Word: projects
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...work moved to the University of Chicago when the Manhattan Project consolidated its operations there, culminating in the assembly of the first full-scale pile, CP-1, on a doubles squash court under the stands of the university football field in late 1942. Built up in layers inside wooden framing, it took the shape of a doorknob the size of a two-car garage--a flattened graphite ellipsoid 25 ft. wide and 20 ft. high, weighing nearly 100 tons. Dec. 2 dawned to below-zero cold. That morning the State Department announced that 2 million Jews had perished in Europe...
Fermi died prematurely of stomach cancer in Chicago in 1954. He had argued against U.S. development of the hydrogen bomb when that project was debated in 1949, calling it "a weapon which in practical effect is almost one of genocide." His counsel went unheeded, and the U.S.-Soviet arms race that ensued put the world at mortal risk. But the discovery of how to release nuclear energy, in which he played so crucial a part, had long-term beneficial results: the development of an essentially unlimited new source of energy and the forestalling, perhaps permanently, of world-scale...
...Shockley proved to be a particular challenge. He extended his competitive nature even to his working relationships with the young physicists he supervised. Beyond that, he developed traits that we came to view as paranoid. He suspected that members of his staff were purposely trying to undermine the project and prohibited them from access to some of the work. He viewed several trivial events as malicious and assigned blame. He felt it necessary to check new results with his previous colleagues at Bell Labs, and he generally made it difficult for us to work together...
Watson drifted from pure science into administration. As director of the molecular-biology lab at Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y., he turned it into a scientific powerhouse. He also served as head of the Human Genome Project, absorbing some fallout from the high-energy ethical debates whose fuse he and Crick had lighted nearly four decades earlier...
Figuring out how the chemical operations essential for survival are carried out within every cell of living creatures (people included) is a task dominated by complexity. The Human Genome Project aims to specify the location and structure of all 100,000 or so genes in the human body. But that catalog, which will soon be completed, will be simply the springboard for understanding what all the genes do. Only when the network of their interactions with one another has been mapped will enduring benefits follow: in the surer design of drugs, in the growth of replacement organs, in the early...