John “Jack” Marburger, President George W. Bush’s much-maligned science adviser, died Thursday afternoon, according to a note sent out late Thursday by the Office of the Vice President of Research at Stony Brook University.
The former chief of the Bush White House Office of Science & Technology policy, known to his friends and colleagues as “Jack,” last served as vice president of research at the university.
Newsday reports that Marburger suffered from non-Hodgkins lymphoma.
During his tenure at the White House, Marburger’s position became increasingly controversial as President Bush repeatedly made science-related decisions about policy that either ignored or were at odds with the general consensus within the scientific community.
But more recently, Marburger blasted House Republicans for their shortsightedness in the Huffington Post for trying to gut funding for scientific research.
“Science is not a luxury,” he wrote. “It reaches deep into the national infrastructure – economic, physical, and intellectual – that makes modern civilization possible.”
Marburger was a physicist, and (according to USA Today) a Democrat. Before he worked at the White House, he was director of the Brookhaven National Laboratory, and president of Stony Brook University between 1980 and 1994. Prior to that, he was a physics and electrical engineering professor at the University of Southern California. He was also chairman of the university’s physics department.
He also co-founded the university’s Center for Laser Studies, and hosted a series of educational programs called “Frontiers of Electronics,” on CBS.
Despite his passion for science and its ongoing potential to solve big problems, he worked for an administration that upset the scientific community so much that it prompted the politically independent Union of Concerned Scientists to issue a formal statement and 37-page report condemning policies under the Bush administration that covered everything from stem cells, climate change, mercury emissions, reproductive health, lead poisoning in children, workplace safety and nuclear weapons.
But as a note sent out by a Stony Brook colleague showed on Thursday, he was a man who was very much admired by people who knew him.
“Jack will always be to me an amazing and accomplished person, and more important, a very good man for whom I have the utmost respect, admiration and care,” wrote Nancy Daneau, deputy to the vice president for research at Stony Brook, in a Thursday note sent out to her colleagues at the university. “I take comfort now in knowing he is at peace and hope you find the same in remembering and thinking about his wide smile and twinkling blue eyes.”
