Lawrence, tending toward the other extreme, declined even routine chest and dental x-rays. “I’m deathly afraid of cancer,” he once confided to a family member.70
But Lawrence’s caution was sometimes overridden by enthusiasm, or thoughtlessness. Robert Stone, the chief radiologist at University Hospital, recalled how shivers had run down his spine when Ernest first showed him the poorly shielded Sloan x-ray tube in operation at Berkeley. Stone was further astonished to learn that Lawrence had forgotten to budget any funds for shielding the 1-million-volt tube when it was about to be installed in the hospital clinic.71
For all that, the only radiation casualty thus far at the Rad Lab had been the tube’s inventor, Sloan—who damaged his spine carrying 200-pound pieces of lead battery plate, scrounged from the dump and belatedly seized upon by Lawrence as the answer to the shielding problem.72
In summer 1935, Ernest enlisted the aid of John, his physician brother, then teaching at Yale, to deal with radiation concerns at the lab. An early experiment by John provided what seemed at the time a suitable cautionary tale: the boys were left silent and chastened when a laboratory rat placed in the target chamber of the 27-inch was found dead following a bombardment—until the gleeful cyclotroneers discovered that it was asphyxiation, not radiation, that killed the rat.
His brother’s visit convinced Ernest that the future of the cyclotron, and perhaps of the Rad Lab, lay in medical research. Both the Macy and the Rockefeller foundations, searching for cancer cures, had meanwhile joined Cottrell’s Research Corporation as major backers of Lawrence’s laboratory. With showmanship worthy of Barnum, Ernest and John used graduate students, colleagues, and themselves to demonstrate how radiosodium coursed through the body, promising a faster and safer tracer than radium. Moments after volunteers drank a solution of the isotope in water, Ernest or John would follow its path with a clicking Geiger counter.73
John eagerly returned to Berkeley the following year, driving cross-country from Yale with a car full of cancer-ridden mice to be used in cyclotron experiments.
The spreading fame of Lawrence and his laboratory was making Berkeley a beacon that attracted physicists from around the world. In 1936, shortly after beating back an attempt by Harvard to lure Ernest east, Sproul agreed to make the Radiation Laboratory an autonomous part of Berkeley’s physics department, with Lawrence as its director.74 Birge, who paid the most for this concession, pronounced himself satisfied with the bargain. But even the physics chairman, who supposedly had jurisdiction over Ernest’s growing empire, admitted that he did not really know what went on at the Rad Lab. As Birge wearily remarked to a professor at another school, Berkeley had become less “a university with a cyclotron than a cyclotron with a university attached.”75
A year later, the 27-inch was transformed into a 37-inch cyclotron; durable rubber gaskets replaced the ubiquitous red sealing wax. Cooksey’s prized yellow Packard Phaeton—“The Creamliner”—was used to anchor the hoist that brought the huge vacuum chamber into the lab.76 In September 1937, the machine reached a record 8 million electron volts. A few weeks later, Lawrence appeared on the cover of Time magazine after winning the National Academy of Sciences’ prestigious Comstock award. Lawrence used the prize money to buy a cabin cruiser for impromptu overnight trips up the Sacramento River. Although the vessel slept four, Lawrence routinely invited ten of the boys. Molly claimed her husband kept navigation charts onboard just to identify the sandbars they became stuck on.77
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By late that year, the new cyclotron was being run around the clock to meet the demand for medical radioisotopes, which Ernest and John distributed without charge to hospitals and research laboratories around the world. Tiring of the commute from New Haven, John had finally decided to join his brother permanently on the West Coast.78 He, Stone, and Hamilton had been the first physicians to put cyclotron-produced radioisotopes to medical use.
Experiments by physics graduate students were suspended for one day a week so that cancer patients could be treated with neutrons from the cyclotron. White hospital screens temporarily hid the oil-covered machinery and the boys grudgingly agreed to don hospital gowns for the day. Cyclotroneers who complained that the medical research tail had begun to wag the physics dog were not-so-gently reminded by Ernest which end it was that brought in the necessary grants.79
The Lawrence brothers put their faith in the new medical technology to the test at the end of 1937, when Gunda was diagnosed with incurable uterine cancer. Doctors at the Mayo Clinic had given the sixty-five-year-old woman only months to live. Once a week, John accompanied Gunda on the ferry across the Bay to Stone’s clinic, where she received several times the usual radiation dose from Sloan’s x-ray tube. The treatments were both painful and debilitating; Gunda often vomited out the car window from radiation sickness on the drive back from the hospital. But the tumor gradually shrank. By that spring, John predicted the eventual full recovery.80
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The boys had meanwhile been joined by new recruits, drawn to Berkeley like a flame by Ernest’s self-proclaimed “paradise of physics.” Already a veteran was Edwin McMillan, a shy, soft-spoken physicist who had arrived from Princeton in the winter of 1932. An experimentalist like Lawrence, the two men shared another, more personal bond: Ed was dating and would soon marry Molly’s younger sister, Elsie.
Luis Alvarez was still a student at the University of Chicago when he met Lawrence at the Century of Progress Exposition. Despite his Spanish surname, “Luie” was the grandson of Irish-born missionaries and looked Scandinavian. Brilliant, arrogant, and ambitious, Alvarez was recruited to Berkeley by Birge in 1936 but soon concluded that Ernest and the Rad Lab offered more of a career open to talent.81 While Lawrence would later speak admiringly of “the Alvarez style—something out of the ordinary,” for the interim his new star was
