientist that will be talking about is James Barney Pollack. No, not the other Pollack you're thinking of the artist. We're talking about the American astrophysicist who worked for many years for NASA's Ames Research Centre. Now James is a world renowned expert in many fields and actually worked on a lot of stuff that's still relevant to us today. Phrases you may have heard of, such as a nuclear winter, the terraforming of Mars, what caused the extinction of the dinosaurs, as well as being one of the first workers on the concept of climate change. It frustrates me so much I never knew that a queer scientist was responsible for some of the foundation work in climate change, which is such a huge issue today. I'm glad we're doing this story now! And his work on the formation of the giant planets is actually seen today as the standard model. So space gays!

 

So James Pollack was an openly gay man during the 1960s, when this still wasn't really a time where you could be out in the workplace. It was actually illegal at the time to work for a federal agency such as NASA if you were gay because of a 1953 executive order from the President, which banned gay men and lesbians from working for any agency of the federal government. It was not until 1973 that it was ruled that a person's sexual orientation alone could not be the sole reason for termination from employment, and not until 1975 that it was announced that federal government agencies could consider applications by gays and lesbians on a case by case basis. How very generous of them.

 

Back when James was young, he had trouble communicating. But after a psychological assessment, they realised that he just thought so fast that his verbalization got trouble trying to keep up. So Jim ended up teaching himself to speak slowly, keeping his words on track, and throughout the rest of his life he was a slow speaker, and it has been said that he was impossible to interrupt because of this. As a child and teen he was an avid young rocket scientist in the basement of his family home and was also just very talented in general, he was a track star and valedictorian as well, and eventually graduated with high honours in physics from Princeton.

 

Pollack went on to receive his Masters in Nuclear Physics at the University of California Berkeley in 1962 and a PhD from Harvard in 1965 where he was a student of Carl Sagan, you may have heard that name before. And he continued to work closely with Carl throughout the majority of his career. In 1970 Jim began working at the NASA Ames Group and did quite a bit of diverse work: looking at planetary processes, spacecraft data and observatory observations. He played a key role in nearly every NASA planetary mission since Apollo, including the Mariner 9, Viking, Voyager, Pioneer Venus, Mars Observer and Galileo. He modelled compositions of several planets Venus, Mars, Jupiter's moons and Saturn's rings. He and Carl Sagan postulated that the seasonal colour variations on Mars were caused by wind storms and dust rather than plant life. They thought they were plants on Mars? Well , they're still looking for water aren't they?

 

He specialised in evolutionary climate change of terrestrial planets and the evolution of the giant gas planets. Using these models he developed, they were able to explain the different compositions of the moons of Jupiter, how the inner moons were too close to the hot glowing gas sphere to allow icy material to freeze, and hence they remained primarily rock to this day. Jim also used these models to study the Saturn system so Saturn's the planet we know with like the really obvious rings and his understanding of scattering of radiation by wavelength sized particles led him to be the very first person to resolve this puzzle posed by Saturn's rings. They gave off no radio wave emission but were strong radar reflectors. Strange suggestions such as metallic particles were being advanced by other scientists at the time but it was Jim that realised that normal water ice particles could have this behaviour if they're in the proper size range from a few centimetres to two metres in size. That's a really big ice cube. He and Jeff Cuzzi refined these ideas into predictions that were later confirmed by the Voyager observations.

 

Over the years James's work with this team helped develop one of the world's most complete models of Mars' atmospheric circulation. This model was used to interpret Viking spacecraft data and is also still helping to plan future missions to Mars by NASA as well as by the European and Russian space agencies. It's produced an understanding of the wind and pressure patterns seen by Viking, as well as leading towards explanations for the cause of giant dust storms seen on Mars.

 

So after studying the Earth's atmosphere, he thought about the possibility of the greenhouse effect, ozone depletion and climate change they're all words you're really familiar with. These are events leading to sulfuric rains and really high temperatures similar to what we see in the weather conditions of the planet Venus. James actually laid the foundation of the study of evolutionary climate change on all the terrestrial planets including Earth, and this is so large in scope that only the outlines of its methodology are in place today. So there's two separate studies on Mars and Venus still ongoing. They've modelled the coupled evolution of the crust and atmosphere of a planet.

 

James's planetary perspectives led him to make significant early contributions to the evolution of Earth itself. By studying these effects on the atmosphere and the surface biology of the giant asteroid impact they were able to look at the implication of this on the extinctions of the dinosaurs and the insulation effect the debris lofted into the atmosphere. And this eventually led to the concept of a nuclear winter which Jim worked with Carl Sagan on developing the concept and that was really important in this time when nuclear weapons were just such a hot debate. Yes, right in the middle of the cold war right? Jim also made important contributions to the growing understanding that volcanoes can produce significant effects on the climate of the earth, which we have seen in a few volcanic eruptions since then. So many topics such a diverse researcher.

 

There's not actually much recorded on James's personal life in terms of relationships. After he died in 1994 of spinal cancer, the published obituaries on him do not actually mention that he is gay or that he was survived by his partner who's because they don't mention it we don't know his name. And we don't know whether this is omission is just keeping his personal life private or whether it was you know a bit homophobic, and they're like we don't want to publish this kind of stuff. But there is one story that is repeated and it comes from Carl Sagan's biography is that at one point during his university time James' lover was having trouble getting treatment from the University Health Service in their Emergency Department. But being close friends Carl Sagan actually came to his defence and helped out. However they also don't know the name of the partner from this story.

 

From Pollack's obituary we know quite a bit about his personality - he had a great sense of humour, he worked for his college humour magazine and enjoyed a laugh even at his own expense. In 1987, when he was at an awards ceremony for the Ames Fellow Award he was soundly roasted by his colleagues in the space science division and he loved every minute of it. You've gotta love a good roasting. Away from work James enjoyed tennis and science fiction and it's also said that he was pretty good at shooting the hoops. He was an avid opera fan and regularly viewed performances and said he "brought to this advocation the same all embracing intellectual curiosity that he applied to his scientific pursuits." He liked operas of every style in period. He was particularly attracted to those that were new or rarely performed, which gave him the opportunity to study new musical and historical contexts. And people who worked with him said that James would radiate sheer delight for days after seeing a good performance.

 

Pollock really seems to be like a chronic overachiever . He studied at some of the greatest universities in the world, worked at NASA, developed the concepts that really influenced our knowledge of the planets and climate change among about a million other different things. I'm really starting to feel quite inferior to these queer scientists that we're discussing on this podcast. I guess that's something to say in terms of like in terms of historic personalities who do get promoted, we tend to hear all about the really successful stories, and if you look at just today lists of queer scientists, you've got projects like 500 Queer Scientists and there are so many of us out there that just doing regular work in every lab. I would hope that that was still the same back then, but we only hear about those who were the chronic overachievers with fascinating lives.

 

I hope you all enjoyed hearing a bit more about the life and work of James Pollack. We will be joining you again next week for another fantastic queer scientist story. But closing note, if you want to visit something named after James Pollack, you have to go a bit far because he actually has a crater on Mars named after him. So the craters called Pollack, it's an impact crater on the south east region of Mars and it's up to 96 kilometres in diameter because of his research on the climate of Mars this is why he got this great honour, and I wish I had a crater on Mars named after me. Pretty cool. So the last two episodes we've started to amass a bit of a queer science bucket list to live on a twenty four acre farm and have a crater named after you on Mars. What else do you need? Pay attention the next few weeks and see what else we can find. So once again, we want to thank the Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science for letting us use their podcast studio without that this podcast would not be possible or would just be really low quality. If you want to find out more information about James Pollack or any of the queer scientists that will be discussing this podcast please find us on Facebook Queer STEM History, Twitter at Q STEM History or on our website. Links to all of those are in our podcast description and you can find our show notes on our website for links to all of the research that we found. We hope you all enjoyed listening and we will join you again next week.

 

[Bloopers] Welcome to Queer STEM Histories the podcast where we going to tell you some exciting stories about some fascinating Queer people throughout the ages. Tonight we're gonna take you through a story of romance, passion and science. I'm Lenjamin.