As he sat in his room, straining to focus on his work, Sanduk put down his papers and laid his head on top of them. His parents had given birth to six children. Only three remained. The others had died of easily treatable conditions like fever, diarrhea, and tuberculosis.
“A fifty percent survival rate,” Ruit says. “Unacceptable, unacceptable, unacceptable. The more I thought about it, the more I realized Yang La didn’t have to die. None of my brothers and sisters had to die. They died because resources the rest of the world had were not available to us. And after a month or so of spinning round with my thoughts, suddenly I saw the path I had to follow. It was straight and clear; I realized I had to become a doctor. I had to become someone who could go out and get those resources. I’d been working hard, but I had to work harder. Real study began after that.”
Sanduk was relentless. He targeted his grief, wedded it inseparably to his work. With Yang La’s melodies still in mind even years later, as he prepared for the most important entrance exams of his life, was it really a surprise that this son of a salt trader, this casteless outsider from the wild Tibetan border, from a blank spot on a British colonial map, scored high enough, when pitted against all the students of the subcontinent, to earn a scholarship to Lucknow’s prestigious King George Medical College?
Sanduk Ruit was no longer powerless. His feet were finally on that straight path, the clear course he’d chosen. He would put his faith and his sweat and his soul into exploring what wonders he could discover at the leading edge of science. There was no limit to the transformative powers he felt he should find there.
Daylight in the Dark
Some of you may ask, what is the good of working so hard merely to collect a few facts which will bring no pleasure except to a few long-haired professors who love to collect such things? In answer to such question[s] I may venture a fairly safe prediction. History … has consistently taught us that scientific advances in basic understanding have sooner or later led to technical applications that have revolutionized our way of life. It seems to me improbable that this effort to get at the structure of matter should be an exception to this rule. What we all fervently hope, is that man will soon grow sufficiently adult to make good use of the powers that he acquires over nature.
—Enrico Fermi, the father of the atomic bomb, shortly before his death
The fireball that lit the night-dark sky over New Mexico seemed to usher in morning before daybreak was due. On July 16, 1945, at 5:29 A.M., during what was then known as Mountain War Time, John R. Lugo, piloting a U.S. Navy transport flying at ten thousand feet, thirty miles east of Albuquerque, was startled by the bright explosion. “What a ball of fire!” he told the Albuquerque Journal. “My first impression was, like, the sun was coming up in the south.… It was so bright it lit up the cockpit of the plane.”
On the ground, in a bunker ten thousand yards from the blast, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the theoretical physicist who led the team of scientists gathered at the Trinity testing ground, had a prosaic initial reaction to the first successful detonation of an atomic bomb. “It worked,” others in the bunker recalled him saying. But as the explosion lit the mountains ringing the Jornada del Muerto, and a mushroom cloud billowed more than seven miles above the blast site, Oppenheimer later famously said, a phrase from the Bhagavad Gita, the Hindu holy book, flashed through his mind: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”
Enrico Fermi, the physicist most responsible for the scientific breakthrough that made the bomb possible, was, as always, consumed by practicalities. During the explosion, he huddled with Julius Tabin and two other young scientists at the test base camp, ten miles from the blast site. Seconds after Fermi, Tabin, and the others watched the blindingly bright explosion through sheets of dark welding glass, they stood and observed the forces they’d set in motion. Fermi threw a handful of paper he’d torn from his notebook into the air as the shock wave rolled toward them. From the distance the confetti flew, he calculated that the yield of the explosion was equal to at least ten kilotons of TNT. It later proved to be nearly twice that powerful.
The physicist Philip Morrison, another scientist at base camp that morning, recalled not only the bright light of the explosion but the sensation of feeling the heat of the sun on his face ten minutes before the real sun rose. In interviews after the test at Trinity, he referred to the unforgettable day that he saw two separate sunrises.
After they watched a mushroom cloud form, then drift away over the desert, three young scientists from Fermi’s team moved in to collect evidence. Herbert Anderson, the most senior of the three, rode in a specially shielded tank to collect core samples from the periphery of the crater. He was followed by Darragh Nagle, who traveled a third of the way in. Then Julius Tabin climbed into the retrofitted M4 Sherman. As the tank commander put the vehicle into gear, Tabin struggled to control his nerves. He had volunteered to be the first scientist to examine the center of the blast site, and there was no guarantee he’d come back alive. The tank had been lined with lead to reduce his exposure to radiation, but it couldn’t be pressure-sealed to provide reliable protection.
“I was twenty-four and single, so I said ‘I’ll do it,’ ” Tabin remembers. “You had to be a little crazy to go out there. But there’s tremendous strength in young people. I believed what I was doing was important enough to take the risk.”
Tabin had followed his mentor Fermi from the University of Chicago to Los Alamos, New Mexico. Fermi, Italian by birth, had won the 1938 Nobel Prize in physics for his groundbreaking experiments detailing the structure and behavior of the atom. As World War II approached, he fled Italy for America, to protect his wife, Laura, who was Jewish, from the catastrophe he saw coming when Mussolini followed the example of his fascist ally Hitler and enacted anti-Jewish laws.
At first Fermi’s team worked in a secret laboratory under the University of Chicago’s football stadium. They were the sharpened point at the tip of the Manhattan Project, the vast secret collaboration between the Allied nations’ finest scientific minds, trying to develop atomic weapons before the Nazis could construct their own. Fermi’s team built “Chicago Pile-1,” a rudimentary nuclear reactor, on a squash court under the stands of Stagg Field. And there they kindled humankind’s first atomic flame, setting off a nuclear chain reaction and proving the atomic bomb to be no longer a theoretical device but a weapon that might be used to bring the war to a swift conclusion. Further research with a reactor was considered too dangerous to conduct in a city, and, after earning a PhD in physics, Julius Tabin joined Fermi, helping him run tests on another reactor the Manhattan Project had built, this one at Argonne, a classified facility surrounded by a forest preserve southwest of Chicago.
Finally, Fermi’s team was sent to New Mexico, where they set up a laboratory dedicated to weaponizing their discovery. Some scientists feared the power of an atomic detonation could set the entire planet’s atmosphere on fire and lead to the destruction of life on earth. Fermi’s team calculated that the yield would be larger than any man-made explosion that had preceded it but that it posed no danger, other than radioactive fallout, to the planet as a whole.
“We built a new reactor at Los Alamos,” Julius Tabin says. His primary assignment was to calculate how much fissionable material it would take to construct a viable atomic device. “And with Fermi, we developed a system for measuring how much energy the bomb was going to emit, how many kilotons. I knew it was going to be big, but boy,” Tabin says, “was it even bigger than I imagined!”
Crouched inside his Sherman tank, rolling toward the center of the blast site, Tabin blocked out the faces of his parents and elder brother and tried to control his fear by focusing on the importance of the task at hand. Two months earlier, the U.S. Army had detonated a hundred-ton block of TNT, near the spot where the atomic device they all referred to as “the gadget” would soon be tested. At the time, it was the largest conventional explosion in history. On his training run that day, Tabin had traveled
in the tank, through the crater the TNT had created, and he’d been temporarily stranded in dust eight feet deep as the M4’s treads spun and spun, before they found enough purchase to escape.
Heading toward the center of a far more formidable crater, Tabin worried that his tank might not make it through. If simple TNT had created dust deep enough to stop an M4, what might he be churning toward after an atomic explosion? “It was a bit of a shaky time for me,” he remembers. “If we got stuck out there, there would be no one to help us. And we knew that if you stepped out into that radiation for even a second, you’d be fried.”
The Sherman tank rolled on with unsettling ease. Unlike the dust created by conventional explosives, the heat of the atomic blast had fused the desert sand into glass. Pebble-sized pellets were thrown miles into the air and rained down by the thousands, creating what appeared to be a lake of pale green glass. At the center of that liquid-looking waterless landscape, Tabin took a breath, held it, and opened a small trapdoor on the underside of the tank. He lowered a drilling device, gathered core samples of the material at the center of the crater, and closed the door as quickly as he could.
“We’d set up a mobile lab to measure the radioactivity of the samples I brought back,” Tabin says. “When I climbed out of the tank and walked inside, every instrument in that room went crazy. I probably took more radiation than any person ever had.”
The following month, on August 6, 1945, the first atomic bomb was detonated, over Hiroshima. Three days later, a second device was dropped on Nagasaki. On September 2, Japan surrendered unconditionally, ending World War II as rapidly as the architects of the atomic bomb had hoped. The military thanked Tabin for his service, and required him to sign a release saying he wouldn’t hold the U.S. government responsible for whatever happened to him in the future. Military doctors told him they couldn’t predict what he’d face after exposure to so much radiation. Tabin wondered what sort of life he’d be able to lead, and whether he’d ever be able to father children.
Enrico Fermi died less than a decade later, at age fifty-three, from stomach cancer he attributed to the radiation he absorbed during his days working on the Manhattan Project. “He believed the work he did was important, the risk was worth it, and he died perfectly reconciled to his fate,” writes his biographer James Cronin. Two other members of Fermi’s team also died of cancer within the decade.
But Julius Tabin continued to confound expectations. “I did feel tired for a while, afterwards,” Tabin says, “but it wasn’t so bad.” Nine years later, he and his new wife, Johanna, gave birth to their first son, Clifford. Two and a half years after that, on July 3, 1956, the Tabins’ second son entered the world, a compact, energetic bundle they named Geoffrey. “Cliff and Geoff were both delights, but they were different sorts of children—you could see that right away,” Julius told me a few weeks before celebrating his ninetieth birthday. “Cliff was calm and introspective. But from the moment Geoff was born, he was in perpetual motion. There was no quiet time with that kid; he always had sixteen things going on at once. No one else in the family had that kind of energy. I don’t know where he got it.”
It’s tempting to look to science fiction, toward a comic book kind of explanation for the appearance of a Geoff Tabin, to compare the massive dose of radiation his father received when he opened the trapdoor in the Sherman tank to creation myths like Spider-Man’s. In the cartoon’s case, superpowers were conferred on Peter Parker when he was bitten by a radioactive spider. But Tabin credits something far more mundane for his overachievement: doggedness, an obsessive focus on self-improvement. “With tennis or climbing I was never the most talented,” he says. “I was just willing to hit a few hundred more balls than anyone else. Or stay out until after dark, until I’d climbed twelve pitches, when most people would leave after four or five.”
Cliff remembers how difficult it could be to concentrate in his bedroom down the hall from Geoff, in the large, comfortable brick house two blocks from Lake Michigan where they grew up; Glencoe, a northern suburb of Chicago, had such a large Jewish community that it was sometimes derisively referred to as Glen-Cohen. As a young boy, Geoff took up the harmonica and attempted, loudly and obsessively, to master it. “Whenever Geoff would start something, you couldn’t get him to stop,” Cliff says. “I remember he decided he had to hit a Ping-Pong ball against the wall in his bedroom a thousand times without missing. He’d get to three hundred, or four hundred, miss, and start over, again and again. I’d be trying to read and—pok, pok, pok—the ball would just keep coming, driving me crazy.”
By age ten, when Geoff began regularly beating much older boys in tennis tournaments, he was spending hours practicing topspin drives against the garage door. “He wouldn’t hear you if he was focused on something, whether it was tennis or his homework,” remembers his mother, Johanna. “I’d call him for dinner a dozen times, but the only way I could get him to come was to take the racquet or the book out of his hand.” By the time Geoff left for his freshman year at Yale, he had won several statewide junior tennis championships, and the garage door was a wreck, dented and scuffed in so many spots it had to be replaced.
For most of the Tabins, achievement seemed to come as easily as setting a course and conquering it. After Los Alamos, Julius found work teaching physics at MIT while simultaneously earning a degree at Harvard Law School. After graduation, he began a long and lucrative career as a patent attorney, representing clients in the atomic industry whose scientific breakthroughs he was so well equipped to understand. But Julius never left pure science behind. One of his many achievements was developing a mirror device astronauts placed on the lunar surface. It was able to reflect back a laser aimed from earth with such precision that by timing the beam’s travel, scientists could measure the distance to the moon within inches.
Julius married Johanna in 1950, after he moved back to Chicago. Al Teton, a friend of both Julius’s older brother, Seymour, and Johanna’s family, engineered the encounter. “Teton said, ‘There’s someone I want you to meet. He’s not very tall, but he’s otherwise perfect for you,’ ” Johanna remembers. “And he was. I walked into a room and saw Julius for the first time. He was laughing at something my father was saying, and I thought, ‘He’s not exactly handsome, but he has the most wonderful face I’ve ever seen.’ ”
As a newlywed, Johanna completed her postdoctoral fellowship in psychoanalysis with Sigmund Freud’s daughter Anna, a founder of modern child psychiatry, and soon set up a busy private practice. When I spoke with her at age eighty-two, after nearly sixty years of marriage, she was still counseling patients most days, while Julius continued to show up for work at the oldest law firm in Chicago, where he’d served as a partner for half a century. “I’ve never been interested in retiring,” Johanna says. “A lot of people in my field burn out. But I’ve always believed that every individual is utterly fascinating and unique. There’s no limit to what you can learn from people if you observe them closely enough.”
Parents as successful as Julius and Johanna Tabin can cast intimidating shadows. “But we never pressured Cliff or Geoff to study or follow in our footsteps,” Julius says. “I told the boys, ‘Don’t worry about getting straight A’s. You should be learning and enjoying the process.’ We tried not to interfere with the people they were going to become.”
Their grandmother took the opposite approach. She was determined to steer both boys toward meaningful lives. Johanna’s mother, Sara Krout, had been born in Latvia, and she was one of the few female Latvians in medical school when World War I broke out. She fled to America after surviving an aerial bombardment during which she saw a mother and the infant in her arms killed by shrapnel. In Chicago, where American medical schools wouldn’t accept the credits she’d earned in Latvia, she switched to studying dentistry, then opened one of the first female-run practices in Illinois.
She would often take Fridays off to spend with her grandsons, creating art projects and science experiments for them. “Our gr
andmother Sara was a really strong woman,” Cliff says. “She was a huge influence on us.”
“I remember her talking to me about my future,” Geoff says. “She’d speak about the suffering she’d seen in Europe, and argue about how important it was to choose a career that offered the opportunity to help people.”
Despite the frequent noise and vibrations emanating from the bedroom down the hall, Cliff left for college with sufficient powers of concentration to become a gifted and groundbreaking research scientist. He is currently the chairman of genetics at Harvard Medical School. His lab’s leading-edge research into how instructions, written in genes, direct the human body’s growth and shape may one day help people debilitated by injuries and disease regenerate limbs and regrow complex organs like the heart.
After Geoff left for New Haven, in 1974, he was careful to complete all of Yale’s required premed courses, considering medical school a likely path if careers in climbing or professional tennis didn’t pan out. As the captain of Yale’s tennis team, as well as its number one singles player, Tabin took tennis very seriously. But the fact that he was only five foot eight made playing professionally unlikely and spared him from spending every moment honing his game. As would be the case for the rest of his life, Tabin was tugged in multiple directions. Julius had taken the boys hiking and skiing as soon as they could walk. His second son was a natural athlete and excelled at all manner of physical activity. At age twelve, he won a yo-yo championship the Duncan company staged in Chicago. At fifteen, he got his first taste of rock climbing, on a trip to Devil’s Lake, Wisconsin. And while at Yale, he began slipping away with climbing partners to attempt technical ice and rock routes in the Hudson Valley’s Shawangunks and New Hampshire’s White Mountains, driving overnight back to New Haven and arriving in time to stroll into his morning classes, bleary-eyed and unwashed, with bloody abrasions, but able to marshal enough energy to excel in his academic work.
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