Here's an exercise. I'll do two exhibits (think of World Game Museum), one connecting Bucky into the Humanities, the other bridging to Sciences more, pursuant to your question. I'll try to keep it pithy. Anyone might do this exercise, thereby strengthening the IVM Bridge.
The Humanities
Allegra liked The Pound Era, she told me. I think in the early days we all thought what we needed was a next Hugh Kenner, someone of high literary caliber. Ed expressed strong affinity for Kenner as well, and maybe tried to be the missing literary figure in writing Paradise Mislaid, tackling that biggest question: what is life exactly?
However, before closing the book on these connections, we should remember the circumstances of Pound's era: he was repatriated in shackles having been caged by the US Army for his joining the Italian fascists and broadcasting their worldview on radio.
He faced the death penalty, but so many of his friends were in high places and they managed to get him committed to a mental hospital instead. For like twelve years. After which he went back to Italy, from when we get that famous Bucky-Ezra picture, Noguchi there too.
I've speculated that one of "those in high places" who helped keep Ezra's living situation at St. Elizabeth's remain livable all those years, was cold warrior James Jesus Angleton. Ezra was allowed to entertain, and did. James in his younger days had traveled to Italy and met Ezra then, before Mussolini and all that rot. Angleton then published a poetry mag, named Furioso, with Ezra's input.
A lot in the Angleton file is still under wraps I gather, as an Intercept reporter discovered recently, hoping to score a story. Georgetown University had the papers by then. The article says they were originally curated by another CIA guy, by the name of Ed Applewhite.
I uncovered and shared in my Youtube channel how the CIA has a document on file, with Buckminster Fuller in a footnote, for having recommended for service a British journalist. Mission: contact Ho Chi Minh and secure his cooperation against the Japanese. This was before the great betrayal, as some would see it, which made HCM public enemy number one.
“Fenn’s was the only name [Gordon] would agree to.” Charles Fenn, born in the United Kingdom, emigrated to the United States in his early twenties. He became a news photographer and journalist; joined the Associated Press in 1941; and covered the war in North Africa and Asia, including the Japanese invasion of Burma. In 1943, in New York, Buckminster Fuller, an advisor to OSS, recruited him. He was commissioned as a Marine lieutenant and sent to Burma to run MO operations, in which he excelled. In June 1944, he was sent to China, where his duties expanded to include intelligence collection operations under the cover of AGFRTS. Source: Bartholomew-Feis, The OSS and Ho Chi Minh, 96
The Sciences
Why was C60 named "buckminsterfullerene"?
Sir Harold Kroto, who shares a Nobel Prize for its discovery, tells the story in my blog.
[ blog post snipped ]
