The Price of Altruism Read online

  On warm days George would make the thirty-minute walk from the university down to Lake Michigan and offer to apply girls’ sun lotion as they lay bathing on its shore. He was an oddball, Al thought, an oddball among oddballs, never quite grasping his relation to the world. In the fall he joined the Ellis Eating Co-Op, made up mostly of Jewish students. Al would soon be leaving for the Engineer Corps, and besides, $4.83 was a good deal for twenty meals ($.03 extra charge for additional beverages).22

  “What do you expect of Jews?” George would say loudly while waiting in the queue, somehow missing the point that anti-Semitic jibes might actually off end anyone, not to mention Al. At first it seemed meaningless enough, just kind of strange, really. After a while, though, it was pissing people off. The more irritated the Ellis gang became, the more George pursued them. In a move that baffled every one, he declared a “battle against the non-Aryans,” and then proceeded directly to join the Jewish Ellis Housing Co-Op.23

  He was taking dancing lessons, alone, at Arthur Murray’s. Angular and off rhythm, he seemed lost in a weird and mechanical internal world. Some put it down to geekiness compounded by the trauma of losing a father, and let it go, but most found it difficult to “get” him. Whether oblivious or spiteful, detached or goading, to George it all seemed like one big game. He was positively titillated by attention, even when it was negative. In the spirit of their off beat humor, Al counseled his friend to plead freedom of speech when the constitution-touting co-op finally put up a vote to oust him. It didn’t help. George was a contrarian; he got his kicks from pushing the limits just as hard as he possibly could.24

  Sometimes Al wondered whether his friend was slightly nuts. Then he’d shrug the thought away with a forgiving smile. Between manic bench-pressing, supercilious racism, and all-nighters crutched on Benzedrine, George, he knew, was “just George” and that was that. When he’d question him about his offensive remarks George would offer an innocent glance and shrug his shoulders. He knew that people thought him awkward, but it didn’t bother him, he claimed. Sometimes deeper feelings would escape, like slivery rays of sunlight penetrating a cloud. “It helps my morale,” he wrote to a friend, “to learn that everyone doesn’t dislike me.”25

  In the spring the “Mecca of the caffeine addicts,” the Coffee Shop, was appropriated by the army, and with it the “last vestige” of peacetime campus life.26 In the short time that George had been at Chicago, the university had undergone momentous changes. It had shifted from support from endowment to tuition fees, from individuals to corporations, from private donors to government funding. By 1944, 198 federal contracts had been executed, all on a not-for-profit basis. The university budget had tripled. Civilian enrollment was down 30 percent from the prewar level, and the normal ratio of three men to two women had reversed itself, and worse.27

  But things were beginning to change. With America already well mobilized, university training programs across the country began to close one by one. As the G.I. Bill came in, the army units went out, and regular university life at Chicago, it seemed, was actually returning to normal.

  Or so people thought. In truth enormous resources were now being spent on a top-secret underground project. In 1939 Albert Einstein had sent a letter to President Roosevelt, urging him to call upon the nation’s resources to develop atomic weapons to fight the Nazis. Roosevelt complied, and within a year scientists at Cal Tech and Columbia had theoretically demonstrated the awesome explosive potentials of the isotope uranium 235 and an element just recently discovered called plutonium. Soon after Pearl Harbor a group led by the Nobel laureate Arthur H. Compton was set up by the government for consolidating plutonium research at Chicago. The outfit, called the Metallurgical, or “Met,” Lab, was the cover given to Compton’s facility, and it was tucked away behind the ivy-covered sandstone facade and glistening rectangular windows of unassuming Eckhart Hall.28

  The Manhattan Project charged Compton with producing chain-reacting “piles” of uranium to convert to plutonium, with finding ways to separate the two, and, ultimately, with building an atomic bomb. As George had been innocently taking his undergraduate Organic Combustion Analysis and Differential Equation examinations, Glenn T. Seaborg and his team at the university secretly isolated the first weighable amount of plutonium from uranium, irradiated in cyclotrons.

  But there was still the business of building uranium-and-graphite piles (later called reactors) that could be brought to critical mass in a controlled, self-sustaining nuclear reaction. When a labor strike prevented such work at a designated laboratory at the Argonne Forest thirty miles southwest of Chicago, the famed Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, together with Martin Whittaker and Walter Zinn, set out to build a pile in a squash court under abandoned stands in the west wing of Stagg Field. The pile was a crude construction, made of black bricks and wooden timber, but, miraculously, it worked. On the bitterly cold day of December 2, 1942—unknown to George, his fellow students and professors at Chicago, and practically everyone else in the world—the pile went critical at 3:53 in the afternoon. The nuclear age had dawned.29

  George graduated in September 1943, Phi Beta Kappa. A star in the Department of Chemistry, he was awarded the Eli Lilly Fellowship and invited to continue for his doctorate. Starting off on enzyme chemistry, his project quickly changed. He’d be working now under the supervision of a Dr. Samuel Schwartz, he was told, and joining the Manhattan Project.

  A medical doctor and research scientist from the University of Minnesota, Schwartz was the son of Russian Jewish immigrants who had grown up poor in north Minneapolis. One of seven children, he sold candy and ice cream as a boy to help his family, and after high school snagged a job washing beakers in a lab at the university. The head of the lab, C. J. Watson, was a bigwig at the medical school, and, noticing his quick mind, took Schwartz under his wing. Watson sent him to medical school, and the investment paid off. Now at the Manhattan Project at the Met Lab in Chicago, the bearded, broad-smiling Schwartz headed a twenty-five-man team studying the biological effects of atomic radiation and metals. Day in and day out, George would walk up the sandstone steps of the George Herbert Jones Chemistry Building, nodding hello to the namesake’s bronze bust as he whisked through the entrance hall and down to the lab.30

  His new project was technical and had nothing to do with enzymes. If an atomic bomb was built and ended up being used, small traces of toxic uranium would find their way into human bodies. In order to be able to treat such people, a sensitive method had to be devised to help detect the traces of uranium. A generation earlier a pair of researchers at the Carnegie Institute had shown that the intensity of uranium fluorescence is greatly increased by fusion with sodium fluoride, and that its light, therefore, could be measured. The method was all right but needed to be made better. It was a needle-in-a-haystack problem, and George would try to solve it.31

  He went to work under a veil of secrecy. How to best detect these tiny amounts of harmful substance? Besides the chemistry of the analytical procedure there was also the construction of suitable photoelectric fluorophotometers. It was a task that brought back childhood memories of Display and challenged his talents as a physicist and tinkerer. Various Manhattan Project teams across the country were working on the problem, and the pressure was on. Identical sets of thirty urine samples containing known amounts of uranium were prepared at the Rochester Project, and sent for analysis to seven of the strongest competitors. In March 1945 a uranium analysis conference was held at the University of Rochester, New York, to present the results. Six of the groups had completed the analysis. Of these, one employed spectroscopy and the rest fluorescence. Statistical analysis showed that the method devised by the Chicago group was the most sensitive and accurate, and George returned to Eckhart Hall with a winning smile. Aloof and often indifferent to people, he had emerged the champion of sensitivity with molecules and photons.32

  But science and life, by some mysterious osmosis, were beginning to leak into each other. It was around
this time that he met Julia Madigan, a dark-haired zoology graduate of the University of Michigan who had arrived at the Project after two years in medical school. On her mother’s side, it was thought, she was the daughter of immigrant German Jews who had converted on the boat, and on her father’s of Roman Catholic Irish who’d fled the great potato famine in the 1850s. Raised in the small paper mill town of Munising, Michigan, Julia’s mother, Barbara Kinde, was the telegraph operator in the Upper Peninsula town of Marquette, and her father, James, the train station manager. With the help of two of his younger brothers, Frank and Michael, James bought the local hardware store, and before long the Madigans had secured profitable Forest Service contracts revolving around the logging trade with Canada. The Madigans were hardworking community people, and gave thanks for their prosperity by generously donating to the local church. When she came of age they sent little Julia to attend Sacred Heart with the nuns.

  When Al Somit heard from his best friend that he was beginning to fall for her, he rubbed his eyes in disbelief. Julia was sexually conservative, George naturally prurient; Julia was a devout believer, George a militant atheist; Julia was mercurial, George a prankster; Julia respected convention, but George reveled in extremism. Working together at the Manhattan Project, the two couldn’t even agree on the bomb (George was for, Julia against). What was worse, they were both opinionated and stubborn as goats. Still, a Madigan family legend had it that a cadaver’s hand had slipped and grazed her chest in med school: “Julia could even raise the dead,” the professor had said to the class. When she had arrived in Chicago looking for a flat, the landlady snapped, “I don’t rent to Jews,” to which Julia responded, “But I’m Irish!” and stormed off. She had high cheekbones, full lips, and black eyes. She was short. She was curvacious. And to George she was absolutely divine.33

  On the afternoon of May 7, 1945, Julia and George ran out of the lab and rushed to the quadrangle. With its armies in total collapse and its cities in rubble, the Third Reich had finally been defeated. The campus was abuzz. From the lofty gray stone tower of Rockefeller Memorial there floated a melody, the university magazine would later report, “more majestic than a thousand muffled drums.” The earth literally “shook under the iron clangor of the mammoth Bourbon bells.” In the chapel students crowded in the pews, seated, knees hugged to chin, before the altar, clinging to vantage points in the balconies. The sunlight poured into the vast chamber from the multicolored Gothic windows, as two thousand people stood to sing the “Star-Spangled Banner.” The war in Europe was over.34

  Just as people were getting used to the newfound peace in Europe, in August the United States dropped a uranium bomb on Hiroshima, and three days later, a plutonium one on Nagasaki. That week George’s uncle and namesake died in the Midwest. “From what I have learned from the next world,” Alice now wrote to him from New York about her brother:

  He will be far happier there than here. I have already had some remarkable messages come thru relative to him, one from Dear-Dear who appeared to a psychic friend of mine who sat right beside me, described her, and repeated all she said to me. Aunt Julia has also been coming right into my body since I visited Cousin Bessie, also mediumistic, in Battle Creek. Aunt J. seized my right hand and arm there as we sat together, then took control of my left hand and arm, and when I asked her to demonstrate how she tramped thru the Heliker’s house last summer on the first anniversary of her death (did I tell you?) she controlled my entire body suddenly and bent it over as she was bent, and whirled me right across the room…. At home she clapped my fists together and said “Goody, goody, goody, goody, goody” over and over again when I asked her if she was happy that the war was ended.35

  It seemed a rather strange way to express her thoughts about the most momentous event of the century. But then she added: “Hurrah, George, Hurrah! Wonderful to have it come so soon, and that is what all you chemists did for the world. I’m so proud of you, not yet 23, that you had something to do with it.”

  George was not amused. “Please do not ever again write to me or speak to me about ‘vibrations,’ ‘batteries,’ ‘guides,’ about dead people throwing you around the room, or anything else of that sort. I do not ever want to hear you refer to such things again, and I just won’t reply to any letter in which you mention supernatural phenomena.”36

  A few months later the Coffee Shop on campus reopened.37 Even though the war was over, George couldn’t yet tell anyone about what he was doing. In August 1946 he handed in his thesis: “Fluorescence Studies of Uranium, Plutonium, Neptonium, and Americium.” “I concluded my writing,” he summarized to a friend,

  with a 59 hour sleepless period, during which I also practically cut out eating. When my benzedrene gave out and I was too busy to get more, I had a surprising auditory hallucination for several hours. But now that’s all finished.38

  The previous April the University of Chicago had accepted a letter contract from the government to operate an Argonne National Laboratory, as yet unnamed and not yet in official existence. On July 1 the name of the Met Lab was officially changed to the Argonne National Laboratory. And on August 1 President Harry S. Truman signed the Atomic Energy Act, ushering in the age of civilian nuclear power.

  At convocation that summer at the end of the month, Vice President Lawrence Kimpton spoke on “Science and the Humanities” followed by the singing of the “Alma Mater.” It was a happy occasion, but there was something weighty and somber about it, too. Between the verses (“Of all fair moth-ers, fair-est she / Most wise of all that wis-est be”) George could take a moment to consider his future. He had taken a number of courses as an undergraduate in physiology and on the nervous system, and although the problems of biology interested him more, he felt a much greater aptitude for physics. Kicked out for his grades five short years earlier, he was set to return to Harvard as a chemistry instructor, and had secured an Argonne consultancy at $2.50 an hour. The arrangement would give him a lot of free time to think even if it wouldn’t make him rich. He was ponderous as he packed up and got on the train for Cambridge. “Without the atomic bomb the prospects of civilization would be dubious enough,” President Hutchins wrote that fall in his reports to the friends of the university. “Now that we have it, they are black,” and civilization is “on the brink of catastrophe.”39

  On June 28, 1947, Julia and George were married in a small ceremony in Munising. George’s childhood auburn hair had turned darker, and with his glasses and suit and tie, he looked more grown up. He was dashingly handsome—in spite of the slacks pulled up slightly too high. Julia’s Irish family expressed concern that he wasn’t Catholic, and in the face of his atheism made him agree to raise his future kids in the Catholic Church.40 He had spent the last year as an instructor of chemistry at Harvard, living like a student in the dorms at Winthrop House. Now the newlyweds were on their way back to Cambridge, to settle in a small home on Linnaean Street, just a ten minute walk north from George’s office at the Mallinckrodt Chemical Laboratory Building.

  Almost everyone in the department was a big name: There were Professors Woodward and Bartlett and Fieser in organic; Rochow and Lingane in inorganic; and Kistiakowsky, Wilson, and Doty in physical. The atmosphere was serious, matter-of-fact. At least three young fellow instructors of chemistry—Walter Gensler, Edward King, and Leonard Nash—would go on to long and distinguished careers in academia. But George was different. He’d left behind his strange antics and was becoming more withdrawn. A “loner who kept to himself,” he was hardly known in the department. Academic life, with its teaching and administrative work, wasn’t for him. To his colleagues he seemed “wholly disengaged.”41

  Looking for a way out, he found an opening in a childhood pastime. The university chess team required two faculty members; his old Harvard classmate Lloyd Shapley, now doing economics, invited him to join as Top Board. It was a godsend. There was practice and there were meets. And then there was the Argonne consultancy, which would take him on weekends to Chicago—a
nything to keep him away from the department.42

  In January the Atomic Energy Commission had designated Argonne National Laboratory its principal reactor-development center. Work on a liquid-metal-cooled, fast neutron reactor, dubbed “Zinn’s Infernal Pile,” together with the first nuclear submarine plant, was already under way.43 George was making only $3,500 a year at Harvard, and the pocket change from Argonne wasn’t much of a boost. And so when Annamarie Louise Barbara Juliet Price came along on May 4, 1948, he began to feel the pressure of the provider. He knew that Julia didn’t like him traveling so much—increasingly she let him know it. Besides, the real action at Argonne was in energy and reactors, not in measuring fallout in people’s urine.

  Other pastures suddenly seemed a lot greener. That summer of 1948 Claude Shannon published the first part of a general theory using mathematics to quantify information.44 Immediately it caught George’s attention. He liked things like that: It was elegant and precise. It was simple. It got rid of clutter, told it like it was, altogether cut to the matter. More important, it seemed to be leading in the direction the world was heading, and George wanted in.

  In August he and Julia and Annamarie packed up at Linnaean Street and headed down to Morristown. With an offer doubling his salary, and far from the pressure and tedium of students and examination papers at Harvard, George was going to work for Bell Labs.45

  Morristown, New Jersey, was a small town but its history was rich. It was there in 1777 that George Washington encamped with his Continental Army, to rest and spread the news to the world of their victories at Trenton and Princeton. There Samuel F. B. Morse, together with Alfred Vail, built the first telegraph at the Speedwell Ironworks in 1838, sending the first-ever telegraph message: “A patient waiter is no loser.” And it was there that George and his family now settled, to join the new information revolution.46