IN MEMORIUM

Dael Wolfle

Dael Lee Wolfle, 96, an honorary member of NASW, died on Dec. 26, 2002, in Seattle, Wash. Wolfle had two distinct careers, each lasting more than 25 years.

Wolfle dedicated his life to the study of science and policy. As an advisor to federal and state government, he helped craft scientific guidelines and principles.

Wolfle was born in 1906 in Puyallup, Wash. He graduated from the University of Washington in 1927 and received a doctorate in experimental psychology from The Ohio State University in 1931. He served in World War II with the U.S. Army Signal Corps and Office of Scientific Research and Development. After the war, he became executive secretary of the American Psychological Association and was secretary-treasurer of the Inter-Society Committee for a National Science Foundation, which helped establish the National Science Foundation.

He was executive director of AAAS from 1954 to 1970. During his tenure, Wolfle wrote 244 editorials for Science, 243 on serious subjects and one piece of satire. It was the latter that got the most attention. In it he proposed the establishment of a Potomac Valley Test Facility, to be located between the White House and the Pentagon, wherein such experiments could be conducted as dropping unwanted poison gas containers to test their structural integrity before dumping them into the sea, or the effects of sonic booms on sleep deprivation. If this led, he suggested, to the absence from Washington of certain politicians, bureaucrats, and editorial writers, it “would be considered by many to be in the national interest.”

Wolfle wrote several books and many journal articles during his career. In 1989, he published a book on the history of AAAS. In the book, colleague William Golden wrote: “Dael Wolfle’s one shortcoming is also one of his virtues: modesty.” AAAS membership and its financial strength grew under Wolfle’s leadership.

After leaving AAAS, Wolfle taught at the University of Washington’s Graduate School of Public Affairs. He left that job after 26 years, at the age of 90. The University of Washington named him one of its 100 most famous graduates of the 20th century.

Wolfle’s son, Lee, said his father was well organized, and left the family instructions on who should be notified of his death. That included NASW.

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(Sources: Seattle Times and Washington Post obituaries, and the Wolfle family.)