Labors of Love:
The Legacy of Inherited Wealth, Book II

I N T R O D U C T I O N  ( E x c e r p t )

Physicist Henry W. Kendall was a man of immense curiosity and enthusiasm. Life was an adventure for him. He was an expert mountaineer, a superb photographer, and an inventor. In 1990, he and two fellow physicists were awarded a Nobel Prize for their discovery of the quark. Even after winning the Nobel, he continued to bring his lunch to work in a brown bag and answer his own telephone. Kendall's life was also guided by a deep sense of moral responsibility. He co-founded, in 1969, of The Union of Concerned Scientists.

Kendall was an heir. He didn't need his salary. His father, an entrepreneur, founded Kendall Co., which manufactured, among many other useful things, Curad bandages. Henry died at age seventy-two while taking photographs on a scuba expedition. Columnist Lee Dye eloquently summed up his life: "Despite all the doors his Nobel could have opened, Kendall continued teaching freshman physics at MIT. Those young minds, he believed, needed to understand that sometimes the toughest problems are outside the laboratory. He was, after all, a man who loved to climb mountains."