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America’s Oldest Worker Dr. Ray H. Crist, 102 Visiting Professor of Environmental Science Messiah College Carlisle, Pennsylvania

“I guess you could say living has been my hobby,” mused Dr. Ray Crist, who turned 102 in March of this year. As a visiting professor of environmental sciences at Messiah College in Grantham, Pennsylvania, Dr. Crist conducts experiments and does research in his lab located in the Klein Science Center on the college’s campus. When asked about working, Dr. Crist replied, “I have never given a thought to working as far as its being a job. I have just kept on living and wondering and trying to understand nature.”

Dr. Crist continues his work each day because he has a personal mission to “teach liberal art students to become socially responsible and understand how they might control the impact of the science and technology revolution on society and the environment.” In addition, Dr. Crist feels that it is of major importance to contribute to scientific literature on the subject of the way elements bind to surfaces. His research in this area has expanded the understanding of how plants interact with metal.

Currently, Dr. Crist’s area of research is bioremediation, a study that uses biological materials such as algae to remove heavy metal contaminants from the water and soil. His colleague, Dr. Guy Lanza, credits him with laying the foundation of research in this field.
Dr. Crist developed an affinity for science during his early years spent working on his parents’ farm in Pennsylvania. About those years, Dr. Crist says, “I was always interacting with plants and animals and I became interested in the manner in which ordinary things function. This interest then focused on the chemistry of substances and how those reactions are an integral part of a living system.”

Dr. Crist was lucky that education was important in his family. When he was four years old, his parents sent him to Little Grantham School where his aunt was a teacher. He spent seven years at the school until 1911 when his father enrolled him and his older brother Guy in Messiah Bible School, now Messiah College, because Little Grantham School “didn’t give enough homework.” At the age of 16, Dr. Crist entered Dickinson College, graduating in 1920.

After graduation, Dr. Crist taught general sciences at Williamsport Dickinson Seminary, now Lycoming College. Within 6 years, he earned his doctorate in chemistry from Columbia University where he became a professor in the chemistry department. In 1928, he received the Cutting Travel Fellowship, spending a year in Berlin.

While teaching and conducting research at Columbia University, Dr. Crist became part of the Manhattan District Project in 1941. The Colombia Division of the Manhattan District Project worked on separating isotopes of uranium for use in the atomic bomb. Dr. Crist performed experiments and eventually became Dr. Harold Urey’s assistant. He succeeded Dr. Urey in 1944 as Director of the Project for the Columbia University’s division, seeing the project through to its completion.

In 1946, Dr. Crist entered the private sector directing research for Union Carbide Chemical Corporation in Charleston, WV. He spent 13 years on the Coal Hydrogenation Project, and then become director of the Union Carbide Research Institute in Tarrytown, NY, from 1959 until his chosen early retirement in 1963.

Following his retirement from Union Carbide, Dr. Crist returned to teaching in 1963 at Dickinson College, because he had become concerned with the rapid growth of science and technology. Dr. Crist says, “I had become deeply concerned with the way science and technology was rapidly changing the social and industrialized world. I wanted to help the future leaders of the country learn how to be more successful in affecting the direction of a society where science and technology, if continued to be left alone, would blindly dictate our future.” He developed a course on the history of science, which studied the impact of science and technology on the course of civilization. In 1971, Dr. Crist left Dickinson and began working at Messiah College where he could pursue his research ideas more freely.

Since 1990, Dr. Crist’s research has been published in eleven international
journals, including an article in the Journal of the Pennsylvania Academy of Science, and has been presented at national and international meetings in Chicago, California, Atlanta, Florida, Montana, Sweden, Japan and France. He and Messiah College have applied for a patent and are working with industries towards a possible product to remove metals from water for practical use. He has been a member of the American Chemical Society for 76 years.

Dr. Crist believes that working “maintains a person as an integral part of the living process,” a philosophy that has served him well throughout his life and career and continues to serve him at age 102. His lifelong curiosity and drive to understand the natural world is an inspiration to both the scientific community and to everyone who knows him.