Genius in the Shadows

by William Lanouette

  At the time, Szilard received scant credit for one insight: in the 1950s he proposed a technique for cloning mammalian cells that was claimed, developed, and applied by others. That issue is now resolved in the scientific literature to Szilard’s full credit. Citations to his scientific and political works continue to pop up in journals and books.

  Szilard’s speculations in biology were tested in 2009 by researchers in Sweden who re-examined his assumptions, the then available knowledge, and hypotheses for a 1959 paper on the causes of aging. They concluded:

  Szilard’s model was the first serious hypothesis to posit accumulated genetic damage as an important cause of senescence, a view most researchers agree with today . . . and in spite of being oversimplified and on some aspects wrong, it also predicts population-based death rates in a quite accurate manner. In the literature, Szilard is often described as a visionary man with a remarkable ability to make accurate predictions on grounds not always clear to his fellow scientists. In a sense, his model for the aging process may be another example of this extraordinary gift. (Zetterberg, et al., “The Szilard Hypothesis on the Nature of Aging Revisited,” Genetics 182: 3-9, May 2009)

  Indeed, Jonas Salk admired Szilard’s freewheeling intellect when he was one of the Salk Institute’s first fellows. Salk said that Szilard “could effect chain reactions both in atoms and in human minds.” James D. Watson, who with Francis Crick gained a Nobel prize for discovering the genetic code DNA, said recently that Szilard had influenced him more than anyone else: not for any particular scientific idea, but by his creative imagination. Watson said he loved being around him because “Leo got excited about something before it was true.”

  Scholars continue to discover that ingenuity in the Leo Szilard Papers at the University of California, San Diego, Mandeville Special Collections Library (libraries.ucsd.edu/speccoll/testing/html/mss0032a.html). Several internet sites provide information on Szilard’s life and science. A respected website containing various online documents has been created by independent scholar Gene Dannen (http://www.dannen.com/szilard.html), and Nelson H. F. Beebe at the University of Utah has compiled a comprehensive Selected Bibliography by and about Leo Szilard that seems to expand by the week (http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/).

  Other Szilard documents, still in private hands, have become attractive to collectors. In December 2012, an auction that included manuscripts by Thomas Jefferson, Vincent van Gogh, George Washington, Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Beethoven, and Tchaikovsky also offered for sale Leo Szilard’s January 1939 letter to Lewis L. Strauss that first described nuclear fission as “a very sensational new development in nuclear physics” that could lead to electrical generation, medical isotopes, and “unfortunately also perhaps to atomic bombs.” This Szilard letter sold for $240,000, only barely out-priced by Jefferson and Van Gogh.

  At Kerepesi Cemetery in Budapest, only half of Szilard’s ashes were buried in 1998. The other half went to Ithaca, New York, to join those of his wife Gertrud Weiss Szilard and her family. Speaking at Lake View Cemetery in May 1998, Szilard’s friend and colleague Hans Bethe recalled how in England, in 1933, Leo seemed ubiquitous as he raced about working to settle the academic refugees expelled by Hitler. “We thought he was seen at two places at the same time,” Bethe recalled, and now, with ashes in Budapest and Ithaca, that suspicion was demonstrably true.

  Szilard’s wish was that his ashes not be buried at all, but go off in balloons because, he said, “it is more pleasing for people to look up rather than to look down,” and that way “at least it will delight all the children.” This was achieved in Ithaca as grandnephews and grandnieces placed some of his ashes in an airmail envelope (on which they wrote the epitaph Szilard preferred, “He Did His Best”) and launched them with colorful balloons that drifted over treetops toward the Atlantic. A month later, Szilard’s wishes were granted again when relatives at San Diego let fly some ashes lofted by balloons that rose above the Pacific.

  Although a bird of passage whose genius shaped science and history at critical times, Szilard and his legacy are also timeless. His mode of being informs us anew. “There are all too few like Leo Szilard,” his friend and colleague Jonas Salk recalled, and his example provides “a role model for others of his kind for which the world is now in great need.”

  —William Lanouette

  San Diego, CA

  Foreword

  by Jonas Salk

  Leo Szilard’s life spanned the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, the two great wars, and beyond. His experiences extended from physics to biology and from academia to the halls of world power. In his special ways, through a quest for knowledge and through the force of his pragmatic idealism, he sought to create a more peaceful world.

  He was equally himself with colleagues, friends, or heads of state, and possessed the wit and the wisdom to be listened to and appreciated because of his sincerity. However, because of the intensity with which his intellectual vigor was delivered, his intentions were sometimes misunderstood. His scintillating mind was always turned on, and as if through the power of his mind—knowing how rarely it might otherwise have occurred—his inoperable cancer appeared to vanish through his will to live and to continue to give of his genius.

  This biography of Leo Szilard reveals a multifaceted singularity, a person who could effect chain reactions both in atoms and in human minds. Few came into his presence who left unchanged. The essence and spirit of this fascinating man who played so vital a role at a critical time in the history of humankind is captured in these pages. This book makes up for the fact that for all the people he influenced Leo remains a curiously obscure figure.

  He was a true scientist/humanist and a philosopher as well, a natural philosopher who caused things to happen. That he was also an artist of science is evident in his statements: “The creative scientist has much in common with the artist and the poet. Logical thinking and an analytical ability are necessary attributes to a scientist, but they are far from sufficient for creative work. Those insights in science that have led to a breakthrough were not logically derived from preexisting knowledge: The creative processes on which the progress of science is based operate on the level of the subconscious.”

  His desire to associate with people of like mind was reflected in an ambition that we both shared, to bring scientists and others possessed of a deep human concern together in a scientific institution such as was established in La Jolla, California, in which he found peace in the last days of his life. The Salk Institute was for evolvers rather than maintainers of the status quo, and Leo was one of the most evolved of evolvers. Leo’s suggestions for colleagues at the institute quickly revealed his preference for iconoclasts, a reason for the kinship that we felt. I discovered that we had even more in common one day when we were discussing an idea that I had, and Leo said there were those who would never forgive me for being right. I knew at that moment he was speaking about his own experiences as well, another reason for the understanding we shared.

  There are all too few like Leo Szilard. This poignant story of his life will inform and inspire, providing a role model for others of his kind for which the world is now in great need.

  Preface

  It was hot and humid in Manhattan on the morning of August 2, 1939, yet Leo Szilard, a round-faced Hungarian-born physicist working at Columbia University, appeared at the curb in front of his hotel near the campus wearing a suit and tie. Szilard always wore a suit and tie. He hopped into a blue Plymouth coupe, and the car sped through Harlem, across the new Triborough Bridge, and past the glittering World’s Fair grounds. Szilard was headed for a small cottage on Long Island to visit a friend. His driver that morning was Edward Teller. The friend was Albert Einstein.

  This was Szilard’s second visit to Einstein’s cottage in three weeks. Szilard had studied with Einstein in Berlin in the 1920s, and their research had produced more than thirty joint patents for a refrigerator pump with no moving parts. The two friends had met but rarely sin
ce Szilard moved from England to America more than a year before. During that first call at the cottage, the forty-one-year-old Szilard had stunned his sixty-year-old mentor by describing the concept of a nuclear “chain reaction.” Szilard had conceived this in London, in 1933, but had tested the idea using uranium at Columbia only in the spring and summer of 1939. “I haven’t thought of that at all,” Einstein had replied, seeing at last a mechanism and a natural element that gave his 1905 equation for E = mc2 a new and terrifying reality.

  On that first visit, Szilard and Einstein agreed to warn the Belgian royal family—personal friends of Einstein’s, whom he called “the Kings”—that Nazi Germany coveted the world’s largest uranium supply in the Belgian Congo. In the days between those visits, however, Szilard had decided that US officials should also be warned about German intentions, and through friends he had met Alexander Sachs, a Wall Street banker who claimed easy access to the White House. So, in the white-shingled cottage near Peconic Bay that sultry August day, Einstein, wearing an old robe and slippers, and Szilard, now down to shirtsleeves and tie, hunched over the dining-room table, sipped iced tea, and wondered how to tell an American president about something that might change the world forever.

  “We did not know just how many words one could put in a letter which a president is supposed to read,” Szilard recalled later. That afternoon, Einstein dictated in German a brief, preliminary draft, leaving Szilard to write both a long and a short letter to Franklin Roosevelt.

  “Some recent work by E. Fermi and L. Szilard . . . .” Einstein’s now famous letter began, “leads me to expect that the element uranium may be turned into a new and important source of energy in the immediate future.” It went on to explain how physicists Enrico Fermi and Szilard had just demonstrated that a nuclear chain reaction could probably occur. “This new phenomenon would also lead to the construction of bombs, and it is conceivable—though much less certain—that extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed. A single bomb of this type, carried by boat and exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory.”

  Einstein’s letter ultimately led to the federal government’s top-secret Manhattan Project to design and build atomic reactors and atomic bombs. When that letter was written, Einstein and Fermi were both acclaimed Nobel laureates in physics, while “L. Szilard” was unknown outside a small circle of physicists. He remains a shadowy historical figure today, even though he did the most among scientists of his generation to help forestall, then create, and then control the atom bomb.

  Indeed, Szilard personifies the nuclear era and its fateful consequences as no other individual can. He successfully forestalled a nuclear arms race with Hitler by having the British government make his 1934 chain-reaction patent a military secret; and beginning in 1935, he angered many scientists outside Germany (including Fermi) by urging them not to publish their nuclear research.

  After German scientists experimentally split or “fissioned” the uranium atom in 1938, Szilard worked frantically to start the very arms race he had feared, using Einstein’s letters, Fermi’s connections, and his own feisty imagination to beat Hitler to the A-bomb. He drafted a second Einstein letter to Roosevelt in early 1940, when federal interest in atomic research was flagging, and he codesigned with Fermi the world’s first nuclear reactor. (Their joint US patent was issued publicly in 1955 to “E. Fermi et al.”)

  Yet by the spring of 1945, with Germany all but defeated and its race for the A-bomb lost, Szilard began efforts to forestall another nuclear arms race—this time with Russia. He drafted a third Einstein letter to Roosevelt, which failed to reach the president before his death. Then, with Truman in the White House, Szilard led two other initiatives: the atomic scientists’ unsuccessful petition to the president to prevent the atomic bombing of Japanese cities and their successful lobbying of Congress to shift postwar control of the atom from military to civilian hands.

  Szilard’s many efforts to create peaceful uses for the atom are also lost in the shadows of modern history. A few weeks after the first Fermi-Szilard nuclear reactor surged to life in a squash court at the University of Chicago, in December 1942, Szilard, then chief physicist of the Manhattan Project’s secret “Metallurgical Laboratory,” proposed, named, and designed the “breeder” reactor—an atomic power plant that makes more fuel than it consumes. The breeder’s wartime mission was to make plutonium for bombs; in peacetime it would generate electricity and fresh fuel for other nuclear power plants. Yet the first commercial breeder, when built near Detroit in the 1960s, was named for Fermi.

  After serving as Szilard’s chauffeur in 1939, Edward Teller worked as his agent in Washington, tracking federal decisions once Roosevelt had acted on Einstein’s letter. Teller also joined Szilard in early meetings of the government’s Advisory Committee on Uranium and in research for the Manhattan Project. But by 1945, with the race against Germany won, the two split over the need for arms control; in later years, they disagreed bitterly about nuclear policy, yet still remained personal friends.

  From the war’s end until his death in 1964, Szilard worked tirelessly to control the A-bomb he had helped create. He proposed or helped to found publications and institutions that today still influence science and politics: one is the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a monthly magazine first published at Chicago’s Metallurgical Laboratory in 1945; another is the Council for a Livable World, the first political-action committee for arms control, which he founded in Washington in 1962. Today the council leads and coordinates a network of groups working for demilitarization and peace, and each election year it raises more than one million dollars for congressional candidates.

  Szilard’s efforts were personal, clever, at times outrageous, and usually made behind the scenes. Justice Department officials threatened to jail Szilard (by now a United States citizen) in 1947 for writing a letter to Stalin that called for radio broadcasts by US and Soviet leaders to each other’s countries, an idea finally realized by presidents Reagan and Gorbachev in 1988. Szilard succeeded more promptly when, at a private meeting with Nikita Khrushchev in 1960, he gained the Soviet premier’s personal assent to a Kremlin–White House “hot line” that opened three years later.

  Szilard is remembered by friends and colleagues for his wry and puckish humor, a twinkle in his eye as he deflated pompous egos or described playful (and sometimes even practical) scientific or political inventions. They remember with glee Szilard’s tongue-in-cheek explanation for Grand Central Terminal’s pay toilets, published in a 1961 collection of his satires called The Voice of the Dolphins, or his proposal that the National Science Foundation pay second-rate scientists not to conduct research and not to publish articles. To microbiologist François Jacob, Szilard was an intellectual “bumblebee,” cross-pollinating ideas and institutions with his unconventional wisdom. One Szilard idea earned Jacob and his French colleagues a Nobel Prize. Another idea—a research center combining science and human affairs—became the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, where Szilard spent his last days. Yet for many reasons, among them his own maverick personality, Szilard’s story could not be told until now.

  Since childhood Szilard enjoyed being “different” and independent, unbound by common ideas and conventions. In later life, this independence led to Szilard’s being overlooked by the Manhattan Project’s official history, in part because of his many policy disputes with its headstrong director, Gen. Leslie Groves. Szilard was for years a forgotten man. Documents about his physics research and political activities remained military secrets for decades, and after his death, his personal papers and letters were sheltered from would-be biographers by his widow, although she worked to publish his scientific and professional papers.

  It was not until 1983, two years after Gertrud (Trude) Weiss Szilard’s death, that I began work on a biography and all papers became available through her brother, Egon Weiss. Still, the papers were in
chaos. Szilard lived most of his life in hotels and stashed his files in suitcases, which he left with friends and relatives around the world. Until recently the Szilard papers were organized by the color of the bag in which each document was found, and a reorganization by subject was not completed until after I finished writing this book. Luckily, in 1987, Egon Weiss rediscovered more than 350 personal letters to Trude by Szilard, and these were translated for use in this volume.

  Szilard’s widow failed to tell historians or writers about another vital source: Leo Szilard’s younger brother, Bela Silard. Fortunately, Bela and I met through his son John, a Washington lawyer, soon after I began work on this biography. Had Bela Silard’s writings and recollections, and his collection of family photographs and records, not become part of this work, no complete biography of Leo Szilard could have been possible. For this reason I credit my authorship “with Bela Silard.”

  “Leo Szilard was a very complex personality,” his friend and fellow physicist Nobel laureate Hans Bethe remembers. “He was one of the most intelligent people I have ever known. His mind worked quickly and profoundly, and he was able to come to ideas that most of us appreciated only after many hours of talk. This was his strength and, of course, also his weakness. He was always ahead of his time. His ideas often were expressed in paradoxes, and the paradoxes were not always understood.”

  Both Szilard’s candor and his cockiness made him a ready target of federal agents, who shadowed his actions for years without results. (Szilard’s FBI files are, in turns, both painful and hilarious to read.) Szilard irked his Manhattan Project superiors by both criticizing and ignoring some measures imposed to maintain secrecy and by complaining to congressional committees and the press after the war that the army’s “compartmentalization” of the scientists’ work had delayed America’s first atomic bomb by more than a year. After World War II, Szilard promoted sharing US atomic secrets with Russia in order to bring about international arms control agreements—hardly a popular idea at the time or through the cold war. And he predicted accurately the time needed by Russia to catch up with US nuclear developments. Fearlessly he mocked anti-Communist paranoia on university campuses. And in his lifetime Szilard publicly criticized every US president since Truman for escalating the nuclear arms race.