Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley

Through war work on extraction methods for plutonium and uranium, Calvin became acquainted with Ernest O. Lawrence (1901-1958), head of the Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley which played an important role in the initial production of plutonium. On his suggestion, a bioorganic group was founded at the Radiation Laboratory under Calvin s direction. This may have been the first use of the term bioorganic in an official way. The initial task for Calvin s group was to use the supply... 

Shortly after Arthur Pardee came back to Bushnell fi"om the Dry Tormgas Islands, he left and joined a war project in the Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley. Captain Nolen was furious. He said Pardee had abandoned real war research at Bushnell and fled to ivory tower research in the University at Berkeley. Only later could it be said that Pardee had left Florida to work at Berkeley on the nuclear bomb program. 

Ernest s brother, John Lawrence, vdio received his MD at Harvard in 1930, joined the Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley as a Research Assodate in 1936. In February 1936 with his brother, Ernest, as co-author, he published an artide on the biological action of neutron rays in (Lawrence and Lawrence, 1936). On Christmas Eve of that year, after successful results in treating leukemia in mice, John carried out the first radiopharmaceutical therapy when he administered a radiophosphorus solution to a 28-year old woman with leukemia. Subsequently this treatment was used to treat patients with polycythemia vera. In 1942, he and his colleagues published their results in Radiology (MLawerence, 1942). 

From 1953 to 1955 Kazuo Shibata joined the research group of Melvin Calvin and Andrew Benson at Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley, California. 

In the spring of 1940 Philip Abelson came to Berkeley for a short vacation. He had been a graduate student in the Radiation Laboratory at the time when fission was announced, and was now at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, where, unknown to McMillan, he had also begun to work on the 2.3-day substance. When McMillan and Abelson discovered their mutual interest, they decided to work together on the problem (51). They soon established the fact that the substance could exist in a reduced and an oxidized state, with valences of four and six, like uranium, which it resembled also in other respects. Using these... 

The chemistry of petroleum will be described here by Melvin Calvin, Professor of Chemistry and member of the Radiation Laboratory at the University of California in Berkeley and one of the world s outstanding organic chemists. Dr. Calvin is Director of the Bio-organic Chemistry Group at the Radiation Laboratory and is noted for his productive research in the chemical processes of photosynthesis. 

The discovery of element 102 was reported at the Nobel Institute for Physics in Stockholm in 1957, but experiments to date attempting to confirm its discovery have not been successful. The element was produced and positively identified, however, at the U.C. Radiation Laboratory in Berkeley in April 1958. It was made by bombarding curium (containing 96 protons) with carbon ions (containing 6 protons). 

I would like to acknowledge the aid of E. K. Hyde of the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory in Berkeley, who kindly made his extensive file on the radlochemlstry of lead available to the author at the beginning of this study and the- perserverance and perspicacity of Miss Nancy Hughes, who typed the drafts arid, final manuscript. 

Plutonium as a chemical element was discovered in 1941 at the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley by Seaborg, McMillan, Kennedy, and Wahl by bombarding a uranium target with deuterons in a cyclotron. It was named after the planet Pluto (no longer considered a planet), which was discovered 10 years earlier, having been discovered right after neptunium. 

The first liquid hydrogen bubble chambers were developed and built at the University of California Radiation Laboratory in Berkeley, and were made sensitive to radiation by means of a vapor expansion system," Since 1953 a number of groups have constructed and used bubble chambers of varying sizes. The largest now in operation is 15 inches in diameter at the University of California Radiation Laboratory, The largest chamber under construction is 72 inches long, and... 

Bromley, L. A., Thermal Conductivity of Gases at Moder ate Pr essur es, University of California Radiation Laboratory, Report No. UCRL-1852, Berkeley, CA (1952). 

Experimental studies soon confirmed all these expectations. The most powerful tool in achieving these results was the cyclotron. Ernest O. Lawrence, its inventor, was born in Canton, South Dakota, on August 8, 1901. He was educated at St. Olaf College and the University of South Dakota, and did graduate work in physics at Minnesota, Chicago, and Yale. The latter university gave him his doctorate in 1925. He remained at Yale until 1928, and was then called to the University of California at Berkeley, where he still remains as Director of the Radiation Laboratory. He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1939. It was due to Lawrence and the cyclotron that California became the outstanding center for the synthesis of new elements, which it still remains (I). 

Work on this element was then begun by Emilio Gino Segre in Italy. Segre was born at Tivoli, Italy, in 1905. He took his doctorate in Rome in 1928 and remained there until 1935. At that time he was named professor of physics at the Royal University of Palermo, where he remained until 1938. He then came to the Radiation Laboratory of the University of California at Berkeley, where he remained, except for the years from 1943 to 1945, which he spent at Los Alamos. He is now professor of physics at the University of California. 

Thus, synchrotron radiation finds more and more use today, although its availability is restricted to the existing synchrotron sites. Some of the well-known sites are the ALS - Advanced Light Source at Berkeley Lab, APS -Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory, NSLS - National Synchrotron Light Source at Brookhaven National Laboratory, SRS -Synchrotron Radiation Source at Daresbury Laboratory, ESRF - European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, and others. ... 

American biochemist Melvin Calvin (born 1911). In the 1950s, Calvin used radioactive isotopes to elucidate the chemical details of the process of photosynthesis. He won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1961. The photograph was taken at the University of California at Berkeley, where Calvin directed the chemical biodynamics laboratory in the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory (later the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory). (Courtesy of Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory/Science Photo Library)... 

He attended the University of California at Berkeley as a national research fellow working in the field of molecular beams, in particular the measurement of the magnetic moment of the proton by a molecular beam method. He became a member of the team at the radiation laboratory under Professor E.O. Lawrence, studying nuclear reactions and their products and helping design and construct cyclotrons. 

This calls for construction of a special hot lab such as this cave room at the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory. 

Mark Rivers received his PhD in Geology and Geophysics from the University of California at Berkeley for studies of the ultrasonic properties of silicate melts. He is currently a Senior Scientist in the Department of Geophysical Sciences and Consortium for Advanced Radiation Sources (CARS) at the University of Chicago. He has been involved in synchrotron radiation research since 1984, is Co-Project Leader for the GeoSoilEnviroCARS beam lines (Sector 13) at the Advanced Photon Source (Argonne National Laboratory, 1L, USA). His current research interests include the application of computed microtomography to problems in earth and environmental sciences. 

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