Paul MacCready: A Powerful Champion for Citizen Science

Shawn Carlson, Ph.D.
Founder and Executive Director
Society for Amateur Scientists


A giant has fallen and the citizen scientist community has lost a very great friend.

I met Paul MacCready while fighting against pseudoscience through several skeptics societies back in the mid 1980s. At the time, he was a world-famous aeronautical engineer, and I was just a graduate student with but a single peer-reviewed publication to my name. But I had managed to impress him with the quality of my research, my public lectures and my appearances on local talk shows. For Paul, ability always mattered much more than credentials.

So when in 1994 I decided to start the Society for Amateur Scientists (SAS), he was naturally one of the very first people I invited to help lead the effort by joining the Board of Trustees. He agreed warmly and immediately. And over the years he has quietly done more for SAS than any other Board member. He has attended every one of our national conferences that he could. He promoted our organization to his powerful friends. He personally donated many thousands of dollars to our cause, and he caused others to donate tens of thousands more.

Shawn Carlson (l.) and Paul MacCready visit during a break at the 2005 annual meeting of the Society for Amateur Scientists. Photograph by Forrest M. Mims III.

Moreover, I now know that it was Paul MacCready who brought SAS to the attention of the MacArthur Foundation. It was a masterstroke on his part and one for which I shall always be very grateful.  At the time I was running SAS as a full-time volunteer, and my wife and I were trying to make it on her graduate student salary plus a small stipend I was earning by writing for Scientific American magazine. We were really struggling, and my wife was pressuring me (using all the persuasion a wife can apply to a husband) to abandon SAS altogether and find a job that could support our growing family. SAS was in serious danger of closing down. Winning the MacArthur Fellowship saved my family and our organization. It silenced our critics (and we had a few in those days). It put citizen science on the map and it freed me to continue to work to promote our community. For all the good we've done since then, Paul MacCready deserves a good part of the credit.

A lot of folks have looked at what we've accomplished at SAS over the years. When they see the amazingly good fortune we've had and the seemingly miraculous ways that obstacles have somehow been removed at just the right time, they usually declare me to be a very lucky man. Now I can finally tell the truth. SAS never had Lady Luck on our side. We had Paul MacCready.

It is my sincerest hope that I will one day be able to do for other young do-gooders out there what Paul MacCready did for us.

A giant has fallen. The citizen scientist community has lost a very great friend. And today, I grieve.