This fall, on a mountaintop in southeastern Arizona, astronomers from around the globe will celebrate first light at the world's most powerful optical telescope. They will also toast John Schaefer, the longtime head of Research Corporation (RC), the oldest scientific foundation in the United States. It was Schaefer who, in 1992, applied RC's weight—and eventually $12 million of its money— to pull what became the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) from a mire of problems that was threatening to engulf it (Science, 22 June 1990, p. 1479).
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