Alec Hester, a former editor of CERN Courier and later physics subject specialist at the CERN library for nearly 30 years, passed away in Geneva on 9 March at the age of 96.
Born in Hatfield, to the north of London, in 1928, Alec graduated in physics from Imperial College London in 1949. He continued there for his PhD, building a Van de Graaff accelerator to study (p, alpha) reactions in light nuclei. Yes, in those days postgraduate students built their own accelerators! One of his older fellow students was Don Perkins, who passed away in 2022.
In 1952 Alec interrupted his studies to take a job in the publicity department of General Electric at its site in Kent, England. Nine years later he came to CERN to take over the editorship of CERN Courier from Roger Anthoine. The Courier was then just two years old, and it was during Alec’s period as editor that it began to move beyond its initial role as the house journal for CERN staff to one that communicated the work of CERN and other laboratories to a wider scientific and technical readership. Marking the end of Alec’s editorship in the December 1965 issue, Anthoine wrote: “The editing and production of our periodical, with limited means, requires not only very definite intellectual qualities, for collecting and processing information from all over the Laboratory, but also considerable physical and moral toughness to cope with the many dictates of production, which are the lot of every editor… It is mainly thanks to [Alec’s] drive that CERN Courier, which now has a circulation of 6000 copies (French and English versions combined), has risen from the rank of ‘internal information journal’ to that of ‘world spokesman for European sub-nuclear physics’.”
In 1966 Alec moved to the CERN scientific information service as the physics subject specialist, remaining there until his retirement in February 1993. His accurate and painstaking work developing the library’s bibliographic databases provided the nucleus for those searchable on the CERN Document Server today.
Alec leaves behind Annemarie, his wife for over 70 years, his daughters Barbara and Dagmar, and his four grandchildren.
