Welcome to our recently refurbished website, which I hope you find useful and interesting. The site was developed by Regina Mertz, wife of longtime BGC colleague Professor Dieter Mertz of Mainz University in Germany, who was my first postdoc back in 1994. As this second-generation website is still evolving, we appreciate any constructive suggestions via the feedback link in this website.
Dieter arrived amidst a painful separation of BGC from the Institute of Human Origins. During this time my energies and those of my colleagues were significantly diverted to a legal battle over custody of equipment, and to establishing the infrastructure of a new, independent non-profit institution. Fortunately, the Attorney General of California saw the merits of our custody lawsuit and joined us as a co-plaintiff. Perhaps even more fortunately, we received generous support from the Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation, whose ongoing support has allowed BGC to flourish and grow over the succeeding twelve years.
Today we are in the process of adding a new laboratory, for uranium-thorium-helium thermochronology, under the direction of our latest Faculty member, Dr. David Shuster. David completed his PhD at Caltech only a year ago, and has already emerged as an innovative leader in his field. I am very pleased (but hardly surprised) that we were able to attract David to BGC when he had other offers from some very prestigious institutions. The attraction of BGC to a young scientist with a bright future is fairly simple, I believe: BGC provides its Faculty with high-level technical support, the freedom to pursue their research with minimal distractions, and a synergistically fertile research environment. Though we rely on grants to support much of our work, funding from granting agencies such as the National Science Foundation is highly leveraged by internal support.
BGC is the only independent institution in the world devoted to geochronology. This may seem a curious theme for an entire institution, but the fundamental importance of our work to such diverse fields as geology, paleontology, archeology, paleoanthropology and planetary science clearly justifies the existence of such an enterprise. A prominent example is our work in establishing the timescale of human evolution over the past 6 million years. In the face of mounting evidence for transitional fossil hominids in temporal sequence over this time span, there is increasingly little rational basis to challenge the evolution of Homo sapiens from common ancestry with apes.
The importance of geochronology to historical sciences seems secure for the foreseeable future. Hopefully, BGC will continue to be at the forefront in establishing the time axis of biological and physical planetary evolution. Part of our agenda is training young scientists in geochronology to meet future needs, and I am proud to note that we now have three BGC-funded postdocs to this end. This contrasts with the early days, when we had postdocs like Dieter Mertz only when they came with their own funding.
Regards,
Paul R. Renne
Director and President
Berkeley, April 27, 2006