Buckminster Fuller

I met Bucky Fuller while working with Keith Critchlow then a lecturer at the Architectural Association School now the Director of the Islamic Arts course at the Prince of Wales' Institute of Architecture in London.

Keith Critchlow is the cofounder of Temenos, as well as the author of numerous books on geometry, including Order in Space and Time Stands Still and Islamic Pattern as a Cosmological Art. He is a founder member of RILKO (Research Into Lost Knowledge Organisation), a founder member and Director of Studies of Kairos and a founder member and president of the Temenos Academy. Professor Critchlow founded VITA (Visual Islamic and Traditional Arts) a department now attached to the Prince of Wales Institute’s School of Traditional Arts. The School specializes in the arts and architecture of Islam, as well as the traditional arts of other civilizations.

 One of the principal aims of the school is to encourage appreciation of the universal values that are fundamental to the arts of the great traditions of the world. He is also the Director of the Prince of Wales Institute of Architecture and a former professor of Islamic Art at the Royal College of Art. Dr. Critchlow, a leading expert in sacred architecture, also founded Kairos, a society that investigates, studies, and promotes traditional values of art and science. Dr. Crithchlow wrote a foreword to Chartres and a foreword to The Foundations of Christians Art: Illustrated.

He is now semi-retired as Professor Emeritus at VITA but continues to lecture worldwide and practice as an architectural consultant. His work in the field of architecture includes the Krishnamurti Study Centre in the U.K., the ecumemcal chapel in Crestone, Colorado, USA and the Sathya Sai Institute of Higher Medicine in Puttaparthy, India, in all of which he has embodied the principles of sacred geometry is an internationally known lecturer, teacher and author.

Monica Pidgeon, editor of Architectural Design magazine gave me the opportunity to work co-edit a special issue together with Jean Michel Cousteau.

John Cunningham Lilly 1915 - 2001

In the late 1950s John Lilly established a center devoted to fostering human-dolphin communication; the Communication Research Institute on St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands. In the early 1960s, Lilly and co-workers reported that dolphins could mimic human speech patterns. The novel Day of the Dolphin was based loosely around Lilly and his research on communication with dolphins.

A pioneer researcher into the nature of consciousness, Lilly was a prominent member of the Californian counterculture of scientists, mystics and thinkers that arose in the late 1960s and early 70s. Albert Hofmann, Gregory Bateson, Ram Dass, Timothy Leary, Werner Erhard, and Richard Feynman were all frequent visitors to his home.

He studied physics and biology at the California Institute of Technology, graduating in 1938. He studied medicine at Dartmouth Medical School and received a medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1942.

Maurice Wilkins 1916 - 2004

My mentor at King's College, University of London

Maurice Wilkins died aged 87 on October 5th, 2004 surrounded by his family. He shared the Nobel prize for the discovery of the double helical structure of DNA together with Frances Crick and James Watson. Rosalind Franklin whose x-ray diffraction work was also crucial to the discovery had died of cancer some years prior to the award of the prize. Maurice Wilkins' death came just two months after that of Francis Crick.

Joseph Beuys

Linus and Ava Helen Pauling 1901 -1994

Physicist and international security and arms control leader. My faculty sponsor at Stanford (Ford Foundation post-doctoral fellowship international arms control)

Photo of Sid Drell taken 2002 by Peter Ginter
Stanford Linear Accelerator