Miller Institute History
The Miller Institute is "dedicated to the encouragement of creative thought and the conduct of research and investigation in the field of pure science…."These words, originally stated in the founding documents of the Institute, embody the Institute’s special role in nurturing researchers in the basic sciences at UC Berkeley. The Institute, founded by UC Berkeley Professor Adolph C. Miller and his wife Mary Spraugue Miller in the 1950s, has carried on the legacy of funding basic science research, encouraging curiosity, and sparking interdisciplinary cross-pollination within the sciences.
Adolph C. Miller: A Legacy of Scholarship and Service
Adolph C. Miller was born in San Francisco on January 7, 1866. He entered the University of California in 1883 and remained highly active throughout his student life. Upon graduation, he was awarded the Harvard Club Prize for graduate study at Harvard and subsequently continued his studies in Paris and Munich. Following his return to the United States, he served as an instructor in Economics at Harvard before being appointed Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1890.
The following year, he accepted an Associate Professorship in Political Economy and Finance at Cornell University. After only one year at Cornell, however, Miller was persuaded to move to the University of Chicago, where he was awarded a full Professorship of Finance. In 1895, Miller married Mary Sprague, the eldest child of Otho Sprague, a prosperous Chicago businessman.
In 1902, UC President Benjamin Ide Wheeler convinced Miller to return to Berkeley as the Flood Professor of Economics and Commerce. In this role, he was tasked with developing the newly established College of Commerce—the forerunner to the present Haas School of Business. After eleven years of distinguished service to the University of California, Miller resigned to become the United States Assistant Secretary of the Interior under his former classmate, Franklin K. Lane. The following year, the Federal Reserve System was established, and President Wilson appointed Miller to its Board of Governors. He held this position for twenty-two years, serving under five presidents: Wilson, Harding, Coolidge, Hoover, and Franklin Roosevelt.
Continued Ties to California
Despite their long residence in Washington, D.C., the Millers’ ties to Berkeley remained strong. They donated 250 acres of the Locatelli Ranch in the Santa Cruz Mountains near Boulder Creek to the University to be used as a center for faculty conferences and recreation. Later, two additional gifts of $10,000 each were made to support the property.
The University bestowed honors on its benefactor in 1937 by asking Miller to deliver the first Bernard Moses Memorial Lecture. In 1940, he was awarded an honorary LL.D. degree, accompanied by a citation from President Robert Gordon Sproul:
"Native son of California; graduate of this University, and the first head of its Department of Economics; for twenty years a member of the Federal Reserve Board, contributing in a unique and invaluable way to its deliberations through his keen mind, sound thinking, and profound mastery of economic theory."
Founding of the Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science
In 1943, Adolph C. and Mary Sprague Miller entered into a trust with the Board of Regents of the University of California to establish an institute "dedicated to the encouragement of creative thought and conduct of research and investigation in the field of pure science."
Upon the death of Dr. Miller on February 11, 1953, a fund in the amount of $2,856,566 became available to the University. The "Statement Establishing the Institute for Basic Research in Science" was submitted to the Regents on October 14, 1955, and was subsequently approved. As the organization of the Institute began, Mrs. Miller passed away on January 10, 1957, and an additional $2,159,945 became available. At that time, the names of the donors were made public, and the Institute was officially designated "The Adolph C. and Mary Sprague Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science." The first appointments to the Miller Institute were awarded in January 1957.
Governance and Leadership
The Miller Institute is governed by the Statement Establishing the Institute for Basic Research in Science and its Deed of Trust. Oversight is provided by an Advisory Board, officially chaired by the President of the University; however, since the tenure of Clark Kerr, this role has been delegated to the Chancellor of the Berkeley campus.
The Board consists of eight members. Four are faculty from UC Berkeley’s science departments who serve as the Executive Committee, responsible for implementing the Board’s policies. Within this committee, one member serves as the Executive Director of the Institute. The remaining four members are external to the University of California.
The "Miller Knot": Where Art Meets Science
The Institute’s visual identity was born from a remarkable scientific discovery decades later. In 1985, Miller Fellow Steven A. Wasserman and his host Nick Cozzarelli published a paper in Science featuring an electron micrograph of a single length of double-stranded DNA formed into a six-node knot, photographed at 40,000x magnification.
This discovery took an unexpected turn during a lecture given by Cozzarelli. Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine, who was in the audience, noted that his private art collection contained a third-century A.D. Roman bas-relief depicting the identical knot form described in the paper. This striking parallel between ancient art and molecular biology was featured on the cover of the July 12, 1985, issue of Science.
That same year, Executive Director Robert Ornduff featured the knot on the cover of the Miller Institute's 30-Year Report. It was formally adopted as the Institute’s official logo in the early 1990s. In 1999, Visiting Miller Professor and knot theorist Dror Bar-Natan dubbed the image "The Miller Knot." It remains a symbol of the creative thought the Millers sought to foster.
