Salk acknowledged that Szilard was “more interested in getting something done than in who got credit for it,”8 as he did by inspiring other scientists to unite research with real-world problems. One disciple who followed Szilard’s example is Richard Garwin, a physicist who seizes on the policy implications of science and technology, as he did in the 1970s with the controversy over the effect that supersonic transport planes would have on the atmosphere and in the 1980s with his critical analysis of “Star Wars” defense systems. Another disciple, biochemist Matthew Meselson, not only worked actively in the Council for a Livable World but also applied research on chemical weapons in the 1980s to demonstrate that “yellow rain” falling in Southeast Asia was not chemical defoliant, as the Reagan administration had claimed, but bee feces. And Harrison Brown, an editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, integrated biology and social science into his studies of the earth’s “carrying capacity” decades before global environmental issues became prominent.9
In applying science himself, both by research and in creative fiction, Szilard was ahead of his time when he advocated and advanced fertility and birth-control studies and when he dealt with the medical opportunities and psychological costs of preserving disease victims cryogenically. He experienced the terrors that lead many thoughtful people to choose euthanasia over a long and painful death, and as this issue receives increased attention today, he would no doubt be trying to market the kind of “suicide kit” he first devised in 1960.
Szilard’s faith in the peaceful benefits of atomic energy has certainly been rewarded in the development of medical technology, although his hope that nuclear power would help developing countries to prosper has proven impractical. Overstated, too, was Szilard’s faith in his breeder reactor, which has proven to be a dangerous and costly electricity producer in every country that has tried to build one. Szilard never anticipated the need to deal with nuclear waste and would surely be miffed by the public debate that today surrounds this issue, although, no doubt, he would also have a clever solution, or two or three.
For a scientist of his stature, there is still little public recognition for Szilard’s life: No professorship or university chair or institute bears his name. But as he wished in a moment of whimsy, Szilard is memorialized in at least one place along with Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, and Einstein: There is a crater named for him on the moon.
Szilard’s legacy is best captured in his mode of thinking, a playful but persistent attack on the world and all the woes and wonders in it. With that feisty spirit in mind, it is still useful to do as his friends do: to pause, to smile, and to ask: “What would Leo think?”
Chronology of Leo Szilard’s Life
1898 February 11
Born Leo Spitz in Budapest, 28 (now 50) Bajza Utca.
1900 October 4
Family changed its name to Szilard and later moved to 33 Varosligeti Fasor.
1908 September
Attended technical eight-year high school in Budapest (to June 1916).
1916 September
Entered Budapest Technical University to study engineering.
1917 fall
Was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army.
1918 fall
Returned to civilian life and engineering studies.
1919 spring
Began political activities during the Béla Kun government's four-month Communist rule in Hungary, organizing with his brother the Hungarian Association of Socialist Students.
1919 December
Escaped from Hungary to study engineering at the Technical Institute (Technische Hochschule) in Berlin.
1920 fall
Transferred to the physics department of the University of Berlin, where he met physicists Max von Laue, James Franck, and Albert Einstein.
1922 August
Received a Ph.D. in physics under von Laue and began teaching as his first assistant in 1925.
1922 fall
Applied the principle of entropy to information, the basis of modern “information theory.”
1927 December
Filed the first of more than thirty patents with Einstein for an electromagnetic pump, which became the basis of cooling systems in "breeder" nuclear reactors in the 1950s and 1960s.
1929 January 5
Patented the concept of the cyclotron.
1929 fall
Met Gertrud (Trude) Weiss, his future wife.
1931 December 25
First visited New York, working on research in theoretical physics at New York University.
1933 March 30
Left Germany for Vienna and then London, where he worked to settle academic refugees.
1933 September/ October
Developed the idea of a nuclear "chain-reaction" and the concept of a "critical mass" to create it.
1934 March
First patented the chain-reaction concept.
1934 summer
Conducted atomic research at St. Bartholomew's Hospital, London; invented the Szilard-Chalmers effect for isotope separation.
1935 winter/spring
Visited New York, then began research at Oxford.
1935 spring
Began extensive efforts to encourage scientists to self-censor research to keep atomic developments secret from Germany, his first attempts at nuclear arms control.
1938 January 2
Landed in New York; conducted research at the University of Illinois, Rochester, and Columbia.
1939 spring
Worked on atomic research at Columbia with Enrico Fermi, Walter Zinn, and others.
1939 summer
Collaborated with Fermi to design the first nuclear reactor; urged censorship of atomic developments by US, French, and British scientists.
1939 July
Told Einstein about chain reactions and the weapons potential of his equation E = mc2. Proposed and drafted a letter for Einstein's signature to Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt warning of atomic weapons—an alert that led to creation of the Manhattan Project to develop A-bombs.
1942 February 1
Moved to Chicago with other Columbia scientists, becoming chief physicist of the Manhattan Project's Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago.
1942 December 2
With Fermi put into operation the world's first chain-reaction atomic "pile" (reactor) of their design.
1943 January
Prepared a memo on the first of three designs for a "breeder" reactor (a name he coined) to create plutonium for fuel and A-bombs.
1943 March 29
Became a US citizen.
1944 August 10
Proposed postwar arrangements for national and international control of atomic energy (to curb what he predicted would be a US-Soviet arms race) almost one year before the first A-bomb was tested.
1945 March 15
With another Einstein letter sought an appointment with President Roosevelt to present scientists' views about wartime and postwar use of A-bombs. FDR died before their meeting.
1945 May–June
Helped write the Franck Committee report urging a demonstration of A-bombs before use on Japanese cities.
1945 July 1
Organized a scientists' petition against dropping A-bombs on Japan, an effort hampered by his superiors (first bomb tested July 16; bombs dropped on Japan on August 6 and 9).
1945 October
Led scientists' protest against the May-Johnson bill, which would keep atomic energy under military control, and testified before Congress (October 18 and December 10) in favor of the successful McMahon bill, which would create a civilian Atomic Energy Commission.
1945 fall
Helped organize the Federation of American Scientists, a group active in arms-control issues, and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a public forum for scientific and arms-control issues.
1945 December
Proposed the first of several initiatives toconvene US and Soviet scientists for arms-control discu
ssions.
1947 spring
Began an extensive public-speaking tour, mostly at universities, proposing political solutions to a US-Soviet atomic arms race.
1948 summer
Invented, with Aaron Novick, the chemostat to test bacteria in a steady state. In satirical writing and by informal organizations opposed anti-Communist pressures on US campuses.
1951 October 13
Married Gertrud (Trude) Weiss in New York City.
1955 May 18
Received, together with Enrico Fermi, a joint US patent on the nuclear reactor.
1957 January
Proposed that Dr. Jonas Salk, developer of a polio vaccine, found and lead a new research center combining science and social issues which later became the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California.
1957 spring
Helped plan the First Pugwash Conference, involving US and Soviet scientists and policymakers in discussions on peace and disarmament (held in July at Pugwash, Nova Scotia).
1957 December
Suffered a mild heart attack when in Paris.
1959 fall
Diagnosed as having bladder cancer. Hospitalized in New York City. Directed his own radiation treatment. During the next year wrote and edited science fiction and political satires that were published in 1961 as The Voice of the Dolphins.
1960 May 18 1960 fall
Received the US Atoms for Peace Award. Met with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in New York, gaining his assent to a Moscow-Washington hot line.
1961 February
Moved to Washington to promote arms control.
1962 June
Organized the first political action committee for arms-control and disarmament issues, the Council for a Livable World.
1962 October
Fled to Geneva during the Cuban Missile Crisis and from there tried to reach Khrushchev to further US-Soviet dialogues.
1963 December
Wrote on "minimal deterrence" as a concept to guide arms-control negotiations.
1964 February
Moved to La Jolla to work at the Salk Institute, becoming a resident fellow on April 1.
1964 spring
Began a concerted research program and wrote on "Memory and Recall."
1964 May 30
Died of a heart attack in his sleep in La Jolla.
Acknowledgments
Researching and writing this biography has been an eight-year effort to capture Leo Szilard’s elusive spirit. In this quest many people have helped me to retrace Szilard’s life and works in Europe and North America. For their assistance and encouragement I am deeply thankful. Among those whose aid I gratefully acknowledge are the following:
Lynda C. Claassen, Lillian Gutierrez, Geoffrey Wexler, Kim Palmer, Steve Coy, Jackie Dooley, Renee Robinson, and Evelyn Sander at the Leo Szilard Papers, Mandeville Special Collections Department, University of California, San Diego; Sylvia Bailey and June Gittings at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies; Marjorie Cirolante and Eddie Reese at the National Archives; Cooper Graham at the Library of Congress; Joshua Lederberg and Ann Quatela at Rockefeller University; Darwin H. Stapleton, Madeleine Tierney, and Lee Hiltzik at the Rockefeller Archive Center; Paul Marks and Evelyn Saulpaugh at the Memorial Sloan- Kettering Cancer Center; Melanie Marhefka, James Yntema, and Daniel Meyer at the Joseph Regenstein (University of Chicago) Library, Special Collections Division; Jeri Nunn, John Verso, and Ronald Grele at the Columbia University Oral History Research Office; Louis Brown at the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, Carnegie Institution of Washington; Judy Goodstein at the California Institute of Technology Library; Nancy Bressler at the Albert Einstein Duplicate Archive in Princeton University; John Stachel, David Cassidy, Robert Schulmann, and Ann Lehar at the Albert Einstein Papers Archive at Boston University; Helen W. Samuels and Kathy Marquis at the MIT Manuscript Archive; Dale Mayer, Mildred Mather, and Shirley Sondergard at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library; Barbara Anderson, Megan Desnoyers, and Michael Desmond at the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Library; Susan Elter at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library; Paul Forman, Roger Sherman, and Andrew Szanton at the Smithsonian Institution; Glenn Stout and Wendy Marcus at the Boston Public Library; Jerome
Grossman, Rosalie Anders, Julie Cohen, and Michael Litz at the Council for a Livable World; Larry Arbiter at the University of Chicago, News and Information Bureau; Len Ackland, Lisa Grayson, and Ruth Grodzins at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists; Spencer Weart, Jean Hrichus, Julie Martin, Elisabeth Elkind, Douglas Egan, and Ann Kottner at the American Institute of Physics; Jennifer Belton and Cathy Wall at the Washington Post library; Ted Slate at the Newsweek library; Mary Ellen Adamo at the Forbes magazine collection; and Nati Krivatsy at the Folger Shakespeare Library.
In England, Colin Harris at the Bodleian Library, Oxford; Michael Brock and David Smith at Nuffield College Library, Oxford; Ramila Chauhan, Fiona MacColl, and Jill Breen at the British Library of Political and Economic Science, London School of Economics; Sally Grover and Nina Cohen at the Library of the Royal Society; Natalia Macher and Edith Salt at the London office of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs; and Liz Fraser at the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning, (formerly AAC). My special thanks to Esther Simpson, Szilard’s friend and AAC colleague.
In Budapest, Istvan Lang, Annamaria Furst, George Litván, and Attila Pók at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences; Laszlo Nagy, Emil Horn, and Robert Szabo at the Museum of Contemporary History; Istvan Kovacs and Gábor Pallo at the Technical University; Ferenc Szabadváry at the Museum for Science and Technology; Eva Litván at the Kiscelli Museum; Tibor Sandor at the Ervin Szabó Municipal Library; and Eva Kaszas at the Lukács Archive.
In Geneva, Roswitha Rahmy at the Archives of the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) and Yves Felt, John Krige, and Dominique Pestre at the Study Team for CERN History.
Enid C. B. Schoettle, Joyce Nixon, Kathryn Mitchell, and Laurice H. Sarraf at the Ford Foundation; Ruth Adams, Rachel Williams, and George Hogenson at the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation; Arthur L. Singer, Jr., at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation; and Clifton Mitchell at the Brookings Institution.
Sharon Mylask, Tom Power, and Frank Tauss at Idea Tech; Eugene Racanelli and Tina Oliver at Kinko’s Capitol Hill.
Egon and Renée Weiss and Efraim and Frances Racker for their encouragement and their sharing of numerous items from the Gertrud Weiss Szilard estate; Gar Alperovitz, Brian Balogh, Anna Bettelheim, John F. Bresette, John C. Culver, Warren Donnelly, Robert Doyle, Elie Feuerwerker, Floyd Galler, John H. Gibbons, Vitalii Goldanskii, Margaret Gowing, Gail Griffith, Paul Hendrickson, Gregg Herken, James P. Hume, Marvin Kalb, William Kincade, Richard Leghorn, Howard J. Lewis, Patricia Lindop, William Martin, Henry Myers, Ayub Ommaya, Barbara and Owen O’Neill, Humphry Osmond, Nancy Palmer, Bill Perkins, Paul Ress, Jean Richards, William Scott, Martin Sherwin, David Shoaf, John and Janet Silard, Thomas Simons, Ralph G. H. Siu, Alice K. and Cyril Smith, Margaret Spanel, Istvan Szemenyei, Joseph Tarantolo, Valentine and Lia Telegdi, Kosta Tsipis, Francis Wagner, Horst and Maria Luise Wagner, George Weil, David Wiener, and Ruth Wuest for their helpful comments and suggestions during my research.
Josef Ernst and Gábor Pallo for determined research and translation. Priscilla Johnson McMillan and Stanley Goldberg for their critical reviews of the manuscript; Dan Grossman, Carol Gruber, James Hershberg, Ira Kaminow, Ralph W. Moss, Sharyl Patton, Paul Pavlovich, Marc Trachtenberg, Frank von Hippel, and Helen Weiss for their suggestions of information and sources; Barton Bernstein, Albert and Susan Cantril, and Robert E. Hunter for their helpful brainstorming; and Pnina Abir-Am, Charles Fenyvesi, Maurice Fox, G. Allen Greb, Howard Green, Helen Hawkins, Karl Maramorosch, Philip Marcus, Aaron Novick, John Platt, Thomas Powers, Theodore Puck, Frances Racker, and John Yakaitis for reviewing and correcting sections of the manuscript.
Claudia Andrews, David Austin, Brian Daley, William and Helen Hawkins, Paul Keegan, Hinrich a
nd Ursula Lehmann-Grube, Thomas and Irene Litz, Robert and Joany Mosher, Michael and Claude Sullivan, Tony and Mary Alice Wolf, and my brothers John, Joseph, Peter, and Robert and their families for their hospitality during my research travels. And my Kennedy School, Wilson Center, and GAO collegues for enduring all my Leo Szilard stories.
The Ford Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Rockefeller University, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Council for a Livable World Education Fund, and the Hoover Presidential Library Association for financial support during my research and writing.
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