Science: The Hard Worker

“You don’t have to have genius to be a scientist—just character. All you have to do is work hard and figure things out.” So said Ernest Orlando Lawrence in what amounted to a self-portrait. Hard work and hard figuring led to his development of the atom-smashing cyclotron and the Nobel Prize of 1939. His hard work led to creation of the University of California Radiation Laboratory, the country’s best source of nuclear research. Last week when Physicist Lawrence died unexpectedly in Palo Alto at 57, science and the nation lost a citizen with character to spare.

A tall, lithe man with greying blond hair, Lawrence never looked his years. Born in Canton, S. Dak. of Norwegian stock, the son of a superintendent of schools, he was a radio tinkerer in high school, worked his way through local Midwestern colleges. His interest in radio led him to a Ph.D. in physics at Yale (1925), and he began studying ionization, the electrification of atoms by loss or gain of electrons. At 27 he was made an associate professor at the University of California, in 1930 conceived the idea of the cyclotron, which has been called “as useful in research as the microscope.”

Brass & Wax. By giving low-voltage kicks to moving ions (charged particles), Lawrence calculated that they could be made to whirl progressively faster in a closed chamber, reaching great speed and high voltages. They could then smash atoms and transmute elements. He first demonstrated this phenomenon with a crude but spectacular Rube Goldbergish kit: a kitchen chair, clothes tree, 4-in. electromagnet, pie-sized vacuum chamber made of glass, brass and sealing wax, all put together for $25. When he hooked this odd gizmo up to an ordinary electric socket, atoms whirled around faster than those emitted by radium.

The cyclotron mechanized U.S. university research. Lawrence founded the Radiation Laboratory (total current staff: 5,100) to house his cyclotrons, which grew enormous once he learned that requests for big research money are more successful than begging for pennies. To study radiation. Lawrence brought in his physician brother, Dr. John Lawrence, then with Yale School of Medicine, who soon proved the isotope-making cyclotron’s worth in disease research. World War II gave the isotopes another use: the atom bomb, which the cyclotron helped make possible by producing purified uranium 235. This achievement by Lawrence, one of the six U.S. scientists appointed to weigh the bomb’s possibility, was a green light for the Manhattan Project.

Rods In. War’s end brought Scientist Lawrence a new role as an elder science statesman. He advised the Government on atomic energy, served on numerous missions, received a long string of honors. Lawrence was one of the U.S. scientists who backed the AEC view that fallout from nuclear-weapon testing is not critically dangerous. Last year he backed continued U.S. nuclear testing in a report to President Eisenhower that H-bombs can be made 96% “cleaner.” The Radiation Laboratory flourished under his direction, built a bevatron for advanced particle research. Lawrence became chiefly an organizer, a humorous, vigorous prodder who steamed around Berkeley encouraging younger men with—as nuclear physicists put it—”all rods in.”

Though too busy for laboratory research, Lawrence found spare time for inventing a color TV tube in his basement, for afternoon tennis, duck shooting with his brother, swimming and sailing with his six children and wife (a Harvard-trained bacteriologist). This summer he went to Geneva as one of three U.S. delegates to the East-West talks on detection of nuclear tests, there fell ill and had to fly home. Last week Physicist Lawrence went into surgery for ulcerative colitis—an inflammation of the colon—from which he had suffered for years. A few hours later he died.