John outlined a safety regime for the lab, including the relocation of the cyclotron controls from their place next to the machine and into a separate room. He ordered a protective shielding of metal canisters filled with water erected around the machine to sap the neutrons of their destructive energy. Yet John’s abstract warnings of the perils of the unshielded cyclotron had less visceral impact on the staff than the fate of the very first mouse he irradiated with neutrons. The animal was confined in a small brass cylinder with a single airhole. The cylinder was placed between the magnet poles and nestled right up against the beryllium target that produced neutrons when struck by deuterons. After a one-minute irradiation at low power, the machine was stopped and the cage opened. A stunned silence fell on the room at the sight of a dead mouse.
As it turned out, the mouse had died not from radiation but suffocation, for someone had forgotten to activate its air supply. That was not learned for several days, however, leaving enough time for the putative lessons of the irradiated mouse to sink in deeply. “No one ever got close to this beam after this,” John recalled.
Ernest dismissed the episode as an “amusing” distraction. But more seriously, he informed Milton White, then at Princeton: “All of us working with the cyclotron got the jitters and decided that something had to be done about providing protection from the neutrons . . . We all became really scared and decided that it was time to call a halt.” John’s proposed alterations soon were installed.
After returning back east, John continued to fret over the neutron flux bathing Ernest and his assistants. The Rad Lab, he advised his brother, should perform “complete blood studies on all of the men—and repeat them every so often. I believe we should respect them more and take less chances with them.”
It is doubtful that Ernest needed a reminder of the neutron effects on the body; more likely he needed constant goading to take the appropriate precautions. The brothers reported on both the dangers and the therapeutic potential of the particles in a paper for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences—their first collaboration—sent off in December and published the following February. The article described how neutrons come by their superior ability to penetrate heavy elements such as lead: the neutron is so light in relation to lead’s nucleus that in even a head-on collision, the neutron rebounds with very little loss of energy, “not unlike a billiard ball colliding with a cannon ball.” Therefore, it can ricochet through even a thick layer of dense material without losing much energy. But when colliding with a nucleus close to its own weight, like a hydrogen nucleus (that is, a proton), the neutron imparts more of its energy to the target proton. This property allows the neutron to be absorbed more easily in substances with a high hydrogen content, such as biological tissues. Ernest characteristically drew an audacious conclusion from this effect, crowing to Poillon that “preliminary results” on mouse tumors bathed in X-rays from the Sloan tube hinted at “a development which is of far more importance than anything that has been done thus far in the Radiation Laboratory, because it means we have a cure of cancer.”
Ernest and John calculated that the biological action of neutrons was as much as one hundred times more powerful than X-rays. They proposed that the allowable daily dosage for a human being should be one-hundredth of a roentgen, about a tenth of the standard applied to X-rays. “This should constitute a warning inasmuch as many laboratories will soon be using neutron generators of such power that individuals in the vicinity of the apparatus will be exposed to many times this allowable dosage in the course of a few minutes unless adequate protective screening is provided,” they wrote in their paper for the National Academy.
In the Rad Lab, these words were typically honored in the breach. At one point, Kamen and Jack Livingood became so preoccupied with an urgent order for radio-sodium that they ignored their pocket exposure meters. After spending twenty minutes in the neutron-rich environment next to the cyclotron, they discovered that they had each absorbed several hundred daily doses. The experience “led to much coarse humor about production of monsters among our progeny in years to come,” Kamen recalled. They took their comfort from assuming “from what little we knew of elementary genetics that no great consequences would ensue [as long as] our children did not intermarry.”
• • •
Ernest was now engaged in an unceasing circuit of meetings with foundation boards and speaking invitations all over the country. One tour brought him to Harvard for a series of six lectures in the first week of January 1936. The event would provoke the worst crisis in the long partnership between Ernest and the University of California.
It was evident from the moment Lawrence stepped off the train in Boston that Harvard president James B. Conant had more on his mind than hearing his lecture. At dinner the first night, Conant asked Lawrence what he thought it might cost to replicate the Rad Lab at Harvard. The next question was obvious: Would Lawrence take on the task? Ernest left his host with a list of general specifications that included faculty positions for his top associates and money for the next-generation cyclotron taking shape in his mind: a sixty-inch behemoth to produce medical isotopes and treat cancer.
The discussion soon yielded a formal offer from Conant of a $12,000 salary to cover a full professorship, along with the deanship of a new graduate school of engineering and applied science. The construction of a new cyclotron also was part of the deal.
Conant had been pondering for some time how to move Harvard into the forefront of experimental and theoretical physics. The university was then almost as much of a physics backwater as Berkeley had been when Lawrence first set foot on its campus, especially in comparison to its Cambridge neighbor, MIT. Conant figured that recruiting Lawrence would eliminate with one stroke the two universities’ disparity in experimental physics. It would be even better if Lawrence could help Harvard move into the vanguard of theoretical physics by bringing along his friend Robert Oppenheimer, who had been fending off a standing offer from Harvard for years. Graduate Dean George Birkhoff assured Ernest of Harvard’s high esteem for Oppenheimer “as a creative theorist” and confided that the university was willing to appoint him as an associate professor at $6,000. “Inasmuch as he is thirty-two years of age, this would give him here a high rank in comparison with his age group,” Birkhoff wrote, apparently under the impression that Oppie served as a junior member of Lawrence’s team.
As chairman of the Berkeley Physics Department, Raymond Birge was deeply sensitive to the threat Harvard’s offer posed to the University of California. He feared that with Lawrence gone, the staff of the Rad Lab and the Physics Department would drain away like a reservoir behind a breached dam. If both Lawrence and Oppenheimer resigned, there would be little to keep McMillan, Alvarez, and other promising young physicists in Berkeley. By his reckoning, the department would drop from first in the nation to twelfth. Not only would brainpower disappear but also funding. The Research Corporation “will give a little here,” Birge reflected, “but will anyone be left?”
But the truth was that Oppenheimer had no desire to return to Harvard, which as a student he had found intellectually stimulating but socially isolating. He also considered Harvard the wrong choice for Lawrence. Oppie judged that Ernest would never have the freedom there that he had at Berkeley, and he guessed that his friend would find the duties of a dean burdensome. He understood the superficial allure of a Harvard faculty appointment, but he advised Birge, “It’s our duty to save Ernest from himself.”
Indeed, at first Lawrence seemed to let Harvard’s flattery go to his head. Birge knew there was even more to it than that: Ernest had been irritated by the University of California medical school’s dismissive treatment of his brother, a physician with a solid background in research who had become an associate in the Rad Lab because the medical school refused to award him a faculty post. The work that John and Ernest were doing at the Rad Lab, Birge recalled, “was pure research, and the medical school had a low opinion of it . . . They thought
that anyone that hadn’t had extensive clinical experience was just nobody they wanted to do much about. So there was practically no chance for John . . . to get promoted over there.” UC Berkeley’s medical school would not get over its disdain for John’s studies for years, until the situation was finessed by the creation of a separate laboratory for radiation science in 1942. The Donner Lab was built with a donation from William H. Donner, a retired steel executive whose son had succumbed to cancer, and who had been in the audience when Ernest and John presented their first paper on the biomedical uses of radioisotopes. John became its director in 1948.
• • •
Bob Sproul and Ernest Lawrence were something of a matched pair: “big, outgoing, hearty men,” as Molly Lawrence described them. Their relationship was based partially on personality and partially on trust. Ernest had demanded much from Sproul in funding, space, and institutional support, and promised much in return, and to their mutual benefit he had invariably delivered on his promises. On one previous occasion, Sproul had countered an offer from a rival university—Northwestern, in 1930—by maneuvering around faculty objections to promote Lawrence to a full professor. Perceiving that this was a more serious affair, he invited Lawrence to his office to discuss it.
A few days in advance of the meeting, Birge sat down with a stack of index cards to construct his case for giving Lawrence whatever was necessary to keep him at Berkeley. “To have a quarrel [with Lawrence] would be fatal,” he intended to warn the university president, “because [Lawrence’s] decision would then rest on emotions and not on sane thinking.”
Yet Birge underestimated Robert Sproul, one of the few people who could outmatch Ernest Lawrence in cajolery. Only a consummate politician could have balanced the interests of regents, legislators, professors, and philanthropists to build the University of California into the first-class academic institution it had become. Sproul’s back-slapping manner and booming voice were legendary on campus. He took pride in never having lost a faculty member he wished to keep—and among that group, Lawrence stood out. “Hell, he made me,” Sproul would say later of the scientist whose tenure at Berkeley coincided almost exactly with his own.
Their years of partnership had given Sproul plenty of opportunities to size up Ernest as someone for whom the latitude to conduct research with appropriate resources and administrative encouragement vastly outweighed mundane matters such as salary and institutional prestige; Ernest’s interest was in making science, not necessarily himself, bigger. Sproul perceived that while Harvard’s status was alluring, it was so far behind Berkeley in physics that it might need two years or more to catch up—time that would represent reverse progress for someone with Lawrence’s determination to remain at the forefront of research. The task was to assure Lawrence that Berkeley would continue to support the Radiation Laboratory at its accustomed level and open the doors for the expansion he was already contemplating.
The only record of their conversation comes from Lawrence, who shared his impressions with Howard Poillon in a letter that documents Sproul’s sublime skill at intellectual and emotional combat:
Right away, President Sproul made it clear that he was extremely anxious to keep me . . . He immediately assured me that as long as he was president of this university and unless I went crazy, he would back me and our work. He said that the Harvard offer was not only a very great honor, but also offered many opportunities and that he quite understood my inclination to accept. On the other hand, he said that he felt that it was not impossible that he would be able to offer comparable inducements here and asked me to outline what I would like to have . . . I said that if I could have my heart’s desire, I would ask that the work in nuclear physics in the Radiation Laboratory receive continued support at about the present level and that in addition a new laboratory be built with a cyclotron equipment designed especially for medical research and therapy. Also a continuing budget to support a small staff to carry on the medical research work.
Sproul plainly knew his man. He made the required optimistic noises and asked Lawrence to prepare a preliminary budget. Ernest submitted the plan three days later, proposing that the Rad Lab’s existing budget of $15,500 be augmented by $8,100 in salaries for an assistant lab director (this was to be Don Cooksey), two research associates, and a research assistant.
Lawrence cautioned Sproul that personnel expenses at the Rad Lab were destined to rise sharply, for the lab was becoming the victim of its own success. Thus far, its unique standing in the physics community had allowed it to attract a full complement of visiting physicists willing to participate in its research for free or to secure grants or fellowships on their own; he counted ten researchers whose contributions to the lab then came at no expense to the university. But this gravy train was nearing the end of the line. “Many of the leading institutions of this country and abroad are now engaged in building laboratories similarly equipped,” Lawrence noted. Consequently, it would no longer be possible to compel “all those interested in nuclear physics and penetrating radiations to come to Berkeley.” Soon the Rad Lab would have to pay its scientists a living wage. Lawrence avoided pointing out to Sproul that he had planted the seeds of this competition himself, but plainly the harvest was already being reaped at Berkeley’s expense.
The heart of Lawrence’s pitch, however, involved two other demands. One was the designation of the Radiation Laboratory as an independent unit of the university, to ensure the “continuity and stability of the work.” That was the easy one. The other was for a “new and larger cyclotron” for medical research, including the full-scale production of synthetic radioisotopes. It would have the capability to produce neutrons ten times more energetic than those emitted by the twenty-seven-inch machine, an intensity that “would make it possible to carry on actual clinical therapy of human cancer.” The projected cost was $25,000, plus as much as $22,000 a year in staff (two MDs, two physicists, and two technicians) and other operating expenses. Lawrence acknowledged that the cost of the new cyclotron “could hardly be absorbed in the general university budget” and promised to help raise the necessary funds. But the implication was clear: if Berkeley could not commit to the medical cyclotron, Harvard was waiting in the wings.
Lawrence’s budget submission launched a game of serve-and-volley with Sproul, who labored to line up voting support and financial pledges from his wealthy regents while Lawrence wondered aloud how soon he could catch a train to Cambridge to continue talking with Conant. The afternoon after Lawrence delivered his budget, Sproul had called him in for another meeting. He ran his finger down the column of figures—$25,000 for the new cyclotron, $40,000 in combined annual operational expenses—and remarked, “It’s a pretty large undertaking.”
Yes, it’s ambitious, Lawrence conceded. “It probably could be done at Harvard.” But he agreed to put off his trip back east to give Sproul a chance to corner his main quarry: Regent William H. Crocker, the railroad heir and banker who earlier had put up the money for Sloan’s X-ray tube at the medical school. In the meantime, Sproul was able to push the regents to commit themselves as a board to more funding from university resources. The regents’ breath was taken away by Lawrence’s audacious request for funds at a time when the stock market crash still weighed on the university endowment. But they bowed to Sproul’s judgment that losing Lawrence would be even costlier, and voted to cover all the annual operating and maintenance costs that Lawrence had budgeted for the Rad Lab. Additionally, the lab would be recognized as a division of the university, independent of the Physics Department, with Lawrence as director. Birge, who already regarded the lab’s relationship with his department as “the tail wagging the dog,” voiced no objection; as far as he was concerned, Lawrence was an adornment to Berkeley physics whether he was formally inside the department or out.
As for the new machine, Sproul wrote Lawrence: “I can report only that the Regents have expressed great interest in the possibilities along this line and have offered me their assistance in
securing funds for a new cyclotron, together with the annual operating expenses.” He assured Lawrence that he had his eye on a deep pocket and had “reasons to be hopeful that our quest in this direction may meet with success.”
Sproul’s well-honed intuition may have told him that the thrill of the Harvard offer was beginning to fade for Lawrence. The difficulty of shifting so much established work clear across the country could not have been lost on someone whose habitual preference was to stay put. Sproul may even have learned that another consideration had started to dawn on Ernest: Molly was against the move.
One factor in Ernest’s receptiveness to Harvard’s offer had been the thought of how excited his wife would be about returning to her native New England. In truth, she had long since transferred her devotion to her adopted Northern California and found Ernest’s interest in Harvard distressing. Her traditional family upbringing discouraged her from interfering in decisions about where her husband decided to live and work: “It was a question of what he wanted and what was good for his career,” she explained later. “I wouldn’t have thought of even expressing an opinion.” But she was “just in fear and trembling that he was going to pack up and move back to Cambridge. I’d been there, and I didn’t want to live there, not with a family.” Ernest’s disengagement from domestic matters was a fact of life in the Lawrence household, but as the time for a decision grew nearer, he began to sense the chill in Molly’s voice when the subject of Harvard came up.
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