Frank Stahl, biology professor emeritus and American Cancer Society Professor, is part of the campus movement against military research.
Stahl grew up in Boston and attended Harvard University. He earned a Ph.D. at the University of Rochester and did post-doctoral work at the California Institute of Technology. After a year at the University of Missouri, Stahl came to work at the University’s new Institute of Molecular Biology in 1959.
When Aaron Novick, the institute’s first director, recruited Stahl, he emphasized that the University was not doing military research, Stahl said. Novick helped develop the atomic bomb during World War II and afterward became very opposed to military research, Stahl said.
Stahl said he was primarily focused on his own scientific research for most of his career, so he did not know a lot about campus military research until recently. His research focused on genetic recombination, the process in which two parent organisms create an offspring containing DNA from each parent.
Stahl retired in June but still has an office on campus.
In late 2002, Stahl tried to get the University Senate to pass a resolution against what was then a possible war in Iraq, on the grounds that the war would divert national resources from education. The senate refused to vote on the issue, so Stahl circulated a petition to have a faculty assembly.
He and his partner Jette Foss enlisted the help of Concerned Faculty for Peace and Justice to collect the necessary 500-plus faculty signatures, and have been involved with the group ever since.
Stahl said he has been interested in removing the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps from campus for years as a statement against militarism and the military’s homophobic policies. He said he became specifically interested in military research when graduate student Brian Bogart came to campus and shared his ideas with him.
– Eva Sylwester