Sanford "Sandy" David Greenberg (born December 13, 1940) is an American inventor, author, public servant, and philanthropist best known for his efforts toward the goal of ending blindness.[1][2]
Greenberg was born in Buffalo, New York as the oldest of four children. His father Albert was a tailor who died of a heart attack in 1946. Greenberg attended Bennett High School, then entered Columbia University in 1958 on a full scholarship where he roomed with Art Garfunkel and Jerry Speyer, and was a friend of Michael Mukasey.[3]
As Greenberg recounts in his memoir, misdiagnosed glaucoma caused his eyesight to fail during the first semester of his junior year in college, and then in January 1961 his vision failed completely.[4] The next month, a surgeon blinded Greenberg to save his eyes. With Art Garfunkel's encouragement and help, Greenberg returned to Columbia in September 1961, made up the semester he had lost, and graduated with his class as its president and Phi Beta Kappa.[5][6][7]
In 1965, Greenberg received a master's degree and a PhD in government from Harvard University, where he was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, and attended Harvard Law School. He spent 1964–1965 at University of Oxford, Linacre College as one of 24 Marshall Scholars named that year, and then received an MBA from Columbia Business School in 1966, while also serving as an assistant professor in its department of public law and government.[8][9]
Career
Greenberg launched his first company, International Communications Associates, in the field of the technology of information processing. In 1966, Greenberg developed and got patents on an electronic device for compressed speech, which speeds up the reproduction of words from recordings without distorting any sound. In 1966 Greenberg was named one of the ten "Outstanding Young Men" of America by the United States Junior Chamber.[10] That spring, Greenberg was also one of seventeen young Americans selected to be White House Fellows in the Lyndon Johnson administration. While serving as a Fellow, Greenberg formed a close friendship with David Rockefeller, who had helped found the Program and became Greenberg's mentor.[11]
In 1968, with $2 million raised from Wall Street financial institutions, Greenberg launched EDP (Electronic Data Processing), a systems-analysis company headquartered in Washington, DC.[citation needed] During these years, Greenberg was still perfecting the speech-compression machine he had been working on for almost a decade. The final design, patented in 1969, was one of the earliest methods for time-scale modification of speech.[12] Greenberg licensed the device to Sony, General Electric, Matsushita, and other manufacturers of audio equipment.[13] As a member of the board of governors of Ford's Theatre, Greenberg played a role in the renovation and 1968 reopening of the site of Abraham Lincoln's assassination. The following year Harper & Row published Greenberg's analysis of Executive Branch decision-making, The Presidential Advisory System, co-edited with Thomas E. Cronin.[14][15][16]
As a past director of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations and a longstanding member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Greenberg was a founding director of the "American Agenda: A Report to the Forty-First President of the United States," George H. W. Bush, chaired by Presidents Carter and Ford.[citation needed] In 1994, Bill Clinton appointed Greenberg to the National Science Board, and in 1996, he became chairman of the federal Rural Healthcare Corporation created by Congress.[20][21]
Greenberg Prize
In 2012, he announced the Greenberg Prize, a three-million-dollar prize to go to the scientists who contributed the most toward the cause of ending blindness.[22] This gained wide recognition in 2014 when it was granted a featured session on the agenda of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. In 2020, the Greenberg Prize was awarded to 13 scientists and researchers.[23]
Greenberg married Susan Roseno in August 1962, in Buffalo. Art Garfunkel is godfather to their three children.
Greenberg has been notable for his refusal to avail himself of the most common aids for the blind such as a companion dog, a cane, or the use of Braille.[32] Greenberg also plays basketball. He has written that although he cannot see, he can feel people moving in waves around him and orient himself toward the basket. For more than 50 years, Greenberg has also been collecting art that he cannot see, including pieces by Frank Stella, Picasso, and Rembrandt.[33]
↑ Cronin, Thomas E.; Greenberg, Sanford D. (1969). The Presidential Advisory System. ISBN0060414251.
↑ Cronin, Thomas E.; Greenberg, Sanford D. (March 12, 1969). The Presidential advisory system. Harper & Row – via National Library of Australia (new catalog).
↑ Greenberg, Sanford D. (30 June 2020). Hello Darkness, My Old Friend: How Daring Dreams and Unyielding Friendship Turned One Man's Blindness into an Extraordinary Vision for Life. ISBN978-1642934977.
Brian Wilson Kernighan is a Canadian computer scientist. He worked at Bell Labs and contributed to the development of Unix alongside Unix creators Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie. Kernighan's name became widely known through co-authorship of the first book on the C programming language with Dennis Ritchie. Kernighan affirmed that he had no part in the design of the C language.
Bookends is the fourth studio album by American folk rock duo Simon & Garfunkel. Produced by Paul Simon, Art Garfunkel and Roy Halee, the album was released on April 3, 1968, in the United States by Columbia Records. The duo had risen to fame two years prior with the albums Sounds of Silence and Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme and the soundtrack album for the 1967 film The Graduate.
Paul Frederic Simon is an American singer-songwriter. He is one of the most celebrated artists of the twentieth century, with a career spanning six decades. He is among the most acclaimed musicians in popular music and one of the world's best-selling music artists, noted both for his solo work and work with Art Garfunkel. He and his school friend Garfunkel, whom he met in 1956, came to prominence in the 1960s as Simon & Garfunkel. Their blend of folk and rock, including hits such as "The Sound of Silence", "Mrs. Robinson", "America" and "The Boxer", served as a soundtrack to the counterculture movement. Their final album before disbanding, Bridge Over Troubled Water (1970), is among the bestselling of all time.
Arthur Ira Garfunkel is an American singer, actor and poet who is best known for his partnership with Paul Simon in the folk rock duo Simon & Garfunkel. Born in Forest Hills, Queens, New York, Garfunkel became acquainted with Simon through an elementary school play of Alice in Wonderland and sought a partnership. Their combined presence in music began in the 1950s, and throughout the 1960s, the duo of Simon & Garfunkel achieved great chart success with tracks such as "The Sound of Silence", "Mrs. Robinson", "Scarborough Fair", "The Boxer" and "Bridge over Troubled Water", whose title also served as the name of Simon & Garfunkel's final album in 1970. Simon & Garfunkel split for personal reasons, but the pair have occasionally reunited in the years since. Both men experienced success in solo careers in the years following the duo's breakup.
Richard Elliott Neustadt was an American political scientist specializing in the United States presidency. He served as adviser to several presidents. His book Presidential Power has been described as "one of the most influential books ever written about political leadership." Thinking In Time: The Uses Of History For Decision Makers won the Grawemeyer Award. His other books include Alliance Politics, Preparing to be President, and, with Harvey V. Fineberg, The Swine Flu Affair: Decision-Making on a Slippery Disease.
Val Logsdon Fitch was an American nuclear physicist who, with co-researcher James Cronin, was awarded the 1980 Nobel Prize in Physics for a 1964 experiment using the Alternating Gradient Synchrotron at Brookhaven National Laboratory that proved that certain subatomic reactions do not adhere to fundamental symmetry principles. Specifically, they proved, by examining the decay of K-mesons, that a reaction run in reverse does not retrace the path of the original reaction, which showed that the reactions of subatomic particles are not indifferent to time. Thus the phenomenon of CP violation was discovered. This demolished the faith that physicists had that natural laws were governed by symmetry.
"The Sound of Silence" is a song by the American music-duo Simon & Garfunkel, written by Paul Simon. The duo's studio audition of the song led to a record deal with Columbia Records, and the original acoustic version was recorded in March 1964 at Columbia's 7th Avenue Recording Studios in New York City for their debut album, Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M., released that October to disappointing sales.
Robert McCredie May, Baron May of Oxford, HonFAIB was an Australian scientist who was Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK Government, President of the Royal Society, and a professor at the University of Sydney and Princeton University. He held joint professorships at the University of Oxford and Imperial College London. He was also a crossbench member of the House of Lords from 2001 until his retirement in 2017.
John Franklin Enders was an American biomedical scientist and Nobel Laureate. Enders has been called "The Father of Modern Vaccines."
Torsten Nils Wiesel is a Swedish neurophysiologist. With David H. Hubel, he received the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, for their discoveries concerning information processing in the visual system; the prize was shared with Roger W. Sperry for his independent research on the cerebral hemispheres.
Arthur Meier Schlesinger Jr. was an American historian, social critic, and public intellectual. The son of the influential historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr. and a specialist in American history, much of Schlesinger's work explored the history of 20th-century American liberalism. In particular, his work focused on leaders such as Harry S. Truman, Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Robert F. Kennedy. In the 1952 and 1956 presidential campaigns, he was a primary speechwriter and adviser to the Democratic presidential nominee, Adlai Stevenson II. Schlesinger served as special assistant and "court historian" to President Kennedy from 1961 to 1963. He wrote a detailed account of the Kennedy administration, from the 1960 presidential campaign to the president's state funeral, titled A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, which won the 1966 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography.
Jack Greenberg was an American attorney and legal scholar. He was the Director-Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund from 1961 to 1984, succeeding Thurgood Marshall. He was involved in numerous crucial cases, including Brown v. Board of Education, which ended segregation in public schools. In all, he argued 40 civil rights cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, and won almost all of them.
Bennett High School was an American high school located in the University Heights section of Buffalo, New York. It was named after Lewis J. Bennett, who donated the land for the school and for All High Stadium. Bennett High School formerly was a magnet school with three college prep programs: the Academy of International Law, Business and Computers, and Education and the Arts.
Jerry I. Speyer is an American real estate developer. He is one of two founding partners of the New York real estate company Tishman Speyer, which controls Rockefeller Center. Speyer was featured in the Forbes 400 list in 2021.
Richard Lawrence Garwin is an American physicist, best known as the author of the first hydrogen bomb design.
Charles Davenport Champlin was an American film critic and writer.
David Sanford Gottesman was an American businessman and billionaire. He founded First Manhattan Co. (FMC), and was noted for his friendship with Warren Buffett.
Sanford Biggers is a Harlem-based interdisciplinary artist who works in film/video, installation, sculpture, music, and performance. An L.A. native, he has lived and worked in New York City since 1999.
Thomas Edward Cronin is a political scientist. He was president of Whitman College from 1993 to 2005. He was the McHugh Professor of American Institutions and Leadership at Colorado College. Cronin's field of study is the 'expanding power of the American presidency in the 20th century'. He has also written extensively on American elections, political novels and movies.
Gordon James Fraser MacDonald was an American geophysicist and environmental scientist, best known for his principled skepticism regarding continental drift, involvement in the development of the McNamara Line electronic defense barrier during the Vietnam War, and early research and advocacy on human-made global climate change. MacDonald was admired for his creative mind, and his ability to connect scientific issues and matters of public policy.
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