Founding DirectorThe Knight Fellowships program began in 1983 as the Vannevar Bush Fellowships in the Public Understanding of Technology and Science. Vic McElheny was its creator and leader—mentoring more than 140 science writing fellows—until he retired in June of 1998. Along the way, McElheny assured the program's survival in perpetuity by securing an endowment from the combined funds of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and MIT itself.
McElheny is a longtime science writer who worked for The Charlotte Observer, Science magazine, The Boston Globe and The New York Times, reporting on such topics as science in Antarctica and Europe, the Apollo lunar landing program and the green revolution in Asia. At The Times during the 1970s, he founded one of the first technology columns in American newspapers.
His freelance work has included numerous articles for newspapers and magazines as well as television writing and appearances. In 1978 he joined Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory as the first director of the Banbury Center for conferences on environmental health risks and fundamental biology. He came to MIT in 1982 to create the fellowships program with funding from the Sloan Foundation and the Mellon Foundation.
Since his retirement in 1998 McElheny has published two books, Insisting on the Impossible: The Life of Edwin Land and Watson and DNA: Making a Scientific Revolution. He is currently working on a book about the Human Genome Project.
