Still, as grinding as the routine became, the allure of the lab remained strong. Even Martin Kamen, then on a temporary fellowship and consistently overtaxed by his duties supervising the production of isotopes, found the prospect of returning to his permanent post at the University of Chicago “too painful to contemplate.” His hope was somehow “to earn the right to stay on at Berkeley working with E.O.L. into the indefinite future.” He would earn the right with a spectacular feat of research, but to his misfortune it would not, alas, be indefinite.
Foreign visitors were especially perplexed by the apparent absence of scientific ambition at the lab. Maurice Nahmias, who the Joliots had dispatched to Berkeley to pick up pointers for their Paris cyclotron, was dismissive of the lab’s preoccupation with the easy work of identifying new radioisotopes, as opposed to the hard labor of cutting-edge physics. He ridiculed their devotion to the machine as “a mania for gadgets or a post-infantile fascination for scientific meccano games.”
Alvarez seconded Nahmias’s perception that the cyclotron was used “as a radioactivity factory first of all because great numbers of new radioisotopes could be discovered that way with very little effort.” He felt some empathy with Lawrence over what he called the “gold rush of isotopes,” because he recognized the importance of public relations and “missionary work” for the lab. But he bristled at the countless hours lost to hard science from the dreary routine of “finding leaks, adjusting equipment, repairing oscillators, and developing cyclotron technology . . . After spending days in cyclotron repairs we grumbled when a physiologist or a biologist turned up to claim the fruits of the first bombardment. We grumbled among ourselves, that is; we knew the strength of Ernest’s convictions and were much too loyal to allow outsiders to discover our ambivalence.” This was an early hint of one of the emerging drawbacks of science funded on a large scale: the bigger the financial contribution, the more its donors wished to see tangible results from their money. But that desire was fundamentally at odds with the incremental pace and the serendipity of basic science.
Alvarez may have felt the constraints more sharply than most. He was admired by his colleagues for what Kamen described as his “knack for ingenious experimentation,” though perhaps less so for his unabashed ambition in exploiting it. At one point, Kamen recalled, Alvarez tried to cadge more experimentation time from Lawrence by displaying a chart showing a decline in publications by members of the lab. Lawrence, unmoved, pointed out that Alvarez himself had produced an impressive number of research papers during the very period he claimed that scientific research had been hobbled. Alvarez’s own record, he argued, proved that the lab had reached the optimum balance between work on the cyclotron and work with the cyclotron.
Yet Ernest was not oblivious to the tensions in the lab. “We are trying to preserve a reasonable balance between using the cyclotron and improving it,” he wrote Malcolm Henderson, now at Princeton, in January 1937, “and accordingly about half our time is being used for physics and the other half of the time we are making improvements on it.” Perhaps not all his younger colleagues would have concurred with his calculation of the balance, but at least he was trying to strike one. And with few exceptions, those who worked in the lab recalled their time there as “magical years” pervaded with “enthusiasm and zeal for accomplishment,” in Kamen’s words. Those who found the team research Lawrence pioneered uncongenial simply moved on, but they were a distinct minority.
During 1937, another constraint on experimentation appeared: the rising demand for isotopes from Ernest’s brother, John. This was endured silently not only because of its family pedigree but also because Ernest so heartily endorsed the science underlying John’s experiments. Meeting the biochemical needs of John’s group alone was “a full-time occupation,” grumbled Kamen, whose duties included the production of the radioactive phosphorus John needed for experiments in the treatment of leukemia and other blood diseases. John’s medical hypothesis was based on the observation that phosphorus naturally concentrates in bone marrow. This suggested that phosphorus would be a better carrier of therapeutic radiation than radio-sodium, since the latter distributes itself all through the body as salt, attenuating its effect. Starting around Christmas 1937, when he administered his first dose of a phosphorus radioisotope to a patient at the university medical center, John’s need for the substance became “insatiable,” Kamen recalled. This imposed a burden on the Rad Lab not only because the necessary bombardments took hours but also because the isotope had to be painstakingly cleansed of contaminating radioactivities and other impurities to render it safe to administer to a patient.
The following year, doctors working with John Lawrence conceived a new use for the cyclotron: the direct irradiation of patients. The legend took hold in Berkeley that this fancy was born in the Lawrence brothers’ neutron treatment of their own mother. As related by Raymond Birge in 1960, after both Ernest and Gunda were dead, the story was that Gunda had been diagnosed with terminal cancer and been saved by the cyclotron. “She was the first person to get this treatment, and the neutrons cured the cancer completely,” he reported. Birge, who used the story to show that “there’s no question about the medical value of the instrument,” was retailing hallway gossip that may have spread in part because the idea of a scientist curing his own mother of a dreaded disease packed an irresistible dramatic punch. But his version was garbled and exaggerated. The facts were these: Gunda’s chronic abdominal pain and swelling had been diagnosed by the Mayo Clinic as a cancerous tumor in November 1937. Carl reported to his sons that the doctors declared it inoperable and gave their sixty-eight-year-old patient three months to live, at which point John brought her to California to receive X-rays from David Sloan’s powerful tube. John took credit for ordering especially aggressive treatment under the medical center’s chief radiologist, Robert Stone—“I’d stand by and encourage Dr. Stone to give as big a dose as he could”—and under this onslaught, the tumor shrank and, over a period of ten years, disappeared. “She was cured, no question about it,” John recalled. It is impossible today to reconstruct what actually occurred, because the exact nature of Gunda’s tumor is unrecorded and whether other factors contributed to her recovery is undocumented. But she had not been treated with neutrons, and obviously was not the first patient subjected to neutron therapy. X-ray treatment, which she did receive, was by no means novel at the time, though the intensity of her treatment might have been unusual.
In fact, neutron irradiation of live tumors was more Ernest’s enthusiasm than John’s. Although the younger brother had pioneered the technique, his targets were tissues that had been surgically removed from diseased mice and placed in the beam, which appeared to destroy the tumors at lower exposures than those that killed living mice. That was an indication that patients might survive bombardments that killed their tumors. But John quickly cooled on the concept, partially out of doubt that his experimental conditions fairly replicated the effects on tumors in the human body. Meanwhile, his brother pushed ahead enthusiastically.
Ernest invited Stone to bring cancer patients from San Francisco for treatments at the thirty-seven-inch one or two days a week. Paul Aebersold constructed a removable wooden chamber as a “treatment room” next to the imposing machine. (“[T]he patients will hardly know they are next to such a monster,” Ernest proudly informed one cancer specialist.) But the new mandate interfered further with the work of the Rad Lab; Kamen observed that the hassle of constantly erecting and dismantling the wooden box while crossing his fingers that the machine would operate as needed during each session “made a pill-popper out of Aebersold.”
The neutron therapy experiments would continue through 1943 at Berkeley’s new sixty-inch cyclotron with Stone’s guidance, Ernest’s enthusiastic support, and John’s increasing disaffection. “I could see that nothing really great was happening,” John recalled. On the contrary, some patients developed severe skin reactions that lasted for years. Stone himself eventually disavowed the
technique as a useful therapy. In 1947, delivering the annual Janeway Lecture of the American Radium Society, he reported that of his original 252 patients, only 18 were still alive less than ten years after the experiment. Even considering that all had been considered terminally ill when treated, Stone thought this a dismal outcome and recommended that the therapy be discarded.
So it was for more than two decades. In 1970 the concept was revived after new findings showed that neutron therapy was most effective at dosages a fraction of those Stone had used. To this day, neutron therapy as pioneered by the cyclotroneers in 1938 remains an important part of the arsenal against certain cancers, including those of the prostate and salivary glands. Lawrence and Stone may have been too aggressive, but they were on the right track.
Chapter Nine
* * *
Laureate
As Lawrence had pointed out to Alvarez, outstanding results in nuclear physics were now emerging steadily from the Rad Lab. One reason was the increasing power and efficiency of the Berkeley cyclotron, which then outstripped those of every other cyclotron in existence. Outsiders might disdain the lab’s focus on radioisotope hunting, but filling in the roster of isotopes throughout the periodic table was important work.
By the end of 1939, the Radiation Laboratory was leading the world in its discoveries of nuclear transformations. In 1935 the dominant lab in this category had been the Cavendish, which specialized in reactions induced by alpha rays and protons; Berkeley could only compete in research on deuterons. But by mid-1937, Berkeley was accounting not only for more than half of all discoveries of deuteron reactions but a significant share of neutron and proton reactions; and by December 1939, it comfortably dominated discoveries using alpha rays, deuterons, and neutrons, and held its own in the use of protons. This was an extraordinary range of experimentation unmatched by its rivals: in 1939 Birge calculated that the Rad Lab had discovered more than half of all isotopes identified by cyclotrons worldwide. Big Science had plainly demonstrated its value. As cyclotrons around the world contributed to the list of known isotopes, rumors and expectations began to surface that the accelerator’s inventor might be in line for the Nobel Prize.
There was more to Rad Lab science than the identification of new radioisotopes, due in part to the recruitment of world-class physicists such as McMillan and Alvarez. Soon after returning to Berkeley, Alvarez decided to focus his research efforts on the lab’s most intriguing experimental project: the search for an elusive decay process known as K-capture. This is different from beta decay, in which a neutron is transformed into a proton by the emission of an electron. In K-capture, the nucleus absorbs one of the two electrons from its innermost electron “shell”— the “K” shell—thereby transforming a nuclear proton into a neutron. When that happens, an orbital electron drops down from a higher shell to fill the gap in the K shell. That action emits a recognizable X-ray signature.
Despite Ernest’s personal interest in the search for these X-rays, the Rad Lab had no more success finding them than other labs. The problem, as it turned out, was that everyone was looking in the wrong place. Alvarez determined that K-capture occurs only in heavy atoms with many protons—that is, those with high atomic numbers—and in isotopes with long half-lives. By resourceful engineering, he fashioned an experimental apparatus to find the reaction in elements of atomic number 23 (vanadium) and above.
Alvarez would say later that he was inspired by the pleasing thought of undermining “the infallibility of Bethe’s Bible.” The “bible,” a heroic synthesis of everything then known and accepted in nuclear physics, had been published in 1936 and 1937 by Cornell’s Hans Bethe, one of the preeminent theorists in the field, with the assistance of Robert Bacher and Stan Livingston. In its first volume, Bethe asserted that K-capture was “practically unobservable.” It was typical of Alvarez’s competitive personality that he would describe the work that first made his reputation as an effort to take one of his respected elders down a peg. But he could not have been unaware that solving the riddle of K-capture would be an important scientific achievement in its own right. Alvarez’s experiment, which involved his spending long hours in the LeConte basement counting clicks on his handmade X-ray detector, set a new standard for rigorous physics at the Rad Lab. With it he finally identified the telltale X-ray emissions in gallium (atomic number 31).
Even pieces of the cyclotron diverted from the refuse bin were advancing science. When the old vacuum tank was replaced in 1936, Lawrence handed over strips of molybdenum from the interior of the discarded tank to the visiting Emilio Segrè. The parts had spent their working lives under bombardment by deuterons. For Segrè, a friend and collaborator of Enrico Fermi’s who was heading home to a professorship at Italy’s poverty-stricken University of Palermo, these pieces of radioactive shrapnel were priceless. At his Palermo laboratory, he worked the Berkeley molybdenum assiduously. Finding it “a fertile mine of radioactivity,” Segrè extracted phosphorus, cobalt, and zirconium isotopes, and then, in early 1937, a real prize: element 43, which had never been seen in nature and was suspected by some scientists not to exist at all, leaving an irksome gap in the periodic table between elements 42 and 44 (molybdenum and ruthenium). “The cyclotron evidently proves to be a sort of hen laying golden eggs,” Segrè wrote Lawrence fulsomely. Ernest might have preferred that the discovery of the first artificially produced element, presently dubbed technetium, be made in his own lab, but at least the Rad Lab had played an important role in the achievement. He continued to provide Segrè with metal scraps and even acceded to Segrè’s request to irradiate a quantity of uranium oxide mailed from Italy so that he could continue searching for nuclear reactions. “I would beg you to put them somewhere near the cyclotron with a paraffin block on the back so that they may be strongly irradiated by neutrons,” Segrè wrote, adding presciently: “U[ranium] seems to me to be rather promising.”
• • •
Nineteen thirty-seven was shaping up as the year of the cyclotron. Lawrence basked in its glory and made sure the entire lab was warmed in the glow. “Of course all of us here are pleased with the world-wide epidemic of cyclotron construction,” he assured William W. Buffum, general manager of the Chemical Foundation, one of his major patrons. The lab was hosting a steady stream of eminent international visitors, he reported, adding that “two of our young men have been invited to go abroad next year” to assist Bohr in Copenhagen and the Joliot-Curies in Paris with their cyclotron projects. Later that year came the award ceremony for the Comstock Prize, given every five years by the National Academy of Sciences for outstanding work in physics. In his keynote speech, General Electric research chief W. D. Coolidge lauded Ernest’s “boldness and faith and persistence to a degree rarely matched.” In his acceptance remarks, the honoree alluded to his treasured principle of interdisciplinary collaboration. The “essential unity of science,” as he described it, means that “an advance of the horizon of knowledge in any direction uncovers territory of all the sciences.”
One week after that ceremony in Rochester, New York, Time appeared on the stands with Ernest’s bright blue eyes staring out from the front cover over the caption “He creates and destroys.” To the unabashedly chauvinistic Time, the youthful Professor Lawrence’s career symbolized the emergence of American science as the lodestar of international research. Its judgment was underscored by the passing of Lord Rutherford only eleven days earlier: “Ernest Rutherford was one of the old pioneers in atomic physics and Ernest Orlando Lawrence is one of the new,” the magazine declared, marking the handoff of science’s torch to a new generation and from Old World to New—and from small science to Big.
Ernest had sought to get Time to hew to his practice of spreading credit broadly, but was only partially successful. The names of Edlefsen, Livingston, and Sloan appeared in the article, but Ernest’s acknowledgments of the assistance of the Research Corporation and Chemical Foundation were lopped from the piece as a result of Time’s decision to squeeze a Rutherford
obituary into the available space. Also omitted were his mentions of the biomedical team working with John Lawrence; consequently, the article gave readers the impression that the radioisotope and neutron work was solely a two-brother effort. Robert Stone of the medical school, who was intimately involved in the research, “blew his top” at the omission, which he found especially irksome given that Berkeley’s nepotism rules had been waived to facilitate John’s recent appointment to the Berkeley faculty. Ernest mollified Stone by blaming Time’s editors for the slights.
The Time cover story, an all-purpose certification of celebrity in that era, enhanced Ernest’s fame among the lay public, which was happy to offer unsolicited advice and criticism to the brilliant young American scientist. Wrote one Alan Wells of Cambridge, Massachusetts: “I realize it is none of my business, but is there nothing you can do to the atom’s nucleus but smash it? Divinity seems to think it wise to uncover the earth’s secrets a little at a time with sort of a loving unfoldment instead of smashing it all of a sudden just for the hell of it.” This and similar correspondence went into Ernest’s file cabinet, in a new folder labeled “Crank.”
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