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Dick Wilson: Applying Uncommon Sense to Risks

It is hard to imagine interviewing someone who has more interesting stories than Richard “Dick” Wilson. When we asked Dick about events that piqued his interest in risk, he mentioned two that are difficult to top. “As a teenager, I was having tea on a beautiful summer afternoon in London, when stukas (German World War Two dive bombers that made a terrifying screeching sound) dived on the local airport dropping bombs. One 50 pound bomb landed about a half mile away from us, destroying a house. The stukas were followed by British spitfires who shot some of them down.” On another occasion, when he was 18 years old, Dick and his brother heard a strange sound, looked up and saw a German V-1 flying bomb heading straight for them. It all happened too fast for them to be scared. Dick had about seven seconds to take cover and fell flat on the ground. The force of the missile hitting nearby caused a window frame to come out of his home. This incident, as Dick put it, gave him “first-hand experience in the importance of taking precautions!” These war-related experiences from his youth provided Dick with quite an introduction to personal risk analysis and led to a lifetime of interest in examining the destructive capacity of weapons. But this has been only one of many interests that Dick has pursued in his six decades as a scientist and researcher.