Lawrence’s stint as a teenage cookware salesman had shown his early talent for raising the funds necessary to do his work. The economy with which Lawrence ran the Rad Lab was likewise notorious among colleagues. Scientists were routinely reminded to pick solder off the floor and reuse it. Lawrence once fired a fellow physicist—a subsequent group leader at Los Alamos—for ruining a pair of pliers.60
Lawrence’s kitchen-chair cyclotron had given him the necessary foot in the door: a $500 bequest from the National Research Council toward a bigger machine that would reach energies of interest to physics. The expense of each successive cyclotron had increased by almost an order of magnitude, as had the energies achieved. The 11-inch cost less than $1,000. The 27-inch was nearly ten times that amount. In order to pay for getting its huge magnet trucked across the Bay to Berkeley, Lawrence persuaded a scientist-entrepreneur and philanthropist, Frederick Cottrell, that the work going on at the Rad Lab might bear looking into.61
But luck, timing, and serendipity also contributed importantly to Lawrence’s success. Cyclotrons would probably have remained a theoretical curiosity were it not for the nearly simultaneous progress of vacuum tube technology, itself the result of the phenomenal growth of commercial radio in the early 1930s. Lawrence’s introduction to science had come as an amateur radio buff in high school.62 Merle Tuve, another early experimenter with wireless—and Ernest’s boyhood friend on the prairie—later became a department head at Washington’s Carnegie Institution.
In another happy coincidence, the oscillator vacuum tubes used in the cyclotron operated near the same part of the radio-frequency spectrum as x-ray tubes made for the diagnosis and treatment of disease. This overlap fortuitously pushed the boys early on into building machines for medical research.
One of Lawrence’s graduate students, David Sloan, had already built a 1-million-volt x-ray tube three times more powerful than existing hospital equipment. Sloan’s invention interested Cottrell as well as Lawrence’s colleagues across the Bay, at the University of California’s medical school and hospital in San Francisco. By 1933, radiologists at University Hospital were using Sloan’s x-ray tube for the treatment of cancer patients.63 But Ernest hoped that the cyclotron itself might someday become a weapon in the physician’s armamentarium against disease. As he was quick to recognize, the ability of neutrons to penetrate tissue promised to make them useful in the treatment of cancer: a tightly focused cyclotron beam might conceivably destroy malignant tumors while leaving nearby healthy organs untouched. Cottrell’s support left Lawrence optimistic about invoking the muse of medicine to pay the bills for his cyclotroneers.
Ironically, Ernest’s interest in the biological effects of radiation also stemmed from a concern with how the cyclotron might be affecting the health of the boys.64 He soon found that there was good reason to worry.
Early in 1934, a husband-and-wife team of physicists in Paris, Frédéric and Irène Joliot-Curie, discovered the phenomenon of induced, or “artificial,” radioactivity. Two months later, in Italy, physicist Enrico Fermi proved that radioactivity could also be induced by neutrons, a feat that earned him the Nobel prize.65
Both discoveries could and should have been made at the Rad Lab, since neutrons were something that the 27-inch at Berkeley was already producing in prodigious quantities. The tale would later be told that Lawrence had missed discovering artificial radioactivity because the cyclotron and the Rad Lab’s Geiger counter were both wired to the same switch—a tale that reflected upon Lawrence’s frugality as well as his impatience. But the truth was more damning, if less poetic.
Two years after the Cavendish had stolen a march on the Rad Lab, Lawrence and the boys were still so preoccupied with where they might go that they had neglected to notice where they had been. The strong but variable background radiation that accompanied the operation of the 27-inch had long been attributed to an equipment problem. Evidently, no one had thought to look at a Geiger counter after the cyclotron stopped running.66 His laboratory’s headlong rush toward bigger machines, higher energies, and future funding had caused Ernest, once again, to ignore those more modest instruments that recorded the results of cyclotron experiments.
Maddeningly, Lawrence and the boys were able to reproduce the Curies’ results within a half hour of reading about them in Nature. The steady clicking of the Geiger counter in the silent control room made it suddenly obvious to the cyclotroneers that they had been creating radiation artificially, and unknowingly, for more than a year.
The Curies’ discovery brought changes both big and small to the Rad Lab. On the bright side, the 27-inch promised an unending supply of new radioisotopes, with different properties and as-yet-undreamed-of applications.67 But whereas it had once been common for tired experimenters to lean against the cyclotron when it was not operating, crude hand-lettered signs went up overnight warning against such behavior. Water-filled metal cans were hastily stacked around the machine to absorb stray neutrons. Whereas the boys had once only to fashion hats from newspaper to protect themselves against the machine’s best-known hazard—oil spraying from the vacuum pumps—they now had a more serious concern. “We realized we were wading through a sea of neutrons much more intense than existed anywhere else, and the lab itself was alive with radioactivity induced by cyclotron radiations,” one later wrote.68 Not only the coins in their pockets but even the silver and gold fillings in their teeth were made radioactive by the machine.
Gruesome stories of carelessness around radiation were plentiful and well-known at the lab. All were aware of the tragic fate that had befallen the radium dial painters of the previous decade, who had inadvertently ingested the deadly element by licking the tips of their brushes to get a better point. The bones of the young girls had gradually grown brittle and melted away. Closer to home, the telltale black glove that covered the radiation-scarred hand of one of Ernest’s wedding guests still haunted Molly’s sleep.
Nonetheless, a kind of disdaining bravado persisted among the cyclotroneers, many of whom viewed overexposure to radiation as a
