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  Weaver informed Rockefeller Foundation president Raymond B. Fosdick in November that “an unexpected emergency” had developed at the Rad Lab. Three emergencies, actually: first, Lawrence recognized that he must spend more “in order that this giant new machine may really be safe.” Second, the price of steel and other materials had been on the rise. Finally, the Rad Lab’s usual sponsors were tapped out. Weaver told Fosdick wryly that most of them “warmly express the hope that the Rockefeller Foundation will be able to come in at this critical juncture.”

  Lawrence’s request was for $30,000. His application emphasized that the new lab would be equipped not merely as a cyclotron installation but “also as a biological laboratory”; in a separate letter, Bob Sproul appealed to Fosdick’s idealism by underlining the “breath-taking possibilities” presented by the cyclotron. “There is a spirit about it that should be fostered,” he wrote, portraying the entire project as “an investment for the future of mankind.” The three-way appeal from Weaver, Lawrence, and Sproul convinced Fosdick and the foundation trustees: the grant, to be disbursed over two years, came through before the end of January.

  It still was not enough. Lawrence filled out the rest of his budget with contributions from the John R. and Mary Markle Foundation and the Macy Foundation. He also accepted a grant from the federal government’s Works Progress Administration for the hiring of otherwise unemployed shop craftsmen—ten positions each in 1937 and 1938—even though this grant raised objections from the other donors after the WPA demanded an acknowledgment of its contribution in any papers the Rad Lab published. Some of the private foundations’ publicity-shy directors quailed at becoming named as partners with a New Deal program detested by their corporate patrons. The strongest complaint came from the Macy Foundation’s Ludwig Kast, who fretted to Howard Poillon that if the WPA were overturned by the Supreme Court as “subversive to the spirit of the Constitution,” public disclosure of the WPA’s support of a Macy grantee might suggest “that we have something to do with sinister communistic tendencies.” At Poillon’s suggestion, Lawrence deleted the WPA acknowledgment from papers that involved medical work financed by the Macy.

  • • •

  Two days before Christmas 1937, a load of 196 tons of steel was delivered to the Moore Dry Dock Company on the Oakland waterfront, to be machined into the Crocker Cracker’s huge magnet. Wound with twenty-five tons of copper, this behemoth was transferred to the cyclotron’s unfinished new home before the end of March. The work was tracked assiduously by a parade of fascinated foundation executives; for ten days in April, it was the turn of Rockefeller executive Frank B. Hanson. In the shadow of the hulking magnet, which now stood inside a three-story wing of the new Crocker building, Ernest showed Hanson where a medical treatment room would be built “in such a way that the patient will not see the machine, which will be noiseless,” and how ample clearance was being left around the unit for the radiation shielding on which so much of the Rockefeller money was being spent. There also would be quarters for John Lawrence’s “rat colony,” Hanson reported. After inspecting the unfinished Crocker Cracker, Hanson was escorted across the street to the Rad Lab for the obligatory demonstration of the lavender beam and was sent home suitably awestruck.

  In January 1939, the cyclotron’s six-ton vacuum tank, engineered by Bill Brobeck, was slid in between the magnet poles. The sixty-inch machine laid easy claim to being the last word in cyclotron design. Everything was custom engineered—“no hand-me-down magnets, no industrial discards . . . ‘no patch work,’ ” as the Joliots’ emissary Maurice Nahmias had derided the old standards. Every part had been modeled and tested, even against the seismic shocks of shaky Northern California. Reflecting Lawrence’s lack of conceit when it came to engineering, the machine incorporated the latest innovations of cyclotroneers across the country in designs for transformers, power transmission, the oscillator, and the ion source.

  Finally came the moment for “beam hunting,” or the tuning of the system. Here the reality that cyclotroneering was still very much a black art reasserted itself. For four months, the beam remained elusive as Lawrence, Alvarez, McMillan, Cooksey, and Brobeck tinkered with shims, relaid transmission cables, rewired the oscillator, and attempted myriad other tweaks and trims to coax a detectable stream of protons from the machine. The lab’s initial confidence in its handiwork had prompted Lawrence to agree to a live radio broadcast of the start-up over the Columbia Broadcasting System on April 15; when no beam had emerged by April 4, the broadcast was canceled.

  Nature finally capitulated on April 17, when resonance was finally detected. A stream of protons reached the collector exactly one month later. On June 7 came another milestone, a 17-million-volt deuteron beam slicing through the air for a distance of five feet. Lawrence calculated the cyclotron’s yield as the equivalent of more than one ton of radium—more radium than was known to exist on earth. Triumphantly, he reported the Crocker Cracker’s performance to the Physical Review in a letter cosigned by Alvarez, Brobeck, Cooksey, McMillan, and three other physicists; in the new paradigm of Big Science, success belonged to an expansive family. One aspect of the report, however, was uniquely Lawrencian. “We are convinced,” he wrote, “that much higher energies could be obtained from a cyclotron of larger dimensions.” The sixty-inch, a huge leap forward in cyclotron technology, had just begun to work, but Ernest Lawrence was already thinking ahead to the next step.

  • • •

  The year 1938 had closed in a whirl of expectation and hope at the Rad Lab. The sixty-inch was taking shape. Its cousins around the nation had shaken off the torpor observed by Livingston in midsummer and were all operating again. From overseas came a cable signed by Bohr—“all institute wishes [to] express thanks and admiration”—for the Copenhagen machine finally had been finished and made operational with the help of Rad Lab veteran Jackson Laslett. From Soviet Russia there was word of a project to build a cyclotron—known there as a “Lawrence apparatus”—under the supervision of physicist Igor Kurchatov, later to become famous as the father of the Soviet atomic bomb. That machine was developed without advice or assistance from Berkeley but with funding cadged from the Soviet regime very much by the Berkeley method: by stressing its potential contributions to medical research. (Testing on the Russian cyclotron’s vacuum chamber began in Leningrad on June 1, 1941, but the machine never ran, as the German invasion of Russia prompted its physicists to flee the city three weeks later.)

  In this triumphal atmosphere, rumors were heard again that Ernest might land the Nobel Prize. The high caliber of the competition, which included Fermi and the team of Cockcroft and Walton, made for long odds, but news reporters and newsreel photographers gathered at the lab and camped at the Lawrence home on hilly Tamalpais Road on the date of the scheduled announcement from Stockholm. Microphone cables crisscrossed the living room, posing an obstacle course for a pregnant Molly as she waited impatiently for Ernest to traipse home from campus. At lunchtime came the word: it was Fermi. (Cockcroft and Walton would have to wait until 1951 to receive recognition for the work they performed in 1932.) The newsmen packed up their gear, relieving Molly, who had cringed at the thought of being photographed in her laden condition and having to brace up for a royal reception in Sweden. Lawrence tendered his congratulations to Fermi via Segrè, who was now in residence at the Rad Lab and who observed that despite Ernest’s graciousness, he was “clearly disappointed.”

  For the rest of that year and into the next, the sixty-inch, despite its painstaking engineering and construction, exasperated its handlers. Brobeck regimented the operating crews into shifts, but the increased specialization in the Rad Lab failed to overcome the machine’s vulnerability to bugs that could knock it off-line for more than a week at a time. The burden fell most heavily on Martin Kamen and others tasked with isotope production. “The new cyclotron still continues to be a creature of chance and in its present condition cannot be expected to run continuously for another month,” he wrote in
late November to Paul F. Hahn, a physiologist at the University of Rochester who was anxiously awaiting a shipment of radioactive iron for his research on the bloodstream. Kamen offered Hahn some “excreta” from the thirty-seven-inch, including iron shavings and the remnants of a recently used probe, “to tide matters over until the advent of the iron utopia I have been so glibly promising for the last three months.”

  Kamen’s chemistry skills had steadily raised his profile in the Rad Lab, to the point where his original panic over being exiled back to the University of Chicago gave way to the fear of collapsing from overwork. He celebrated the “dramatic improvement in my prospects,” which included marriage—his second—to a bride who shared his deep love of music. He also carried the evidence of his scientific labors everywhere, for his heavy exposure to cyclotron targets, as he recalled, “kept me in a steady state of radioactive contamination, which rendered me persona non grata around assay equipment.” During one collaboration, he and Philip Abelson were bedeviled by the erratic performance of an ionization chamber until Abelson noticed that its behavior corresponded to Kamen’s wanderings around the room. He ordered Kamen to disrobe, garment by garment. Finally, they got to the last piece of clothing: Kamen’s trousers. They draped these over the balky apparatus and localized the radiation source to Kamen’s fly, which evidently had collected a heavy burden of waste radio-phosphorus from Kamen’s work for John Lawrence.

  Yet once the sixty-inch shook off its quirks in the spring of 1939, it began to perform as spectacularly as its designers expected. Lawrence touted its achievements proudly; to Gerald Kruger of the University of Illinois—to whom he had once confessed being “almost driven to distraction” by the eccentricities of the twenty-seven-inch—he proclaimed the new machine’s “amazing smoothness and stability.” To J. Stuart Foster, who was planning a cyclotron at McGill University in Montreal, where he was an associate professor of physics, Ernest boasted of its 33-million-volt alpha particles and an output of neutrons and radioisotopes “no less than prodigious.”

  Now it was about to bulk especially large in Kamen’s career and establish a new milestone in the Rad Lab’s reputation. The episode began with a prickly remark by Columbia’s Harold Urey, a chemist who maintained a lively skepticism about the cyclotron’s usefulness. Urey questioned publicly whether radioactive isotopes would ever play an important role in biological research, for the simple reason that no long-lived radioactive isotopes had been found for hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, or oxygen, the essential building blocks of life. This was true at the time of Urey’s writing: of the known radioisotopes, carbon-11 had a half-life of only twenty-one minutes; nitrogen-13, only ten; and oxygen-15, only two. Hydrogen’s naturally occurring radioactive isotope, tritium, which has a half-life of more than twelve years, would be isolated late in 1939 by Luis Alvarez and Robert Cornog of the Rad Lab, using the sixty-inch cyclotron; but they published the bulk of their findings only in 1940. All four elements had stable isotopes, however, which Urey was assiduously producing in his own lab for a wide range of studies. He had also begun negotiating a contract with Eastman Kodak for large-scale industrial production of these nonradioactive substances.

  Lawrence was deeply irritated by Urey’s doubts. It was not merely that he took Urey’s words as a personal affront, but he understood that if Urey’s prediction proved correct that radioactive tracers would not be found for these essential biological materials, an important pillar of the Rad Lab’s fund-raising edifice would be undermined. So one day in September he issued an urgent summons to Kamen. The young chemist sprinted up three flights to Lawrence’s office in LeConte Hall to find him in a state of agitation over Urey’s needling. “What can we do about this?” Lawrence asked.

  Kamen thought he might have an answer, but it would not be easy. In collaboration with a biology grad student named Sam Ruben, he had been probing the mysteries of photosynthesis using carbon dioxide tagged with carbon-11, but the isotope’s short half-life had brought them to a dead end. The one prospect of success lay with carbon-14, which was expected to be radioactive. The problem was that although its existence had been conjectured for years, no one had found it. Ed McMillan had staged the Rad Lab’s most determined search for the isotope by propping a bottle of granular ammonium nitrate in the path of the thirty-seven-inch machine’s neutron beam for several months. That effort ended when the bottle was accidentally knocked from its perch and smashed on the floor. No one was even sure if carbon-14 was long- or short-lived—its elusiveness might be caused by its having such a short half-life that its radioactivity dissipated before it could be measured; or such a long life that the telltale emissions were too rare to be spotted. Kamen told Lawrence that he and Ruben would have been happy to continue their search, but the oversubscribed cyclotron was unavailable for the lengthy bombardments the program required.

  “I would need it full-time,” Kamen said.

  “You have it,” Lawrence replied instantly.

  Lawrence granted him priority access to both the thirty-seven-inch and sixty-inch cyclotrons for a “systematic and energetic campaign” to find long-lived radioactive isotopes of carbon, nitrogen, or oxygen, with carbon-14 the main quarry. Kamen staggered down the stairway in a daze and made a beeline for Ruben’s lab, located in a derelict old annex to the chemistry building known as the Rat House. The two researchers were a Mutt-and-Jeff pair—Ruben, who had boxed for a boys’ club coached by former heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey and starred on the Berkeley High School basketball team, towered over his squat, unathletic partner. That said, Kamen was very much Ruben’s superior in the academic pecking order, for the latter was a freshly minted PhD still seeking a faculty position in the Chemistry Department.

  The search for carbon-14 was a messy, exhausting job. Their carbon preparation was a paint-like graphite suspension known as Aquadag, which they smeared onto probes for insertion into the cyclotron tank to be bathed in the deuteron beam for days at a time. Periodically Kamen would withdraw a probe and chip off the irradiated Aquadag, trying not to think about the exposure he might be absorbing. The target material went to Ruben for analysis while a resmeared probe got plugged back into the tank.

  The launch of the carbon-14 project coincided with another round of anxious expectation about a Nobel Prize for Ernest Lawrence. The few doubts being heard stemmed from rumors that the Nobel committee might suspend the prizes for the duration of the European war, which had begun with Germany’s invasion of Poland on September 1. Instead, the committee made one last round of awards in 1939, and then no more until 1943.

  On November 9 the announcement came, first by telegram and then by phone from the Swedish consulate in San Francisco. Ernest had been working out his nervous anticipation on the tennis court. The news reached him there in mid-set.

  At the Rad Lab, the telegram was tacked on the blackboard next to the scrawled words “EOL has NOBEL PRIZE” and the announcement of a congratulatory “BROBDIGNAGIAN BRAWL & BOOZING Horrific Hellraising Fabulous Fiesta,” scheduled for DiBiasi’s on November 17. The occasion would live up to its billing—a raucous gathering at which the attendees tried to top one another with randy limericks and songs. Aebersold’s contribution was set to the tune of “The Ramblin’ Wreck from Georgia Tech”:

  And then he bombed some common lead and turned it into gold

  The prexy jumped around with joy and loudly shouted “Hold

  I am convinced the thing is good—no more I’ll have to go

  To the solons up in Sacrament’ to ask them for some dough.”

  There was a cake in the shape of the sixty-inch, marked with the words of a telegram from Art Snell, a cyclotroneer at the University of Chicago. “Dear Ernest, Congratulations,” he wrote. “Your career is showing promise.”

  • • •

  Lawrence was the University of California’s first Nobel laureate—indeed, the first from any public university in the United States. But the prize carried a greater significance. By honoring both the inv
ention of an essential instrument for large-scale research and the creation of a laboratory model to put it to use, the Nobel committee validated a sea change in science. In the presentation speech, Professor K. M. G. Siegbahn of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences praised the cyclotron as “without comparison, the most extensive and complicated apparatus construction carried out so far.” The debate behind the scenes had focused on Lawrence’s role as the quintessential pioneer of Big Science. “Well, what has Lawrence done?” Bohr waspishly lectured G. P. Thomson of the Cavendish, who had been stumping for Cockcroft and Walton. “Invented an instrument which would have been more or less obvious to anybody unfamiliar with the difficulties of experimental technique, made it to work, and done nothing with it except to incite a large number of very able experimental physicists all over the world, unsuccessfully, to emulate his methods.” Cockcroft and Walton had built a big machine, yes, but as Bohr observed, it was not as big as Lawrence’s, nor had they carried it through to the invention of a new paradigm of research experimentation. (George Paget “G. P.” Thomson was the son of J. J. Thomson and a Nobel Laureate in his own right—in 1937, for research into the properties of the electron.)

  The last word came from Mark Oliphant, one of the few Cavendish alumni to support Lawrence’s candidacy over his former colleagues, and one of those who noticed the shift in the Nobel committee’s interest from pure theory to the hard toil of experimentation: “It is extremely encouraging to find that the Nobel Prize Committee . . . is now recognizing the tremendous importance of technique in scientific investigations,” he wrote the new laureate. “The technical side of the subject is now recognized as equally important with advances that follow from the use of these techniques, and more important, I hope, than the theories that endeavor to explain them.” An assiduous fund-raiser himself and the recipient of Lawrence’s confidences about a planned new cyclotron to dwarf the Crocker Cracker, Oliphant was fully alive to the real value of the prize beyond the $40,000 check that came with it: “It is certain that you will have no difficulty now in raising funds for your ‘father of all cyclotrons.’ ”