[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 141 (Thursday, October 3, 1996)]
[Senate]
[Page S12340]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                       TRIBUTE TO DR. BILL WILEY

 Mr. JOHNSTON. Mr. President, I have been privileged in my 
career in the U.S. Senate, through my work on the Energy and Natural 
Resources Committee and on the Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy 
and Water Development, to work with many of the great scientific minds 
of this country. I rise today to pay tribute to one of those scientists 
with whom I worked especially closely and who was a longtime close 
personal friend before his death last summer.
  Dr. Bill Wiley of the Battelle Memorial Institute built a monumental 
career and left a huge legacy first and foremost because of his special 
gifts and training as a fine scientist. His achievements over his 30-
year career with Battelle, beginning as a staff research scientist and 
ending with his position as vice president for Science and Technology, 
contributed significantly to this country's scientific understanding.
  But I believe that the work for which Bill Wiley should and will be 
best remembered is the concrete result of his vision which is now 
nearing completion on the banks of the Columbia River in Richland, WA, 
the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL), which will be 
the jewel of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and which may 
very well hold the key to this country's Herculean effort to the 
cleanup of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation and other, similar sites 
around the country.
  Armed only with this vision and his irrepressible charm and 
enthusiasm, Bill Wiley came to see me several years ago to lay out his 
plans for EMSL, undaunted by skeptics who had told him at every turn 
that it might be a good idea, but the Congress was unlikely to embrace 
such a costly project. I must say that had it been anyone other than 
Bill Wiley pushing the dream, the skeptics probably would have been 
right. But Bill not only convinced me that it was worth doing, he 
persuaded all the other relevant players that not only was it something 
we could do, but that it was something a great nation should not fail 
to do. I visited the EMSL facility in its late stages of construction 
shortly before Bill's death last summer. Anyone who ever harbored 
doubts about the wisdom of this research facility should go have a look 
when it opens its doors next month. It will be home to America's finest 
scientists employing the latest tools doing the best research in the 
world today. And it is a point of special pride to those of us who were 
his friends that they will be doing so in the building named in memory 
of William R. Wiley.
  This African-American son of an Oxford, MS, cobbler served his Nation 
well professionally and as a humanitarian who was never too busy in his 
career to help the less fortunate who were trying to work their way up 
the ladder or merely to get to the first rung of the ladder. I know 
many colleagues join me in expressing our condolences to Bill's loving 
wife Gus and to his daughter Johari Wiley-Johnson and in expressing our 
deep gratitude for the paths that Bill Wiley charted and the mark he 
left behind.

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