The most recent new arrival at the Rad Lab was an émigré from fascist Italy. A small, outspoken, and volatile man, Emilio Segrè was a former student of Fermi’s. Segrè had been teaching at the University of Palermo when he received a letter from Lawrence that contained a piece of the 37-inch’s deflector. From that radioactive metal fragment, Segrè and a colleague had isolated the first man-made element, which they dubbed “technetium.”83 Segrè was visiting Berkeley in 1938 when he learned that Mussolini’s anti-Jewish decrees made it impossible for him to return to Italy.84
Although Lawrence would later claim to have rescued Segrè from the fascists, some at the Rad Lab—Segrè included—felt that Ernest actually took advantage of the Italian’s plight, paying him barely more than a graduate assistant. Behind Ernest’s back, the touchy Italian returned the affront—spreading the story that John Lawrence had never really recovered from a blow to the head received in a near-fatal car accident. Segrè also found Oppenheimer’s continental pretensions “slightly ridiculous.”85 While resolved to be a good citizen of what he called “the Cyclotron Republic,” Segrè nonetheless discreetly sounded Birge out about finding a permanent job in the physics department.86
Martin Kamen, a slight and somewhat disheveled-looking chemist from Chicago, was put to work making radiophosphorus for John’s medical experiments. The late-night antics and bohemian lifestyle of the twenty-three-year-old Kamen drew pursed lips and disapproving looks from Lawrence but favor from the boys. (In one celebrated contest, initiated by Kamen, inebriated cyclotroneers vied to see who could do the greatest number of pull-ups on the suspension cables of the new Golden Gate Bridge; Kamen won.)87
Years later, Kamen would learn about the price of empire the hard way, when he and a colleague in the chemistry department, Sam Ruben, used Lawrence’s cyclotron to synthesize the first long-lasting radioisotope of carbon. Like radiosodium, carbon-14 held promise as a biological tracer. When Kamen went to Ernest’s home one rainy night to announce the discovery, Lawrence, suffering from a bad head cold, sprang from his sickbed to embrace the young man.
But Lawrence’s joy turned to “ill-concealed anger” just days later, Kamen recalled, when the scientific paper announcing the discovery gave Ruben and the chemistry department precedence over the Rad Lab.88 Lawrence had turned on his heel and wordlessly walked away when Kamen offered him the paper. To the young chemist, the incident showed that not even Ernest was immune to chauvinistic pride, and that there was a dark side to Lawrence’s ambition.
* * *
Even before the 37-inch cyclotron had reached its theoretical limits, Ernest was looking for new worlds to conquer. Indeed, he already had a bigger machine in mind. At Chicago’s Century of Progress Exposition, he had talked about a future “atomic gun which in comparison with the present one will be like a 16-inch rifle alongside a mere one-pounder.”89 At the time there had been no interest in building such a machine, but that changed with the discovery of artificial radioactivity less than a year later.
The next cyclotron would be specifically designed to produce radioisotopes and treat cancer patients. Since it was no longer as a supplicant physicist but as a freshly minted hero of medicine that Lawrence made his appeal, this time he planned to custom build the machine rather than assemble it from scrounged parts. Ernest asked Alvarez to calculate the optimum size of the magnet and McMillan to build the power supply. Edward Lofgren, a young grad student from southern California, was assigned to help McMillan and William Brobeck, the Rad Lab’s only engineer.90
Lawrence had decided that his “medical cyclotron” should operate in the neighborhood of 20 million electron volts—an energy which, not coincidentally, was also of interest to physics. The pole faces of the new cyclotron would be 60 inches across; its magnet weighed 200 tons. A wealthy University of California regent, William Crocker, offered $75,000 toward construction of a new building on campus to house the machine.91
The 60-inch was still under construction in January 1939 when word came of the discovery of nuclear fission in Germany. This time Lawrence and his colleagues learned of the development from the newspapers rather than academic journals. Once again for the boys, surprise and elation rapidly gave way to the frustrating realization that another major find had narrowly escaped them.
On Telegraph Avenue, Luis Alvarez leaped from a barber’s chair and ran to the lab upon seeing the headline in the San Francisco Chronicle. A graduate student of his, Philip Abelson, had been puzzled for weeks by x-rays emanating from uranium following neutron bombardment. (“I have something terribly important to tell you,” Alvarez told Abelson. When the student proceeded to sit down, Luie suggested that Abelson lie down instead.) It was immediately clear to both men that fission was the solution to the mystery.92
Within hours of receiving the news, Oppenheimer had given a seminar on atom-splitting at LeConte, and McMillan had fashioned a simple but elegant experiment to demonstrate the phenomenon.93 Chemist Glenn Seaborg, a Berkeley graduate whom Lawrence had recruited to help with the radioisotope work, walked the streets of the city that evening, incredulous that he and his colleagues had failed to see what was right before their eyes.
But the disappointment that Lawrence felt was soon overcome by the dawning realization of fission’s possibilities. “This uranium business is certainly exciting,” he wrote Fermi that winter.94 Ernest had been thinking about building a new and more powerful accelerator since the previous year.95 This latest discovery gave that project new impetus.
There was, moreover, a certain cold logic behind Lawrence’s warm enthusiasm this time. The Germans at Berlin’s Kaiser Wilhelm Institute had split the uranium atom using neutrons from a natural radiation source, a small lump of radium. Ernest reasoned that the cyclotron—a much more powerful source of directed radiation, able to penetrate to the atom’s very core—would yield proportionately more interesting results. As he had observed in his riposte to Rutherford, atom-smashing
