Frederick Seitz; top physicist was skeptic on warming; 96

FREDERICK SEITZ (Rockefeller University/file 1992)

LOS ANGELES - Frederick Seitz, a theoretical physicist who played a key role in founding the field of condensed matter physics but who may be better known for his roles as a government adviser and as the president of the National Academy of Sciences and the Rockefeller University, died Sunday at a nursing home in New York. He was 96.

In recent years, Dr. Seitz became controversial as a doubter of man-made global warming and for his efforts at channeling tobacco industry funds into medical research.

He was one of the "founding fathers" of condensed matter physics, said physicist Marvin Cohen of the University of California, Berkeley. "He was a very important influence when the field was growing at a rapid rate."

Condensed matter physics, originally called solid-state physics, involves the properties of bulk substances, such as a lump of silicon, as opposed to those of individual atoms. The field has blossomed in the last two decades with the advent of new materials with special properties, such as better photovoltaic cells and ever-smaller memories for computers.

The field was created by researchers such as Dr. Seitz.

In the early 1930s, while he was a graduate student at Princeton University, Dr. Seitz and his mentor, Eugene P. Wigner, were the first to calculate the physical properties of bulk sodium based on the known properties of sodium ions.

Their technique, known as the Wigner-Seitz method, came to be used by other researchers to calculate the energies of the "band gaps" that electrons jump over to conduct a current in semiconductors - the basis of the transistor. The technique is considered the catalyst for the formation of solid-state physics in the United States.

In 1940, he published the seminal text, "The Modern Theory of Solids," which became the bible of the field for many years, according to Cohen.

His subsequent research involved the theory and properties of crystals and the diffusion of atoms into crystalline structures.

By the late 1950s, his major scientific contributions ended as he moved more fully into administrative positions, first as chairman of the governing board of the American Institute of Physics, then as science adviser to NATO.

In 1962, Dr. Seitz was elected president of the National Academy of Sciences, a part-time job that was nonetheless extremely time-consuming. He played a crucial role in restructuring the presidency into a full-time position and was the first to accept a term in that role.

In 1968, he was recruited as president of Rockefeller University, succeeding Detlev Bronk, who initiated a broad expansion of the institution into a major university. But the poor performance of the stock market in the 1970s sharply restricted the funds available to sustain Bronk's vision.

During Dr. Seitz's tenure, however, he created a joint doctorate-MD program with Cornell University and established a 1,000-acre Center for Field Research in Ethology and Ecology in Millbrook, N.Y.

Toward the end of his tenure at Rockefeller in 1978, he was approached by R.J. Reynolds Industries to oversee the disbursement of about $45 million in medical research funds. Virtually none of the money went to smoking-related research, but critics charged that the industry used the grants as a shield to demonstrate its commitment to science even while they were disputing evidence that smoking causes cancer.

Dr. Seitz later said that his father warned him as a child that smoking was linked to cancer and he never changed his opinion.

"It's who spends the money that is important," he said.

He did, however, express skepticism about the effects of secondhand smoke.

In 1984, he co-founded the conservative George C. Marshall Institute in Washington with William Nierenberg and Robert Jastrow. From that bully pulpit, he spoke often and vigorously against the idea that global warming was caused by humans, savaging a 1995 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that argued the point.

In 1998, he urged fellow scientists to sign a petition backed by an Oregon group opposed to US ratification of the Kyoto Protocol to limit emissions of greenhouse gases. Dr. Seitz also argued that scientific evidence did not support the idea that chlorofluorocarbons damage the planet's ozone layer.

The son of a German immigrant baker, Dr. Seitz was born in San Francisco on the Fourth of July in 1911. He enrolled at Stanford University as a biochemistry major, but soon changed to mathematics, completing his degree in three years. He received his doctorate from Princeton in two years.

During World War II, he worked on the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb and, after the war, interviewed German scientists about their roles in nuclear development on the behalf of the US government.