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Name of creator

William Owen Lock

Biographical history

Born on 8th August 1927, William O. Lock grew up in Cirencester in England and graduated from the University of Bristol with a First Class Honours degree in physics in 1945. He joined Cecil Powell’s international group shortly after their discovery of the pi meson. By the time he obtained his Ph.D. in 1952 he had been, successively, secretary and chairman of the Bristol branch of the Association of Scientific Workers and had joined the World Federation of Scientific Workers and the British Pugwash Movement.

In 1952 he took up a Research Fellowship in Manchester, and became a lecturer at the University of Birmingham in 1953. In addition to lecturing in the physics and extra-mural departments, he formed a group to expose nuclear emulsions to beams at the university’s newly-constructed 1 GeV proton-cyclotron.

Owen obtained a research associateship at CERN in 1959 and a staff appointment in 1960, when he took over joint leadership of the Nuclear Emulsion Group in the Nuclear Physics Division. Here he was responsible for organizing the exposure of emulsions to beams from the Proton-Synchrotron and he became Proton Synchrotron Physics Coordinator, Secretary of the Emulsion Experiments Committee and Secretary of the Nuclear Physics Research Committee. He initiated and organized the first Easter School for emulsion physicists, held in St. Cergue, France, in 1962 and repeated in 1963. This became the CERN School of Physics, held each year in a different CERN member state. He was subsequently responsible for the School becoming a joint venture with JINR, Dubna, USSR, which, from 1970, was hosted alternately in eastern and western Europe.

In 1965 he transferred to the Personnel Division to become Head of the Fellows and Visitors Service. In 1966 he became Head of the Scientific Conference Secretariat and secretary to a working group, chaired by Bernard Gregory, on the European Space Research Organization (a forerunner of ESA). In 1968 he was appointed acting Leader of the personnel Division and, in 1970, Head of Education Services and Deputy to the Personnel Division Leader until 1977.

In 1977 he became Personal Assistant to John Adams, and Secretary of the Board of Directors and of the Management Board. He continued in these roles under two subsequent Directors Generals, Herwig Schopper and Carlo Rubbia. As early as 1965 he had accompanied Bernard Gregory to Moscow to negotiate an agreement with the State Committee for Atomic Energy on collaboration between the new accelerator institute, IHEP (Protvino) and CERN. First contacts with China followed under Willibald Jentschke in 1971, which resulted in a visit by a Chinese delegation to CERN in 1973 and return visits in 1975 and 1977. These contacts led to cooperation agreements with China, signed during visits in 1979 by John Adams and in 1981 and 1985 by Herwig Schopper, where Owen was the link-person.

In 1976 the International Council of Scientific Unions founded what, in 1978, became the International Committee for Future Accelerators, ICFA, with Owen as secretary. Under Carlo Rubbia, Owen became responsible for relations with Central and Eastern Europe, in addition to his ongoing contacts with China and India, which continued until his retirement in 1992. He was instrumental in five countries acceding to full membership of CERN: Finland, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

William O. Lock died on 19th March 2010.

* Source: CERN Courier 7th June 2010

Immediate source of acquisition or transfer

William O. Lock, 1987, CERN