Big Science Page 15
The US patent examiners, however, proved distinctly uncooperative. They objected that the bombardment of light metals with deuterons had been reported by Lawrence, Livingston, Lewis, and Henderson so long ago that it was no longer patentable (although the scientists had not observed artificial radioactivity at the time); that the use of deuterons to induce radioactivity already had been reported by the Joliots and Cockcroft and Walton (although the Europeans had not created radio-sodium); and that radio-sodium itself had been discovered by Fermi (albeit by a process different from Lawrence’s).
Knight and Lawrence spent months trying to counter these serial objections. Meanwhile, the patent examiners wrestled with the fundamental tension between the old, solitary way of doing science and the novel collaborative teamwork Lawrence had instituted at the Rad Lab, soon to become the standard of Big Science; the patent office’s traditionalists had difficulty reconciling team research with their custom of attributing an invention to one inventor or, at most, two. Hoping to untangle the collaboration, Knight solicited an affidavit from Lawrence establishing “just what parts Drs. Lewis, Livingston, and Henderson took in the several experiments” dating back to the original deuton bombardments of 1933—that is, what roles they played in the discovery of radio-sodium. Lawrence replied defensively that “the radio-sodium experiments were instigated by me alone,” adding, “I did suggest looking for artificial radioactivity this way and actively supervised the experiments.”
More aggravation was to come. Caltech hinted to Poillon that Lawrence’s claims for primacy in the discovery of induced radioactivity slighted results obtained first, or at least virtually concurrently, by Lauritsen. As it happened, Lauritsen had slipped an article into Science reporting on his own efforts to validate the Joliots’ artificial radiation results, about a week before Caltech’s and Berkeley’s notices appeared side by side in the Physical Review.
Poillon, concerned that Berkeley’s broad patent claims might provoke a messy interinstitutional fight, pleaded with Lawrence to narrow his claims to avoid controversy. “I know how repugnant it is for any right-thinking scientist to become embroiled in a discussion concerning priority of discovery,” he wrote, “especially if material matters [in other words, money] enter into the picture.” He warned that Robert Millikan’s proud institution in Pasadena was not to be trifled with. “California Technology is quite a ‘powerful Katinka’ and is out for both intellectual recognition and financial return wherever proper and possible.” He closed with the hope that “any question regarding priority in any patent claims . . . be settled without acrimonious discussion.”
Lawrence was predictably incensed by the implication that his patent claims might have infringed Caltech’s claim to primacy. “Although prosecuting patent applications where there are questions of priority, and the like, is certainly not a pleasant matter; yet I should not hesitate to ‘go to bat’ to settle a matter of this kind in case I felt the stake were worthwhile,” he told Poillon. He acknowledged that Lauritsen had beaten him to publication by a week, but “we had been informed in conversation with our friends down there that actually we were the first ones to produce radio-nitrogen by deuteron bombardment.” Still, he had to admit that the evidence for his claim might be murky, since the margin of priority could not have been more than a day or so. “It would be distinctly unpleasant proving that we had the real priority in the matter,” he conceded.
In fact, Ernest was losing his taste for the protracted patent battle. He would have been happy to “look out for the commercial aspects of our work, if this can be done in a dignified and proper way,” but that prospect seemed to be slipping away. Pursuing the patent now seemed to him “hardly worthwhile.” He asked Poillon, Did it really matter? Since the Research Corporation already held his patent on the cyclotron, which was the only practical apparatus for manufacturing radioactive substances, “therefore it is not necessary to have a patent on the substances themselves.”
He left the decision on whether to push ahead with the patent on radioactive substances to Poillon, who was not so willing to give up. Knight tried to extract one more affidavit from Lawrence to complete the application, but Ernest feared that the undignified process of trying to claim ownership of natural substances would give the Rad Lab a black eye no matter how it played out. “The more I think about the matter, the less enthusiasm I have,” he told Knight. “Even if a patent were obtained, I think there would very likely be a good deal of general criticism.” At Poillon’s initiative, the patent case would drag on for another four years. It finally ended in defeat in April 1939, when the patent office rejected the claims finally and decisively based on the prior publications by Cockcroft and Walton and by Lewis, Lawrence, Livingston, and Henderson.
Ernest recognized that the rapidly rising stature of the Rad Lab in worldwide physics was based partially on its generosity to other universities seeking advice, manpower, and radioactive products. For its part, the Research Corporation enforced the cyclotron patent only against commercial and industrial entities; academic institutions got the blueprints for free. Nothing made Lawrence happier than to oversee the expansion of the Cyclotron Republic (as it was labeled by Fermi’s friend and assistant Emilio Segrè). This one battle to patent radioactive salt threatened to extinguish all this goodwill, slowing down the propagation of the cyclotron if not halting it altogether.
The cost of cyclotrons already was raising the hackles of academic deans and presidents. The trend line pointed to a future of intense and expensive competition among academic institutions to be first with high-priced research apparatus. Only a few years hence, MIT president Karl Compton, himself a physicist with a cyclotron at his command, would issue his lament about the introduction of “an abnormal competitive element” into academic science. “This situation is one of the growing pains of a new art, and we college presidents are as much responsible for it as anyone else,” he told M. C. Winternitz, the retired dean of Yale Medical School. As Compton observed, the demands of Big Science, including the staggering cost of the equipment, were already working changes in the academic world. Lawrence, whose machine and research style gave birth to the new paradigm, hoped to stave off its negative effects as long as he could.
In the meantime, the Cyclotron Republic continued to expand its boundaries. This became evident to Ernest during an extended visit back east in May 1935. The trip had three functions: as a lecture tour, an opportunity for more fund-raising, and an introduction of the Lawrences’ first child, seven-month-old John Eric, to his Blumer grandparents in New Haven.
Ernest’s lectures, starting at the Carnegie Institution under Merle Tuve’s sponsorship, “seem to be rousing ‘hits,’ ” he reported to Edwin McMillan, one of his new postgrads at the Rad Lab (and later, with McMillan’s marriage to Molly’s sister Elsie, Ernest’s brother-in-law). The key was a bit of business he called “the vaudeville”: he demonstrated the potency of radio-sodium by drinking a tumblerful of spiked salt water and holding a Geiger counter to his arm to show how rapidly it circulated through the body to the extremities. He was even more thrilled with the reception the cyclotron was receiving on the skeptical and supercilious East Coast. “It has been extraordinarily gratifying (indeed amazing) to find the very high regard for our work by everyone in the east,” he wrote McMillan. “Almost any lab of any consequence has consulted me regarding getting started on a cyclotron development. Even Tuve is making plans in this direction!”
The immediate harvest of the lab’s rising reputation came in the form of cash from foundation grants; as Lawrence walked the streets of Manhattan, dropping in on the offices of the Research Corporation, the Chemical Foundation, and the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation, he was tapping new founts of professional respect. The research philanthropies that had not yet made grants, such as the Rockefeller Foundation, signaled that they would look very favorably upon future applications. “I have already enough funds to assure us essential support, but I am trying to get enough to enable us to go for
ward with full steam ahead,” Ernest informed McMillan. “I am vigorously carrying on the money-raising campaign, and things look very promising . . . I’ll keep at it until somehow we get the money.”
He also was working to secure employment for his trained cyclotroneers. Berkeley had few faculty positions to offer members of the Rad Lab, and, in any case, sending his people out into the world was a crucial factor in spreading the cyclotron gospel. Another lab director might have been inclined to fend off poachers from rival universities; Lawrence welcomed them, or at least refused to stand in their way. “I shall not in my contacts in the east tend to prevent offers to you all,” he wrote. “On the contrary, I shall get as many and good offers as possible and allow the decision for next year to be made by the individual concerned in the light of the possibilities.” Uttered by another laboratory director, these words might sound like lip service, but the record shows that Lawrence vigorously sought opportunities even for his best people. His technique for retaining those he genuinely thought the Rad Lab could not do without was to obtain foundation grants for them or to pressure the Berkeley Physics Department to place them on the faculty in the rare instances where that was possible. Such was the case with McMillan, who was offered a physics instructorship that summer, allowing him to turn down a competing offer from Princeton. The difficulty that even Lawrence faced in obtaining such appointments for his most valued associates while Depression-era budgeting still prevailed can be seen from the fact that McMillan was the first permanent addition to the physics faculty in five years. It would be another three years before the Rad Lab could secure the next appointment, which would go to Luis Alvarez.
Lawrence expected his cyclotron operators to carry their knowledge out into the world. “We were all supposed to get familiar with his technique,” recalled Jackson Laslett, who earned his doctorate at the Rad Lab. “He would say, ‘If you go away now and become a member of a physics department in some other school, you may have to do some of these things.’ ” The required knowledge for a doctoral candidate at the Rad Lab included the fundamentals of metal casting, plumbing, and electrical engineering.
Stan Livingston, who decamped for Cornell in 1934 (and later moved on to MIT), was first among the exodus of cyclotroneers carrying the machine’s DNA. The following year, Milton White and Malcolm Henderson moved to Princeton. By 1939, nearly a score of physicists who had been trained on Lawrence’s machines were building cyclotrons at a dozen American universities. Others were ensconced abroad in Cambridge, Liverpool, Manchester, and Paris. In Copenhagen, engineers at Niels Bohr’s physics institute, overly trusting to the infallibility of its founder and namesake, unwisely launched a cyclotron project in 1935 without the benefit of a Rad Lab consultant or even a tolerably close examination of Berkeley’s blueprints. In 1937 they sent up an emergency flare for help; this brought them Laslett, one of Lawrence’s most valued assistants, who advised them that their magnet had been ill designed and misengineered. The unit had to be sent away for rebuilding, which meant taking down a wall of the building erected around it and returning it to the manufacturer by ferry.
Most labs planning to build cyclotrons solicited the help of the Rad Lab to avoid having to learn things the hard way. Lawrence’s managerial system, which relied on a steady influx of graduate students and postdocs willing to learn how to operate the cyclotron at no pay, meant that the Rad Lab never risked running out of personnel even as experienced hands got snapped up elsewhere. The lab’s output now encompassed not only scientific papers and radioactive isotopes but also at least a half dozen postdocs per year, “all of whom know the game from A to Z,” Cooksey informed a friend back east.
As 1935 drew to a close, the Radiation Laboratory was poised for a huge leap forward in stature and fame. Ernest Lawrence was being mentioned in quarters and in contexts that only a year or two earlier would have been unimaginable. At the Nobel Prize ceremony that December, honoring the Joliots for their discovery of artificial radioactivity, the presenter took a brief detour to mention Lawrence’s preparation of radio-sodium and expressing the hope that “it can be used in the same way as radium salts in medical applications.” Somebody in Sweden already had an eye on him. It was still premature for the Rad Lab to dream of a Nobel of its own, but the reference to radio-sodium and its potential applications hinted at grand things in store.
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I. The curie is a widely accepted measure of radioactivity, defined as the activity of 1 gram of the isotope radium-226. A millicurie is one-thousandth of that measure.
Chapter Eight
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John Lawrence’s Mice
Dr. John Hundale Lawrence arrived in Berkeley by train for the first time in 1935. Nearly four years younger than his brother, Ernest, at the age of thirty-one he looked rather the elder: his hairline receding, his face already bearing the dour expression of a country doctor. John did not inspire the outpouring of loyalty and devotion that his brother enjoyed, was never quite as adept at communicating optimism and enthusiasm for his inquiries into the unknown, never was hailed for charm or ease of manner, or lionized as the leader of an inspired team of scientists. But he did already rank as a successful researcher in a very promising new field.
Ernest and John were too far apart in age to have shared their high school or college years, but personally they were close, writing each other at least once every couple of weeks. On only a few occasions, John remembered, had Ernest pulled rank as the wiser elder brother. During John’s first year at the University of South Dakota, when he had discovered basketball and girls and slacked off in his studies, he received a stern upbraiding. “You’ve really got to start hitting the ball now,” Ernest told him, “because if you’re going to get into a good medical school, you really better settle down.” Recalled John, “I rose right to the top of my class.” His newfound diligence would win him admission to Harvard Medical School.
In professional terms, the brothers’ relationship was symbiotic. John brought to their partnership the initiative to expand nuclear research into biology and physiology, and Ernest contributed the instrument that could make that happen. On that afternoon in 1935, John stepped off the train at Oakland with a peculiar cargo: mice, scores of them, caged to travel with him in his third-class compartment all the way west from Boston, fated to be irradiated with neutrons in Berkeley.
John Lawrence became interested in radiation medicine through his work with the pioneering neurosurgeon Harvey Williams Cushing at Harvard. Twenty years earlier, Cushing, a small, trim man with a magnetic personality and a meticulous clinical style, had made his seminal discovery of the syndrome that became known as Cushing’s disease, a rapid weight gain around the trunk and face he traced to tumors of the brain’s pituitary gland. Cushing may have been an even more important influence on John’s life than his brother Ernest; in John’s fourth year at the medical school, Cushing had picked him out from the student body and appointed him his clinical assistant.
“What am I going to do about my degree?” John asked.
“I’ll take care of it,” Cushing replied. “You don’t have to finish your fourth year.”
Cushing introduced John to the systematic discipline required in medical research and, perhaps more crucially, to the idea that the X-rays produced in physics labs could be deployed to treat tumors. As John recalled, Cushing thought this development could be “as important as, if not more important than, Pasteur and bacteriology.” Under Cushing, John studied pituitary syndromes in dogs and mice and contemplated X-ray irradiations of humans. The work pointed him to his brother’s lab at Berkeley and David Sloan’s X-ray tube, the most powerful in the world. During the summer of 1935, John cadged a small grant from the Macy Foundation to travel third class to Berkeley, and presented himself and his mice at the Rad Lab.
Both brothers were gratified by this convergence in their interests. The divisiveness among scientific disciplines, especially between the basic sciences and the applied science of medici
ne, was then fostered deliberately by medical schools. “Medical students were advised to stay away from mathematics and physics and chemistry, and take mostly biology,” John recalled. Harvey Cushing was one medical expert who understood the value for physicians of the discoveries of radiation physicists, but in this, as in so many other ways, his foresight was uncommon.
Ernest shared Cushing’s faith in the value of interdisciplinary research, but his views were not widely shared on campus. The University of California’s medical school faculty, housed across the bay in San Francisco, was especially dismissive of Ernest’s overtures. Not even the efforts of the medical school dean could quell the interacademic hostility: at one dinner the dean hosted for Ernest, a professor of medicine “got up and made a speech indicating that the cyclotron is of no use in medicine at all, and they were wasting their time on it,” Raymond Birge recalled. But it was not just the med school. John was surprised at the meager demand in Berkeley for the isotopes being discovered and manufactured by the cyclotron with the efficiency of an assembly line. “They were being made available to anybody that wanted to use them,” John related, “but there wasn’t the excitement that we saw back east.” More isotopes were being shipped by the Rad Lab across the country, to Chicago, Boston, and New York, than across campus. Evidently the task of forging a brotherhood of scientists would fall to the two brothers themselves.
• • •
John’s first impression upon stepping into the Rad Lab was the staff’s shockingly casual attitude about radiation. He knew that Ernest himself was aware of the potency—and therefore the hazards—of neutrons, for the capacity of the chargeless particles to penetrate human tissue had been a frequent topic of their correspondence. Ernest had been writing of the strength of the neutron beam since 1933, when he advised Poillon that “the radiation is so intense and so powerful and penetrating that we are already worried about the physiological effects on us.” Neutrons from the Rad Lab could be detected even in Gilman Hall, the headquarters of Gilbert Lewis’s chemistry department, which was separated from the lab by a broad alley. At first Lewis’s chemists were mystified by the sudden degradation in their experimental results, but they eventually traced the trouble to neutron interference. Lewis “told me facetiously that he is going to have the Radiation Laboratory declared a public nuisance,” Lawrence wrote Poillon, not without a certain perverse pride.