Word: berkeleys
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ROBERT S. COHEN Berkeley, Calif...
...first Abomb, U.S. scientists urgently needed one vital component: a chemical element that was fissionable (explosive) but not so radioactive that it would disintegrate before the big bang was touched off. The bomb builders found what they wanted at the University of California's famed Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley, where Drs. Glenn Seaborg and Edwin McMillan had put together some synthetic plutonium, element 94. Until then, plutonium was no more than a lab curiosity, but it proved to be properly fissionable, and it was so slightly radioactive that only half of it would disintegrate in 24,100 years...
Today, element 103 and its short-lived relatives are of interest only to theoretical physicists. They have no known practical value-but neither did plutonium when it was first manufactured at Berkeley more than 20 years...
...Berkeley element makers-Almon Larsh, 32, and Robert Latimer, 26-are native Californians. Larsh, the son of a traveling salesman from Oklahoma, graduated from Caltech as an electrical engineer. Chemist Latimer, a Berkeley graduate, was born with a silver test tube in his mouth: his father, Wendell Latimer, was a famous chemist and head of Berke ley's department of chemistry. But the distinction brought young Robert no favors at the Radiation Lab. His own scientific skill earned him the right to handle the intricate machinery with which new elements are manufactured...
Chemist Torbjorn Sikkeland, 37, was born in Norway and educated at the University of Oslo. In 1957 he came to Berkeley as an exchange scientist and won a permanent place on the Radiation Lab's cosmopolitan staff. He is the only one of the four with a Ph.D. But the lack of an advanced degree is no handicap to the others; top-rank laboratories admit that doctorates are nice decorations, but the lab directors know only too well that the degrees often mean little more than three extra years of unprofitable study...