All the easy experiments
Originally published in the Berkeley Science Review
Sixty years ago Berkeley was a campus at war. Plutonium, which had been discovered by Cal chemist Glenn Seaborg and his colleagues in 1940, had been identified by Manhattan Project scientists as a potential bomb-making material; by 1945 it was the subject of intense research at Berkeley, Los Alamos, and the University of Chicago. The frantic pace of wartime research led to numerous accidents: Los Alamos chemist Don Mastick swallowed much of the world’s plutonium when a test tube he was holding exploded in his face. Mishaps like this made Manhattan Project leaders anxious to better understand the health effects of plutonium. For answers, they turned to Joseph Hamilton, a young Berkeley professor who was already an expert on the toxicology of radioactive materials…