Ernest Lawrence

Ernest Orlando Lawrence was born on August 8, 1901, in Canton, a small town on the South DakotaSouth DakotaSouth Dakota is a U.S. state bordered by North Dakota to the north, Minnesota and Iowa to the east, Nebraska to the south, and Wyoming and Montana to the west. Its capital is Pierre and its largest city is Sioux Falls. It was admitted to the Union on November 2, 1889, as the 40th state, and the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted 886,667 residents.Open the full entry prairie.⁠[1][2]

His father, Carl Gustavus Lawrence, and his mother, Gunda Jacobson, were both children of Norwegian immigrants; they met while teaching at the high school in Canton, where Carl Lawrence was also superintendent of schools, and were married on August 22, 1900.⁠[3][4]

The American Institute of Physics exhibit describes the school where his parents taught as the local Lutheran academy.⁠[1]

He had a younger brother, John Hundale Lawrence, who became a physician.⁠[1][5][6]

As a teenager he tinkered with radios together with his boyhood friend Merle Tuve; the two built and flew gliders and set up a very early short-wave transmitting station, and Merle Tuve also went on to become a nuclear physicist.⁠[7][1][3]

The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory centennial article of 2001 relates that his mother often said he was “born grown up”; that by Norwegian custom he would have been named for his two grandfathers, a custom Carl Lawrence set aside because he thought too many Norwegians already bore those names; that she contracted typhoid within a week of his birth; and that at the age of two he set his clothes on fire while playing with matches and was saved by her “in the nick of time.”⁠[3]

The same article says that for years she worried about his inability to gain weight and that his childhood nickname was “Skinny”; as an adult he stood just over six feet tall and weighed about 180 pounds for most of his life. She described him as “always of a happy disposition,” someone for whom life seemed to be “one thrill after another,” and as “persistent and insistent.”⁠[3]

The American Institute of Physics exhibit says his parents instilled in him and his brother a sense of responsibility and a devotion to hard work and scholarship, and it likens him, Merle Tuve and other future physicists of their generation to Martin Arrowsmith, the hero of Sinclair Lewis’s novel of 1925, in their energy, enthusiasm, Midwestern unsophistication and dedication to science.⁠[1]

R. T. Birge said in 1940 that he received his elementary education in the public schools of Canton and Pierre, South Dakota.⁠[8]

The memoir by Luis W. Alvarez calls Merle Tuve his constant companion in boyhood and says the two carried the friendly rivalry of their boyhood into their later work in nuclear physics; the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory centennial article says he later applied his experience with short-wave radio to the acceleration of protons. Birge noted in 1940 that Tuve was then in charge of nuclear physics research at the Carnegie Institution, where a 60-inch cyclotron similar to the large Berkeley machine was under construction.⁠[9][3][8]

The Sanford Underground Research Facility article cites Alvarez for the view that from early childhood he showed scientific ingenuity and daring.⁠[7]

After early schooling at Canton High School he entered St. Olaf College, a small Lutheran school in MinnesotaMinnesotaMinnesota is a state in the north-central United States and the most northerly of the 48 contiguous states; its capital is St. Paul and its largest city is Minneapolis. It was admitted to the Union on May 11, 1858, as the 32nd state, and its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 5,706,494.Open the full entry, at sixteen, intending to study medicine, and took undergraduate courses there in 1918–1919; after a year, in 1919, he transferred to the University of South Dakota.⁠[1][5][4]

At the University of South Dakota he paid his way by selling kitchenware to farm households. Dean Lewis E. Akeley tutored him privately, turned his interest from medicine to physics and later sent him to the University of Minnesota as a graduate student; Akeley’s picture afterward hung in his office.⁠[9][3]

He graduated with high honors in 1922, with chemistry as his subject. Sources name the degree differently: the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory chronology gives a B.S., the NobelPrize.org biography a B.A., the American Institute of Physics record a BA, and the Bancroft Library’s collection guide an A.B.⁠[1][6][5][10][4]

Accounts differ on who turned him toward physics: the memoir by Luis W. Alvarez and Birge’s address credit Dean Akeley; the American Institute of Physics exhibit says a professor of electrical engineering convinced him that his interest in radio pointed to physics rather than medicine; and the U.S. Department of Energy history says he chose physics on the advice of Merle Tuve.⁠[9][8][1][11]

At the University of South Dakota he shunned fraternities for the sake of his studies.⁠[1]

Alvarez wrote that selling kitchenware gave him an apprenticeship in practical salesmanship and that he later persuaded people by an infectious enthusiasm; the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory centennial article says the experience later helped him sell scientific projects to government officials and funding agencies. In his office Akeley’s picture had the place of honor in a gallery that also held the pictures of his heroes Arthur Compton, Niels Bohr and Ernest Rutherford.⁠[9][3]

In 1922 he joined Merle Tuve for graduate study in physics at the University of Minnesota under W. F. G. Swann, and he received an M.A. in 1923; the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory centennial article of 2001 dates the degree to 1922.⁠[1][5][3]

He followed Swann to the University of Chicago and then to Yale UniversityYale UniversityYale University is a research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Its predecessor, the Collegiate School, received a charter in 1701. Trustees chose New Haven in 1716; the institution became Yale College in 1718 and Yale University in 1887. Yale provides undergraduate, graduate and professional education and has 14 undergraduate residential colleges. As of October 2026, its president was Maurie McInnis, who took office in July 2024. In 2026, Yale expanded aid for incoming undergraduates and celebrated its 325th anniversary.Open the full entry: he worked toward a doctorate in Chicago in 1923–1924 and received his Ph.D. in physics from Yale University in 1925 with a thesis on the photoelectric effect.⁠[5][12][9]

The American Institute of Physics exhibit “Lawrence and the Cyclotron” dates his doctorate to 1924.⁠[1]

His first paper appeared in May 1924; over the following 16 years his name appeared on 56 papers.⁠[8]

Birge gave the title of his first paper: “The Charging Effect Produced by the Rotation of a Prolate Iron Spheroid in a Uniform Magnetic Field.” Birge called Swann’s influence on him profound and said it explained his moves from one university to another.⁠[8]

The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory centennial article describes Swann as an accomplished cellist who steered him into electromagnetic theory; the American Institute of Physics exhibit quotes Swann’s view that cut-and-try methods are sometimes more important than prolonged theorizing and says Lawrence approached physics with a practical, experimental bent.⁠[3][1]

The memoir by Luis W. Alvarez says he passed the French and German requirements for the doctorate by the slimmest of margins. His time at the University of Chicago is given as a year in the NobelPrize.org biography and as two years in the text by Glenn T. Seaborg on the U.S. Department of Energy site.⁠[9][4][12]

After his degree he stayed at Yale University, as a National Research Fellow from 1925 to 1927; in 1927 the university offered him an assistant professorship in physics, skipping the rank of instructor, and he held it until 1928.⁠[5][13]

In these years he continued his research on photoelectricity and began to study how gas atoms are ionized when struck by electrons; his later determination of the ionization potential of the mercury atom was the most precise made up to that time.⁠[1][12]

With Jesse W. Beams he devised a way of measuring time intervals as short as three billionths of a second and used it to study the earliest stages of an electric spark discharge; he also originated a more precise method of measuring the electron’s charge-to-mass ratio e/m, which F. G. Dunnington later perfected.⁠[12][8][5]

Alvarez wrote that he later made light of his mercury measurement, saying that he had looked for possible errors of the correct sign and magnitude to move the result toward the value he expected and that he had been lucky, and that the episode left him with the habit of examining every scientific result critically. Birge noted that the measurement allows the Planck constant h to be calculated.⁠[9][8]

The memoir notes that when Hughes and DuBridge’s Photoelectric Phenomena appeared in 1932, only twelve of the 700 experimenters it referred to were cited more often than he was.⁠[9]

He and Beams became very close personal friends; they took one summer away from their work and toured Europe together, and Alvarez wrote that he later missed the freedom of traveling without the responsibilities of speeches and receptions. The memoir describes one of their joint experiments as “chopping up a photon.”⁠[9]

The memoir notes that the first reference to the high-speed rotor is in an abstract by Lawrence, Beams and Garman dated 1928.⁠[9]

Shortly before leaving Yale University he came to believe that he could make an all-electronic television system without rotating wheels, and he put together a rudimentary one. A friend invited him to the Bell Laboratories to talk about it; seeing how far the work there had already gone, he resolved to concentrate on the things he knew most about and not to dilute his effort by competing in the commercial area, a resolve the memoir says he kept until the last decade of his life.⁠[9]

After Swann left Yale University, he accepted in 1928 an associate professorship of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, which came with an ample research budget and a light teaching load; he arrived that summer, a few days after turning 27.⁠[13][3]

Luis W. Alvarez later wrote that friends had predicted he would “quickly go to seed in the unscientific climate of the west.”⁠[7]

In the summers of 1929 and 1930 he worked at General ElectricGE AerospaceGE Aerospace is the name under which General Electric Company operates, a jet engine maker listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker GE.Open the full entry in Schenectady, New York, hosted by A. W. Hull, an X-ray expert who was working on high voltages.⁠[13]

In 1930 Northwestern UniversityNorthwestern UniversityNorthwestern University is a private research university founded in 1851, with campuses in Evanston and Chicago, Illinois, United States, and in Doha, Qatar.Open the full entry tried to recruit him, and Berkeley promoted him to full professor at the age of 29, the youngest on its faculty.⁠[13][5][9]

The American Institute of Physics exhibit speaks of a bidding war for him between Berkeley and other universities and quotes the Berkeley physicist Leonard Loeb, who took part in the recruiting, calling him “one of the most brilliant experimental young men in the East”; the Bancroft Library’s collection guide likewise says several universities sought him. The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory history names Robert Gordon Sproul, then secretary to the Regents, as one of the principals behind his recruitment, and Birge said that Swann had left Yale University for the Bartol Foundation.⁠[13][10][14][8]

He adapted quickly: within a few months his friend Beams was calling him a “Native Son” of CaliforniaCaliforniaCalifornia is a U.S. state on the Pacific coast; its capital is Sacramento and its largest city is Los Angeles. California was admitted to the Union on September 9, 1850, as the 31st state. Its population at the 2020 Census (April 1, 2020) was 39,538,223, the largest of any state.Open the full entry. In the fall of 1930 Sproul signed off on his promotion to full professor one day before his own inauguration as the eleventh president of the University of California. Birge said in 1940 that the university had kept him for twelve years in spite of numerous enticing offers from elsewhere.⁠[13][14][8]

Alvarez wrote that it took courage for him to leave the security of a rich and distinguished university.⁠[9]

In the spring of 1929 he came across an article by the Norwegian engineer Rolf Wideröe in the German journal Archiv für Elektrotechnik, whose diagrams showed a way of using the same electrical potential twice to double a particle’s energy.⁠[13][15]

He judged the linear design impractical for light particles, since it would need a vacuum tube several meters long. His idea was to bend the particles into circular paths with a magnetic field so that they passed again and again through the same accelerating region; because the frequency of rotation does not depend on the radius of the orbit, an electric field oscillating at a fixed radio frequency could do the accelerating.⁠[13][15]

At first he held back from building the device; Otto Stern, a physicist visiting from Germany toward the end of the year, encouraged him to pursue it.⁠[13]

In his early bachelor days in Berkeley he spent many of his evenings in the library, reading widely both professionally and for recreation, and night after night he leafed through the back issues of the foreign periodicals; that is how he came upon Wideröe’s paper. Alvarez wrote that the journal was one seldom consulted by physicists and that, because he could do his own thinking faster than he could translate, he worked out many of Wideröe’s conclusions for himself.⁠[9]

Birge related that Wideröe had given potassium atoms an energy corresponding to 50,000 volts with a potential drop of 25,000 volts, and that the next morning Lawrence was saying to his friends that he had found a method of obtaining high-energy particles without high voltage; they agreed that the idea was sound but reminded him that having an idea and making it work are two different things. Glenn T. Seaborg wrote that he formulated the principles of the cyclotron and of the linear accelerator within minutes of seeing the sketch. He first called the device his “proton merry-go-round.”⁠[8][12][14]

The American Institute of Physics exhibit says he knew the problem of high-voltage acceleration through the work of his old friend Merle Tuve, who at the Carnegie Institution of Washington experimented first with a Tesla induction coil and then with a Van de Graaff generator and reached a million volts, and that Tuve’s success spurred him to build his machine lest he lose out in the race to high energies. Ernest Rutherford had called in 1927 for “a copious supply” of more energetic particles.⁠[13]

The American Institute of Physics exhibit adds that he read German only with great difficulty, skipped the text of Wideröe’s article and relied on its diagrams; that he was surprised to find that the frequency of rotation does not depend on the radius of the orbit; and that he pressed students and professors to confirm his calculations before sketching out a device.⁠[15]

Birge added that he also built what he called a “linear resonance accelerator,” suited to heavy particles only, and that as late as 1934 he believed a double linear accelerator adapted from David Sloan’s X-ray tube would surpass the cyclotron in its yield of neutrons; in the end the cyclotron proved superior.⁠[8]

The statement issued in 2001 by Richard C. Atkinson, president of the University of California, dates the invention of the cyclotron to the waning days of 1929.⁠[16]

He and Nels E. Edlefsen, his first Ph.D. student at Berkeley, built a crude model out of glass, sealing wax and bronze, which the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory history dates to the spring of 1930. In September 1930 he announced the method at the meeting of the National Academy of Sciences held in Berkeley.⁠[14][8][10]

R. T. Birge, in his address of 1940, dated this glass model to January 1930 and gave its diameter as four inches.⁠[8]

The graduate student M. Stanley Livingston then did much of the construction. On January 2, 1931, the first working cyclotron used a potential of 1,800 volts to accelerate hydrogen ions to 80,000 electron volts; its diameter is given as about 4.5 inches in the American Institute of Physics exhibit, as 5 inches in the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory history and as 4 inches in the memoir by Luis W. Alvarez.⁠[13][14][9]

In the summer of 1931 an 11-inch cyclotron accelerated protons beyond one million electron volts; a telegram of August 3 informed him that Livingston had obtained 1,100,000-volt protons. The instrument cost about $1,000, plus some borrowed equipment. The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory history also reproduces a notebook entry dated January 8, 1932, captioned as the first MeV reading on the 11-inch cyclotron.⁠[13][6][8][14]

In the same period David Sloan, whom he had brought to Berkeley from the General Electric laboratories, built a linear accelerator that by May 1931 was accelerating mercury ions to a million volts.⁠[15]

In the summer of 1932 the 11-inch cyclotron was used to disintegrate lithium nuclei.⁠[8]

The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory history describes the first model as pie-shaped and says a kitchen chair and a wire-coiled clothes tree were pressed into service. Alvarez wrote that the group had to develop and build its own vacuum pumps and oscillator tubes, and that the original apparatus was on permanent exhibit at the laboratory when he wrote.⁠[14][9]

The telegram of August 3, 1931, added that Livingston suggested “Whoopee!” Birge put the energy of the hydrogen ions from the 11-inch cyclotron at one and one-quarter million volts, called it the most energetic beam of particles produced in a laboratory up to that time, and described the lithium experiment of the summer of 1932 as the first artificial disintegration of matter carried out in the western hemisphere.⁠[13][8]

The memoir says the group had no counting equipment until Donald Cooksey and Franz Kurie came from Yale University with counters in the summer of 1932; Alvarez judged that the discovery made by John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton “could almost as well have been made” in his laboratory.⁠[9]

The American Institute of Physics exhibit says he overcame the early obstacles with two cut-and-try discoveries: he removed the metal grid from the dees, which he had thought necessary for electrical shielding but which Sloan’s work showed interfered with focusing, and he inserted small iron shims into the magnetic field to keep the particles in the orbital plane. It describes Sloan as a young expert in electronics whose linear accelerator had a series of thirty electrodes, and says Sloan later set the linear accelerator aside to develop a resonant transformer that became a useful source of X-rays for hospitals.⁠[15]

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s account says the first model was made out of wire and sealing wax, probably cost $25 in all, and produced 80,000-volt projectiles when fed 2,000 volts. BritannicaEncyclopædia BritannicaEncyclopædia Britannica is a general English-language encyclopedia first published in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1768; the name also refers to its publisher, Chicago-based Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. (which presents itself as The Britannica Group). The print edition ended in 2012, and the company’s main businesses since then have been the online encyclopedia Britannica.com, digital education products for schools and libraries, and Merriam-Webster dictionaries.Open the full entry says the first machine, built by his student M. Stanley Livingston, accelerated protons to 13,000 electron volts and a later one to 1,200,000 eV, enough to cause nuclear disintegration, and calls the cyclotron the first particle accelerator to achieve high energies. The memoir by Luis W. Alvarez says that in the spring of 1932 the 11-inch cyclotron was giving protons with an energy of several hundred keV. The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory 75th-anniversary exhibit says the word “cyclotron” was originally laboratory slang for “magnetic resonance accelerator.”⁠[17][18][9][19]

On August 26, 1931, Robert Gordon Sproul, president of the University of California, turned over to him the vacant Civil Engineering Testing Laboratory on campus; he renamed the wooden building, which dated from 1902, the Radiation Laboratory, or Rad Lab.⁠[14][19][3]

The new 27-inch cyclotron in the laboratory used an 80-ton magnet that had been built during the First World War for a transatlantic radio link and was obtained with the help of Leonard Fuller, a vice-president of the Federal Telegraph Company. By September 1932 the machine was accelerating protons to 3.6 million electron volts.⁠[20][14]

In 1933, during the Great Depression, Berkeley’s physics department cut its research budget by a third. From 1931 to 1940 he raised $550,000 in expenses and equipment for the laboratory, from the state of California through the university, the Macy and Rockefeller foundations, the federal government through the National Cancer Institute and industrial firms that donated equipment; the Research Corporation and the Chemical Foundation were also among its patrons.⁠[20]

New Deal agencies such as the Works Progress Administration put technical assistants at the laboratory on the government payroll. The staff grew from 10 in 1932 to 60 in 1939.⁠[20]

The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory history says that until then he had worked in Room 329 of Le Conte Hall, which could hold the 11-inch cyclotron but nothing larger, and that the engineering faculty in the Mining Building had refused him space; the building he was given had concrete flooring strong enough to carry an 80-ton magnet.⁠[14]

The laboratory’s 75th-anniversary exhibit says he obtained the magnet from the Federal Telegraph Company but was less successful in getting free electrical power from PG&EPG&EPG&E Corporation is a U.S. utility holding company whose subsidiary Pacific Gas and Electric Company delivers electricity and natural gas in Northern and Central California.Open the full entry.⁠[19]

Birge gave a different origin for the magnet: it had been built for a radio transmitter ordered by the Chinese government, and what was a “white elephant” to L. F. Fuller, the Berkeley professor who was then also vice-president of the Federal Telegraph Company, became a godsend to Lawrence. The American Institute of Physics exhibit says he acquired it at a discount as war surplus.⁠[8][20]

The American Institute of Physics exhibit says the physics department’s austerity of 1933 also meant lower salaries and fewer teaching assistants; that the second New Deal agency which placed assistants in the laboratory was, as the exhibit names it, the National Youth Authority, and that the assistants included electricians, machinists and carpenters; and that from 1933 to 1940 several graduate and postdoctoral students paid their own way at the laboratory, one of his students remarking in 1938 that the cyclotron trade “has experienced no depression.”⁠[20]

The memoir says that from 1931 to 1950 the laboratory had the highest-energy beams of particles in the world.⁠[9]

In May 1932 he married Mary Kimberly Blumer, known as Molly, in New Haven, ConnecticutConnecticutConnecticut is a U.S. state in the New England region. Its capital is Hartford and its largest city is Bridgeport (2010 census). It entered the Union on January 9, 1788, as the 5th state, and had a population of 3,605,944 in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020).Open the full entry. She was the eldest daughter of George Blumer, dean of the Yale University medical school; the couple had become engaged in 1931 and moved to Berkeley after the wedding.⁠[6][1][9][4]

They had met while he was at Yale University, where he was a frequent guest at the New Haven home of Dr. George Blumer; Molly, the eldest of the four Blumer girls, was then sixteen. The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory centennial article describes her as a Vassar undergraduate when he courted her, and the American Institute of Physics exhibit says she at first spurned his advances and that he was “nothing if not persistent.”⁠[9][3][1]

The chemist Gilbert Lewis supplied the laboratory with deuterium, and from 1932 the cyclotrons were used for research, including the acceleration of deuterons.⁠[14][6]

In 1933 he attended the Solvay Congress in Brussels, the only American invited that year. There he announced that the deuteron was unstable, a claim he later retracted; the results behind it were eventually traced to contamination by stray deuterons.⁠[6][21]

In 1934 Frédéric and Irène Joliot-Curie in Paris discovered artificial radioactivity by bombarding aluminum with alpha particles. The Radiation Laboratory had failed to notice the lingering radiation, and he said its members had been “kicking ourselves that we haven’t had the sense to notice.”⁠[21]

In April 1934, at the age of 32, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the first native of South Dakota to become a member.⁠[8][5]

The memoir’s list records him as the American representative at that Solvay Congress; the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory chronology adds that he was the only American invited that year and “only the eighth ever.”⁠[9][6]

Scientists elsewhere raised experimental and theoretical objections to the hypothesis that the deuteron was unstable. The memoir says the heavy water that G. N. Lewis supplied to the laboratory amounted to a few drops.⁠[21][9]

Robert Thornton, a physicist at the laboratory, recalled: “We looked pretty silly. We could have made the discovery at any time.” Alvarez explained that the laboratory’s Geiger counters had been unusable because the whole laboratory was radioactive. He also wrote that Lawrence often spoke of the day he first heard of Enrico FermiEnrico FermiEnrico Fermi (1901–1954) was an Italian-American physicist who received the 1938 Nobel Prize in Physics and in 1942 led the team that achieved the first controlled nuclear chain reaction in Chicago.Open the full entry’s experiments: he took a fifty-cent piece from his pocket, placed it near the cyclotron and watched it discharge an electroscope after the machine had been turned off, verifying the neutron-induced radioactivity of silver within a minute or two. He enjoyed recounting his mistakes, the memoir says; the American Institute of Physics exhibit likewise says he did not mope over the deuteron error and quotes his remark of 1934: “We would be eternally miserable if our errors worried us too much.”⁠[21][9]

The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory chronology calls his error regarding deuterium a “fruitful error” that inspired Alvarez’s unexpected discovery, made with the 60-inch cyclotron, that tritium is unstable while helium-3 is stable.⁠[6]

In 1935 John Lawrence came to Berkeley to study the uses in biology and medicine of radioisotopes produced by the cyclotron, and Joseph Hamilton and Paul Aebersold followed.⁠[14][6]

David Sloan’s linear accelerator at the university’s medical school was a powerful source of X-rays, and it led him to look for biomedical uses of the cyclotron: radioactive isotopes for treating cancer and tracing metabolism, and beams of neutrons. In 1935 he wrote to Niels Bohr that the biological work had been taken up partly because “it is much easier to get funds for medical research.”⁠[20]

In 1937 John Lawrence used phosphorus-32 to treat polycythemia vera, which the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory anniversary exhibit calls “the first successful treatment of a human disease with radioisotopes.” In 1939 he treated a leukemia patient with a beam of neutrons.⁠[19][22]

Before the Second World War Ernest Lawrence set up a distribution system that supplied radioisotopes to hundreds of doctors and to numerous institutions; Britannica’s article names radioactive phosphorus and radioactive iodine among the medical isotopes he produced, the iodine for the first therapeutic treatment of hyperthyroidism.⁠[12][18]

The memoir says John Lawrence first came to Berkeley to advise on the potential hazards of the neutrons from the 27-inch cyclotron. The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory history says he had studied the effects of radiation on the pituitary gland at Yale University, that with Paul Aebersold he found a beam of neutrons far more destructive to tumors than an equivalent dose of X-rays, and it calls the treatment of 1939 the first treatment of cancer with beams from a particle accelerator.⁠[9][22]

In 1938 and 1939 all physics at the cyclotron was suspended for a full day each week so that terminal cancer patients could be treated with neutrons from the 37-inch cyclotron; the oil-stained machine was disguised with a set of white panels, and the patients were led through a side door into what appeared to be an immaculate hospital room.⁠[9]

The American Institute of Physics exhibit says that philanthropies gave far more money to medicine, public health and biology than to physics and that in 1933 the Rockefeller FoundationThe Rockefeller FoundationThe Rockefeller Foundation is a private philanthropic foundation headquartered in New York City. It was chartered by New York State legislation in 1913 with funding from Standard Oil founder John D. Rockefeller, with the mission “to promote the well-being of mankind throughout the world.” In its early years it funded global public health, medical education, and yellow fever vaccine research; in the mid-20th century it supported agricultural programs that came to be known as the “Green Revolution”; and in recent years it has focused its work on energy, health, food, and climate.Open the full entry decided to concentrate on applying the methods of physics and chemistry to biology and medicine; in the exhibit’s judgment he did not merely pay lip service to biomedicine but saw accelerators as a possible weapon against cancer.⁠[20]

Birge said in 1940 that samples of radioactive material were being supplied to at least twenty research groups and that results in the treatment of chronic leukaemia were distinctly encouraging; 47 men trained at Berkeley were directing or assisting cyclotron work at 25 institutions, and the Radiation Laboratory itself had published 163 papers, on which 76 different names appeared.⁠[8]

On July 1, 1936, the university made the Radiation Laboratory an independent entity within the Department of Physics, dedicated to nuclear science, with him as director, a post he held until his death.⁠[14][6][5]

Britannica’s article and the American Institute of Physics institutional record take 1931 as the year in which the laboratory was founded.⁠[18][23]

By 1937 the 37-inch cyclotron, an enlargement of the 27-inch machine, was accelerating deuterons to 8 MeV and alpha particles to 16 MeV; the memoir by Luis W. Alvarez records that by 1937 the cyclotron current had reached 100 microamperes at 8 MeV.⁠[14][9]

In Italy the physicist Emilio Segrè, examining material irradiated in the 27-inch cyclotron, discovered the first artificially made element, later named technetium.⁠[6][18]

The Crocker Radiation Laboratory, funded by University of California regent William Crocker, housed a 60-inch cyclotron with a 220-ton magnet that began operating in 1939 and produced beams of 16-MeV deuterons.⁠[14][8]

Birge said the 60-inch cyclotron produced 100-microampere currents of 16-million-volt deuterons and was the largest in the world, and that some 200 pounds of radium would be required to match its yield of neutrons.⁠[8]

Alvarez wrote that other accelerator builders of the 1930s typically obtained 1 microampere at 1 million electron volts, and that Lawrence campaigned for ever higher beam intensity, often against the opposition of younger colleagues who wanted to “use what we have.”⁠[9]

The memoir says Lawrence encouraged Martin Kamen to install two water-cooled probes to intersect the circulating beam that had formerly been lost; they added about one milliampere of internal beam, which was always at work producing radioactive isotopes for John Lawrence’s medical program.⁠[9]

On November 9, 1939, the Associated PressAssociated PressThe Associated Press is a cooperative news agency headquartered in New York City. Founded in 1846, it is the oldest and largest news agency in the United States.Open the full entry carried the news that he had won that year’s Nobel Prize in Physics. The prize was awarded “for the invention and development of the cyclotron and for results obtained with it,” with particular reference to artificial radioactive elements.⁠[24][2]

He was the first person to win the prize for work done entirely on a University of California campus and the first professor at a public university to do so. On hearing the news he said: “It goes without saying that it is the laboratory that is honored.”⁠[3]

Because of the war he did not travel to Stockholm. On February 29, 1940, the prize was presented at a ceremony in Wheeler Hall on the Berkeley campus, where C. E. Wallerstedt, the Swedish consul general in San Francisco, handed him the medal and diploma on behalf of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the physicist R. T. Birge gave a detailed account of his work.⁠[8][24][21]

Birge stated in his address that of about 335 artificially produced radioactive substances then known, 223 had been discovered with the cyclotron, and that 21 cyclotrons were in operation at other institutions, with a further 17 under construction.⁠[8]

The presentation speech by K. M. G. Siegbahn, a member of the Nobel Committee for Physics, noted that alpha particles from the cyclotron had reached 38 MeV by November 1939, compared with 7 to 8 MeV for those emitted by natural radioactive substances.⁠[8]

The American Institute of Physics exhibit counts 22 cyclotrons completed or under construction in the United StatesUnited StatesThe United States is a federal country in North America made up of 50 states, the District of Columbia as the seat of government, and territories such as Puerto Rico and Guam; its capital is Washington, D.C. The Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. The 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted a resident population of 331,449,281, and the 435 seats of the House of Representatives are apportioned among the states on the basis of the census.Open the full entry by 1940, and 11 overseas.⁠[21]

Rumors from Stockholm had suggested that no Nobel Prizes would be presented in 1939. The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory centennial article notes that he was also the first native of South Dakota to win one.⁠[24][3]

The medal and certificate were sent to the Swedish consulate in San Francisco. Robert Gordon Sproul opened the ceremony, saying that the press of duty and the hazards of wartime travel had persuaded Lawrence to forgo the visit to Sweden; Wallerstedt expressed the hope that he would soon come to Sweden to deliver his Nobel lecture. As Birge quoted it, his remark on hearing of the award continued: “and I share the honor with my co-workers past and present.” Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s site offers a recording of his speech at the ceremony; the Sanford Underground Research Facility article quotes him as expressing in it “a profound feeling of gratitude and appreciation for this great honor.”⁠[24][8][8][8][25][7]

At the ceremony Birge made the first public announcement of the evidence for element 85 obtained by Dale Corson and others, and Martin Kamen’s discovery of carbon-14 two days earlier was also announced. Lawrence said at the ceremony that the vacuum chamber of the machine he hoped to build would be wider than the 200-inch mirror of the Mount Palomar telescope.⁠[8][24]

Birge quoted a New York TimesThe New York TimesThe New York Times is an American morning daily newspaper published in New York City. Founded in 1851, it is published by The New York Times Company.Open the full entry editorial’s remark that to be called a practical inventor would probably exasperate rather than flatter him; for his own part Birge held that it was a real tribute to call him an eminent inventor and spoke of his completely unselfish attitude toward his associates.⁠[8]

In 1939 he proposed a cyclotron that would reach 100 million electron volts (100 MeV), one aim being the production of mesons, and he used the prize ceremony of February 1940 to promote the idea.⁠[3][21][24]

The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory history relates that at the ceremony he said the new machine’s magnet would weigh 3,000 tons, or perhaps 4,000 or more, and would cost three-quarters of a million dollars, or perhaps one and a quarter million or more; the university would have to raise the money from private sources, and a Nobel Prize made that seem possible.⁠[24]

Physicists at CornellCornell UniversityCornell University is a private research university in Ithaca, New York, and a member of the Ivy League. It is New York State's federal land-grant university, a distinction unique within the Ivy League. Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White founded the university in 1865, and it opened in 1868. In addition to its Ithaca campus, Cornell operates Weill Cornell Medicine and Cornell Tech in New York City and a medical college in Qatar. It enrolled 26,793 students in fall 2024. Its president is Michael I. Kotlikoff.Open the full entry had warned in 1937 that as particles approach the speed of light their mass increases and they fall out of step with the accelerating field, which sets a limit to the energy of a cyclotron. He was confident that a solution would be found and answered Hans BetheHans Albrecht BetheHans Albrecht Bethe (1906–2005) was a German-born American theoretical physicist who joined Cornell University in 1935, headed the theoretical division at Los Alamos during the Second World War and received the 1967 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on nuclear reactions and the energy production of stars.Open the full entry that year that there were “many ways of skinning a cat.”⁠[26]

In the spring of 1940 the Rockefeller Foundation pledged $1.4 million for a cyclotron with a magnet face 184 inches in diameter, to stand on Charter Hill above the Berkeley campus; Warren Weaver, director of the foundation’s Division of Natural Sciences, backed the plan. The memoir by Luis W. Alvarez puts the grant at $1.25 million.⁠[24][3][9]

The machine’s magnet was to weigh 4,500 tons, and its domed building was designed by Arthur Brown, the architect of San Francisco City Hall.⁠[24]

The laboratory made a series of discoveries in the same period: in 1940 Martin Kamen and Samuel Ruben discovered carbon-14 and Edwin McMillan and Philip Abelson produced element 93, neptunium; in February 1941 Glenn T. Seaborg and colleagues made and purified element 94, later named plutonium.⁠[24][6]

The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory history says that Hans Bethe was the first to raise the possibility of a relativistic limit and that James Chadwick estimated it at about 10 million volts for protons; it quotes the historians Heilbron and Seidel as saying that Lawrence “bruited a solution in the style of the Old West.”⁠[24]

For safety the controls were to stand 150 feet from the machine; Arthur Brown, whose works also included San Francisco’s Opera House and Coit Tower, designed a dome 90 feet high. The idea of housing it in a steel-framed building came from Lawrence’s visit to the Folies Bergère dance hall at the Golden Gate International Exposition on Treasure Island, and he asked whether the university might acquire that hall when the exposition closed to house the cyclotron.⁠[24]

The memoir says his longtime friend Alfred Loomis played a key role in the discussions with the Rockefeller Foundation, and the American Institute of Physics exhibit says the Nobel Prize helped to convince the foundation. The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory centennial article has him saying that such a machine could “unlock the vast storehouse of nuclear energy.”⁠[9][21][3]

Sources name the discoverers of carbon-14 differently: Part Two of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory history credits Martin Kamen alone and dates the discovery to February 27, 1940; the laboratory’s chronology names Kamen and Ruben as its discoverers, and the American Institute of Physics exhibit says Kamen and Samuel Ruben separated it and applied it to the study of photosynthesis; and the memoir by Luis W. Alvarez has “Rubin and Kamen” and holds that carbon-14 “could not have been discovered at any other laboratory.” The work on element 94 is credited in the history to Glenn T. Seaborg, J. W. Kennedy and the graduate student Arthur Wahl, aided by Emilio Segrè.⁠[24][6][21][9]

In the summer of 1939 Luis W. Alvarez and Robert Cornog used the 60-inch cyclotron to discover stable helium-3 and, a few days later, the 37-inch cyclotron to make radioactive hydrogen-3, tritium; Alvarez and Felix Bloch measured the magnetic moment of the neutron.⁠[24][21]

The memoir by Luis W. Alvarez lists among his appointments “National Defense Research Committee, June 1940”; in the summer of 1940 he joined that committee’s Microwave Committee, chaired by Alfred Loomis.⁠[9][9]

He recruited staff for the radar laboratory that opened at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in November 1940 and sent Luis W. Alvarez and Edwin McMillan there. The laboratory was named the Radiation Laboratory, to confuse the enemy in the American Institute of Physics exhibit’s account, and partly in his honor in the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory history.⁠[9][27][24]

In the summer of 1941 he became involved in the antisubmarine warfare program and recruited for the new underwater sound laboratories. When the National Defense Research Committee asked him to get the Navy’s Anti-Submarine Warfare Unit in San Diego started, he did so chiefly by persuading Edwin McMillan to leave the laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for San Diego.⁠[9][24]

The memoir says it was Loomis who introduced him to the British Scientific Mission, and that he learned of British wartime developments from his old friend John Cockcroft. He persuaded Lee DuBridge to leave his own cyclotron at Rochester, New York, to head the embryonic laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, recruited McMillan, Salisbury and Alvarez from his own laboratory and visited the new one frequently in its first year; the memoir says its name was intended as a cover.⁠[9]

The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory history holds that McMillan’s contributions proved crucial to the development of sonar. The Bancroft Library’s collection guide sums up his work with the National Defense Research Committee as microwave research and submarine detection.⁠[24][10]

Early in 1939, after news of nuclear fission arrived, the staff of the Radiation Laboratory confirmed the phenomenon. On February 9, 1939, he wrote to John Cockcroft: “We are trying to find out whether neutrons are generally given off in the splitting of uranium.”⁠[27]

In 1939 refugee scientists, Albert EinsteinAlbert EinsteinAlbert Einstein (1879–1955) was a German-born physicist who formulated the special theory of relativity in 1905 and the general theory in 1915 and received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect. From 1933 until his death he was a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, United States.Open the full entry among them, persuaded President Franklin D. RooseveltFranklin D. RooseveltFranklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945) was an American politician who served as the 32nd president of the United States from 1933 to 1945, the only president elected four times; he led the country through the Great Depression and World War II and greatly expanded the federal government’s role through the New Deal.Open the full entry to start a uranium research project; the American effort languished through 1940 into 1941, and he pressed repeatedly for faster action.⁠[27][11]

Early in 1941 he began to consider separating uranium-235 electromagnetically and proposed converting his 37-inch cyclotron into a mass spectrometer. He met Vannevar Bush, director of the National Defense Research Committee, and warned that the uranium committee was moving too slowly; Bush appointed him an adviser to the committee, which brought funding for electromagnetic separation and plutonium work at Berkeley.⁠[11]

In the same year he became a member of the National Academy of Sciences Advisory Committee on Uranium Research. In September Arthur Compton and James Conant met with him and asked whether he was willing to commit himself to the development of an atomic bomb; he was.⁠[5][27]

By late 1941 he was suggesting that plutonium might offer the shortest route to a weapon. He also helped to bring the theoretical physicist J. Robert OppenheimerJ. Robert OppenheimerJ. Robert Oppenheimer (1904–1967) was an American theoretical physicist and science administrator who directed the Los Alamos laboratory that developed the atomic bomb during World War II.Open the full entry, who had come to Berkeley in 1929, into the initial discussions of the physics of the bomb.⁠[11]

The memoir by Luis W. Alvarez lists him as program chief of the S-1 Section (Uranium Section) of the Office of Scientific Research and Development from November 1941 to May 1942 and as a member of that office’s S-1 Executive Committee from May 1942 to March 30, 1946; the American Institute of Physics record gives the two terms as 1941–1942 and 1942–1946.⁠[9][5]

On December 6, 1941, the day before Pearl Harbor, the converted 37-inch cyclotron separated a few micrograms of uranium-235; two weeks later the government provided $400,000 for research on magnetic separation.⁠[24]

The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory history relates that in January 1939 Luis W. Alvarez read of the splitting of the uranium nucleus in the San Francisco Chronicle while sitting in a barber’s chair — “I stopped the barber in mid-snip” — and ran to the Radiation Laboratory with the news. The American Institute of Physics exhibit says the staff, on bombarding uranium with neutrons, confirmed that they had missed another major discovery, and his letter to Cockcroft went on to say that if neutrons were given off, the prospects for useful nuclear energy would become very real.⁠[24][27]

Arthur Compton later recalled that Lawrence hesitated only a moment before saying that if this was his job he would do it.⁠[27]

The U.S. Department of Energy history says he thought it merely a matter of time before the United States was drawn into the war, and that in warning Bush he said Germany was undoubtedly making progress. Some observers doubted that the electromagnetic method could produce uranium-235 on a large scale, but his team’s results led Bush in March 1942 to express the hope that it might yield enough enriched uranium for a bomb by 1944. Hewlett and Anderson wrote that Bush, visiting Berkeley that February, found the atmosphere in the laboratory “stimulating” and “refreshing.”⁠[11]

The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory history says he wanted the contract to build an atomic pile, but it went to the University of Chicago; in March 1942 Seaborg left for the Metallurgical Laboratory there to head the separation of plutonium, taking Albert Ghiorso and others with him. The American Institute of Physics exhibit says that in 1941 McMillan, Seaborg and their colleagues showed plutonium to be fissionable like uranium, and that the realization by the refugee scientists Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls in Britain that a bomb could be made with a relatively small amount of uranium-235, a secret brought to the United States from Britain, helped to energize the American uranium project.⁠[24][27]

The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory history quotes his warning that if the United States failed to get the answers to the uranium problem first, “the results for our country may well be tragic disaster.”⁠[24]

By mid-February 1942 the 37-inch device had produced 75 micrograms of 30-percent uranium-235. In May the great magnet intended for the 184-inch cyclotron on Charter Hill was switched on for the first time; the separators installed in it did not work dependably until the end of 1942. The device was called the calutron, after the University of California.⁠[24][27][11]

In November 1942 electromagnetic separation was chosen, along with gaseous diffusion, as a production method. His group designed for the Y-12 electromagnetic plant at Oak Ridge, TennesseeTennesseeTennessee is a U.S. state in the southeast-central United States, with its capital at Nashville. It was admitted to the Union on June 1, 1796, as the 16th state, and the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted 6,910,840 residents.Open the full entry, the units known as racetracks: electromagnet coils arranged in an oval with 48 gaps, each holding two vacuum tanks, for a total of 96 calutrons. Construction of the first racetracks began in February 1943, fifteen were eventually built, and their power came from the hydroelectric plants of the Tennessee Valley AuthorityTennessee Valley AuthorityThe Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) is a United States corporate agency that is owned by the federal government but receives no tax funding. Created by Congress in 1933 to develop the resources of the Tennessee Valley, it operates the nation’s largest public power system and serves more than 10 million people across seven states.Open the full entry.⁠[11][27]

In the spring of 1943 he and his team went to Oak Ridge to take part in building and running the plant. The early racetracks had serious problems, contaminated cooling oil shorted out the magnets and enrichment was slower than expected; the U.S. Department of Energy’s history nevertheless judges the technique the most fruitful wartime method of producing weapons-grade uranium, and almost all the uranium-235 in the bomb dropped on Hiroshima passed through the calutrons.⁠[24][11][27]

The memoir by Luis W. Alvarez lists his appointment as scientific adviser and project leader of the Manhattan District under the date May 1, 1943.⁠[9]

The Manhattan Project was headed by General Leslie GrovesLeslie GrovesLeslie Groves (1896–1970) was a United States Army general who headed the Manhattan Project, the World War II effort to develop the atomic bomb.Open the full entry. Late in 1942, at his urging, Leslie Groves chose J. Robert Oppenheimer to lead the secret laboratory in New MexicoNew MexicoNew Mexico is a state in the Southwestern United States. Its capital is Santa Fe and its largest city is Albuquerque. It was admitted to the Union on January 6, 1912, as the 47th state, and had a population of 2,117,522 in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020).Open the full entry.⁠[27][24]

The Atomic Heritage Foundation profile likewise says he was instrumental in the appointment of Oppenheimer as leader of the Los Alamos Laboratory; it also says he converted another cyclotron for the purpose of uranium enrichment and developed the electromagnetic isotope separation process used at the Y-12 Plant in Oak Ridge.⁠[28]

By mid-1944 the staff of the Radiation Laboratory had grown to nearly 1,200, and the laboratory had acquired guards and checkpoints. When the university ordered all “enemy aliens” dismissed, he found a way to keep the Italian émigré Emilio Segrè on the payroll. A Manhattan Project security officer later testified: “We had more trouble with Ernest Lawrence about personnel than any four other people put together.”⁠[27]

In July 1944 the 60-inch cyclotron tested graphite rods for the plutonium reactors at Hanford, and Groves contributed $170,000 toward finishing the 184-inch cyclotron.⁠[24]

There are two accounts of the name calutron: the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory history says an administrator of the laboratory suggested it at the end of 1942, while the U.S. Department of Energy history says Lawrence himself dubbed the device a calutron. He had hoped the big magnet could hold as many as ten separators, and Edward Lofgren designed a second-stage process for further purification of uranium-235. Early in 1943 he sent Edwin McMillan to Los Alamos.⁠[24][11]

The American Institute of Physics exhibit describes the racetracks as a first stage of separation and says the production of nearly pure uranium-235 also relied on other methods, gaseous or thermal diffusion; Alvarez, in the memoir, held that the Calutron was almost solely responsible for the uranium-235 of the Hiroshima bomb and that thermal and gaseous diffusion contributed only in a minor way. After the war, the memoir says, his plant was shut down and the more efficient gaseous diffusion plant took over peacetime production.⁠[27][9]

The memoir says that from the summer of 1941 to the summer of 1945 the laboratory worked around the clock and that he and his associates worked twelve hours a day, seven days a week; the American Institute of Physics exhibit says he was plagued with frequent respiratory infections. He and his staff frequently visited Oak Ridge to fight the technical difficulties, among them product that ended up scattered through the insides of the calutrons instead of in the collecting cup. Alvarez wrote that he received no compensation for his wartime inventive efforts and wrote nothing of his experiences in those years.⁠[9][27][9]

The American Institute of Physics exhibit says strict security excluded foreigners from the laboratory and brought an end to his generous sharing of cyclotron information; without protesting against secrecy, he felt free to circumvent restrictions when he judged that the project required it, and said what he wanted to say where it seemed useful.⁠[27]

The Bancroft Library’s collection guide says that during the war he led the work at Berkeley, attended meetings in Washington and gave advice on the development and use of the atomic bomb.⁠[10]

In the spring of 1945 he was appointed, together with J. Robert Oppenheimer, Arthur Compton and Enrico Fermi, to a Scientific Panel that advised the secretary of war on postwar atomic energy policy.⁠[27]

He suggested demonstrating an atomic bomb in front of Japanese representatives before using one against a city. The American Institute of Physics exhibit relates that, after his colleagues raised objections, he conceded and the Scientific Panel unanimously recommended that the bomb be dropped without warning on a war plant surrounded by workers’ homes, and that allies, including the Soviet Union, be notified before its use.⁠[27]

On July 16, 1945, he witnessed the Trinity test of the first atomic bomb.⁠[27][28]

In August 1945 he wrote in a letter to Karl Darrow and Lewis Akeley: “In view of the fact that two bombs ended the war, I am inclined to feel [the Committee] made the right decision.”⁠[27]

That September he joined his colleagues on the Scientific Panel when they opposed, on moral grounds, the development of the hydrogen bomb, then called the Superbomb, a weapon far more powerful than a fission bomb.⁠[27]

His colleagues’ objections were that the demonstration bomb might be a dud, that the Japanese might shoot down the delivery plane or herd American prisoners into the test area, and that a demonstration seemed unlikely to convince the Japanese to surrender. The exhibit adds that the Panel, meeting before the Trinity test, scarcely grasped how a bomb could level an entire city.⁠[27]

The American Institute of Physics exhibit says that, unlike some of his colleagues, he felt no remorse or dread after the Trinity test, only relief that the device had worked, and that he suffered no moral anguish after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: he held that the bomb had ended the war and might prevent future wars, although one might regret the necessity of its use. In mid-August 1945 he said that as long as the nation required strong armed forces it needed to go on stockpiling and developing atomic weapons.⁠[27][29]

In 1944 he still expected the postwar laboratory to return to its prewar size, with a budget of about $85,000 a year; by May 1945 his postwar plan had grown to an annual budget of $1 million, and by December he had tripled that figure.⁠[26]

Leslie Groves agreed to fund new projects at Berkeley with government money: completion of the 184-inch cyclotron, an electron synchrotron for Edwin McMillan, a linear accelerator under Luis W. Alvarez and a nuclear chemistry laboratory for Glenn T. Seaborg.⁠[26][9]

When Congress debated the control of atomic energy, he backed a bill that would have given the military control, while other scientists favored civilian control; he then withdrew from the debate.⁠[26]

Edwin McMillan’s proposal of 1945 removed the limit on the cyclotron’s energy by varying the frequency of the accelerating field to keep the particles in step; the Soviet physicist Vladimir Veksler had independently proposed the same idea in 1944. The 184-inch machine, rebuilt on this principle as a synchrocyclotron, produced its first beam in November 1946 and reached 195 MeV for deuterons, double the energy planned in 1940; the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory history dates the first beam to November 1, 1946, and gives the deuteron energy as 200 MeV.⁠[26][24]

When the 184-inch synchrocyclotron produced its first beam, the laboratory’s staff had declined from a wartime peak of 1,200 to fewer than 500. Two months later the Manhattan District ceased to exist, and the Atomic Energy Commission inherited its laboratories, the University of California’s Radiation Laboratory among them.⁠[24]

Much of the laboratory demobilized after the war, but more than a quarter of its contracted work still related directly to military problems.⁠[29]

In 1948 the 184-inch synchrocyclotron produced muons and pions artificially. In the same year he went before the Atomic Energy Commission to obtain funding for a proton synchrotron, the Bevatron, whose energy is given as 6.2 BeV in the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory centennial article of 2001 and as a design energy of 6.5 BeV in that laboratory’s 75th-anniversary history. Based on a design by William Brobeck, it was completed in 1954, and in 1955 Emilio Segrè, Owen Chamberlain and others used it to discover the antiproton.⁠[6][3][10][26][22]

In 1948 he named John Lawrence the Radiation Laboratory’s first associate director.⁠[22]

He also returned to active research himself, using deuteron stripping to discover nitrogen-17.⁠[3]

The American Institute of Physics exhibit says he was on good terms with Groves and the Army; the memoir speaks of his great respect for Groves, which was apparently reciprocated. The exhibit says he withdrew from the debate over the control of atomic energy because he disapproved of public political activism by scientists and preferred to work with officials as an insider. The prewar Berkeley team was reassembled in the fall of 1945; Alvarez wrote that its members had “gone away as boys, and come back as men,” that Lawrence left them free agents in technical and personnel matters, and that funding at first amounted to a “blank check” from the Manhattan District.⁠[26][9]

In 1946 he remarked that there was “no limit on what we can do,” while cautioning that scientists should be discreet.⁠[26]

The memoir gives the performance of the 184-inch machine by late 1946 as 180 MeV for deuterons and 360 MeV for helium nuclei, and says the rebuilt 37-inch cyclotron was the world’s first synchrocyclotron; the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory centennial article gives that title to the 184-inch machine, which it says accelerated protons to 350 MeV against the 70 MeV within reach of a conventional cyclotron.⁠[9][3]

Once the 184-inch cyclotron was complete he took a direct part in experiments for the first time since his work of 1935 on deuteron-induced radioactivities, spending several hours each evening and much of Saturday and Sunday in the cyclotron building; the delayed neutron activity was his own discovery, and he and his colleagues soon showed that it was due to nitrogen-17. His efforts with Gardner to find pions in nuclear emulsions were unsuccessful until Lattes, who had been in the Bristol team that discovered the pion, corrected the Berkeley development techniques; one evening Lattes saw the tracks of the first artificially produced negative pion coming to rest, and he and Gardner at once telephoned Lawrence, who was entertaining visitors at an Oakland restaurant. Alvarez wrote that it was one of the greatest thrills of his life and that he insisted that the historic paper should be signed “Gardner and Lattes.”⁠[9]

The NobelPrize.org biography places the artificial generation of mesons with the cyclotron in 1941. The American Institute of Physics exhibit adds that the 184-inch machine went on to produce the neutral pion, the first particle detected initially at an accelerator.⁠[4][26]

The memoir says the laboratory’s staff was by then almost a hundred times as large as before the war and that staff members remembered him looking over their shoulders at three in the morning; the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory centennial article calls his late-night visits to ask investigators what they were doing a legend. Alvarez called him a wise “scientific parent” who stood by to help only when the problems were too difficult.⁠[9][3]

There is a third figure for the Bevatron’s energy: the American Institute of Physics exhibit gives 6 BeV, with a 10,000-ton magnet. The exhibit says that after rounds of proposals the Atomic Energy Commission agreed to support proton synchrotrons both at Berkeley and at Brookhaven National Laboratory, founded in 1947, whose machine was to be built quickly and reach 3 BeV. The memoir says the commission authorized a 6.2-BeV Bevatron and the Brookhaven Cosmotron and that the Cosmotron came into operation first; to test external injection Lawrence had a quarter-scale model of the Bevatron built, which worked within nine months of the decision.⁠[26][9]

The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory history says the plans for the machine began in 1948 and were still changing in 1951, and that construction was completed in January 1954; the experiments of Segrè and Chamberlain’s team began in the first week of August 1955 and gave the first evidence of the antiproton on September 21, which Gerson Goldhaber’s analysis of emulsion stacks then confirmed, and Segrè and Chamberlain shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1959.⁠[22]

The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory history says he had not waited for the end of the war to plan his laboratory’s future and envisioned “a paradise of physics.” On September 2, 1945, the day of Japan’s surrender, he is said to have remarked to Melvin Calvin that it was “time to do something useful with radioactive carbon”; Calvin’s group, working in the original Radiation Laboratory building, used carbon-14 to trace the path of carbon in photosynthesis, for which Calvin received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 1961. Edwin McMillan and Glenn T. Seaborg had shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 1951.⁠[22]

The American Institute of Physics exhibit says that after the war more than a quarter of the laboratory’s contracted work related directly to military problems, especially biological studies connected with possible uses of radioactive substances in warfare.⁠[29]

After the Soviet Union tested its first fission device in August 1949, he dropped his earlier opposition to the hydrogen bomb and called for an all-out effort to build one ahead of the Soviets.⁠[29]

The General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission, nine scientists chaired by Oppenheimer, advised against hydrogen bombs on technical and moral grounds. In a letter to James Conant of October 21, 1949, Oppenheimer wrote that “two experienced promoters have been at work, i.e., Ernest Lawrence and Edward Teller.” President Harry S. TrumanHarry S. TrumanHarry S. Truman (1884–1972) was an American politician who served as a U.S. senator from Missouri and as vice president in 1945, succeeding Franklin D. Roosevelt on his death that year and serving as the 33rd president of the United States from 1945 to 1953, a period spanning the end of World War II and the early Cold War.Open the full entry nonetheless committed the United States to a crash program to build the hydrogen bomb.⁠[29]

He proposed a linear accelerator as an intense source of neutrons for making plutonium and tritium. The prototype, Mark I, designed to deliver 25-MeV deuterons and code-named the Materials Testing Accelerator (MTA), was built at the Livermore Auxiliary Naval Air Station, about 45 miles from Berkeley; the full-scale Mark II was planned to stretch over 1,500 feet and deliver 350-MeV deuterons. By mid-1952 the cost of Mark I had mounted to $21 million, and the Atomic Energy Commission canceled Mark II in favor of cheaper neutron sources.⁠[29][6]

In June 1952 the Atomic Energy Commission approved his proposal to establish a second nuclear weapons laboratory at Livermore. The laboratory was set up that year as a branch of the Radiation Laboratory, with Herbert York as director and Edward Teller as a senior member; Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory dates the start of research at the University of California Radiation Laboratory—Livermore Site to September 2, 1952.⁠[29][9][23][17]

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s account says that, alarmed by the Soviet test, he met Edward Teller in October 1949 to discuss the threat of a hydrogen bomb; that late in 1951 Thomas Murray, a member of the Atomic Energy Commission, approached him, then director of the University of California’s Radiation Laboratory, about a second laboratory; and that whereas Teller wanted a large, fully staffed facility, Lawrence, “more experienced in the ways of bureaucracy,” favored an incremental approach, and “Lawrence’s prudence prevailed.”⁠[17]

The University of California Office of the President names him and Edward Teller together as the founders of this laboratory. By mid-1954 Livermore had more than 1,000 staff, over 400 of them scientists and engineers.⁠[30][29]

He held that nuclear weapons should be central to American military strategy and pressed for submarines powered by nuclear reactors for the Navy.⁠[29]

Early in 1952 he was diagnosed with a chronic intestinal disease, which the Bancroft Library’s collection guide calls “chronic ulceritis” and the American Institute of Physics exhibit calls chronic ulcerative colitis.⁠[10][29]

The American Institute of Physics exhibit says he pressed the case for the hydrogen bomb in person with congressmen and generals during a visit to Washington. It says he promoted his views not from official advisory positions but as a highly regarded nuclear physicist with personal connections to members of the Atomic Energy Commission, military leaders and congressmen; that he sat on the boards of directors of several large corporations; and that he sometimes went straight to the congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, bypassing the commission, to win approval for projects he favored. He supported the commission’s studies of warfare with radioactive materials and argued for a crash program for naval reactors.⁠[29]

The memoir explains that he feared a neutron shortage brought on by the dwindling supply of uranium-235; the test section at Livermore accelerated currents of close to one ampere, and the project was abandoned when the commission’s payments for uranium led prospectors to previously unknown reserves in the Rocky Mountain states. The American Institute of Physics exhibit puts the planned beam current of Mark II at one ampere, a million times that of the 184-inch synchrocyclotron, and says the project gave the laboratory valuable experience with high-volume vacuums and exotic electrical engineering. The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory chronology says it was he and Luis W. Alvarez who established the research facility at the Livermore Naval Air Station in 1950.⁠[9][29][6]

The American Institute of Physics exhibit says the proposal for a second weapons laboratory came from Edward Teller, who wanted to relieve Los Alamos and add competition, and who found a strong supporter in Lawrence. The memoir says that in 1952 Lawrence urged the Atomic Energy Commission and the Joint Congressional Committee to set up a second weapons laboratory, offered the Livermore site and pledged his personal oversight, and thereafter spent most of his remaining time and effort on Livermore’s affairs; Alvarez wrote that the young laboratory “stubbed its toe” several times and might have failed without his steadying hand. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s account is that he, Teller and Herbert York, one of his postdoctoral students, won approval for what was called Project Whitney and that the laboratory’s steering committee included Edward Teller, Harold Brown, John S. Foster Jr. and Arthur T. Biehl; the Bancroft Library’s collection guide says he established the laboratory at the commission’s request. The American Institute of Physics institutional record says it was created as a complement and informal competitor to Los Alamos, and the exhibit says it remained an adjunct of the Berkeley laboratory until 1971.⁠[29][9][17][10][23]

On the cause of his illness, the American Institute of Physics exhibit’s account is that his many obligations and repeated trips to Washington and New York aggravated his frequent illnesses and gave him the colitis. The Bancroft Library’s collection guide says that on the diagnosis of 1952 he was advised to rest and relax more but could not hold back his pace for long; by then he seldom took part in experiments himself, though he still visited the laboratories and advised his colleagues.⁠[29][10]

In September 1949 the House Un-American Activities Committee began a hearing on alleged communist infiltration of the Radiation Laboratory, where classified research was still being done.⁠[31]

In 1949 the Regents of the University of California, on a proposal by President Sproul, required employees to swear that they were not members of the Communist Party; the deadline for signing, first set at October 1, was postponed to April 30 and then to June 30, 1950. On June 23, 1950, the Regents, led by the regent John Francis Neylan, voted to terminate 157 employees, academic and nonacademic, and 31 faculty members were ultimately dismissed.⁠[31]

John David Jackson’s article in Physics Today relates that Wolfgang Panofsky, who had worked at the Radiation Laboratory since early 1946, had himself signed the oath but after this vote informed Lawrence and Luis W. Alvarez that he intended to leave Berkeley; Lawrence had written in support when Panofsky was promoted to a tenured associate professorship in 1948. Jackson writes that Lawrence, obviously dismayed at the prospect of losing his young star, used his friendship with Neylan to arrange an out-of-channels meeting at Neylan’s home, having in effect asked Panofsky not to do anything until he had heard the Regents’ side; Neylan did all the talking, and Panofsky was unmoved.⁠[31]

Panofsky accepted a full professorship at Stanford UniversityStanford UniversityStanford University is a research university in California founded by Leland and Jane Stanford in 1885 and opened in 1891.Open the full entry, as he wrote in a letter of November 19, 1950, sent his resignation to Birge on January 2, 1951, with effect from June 30, and moved with his family across the bay in July. Jackson writes that he parted with obvious discomfort from the university and from people like Alvarez, Birge and Lawrence, who had treated him so well. Jackson also notes that Jack Steinberger, Panofsky’s collaborator on the two-photon decay of the neutral pion, left the Radiation Laboratory after one year. In October 1952 the state Supreme Court ruled the oath unconstitutional, and the Regents were ordered to reinstate all dismissed faculty.⁠[31]

In 1954 the Atomic Energy Commission held a hearing on whether to renew Oppenheimer’s security clearance; his critics cited his opposition to the hydrogen bomb and his prewar contacts with Communists.⁠[29]

A bout of colitis kept Lawrence from testifying, but in interviews with the prosecutors in the hearing he concluded that Oppenheimer “should never again have anything to do with the forming of policy.”⁠[29]

The American Institute of Physics exhibit judges that his position, together with testimony from Edward Teller and others, helped lead the Atomic Energy Commission to withdraw the clearance.⁠[29]

The American Institute of Physics exhibit says Lawrence’s increasing hawkishness ended what remained of his friendship with Oppenheimer and that the final break came in 1954, as McCarthyism reached its climax. During the hearing Roger Robb, counsel for the personnel security board, asked Oppenheimer whether he had been the most influential scientist in the field of atomic energy from 1943 until recently, and Oppenheimer answered: “I think Lawrence probably had in many ways more influence.”⁠[29]

In 1954 a thermonuclear device tested by the United States in the Pacific proved more powerful than expected and spread fallout beyond the test site. He argued for continued testing and for the development of “clean” bombs, saying to President Dwight D. EisenhowerDwight D. EisenhowerDwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969) was an American army general and politician who served as supreme commander of Allied forces in western Europe during World War II and as the 34th president of the United States, a Republican, from 1953 to 1961.Open the full entry that a failure to develop them “could truly be a ‘crime against humanity.’”⁠[29]

He opposed a ban on nuclear tests on technical grounds, among them the difficulty of detecting hidden tests.⁠[29]

In August 1955 he was an adviser to the United States delegation to the International Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy in Geneva. From 1956 to 1958 he was a trustee of the RAND CorporationRAND CorporationThe RAND Corporation is an American nonprofit research organization headquartered in Santa Monica, California. It grew out of Project RAND, set up by the U.S. Army Air Forces in 1946 under contract with the Douglas Aircraft Company, became an independent nonprofit in 1948 and conducts research on national security, health, education and social policy.Open the full entry and a consultant for the 1958 Brussels world exhibition, and in 1957 he joined the board of directors of the Monsanto Chemical Company.⁠[9][5]

A long-running controversy over the dangers of fallout followed that test. He held that it was a moral imperative to develop “clean” bombs that could be used in a nuclear war without producing much deadly fallout.⁠[29]

The NobelPrize.org biography characterizes his postwar role on testing differently, saying that he played a part in the attempt to obtain international agreement on the suspension of atomic-bomb testing, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory centennial article says he went to Geneva for talks on a proposed treaty that would ban the testing of nuclear weapons. The Bancroft Library’s collection guide says the federal government called on him for his opinion on weapons development and radioactive fallout.⁠[4][3][10]

The memoir says he was a scientific consultant to many of the largest technical corporations in the United States; its list also records him as a director of the Yosemite Park & Curry Company.⁠[9][9]

In the spring of 1958 he suffered a serious recurrence of his chronic colitis.⁠[22]

That summer, at Eisenhower’s request and against medical advice, he went to Geneva as an American delegate to the Conference of Experts on monitoring a ban on nuclear tests; the memoir by Luis W. Alvarez dates the conference to July 1958.⁠[29][22][9]

He fell ill midway through the conference and was rushed back to the United States; the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory history says he was taken to the Stanford University hospital for surgery.⁠[29][22][3][6]

The memoir says that in the mid-1950s John Lawrence and Dr. Albert Snell, his personal physician, urged him to shed some of the great burdens he was carrying. On one occasion he and Molly took a leisurely ocean voyage to India, which relieved his intestinal problems only temporarily.⁠[9]

The Bancroft Library’s collection guide says he went with only the hesitant approval of his doctor, and the American Institute of Physics exhibit says he accepted the duty reluctantly, fearing that the strain of the journey would worsen his colitis. The memoir’s list describes the American delegation as a three-member committee appointed by President Eisenhower, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory chronology calls him a technical adviser to the talks. Glenn T. Seaborg wrote that he was forced to return to Palo Alto.⁠[10][29][9][6][12]

In his last days he said to Molly: “I wish I’d taken more time off. I would have liked to, you know, but my conscience wouldn’t let me.” The memoir says surgical treatment was recommended but was unsuccessful.⁠[22][3][9]

He died in Palo Alto, California, on August 27, 1958, at the age of 57. The memoir by Luis W. Alvarez says he died in a Palo Alto hospital without recovering consciousness after major surgery; the American Institute of Physics exhibit says he died following surgery for colitis; and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory chronology says he was hospitalized at Stanford and died of complications of colitis.⁠[9][29][6][2]

A few days before his death Eisenhower announced an American moratorium on nuclear testing, which the Soviet Union then joined.⁠[29]

Eisenhower said in tribute: “His loss is a tragic one for the United States and for the entire free world.” Leslie Groves called him “a distinguished scientist, a distinguished inventor, and a distinguished administrator.”⁠[16]

Edwin McMillan succeeded him as director at Berkeley, and Edward Teller became director at Livermore.⁠[23]

The American Institute of Physics exhibit says the moratorium was in part a result of the work of the American delegation at Geneva; it lasted only until 1961, when, the exhibit says, the French broke it, and an international treaty of 1963 allowed nuclear tests only underground.⁠[29]

Other tributes collected by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory include those of Glenn T. Seaborg, who spoke of “his buoyant optimism, and his invincible spirit” and that his own career in science had “a great deal of its foundation in Ernest Lawrence’s contributions and generosity,” and called him “one of a rare company of men in history who lend majesty and hope to human existence”; Clark Kerr, who called him “one of the greatest pioneers of science in world history” and “one of the greatest administrators of scientific research”; Robert Gordon Sproul, who said his achievements “represented the highest standard of scholarly excellence” and that he was thinking of the man, of “his vitality and integrity, his friendliness and modesty”; Goodwin J. Knight, governor of California, who spoke of his “truly magnificent attainments,” which he said were “all geared to the eventual attainment of peace in our world”; and Luis W. Alvarez: “The real difficulty is that there isn’t an Ernest Lawrence anymore.” The memoir says his death was a great shock to his wide circle of friends in science, government and industry.⁠[16][9]

Twenty-three days after his death the Regents of the University of California voted to name the Radiation Laboratory after him; the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory chronology records the name adopted then as the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory.⁠[22][6]

The American Institute of Physics institutional record places the renaming in 1959 and gives the name as the Ernest O. Lawrence Radiation Laboratory.⁠[23]

In 1959 the original wooden Radiation Laboratory building was torn down.⁠[19][9]

In 1971 the Berkeley laboratory was renamed the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, and the Livermore branch, amid anti-war protests, became institutionally separate under the name Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. The two were later named Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.⁠[23][29][11]

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s account is that the Regents voted just after his death to rename both the Berkeley and the Livermore laboratories after him. The American Institute of Physics institutional record lists the directors at Livermore after Teller as Harold Brown (1960–1961), John Foster (1961–1965) and Michael May (1965–1971).⁠[17][23]

The laboratory’s 75th-anniversary exhibit recounts a legend that when the old wooden building was being torn down in 1959, Melvin Calvin salvaged its door for posterity.⁠[19]

In March 1961 A. Ghiorso, T. Sikkeland, A. E. Larsh and R. M. Latimer discovered element 103 by bombarding a californium target with boron ions; the element was named lawrencium after him. The memoir by Luis W. Alvarez says it was named by the young associates of his who discovered it.⁠[32][9]

In September 1958 Glenn T. Seaborg, then chancellor at Berkeley, proposed to the Regents of the University of California a science museum in his memory.⁠[33]

Seaborg wrote that he played a major role throughout what he called a ten-year process, with debates about location, name and educational emphasis, and he named the then Regent Edwin Pauley and the former university president Clark Kerr among its supporters; Anshen and Allen’s futuristic “molecule” design became a distinctive feature of the Berkeley hills. He called the Hall a living memorial developing new and better ways of teaching science to the young, and his principal address at the dedication was titled “The Heritage of E.O. Lawrence—Dreamer in Action.”⁠[33]

In 1962 a national architectural competition selected the San Francisco firm of Anshen and Allen. Of the nine million dollars raised, three million was set aside as an initial endowment for operation and maintenance; total construction costs were estimated at $12 million, and only two of the four planned stages could be undertaken.⁠[33]

On May 20, 1968, the Lawrence Hall of Science was dedicated as part of the university’s centennial celebration; Seaborg gave the principal address, and Harvey White, a professor of physics, became its first director.⁠[33][34]

It is the public science center of the University of California, Berkeley, and his Nobel Prize medal is displayed there.⁠[35][25]

The memoir says his friends endowed the Lawrence Hall of Science after his death and that science teachers from all over the country were to come there on year-long fellowships. The Hall describes itself as named in honor of the university’s first Nobel laureate, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory describes it as a science education museum on the hill just above the laboratory.⁠[9][34][25]

He and Mary Blumer Lawrence had six children, two sons and four daughters: John Eric, Margaret, Mary, Robert, Barbara and Susan; the eldest, Eric, was born about two years after the marriage.⁠[1][3][9]

At his death the couple had been married for 26 years.⁠[10]

John Lawrence was a graduate of Harvard Medical School at Harvard UniversityHarvard UniversityHarvard University is a private research university in Massachusetts, established by the Massachusetts Bay Colony legislature in 1636 and named in 1639 for early benefactor John Harvard. Its principal campuses are in Cambridge and the Allston and Longwood neighborhoods of Boston. It includes Harvard College, graduate and professional schools, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Two governing boards share oversight. Alan M. Garber was president as of October 2026, and the endowment stood at $56.9 billion at the end of fiscal 2025.Open the full entry and taught at Yale University before coming to Berkeley. Early in 1941 the steel executive William H. Donner gave $165,000 for the Joseph W. Donner Laboratory, originally intended for John Lawrence’s research in nuclear medicine; ground was broken in June.⁠[22][24]

On September 3, 1939, the passenger liner Athenia was sunk by a German submarine off Scotland; John Lawrence, who was returning from Europe, was the last person into a lifeboat.⁠[24]

In 1937 Ernest Lawrence brought his mother, who had an inoperable cancer, to San Francisco for treatment with the X-ray tube developed by David Sloan, and her condition improved dramatically; she was still living in Berkeley when he died.⁠[20][9]

R. T. Birge said in his address of 1940 that his father, Carl G. Lawrence, was then president emeritus of Northern Normal and Industrial School in Aberdeen, South Dakota, and was living in Berkeley with his wife; that his paternal grandfather, Ole Lawrence, a schoolteacher, had come from Norway as an immigrant and settled at Madison, WisconsinWisconsinWisconsin is a state in the north-central United States; its capital is Madison and its largest city is Milwaukee. Wisconsin was admitted to the Union on May 29, 1848, as the 30th state, and the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted 5,893,718 residents.Open the full entry, in 1840; and that his maternal grandfather, Erik Jacobson, also an immigrant from Norway, was a South Dakota pioneer.⁠[8]

His recreations were boating, tennis, ice-skating and music.⁠[4]

Alvarez wrote that Molly Lawrence created a home famous throughout the world of physics for its warmth and hospitality. In 1941 her sister Elsie married Edwin McMillan. His parents settled in Berkeley when his father retired from his career in education. Captions in the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory history note that the laboratory’s staff socialized at Di Biasi’s restaurant in Albany and that Molly Lawrence appears in a photograph taken there.⁠[9][14]

Alvarez recalled a Sunday afternoon in the Lawrence living room when Eric, then in high school, came in to say that his physics teacher had assigned him to explain the cyclotron to his class; his father explained it to him then and there, to the boy’s delight.⁠[9]

The memoir gives more detail of his mother’s treatment: after many distinguished specialists had declared her tumor inoperable she was treated, “more or less in desperation,” by Dr. Robert Stone with the one-million-volt “Sloan-Lawrence” X-ray machine at the University of California Medical School, a novel resonance transformer device that Lawrence and his co-workers had installed in the San Francisco Hospital in the early 1930s and that then provided the only million-volt X-rays in the world; she was still alive twenty-one years later. Alvarez thought the knowledge that her life had been saved by radiation therapy must have been one of his greatest satisfactions.⁠[9]

John Lawrence is described as four years younger than Ernest in the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory history, while the American Institute of Physics record gives his year of birth as 1904. The founding of the Donner Laboratory is also dated differently: Part Three of the history says John Lawrence founded it within the Radiation Laboratory in 1936, and the Bancroft Library’s collection guide says construction of the Donner Biophysics Laboratory had begun by 1940. The history adds that William H. Donner’s son had died of cancer.⁠[22][5][10][24]

The NobelPrize.org biography says John Lawrence later became director of the university’s Medical Physics Laboratory and a consultant to the Institute of Cancer Research at Columbia; Birge in 1940 called him a medical scientist of great ability. The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory history says that after the war he and a team that included Joseph Hamilton, Cornelius Tobias, Hardin Jones and Will Siri, funded by the Atomic Energy Commission and using the 184-inch synchrocyclotron, launched modern nuclear medicine, treated acromegaly and Cushing’s disease with particle beams and measured the life span of red blood cells, and that he went with Siri on expeditions to the Andes to study the production of red cells at high altitude. The history also says that 118 lives were lost when the Athenia was sunk and that he was the last person into a lifeboat after saving others.⁠[4][8][22][24]

The Radiation Laboratory operated around the clock, seven days a week; the only time it stood empty was two hours on Monday nights for the Journal Club, at which members exchanged ideas and information. Its engineers, led by William Brobeck, were treated as equal partners with the scientists in experiments.⁠[3]

Besides physicists the laboratory included physicians, biologists and chemists. In 1935 he asked: “Shall we call it nuclear physics or shall we call it nuclear chemistry?”⁠[21]

Oppenheimer and he were very different in temperament but became good friends; Oppenheimer was a frequent participant in the Journal Club, often in debate with him. Before the war he disapproved of the union-organizing activities at the Radiation Laboratory of Oppenheimer and others.⁠[21][3][29]

In 1946 he said: “I endeavor to remain completely non-political.” The American Institute of Physics exhibit describes him as a nominal Republican who had nonetheless voted for Roosevelt through the 1930s.⁠[29]

The American Institute of Physics record lists among those he advised at Berkeley Philip Abelson, Edward Lofgren, Edwin McMillan, Cornelius Tobias, Milton White, Robert R. Wilson and Chien-Shiung WuChien-Shiung WuChien-Shiung Wu (1912–1997) was a Chinese-born American experimental physicist who spent most of her career at Columbia University and worked on the Manhattan Project. Her cobalt-60 beta-decay experiment of 1956–1957, carried out with collaborators, provided the first experimental proof that parity is not conserved in weak interactions.Open the full entry, and also Martin Kamen, whom he advised on the Manhattan Project.⁠[5]

In 1936 Chien-Shiung Wu, newly arrived in the United States, first visited Berkeley, where Luke Chia-Liu YuanLuke Chia-Liu YuanLuke Chia-Liu Yuan (1912–2003) was a Chinese-born American experimental physicist and the husband of the physicist Chien-Shiung Wu; he worked mainly at Brookhaven National Laboratory, where he was a senior physicist. He was elected an academician of Academia Sinica in 1959 and chaired the steering committee of Taiwan’s Synchrotron Radiation Research Center from 1983 to 2002.Open the full entry, a fellow physics student from China, showed her around the campus and introduced her to him; he encouraged her to stay at Berkeley and pursue a Ph.D. He was her official adviser, while she worked under the direct supervision of Emilio Segrè, and she received her doctorate in 1940 with a thesis on the fission products of uranium.⁠[36]

Despite recommendations from him and Segrè, Chien-Shiung Wu could not secure a faculty position at a university and stayed on at the Radiation Laboratory as a postdoctoral fellow after her degree.⁠[37]

Edwin McMillan, Luis W. Alvarez, Melvin Calvin and Glenn T. Seaborg all went on to win the Nobel Prize and continued to describe themselves as members of his team.⁠[38]

The memoir says that in this laboratory those who worked only seventy hours a week were regarded as “not very interested in physics,” and that the Journal Club began as a review of the literature of nuclear physics and became a forum in which the rapidly growing staff discussed its own discoveries. Philip Abelson recalled of the debates with Oppenheimer: “Oppie could always out argue him, but logic or not, Ernest was usually right.” William Brobeck later became an assistant director of the laboratory, which the centennial article also calls the first of the modern laboratories in which experimentalists could choose to collaborate on joint projects.⁠[9][3]

Alvarez wrote that colleagues saw in him almost an aversion to mathematical thought — he would ask to have the physics of a problem explained to him rather than the equations — although he kept his skill in the mathematics of classical electricity and magnetism; that he encouraged his juniors to criticize his own work as vigorously as he criticized theirs, impersonally and without hostility; and that he had some scorn for those who read a meaning into every “bump and wiggle” of a curve.⁠[9]

The American Institute of Physics exhibit contrasts the two: Oppenheimer a cosmopolitan, European-trained abstract theorist, Lawrence a Midwestern Lutheran, an American-trained pragmatic experimentalist and an expert in electronics and fundraising; Oppenheimer, Robert Serber, Melba Phillips and other Berkeley theorists helped to foster the laboratory’s experimental program.⁠[21]

Visitors came to the laboratory to learn cyclotron technique, and to those who could not come he sent blueprints and experienced builders; many of the builders of cyclotrons elsewhere had spent time in his laboratory. His scientific recruits called themselves “Lawrence’s boys.”⁠[21][14]

Part One of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory history says one of the most valuable of all his recruits, the mechanical engineer William Brobeck, came from Hollywood, and that during the 1930s the laboratory’s staff grew from five to 60 members.⁠[14]

Alvarez wrote that he had a distaste for the limelight and let policy makers know his views as an individual available for consultation, never as a spokesman for a pressure group, and that the accuracy of his predictions made leaders in government and industry value his counsel.⁠[9]

The Research Corporation urged him to patent the cyclotron; after an engineer at Raytheon applied for a patent on a similar circular accelerator, he filed his own application, and the patent was granted in 1934.⁠[20]

The cyclotron was patented in his name, but he never asked for royalties and encouraged and helped laboratories around the world to build cyclotrons. He was also the legal inventor of the calutron isotope separator and assigned the patent rights to the United States government for a fee of one dollar.⁠[3]

In the early 1950s he developed a grid-type color television picture tube, known as the Lawrence tube or Chromatron, with the support of Paramount Pictures; in his last years he received dozens of patents relating to color television.⁠[10][9]

In the late 1960s a Japanese company used the tube in its portable color television sets; the memoir by Luis W. Alvarez mentions Sony’s plan to introduce it to the American market in 1967.⁠[10][9]

The American Institute of Physics exhibit says he at first resisted patenting, since like many scientists before the war he did not think of academic research as a money-making business, and that it was fear of an industrial monopoly that led him to file. The memoir says the cyclotron patents went to the Research Corporation, which never asked for royalties, and that he thought it unwise to foster the patenting of scientific discoveries for personal profit, often saying that “patent consciousness” might turn back the pages of progress. Alvarez also wrote that he greatly enjoyed the luxuries that came with wealth.⁠[20][9][3]

He called the color television work his “hobby,” taken up to divert his mind from the pressures of his other duties; the memoir says the business problems of financing proved harder than the technical ones and that the Chromatron was not produced in the United States but was being sold in Japan when Alvarez wrote. The Bancroft Library’s collection guide traces the work to an old interest in television, which led him to take up a color television tube in the early 1950s, and notes that his papers contain little about the tube; the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory centennial article of 2001 said the tube was still in use.⁠[9][10][10][3]

In 1937 he received the Elliot Cresson Medal of the Franklin Institute, the Research Corporation Prize, the Comstock Prize of the National Academy of Sciences and the Hughes Medal of the Royal Society, and was elected to the American Philosophical Society.⁠[9][5]

W. D. Coolidge, presenting the Comstock Prize, said that the course he had chosen called for “boldness and faith and persistence to a degree rarely matched.”⁠[12]

His later awards included the Duddell Medal (1940), the Holley Medal (1942), the Medal for Merit (1946), the Faraday Medal (1952), the American Cancer Society Medal (1954), the Enrico Fermi Award of the Atomic Energy Commission (1957) and the Sylvanus Thayer Award (1958); in 1948 he was made an officer of the French Légion d’honneur.⁠[9][5]

Among the universities that gave him honorary degrees were the University of South Dakota (1936), Yale University and Princeton UniversityPrinceton UniversityPrinceton University is a private university and Ivy League member in Princeton, New Jersey. Chartered on October 22, 1746 as the College of New Jersey, it moved to Princeton in 1756 and adopted its present name in 1896. Undergraduate education leads to A.B. and B.S.E. degrees and emphasizes small-group discussion, independent research and residential college life. Graduate education spans the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences and engineering. As of October 2026, Christopher L. Eisgruber was president. Its 2026–27 operating budget was $3.407 billion, including $342 million for undergraduate aid.Open the full entry (both 1937), the University of MichiganUniversity of MichiganThe University of Michigan is a university founded in Detroit in 1817 that moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1837; it is governed by a statewide-elected Board of Regents and also has campuses in Dearborn and Flint.Open the full entry (1938), the University of Chicago and Harvard University (both 1941), McGill University (1946) and the University of GlasgowUniversity of GlasgowThe University of Glasgow is a research university in Glasgow, Scotland. Founded in 1451, it describes itself as the fourth oldest university in the UK, and it is a member of the Russell Group.Open the full entry (1951).⁠[9]

He became an honorary member of the USSR Academy of Sciences in 1943 and a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1952, and from 1944 he was a trustee of the Carnegie Institution of Washington.⁠[9]

The memoir’s list also has honorary degrees from Stevens Institute of Technology (1937), Rutgers University (1941), the University of PennsylvaniaUniversity of PennsylvaniaThe University of Pennsylvania, commonly called Penn, is a private research university and Ivy League member in Philadelphia. It traces its origins to a 1740 charity-school project; Benjamin Franklin proposed his academy in 1749, classes began in 1751, and a 1791 merger established the institution under its present name. Penn has 12 schools, with undergraduate education concentrated in arts and sciences, engineering, nursing and Wharton. Enrollment totaled 29,384 in fall 2025, and the fiscal 2025 endowment was $24.81 billion. As of October 2026, J. Larry Jameson was president, with his term scheduled to end on June 30, 2027.Open the full entry (1942), the University of British Columbia (1947), and the University of Southern CaliforniaUniversity of Southern CaliforniaThe University of Southern California (USC) is a private research university in Los Angeles, California, planned by a group led by Judge Robert Maclay Widney and opened to students in 1880.Open the full entry and the University of San Francisco (both 1949). The NobelPrize.org biography counts honorary doctorates from thirteen American universities and one British, Glasgow.⁠[9][4]

The list also records membership of the American Scandinavian Foundation (1942), the Newcomen Society (1948–1951) and the Physical Society of Japan (1954); honorary membership of the Bohemian Club and the California Academy of Sciences (both 1940) and of the Royal Irish Academy of Science (1948); and honorary fellowships of Leland Stanford Junior University, the National Institute of Sciences of India and the Institute of Medicine of Chicago (all 1941), the Royal Society of Edinburgh (1946), the Physical Society (1948) and the Indian Academy of Sciences (1953).⁠[9]

Some details are given variously: the NobelPrize.org biography spells the Franklin Institute medal “Elliott Cresson Medal”; both it and the memoir attribute the Duddell Medal to the “Royal Physical Society”; the memoir names the American Society of Mechanical Engineers as the giver of the Holley Medal and lists the Research Corporation award as a “Prize and Plaque.” The text by Glenn T. Seaborg on the U.S. Department of Energy site says his were the very first Enrico Fermi Award and the first Sylvanus Thayer Award. Birge said the Comstock Prize was awarded only once in five years. The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory centennial article says he won virtually every major award in his field.⁠[4][9][12][8][3]

On October 15, 1947, he gave a Silliman Lecture at Yale University on the cyclotron.⁠[21]

The Atomic Energy Commission established annual Lawrence Awards, in recognition of his central role in the development of atomic energy, to honor the work of young scientists; the awards are still given annually by the U.S. Department of Energy.⁠[29]

His personal papers and the administrative records of the Radiation Laboratory are held by the Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley, in 48 cartons and 79 reels of microfilm; they were transferred by the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in 1972 and 1973, and Mary Blumer Lawrence gave additional papers in 1974.⁠[10]

The American Institute of Physics exhibit credits him with creating the model of the big-science laboratory, which spread through the Manhattan Project and the national laboratories.⁠[29][21]

The same exhibit notes that European physicists in the 1930s made discoveries with less funding, fewer people, smaller devices and lower energies, as when John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton in Cambridge knocked alpha particles out of lithium nuclei with artificially accelerated protons in 1932.⁠[21]

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory describes him as its founder and holds that his team-based approach to research became the model for the U.S. Department of Energy’s system of national laboratories.⁠[25]

The historians Richard Hewlett and Oscar Anderson wrote: “His daring, courage, and irrepressible optimism were contagious.”⁠[11]

Glenn T. Seaborg compared the importance of the cyclotron for nuclear science to that of Galileo’s telescope for astronomy.⁠[12]

Luis W. Alvarez wrote: “For those who had the good fortune to be close to Lawrence both personally and scientifically, he will always seem a giant among men.”⁠[3]

On the centennial of his birth in 2001, Richard C. Atkinson, president of the University of California, called him in a statement the university’s most influential physicist and said that his multidisciplinary approach had become the model for national laboratories across the United States.⁠[16]

Luis W. Alvarez also wrote that he would always be remembered as the inventor of the cyclotron but should be remembered too as the inventor of the modern way of doing science. His biographer Herbert Childs called him “an American genius, a success story in the true Horatio Alger genre,” and Charles V. Shank, director of the laboratory in 2001, said: “This laboratory is his legacy.” The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory history says he is remembered as “the Father of Big Science,” and the laboratory’s site says that in his day he was a national figure and celebrity scientist.⁠[3][22][25][9]

Glenn T. Seaborg judged his scientific accomplishments almost unique in his generation, called him a foremost symbol of the rise of indigenous American science in the twentieth century, credited him with bringing engineering into the laboratory and with a new pattern of large-scale research by groups, and wrote that rarely if ever had any person given so many others the opportunity of a career in science in so short a time.⁠[12]

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory calls him “the architect of team research in basic science on a grand scale,” and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Nobel page says that the laboratory’s founder “invented both the cyclotron and the modern team approach to big science”; Part Three of the laboratory’s history calls him “an American genius of Norwegian extract.”⁠[17][25][22]

Hewlett and Anderson went on to write that he inspired his staff to sweat over tedious jobs with no thought of time, his superiors in the university to cut red tape and his seniors in Washington to see heady visions of an early weapon. The U.S. Department of Energy history says he was first and foremost a physicist but perhaps most influential as a leader and promoter, and the Bancroft Library’s collection guide speaks of his remarkable gift for getting financial support and says that his enthusiasm was infectious.⁠[11][10]

Summing up his legacy, the American Institute of Physics exhibit says the Berkeley and Livermore laboratories later served as two of the main centers of the Human Genome Project, and that, having helped to build the first atomic bombs, they drove ahead into what it calls a dangerous arms race with the Soviet Union in the firm belief that they were thus preventing a nuclear war. Richard C. Atkinson’s statement says his was the first Nobel Prize awarded to a member of the University of California faculty and that his unselfish willingness to share the resources of his laboratory set a standard for public service.⁠[29][16]

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory: Official website: https://www.lbl.gov/ (opens in a new window).⁠[25]

The Lawrence Hall of Science: Official website: https://lawrencehallofscience.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[35]

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory: Official website: https://www.llnl.gov/ (opens in a new window).⁠[39]