greg goebel / public domain
* VECTORS is an original newsletter of fact and commentary on aerospace, technology, science, and historical topics.
* Modern medical imaging technology is based on a set of technologies that operate over a range of principles. One of the most important, "positron emission tomography", provides detailed observations of the internal state of patients from the emissions of radioactive materials injected into them.
The discovery of radioactivity early in the 20th century led eventually to the use of radioactive "tracers" in biomedical applications. A patient could be injected with a solution of short-lived radioactive material, and the movement of the material through the patient's body could be then be traced. Radioactive tracers were a big step forward, but they left something to be desired. Traditionally, the tracer atoms were isotopes of heavy elements not generally found in the body, with the atoms building up in tissues and then demonstrating their accumulation on a photographic plate, which recorded the gamma-ray emission produced by the atoms. The heavy atoms used could sometimes interfere with the body processes they were supposed to be tracking.
Oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon are common in our bodies, and so their short-lived radioactive isotopes oxygen-15 (with a half-life of two minutes), nitrogen-13 (ten minutes), and carbon-11 (20 minutes) are compatible with our biological processes. These radioactive isotopes emit a positron -- an antimatter electron -- when they decay; if they decay inside the body the positron quickly encounters an electron, with the two particles annihilating each other, being converted into two gamma-ray photons that fly off in exactly opposite directions.
Once this decay process was understood, it seemed attractive to use it for biomedical applications. If a patient was injected with a positron emitter, the opposed gamma-ray photons could be picked up by sensors on either side of the patient, allowing the site of the electron-positron annihilation -- presumably very close to the location of the radioactive isotope that produced the positron -- to be pinned down by measuring the difference in time of arrival of the two photons. In the early 1950s, Gordon Brownell and William Sweet of the Massachusetts General Hospital experimented with such a device, pinning down the location of a brain tumor in a patient by injecting a radioactive tracer into the patient and then rotating an opposed set of detectors around the patient's head.
One big problem with the scheme at the time was the fact that the appropriate tracer isotopes decayed very quickly, which made them safer for use in patients but also meant that they had to be synthesized in a cyclotron particle accelerator shortly before use. Another problem was that results from a scan were in the form of raw data that had to be deciphered with difficulty by an expert. However, to some the potential was obvious. In 1966, the late Michel Ter-Pogossian, then head of the division of radiological sciences at Washington University In Saint Louis, and Henry Wagner, professor of radiology and medicine at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, published an influential paper advocating use of positron emitters in medical imaging. At the same time, the emerging computer revolution led to the introduction of "computed tomography", in which computer power was used to render piles of raw X-ray data obtained from axial scans of patients into much more easily inspected imagery.
In late 1972, Dr. Ter-Pogossian and Michael Phelps, a young assistant professor who worked in Dr. Ter-Pogossian's lab at Washington University, went to a discussion of computed tomography and came back home thinking it would make medical imaging using positron emitters much more useful. Their lab group began work on prototypes. To obtain more funding, in 1973 Dr. Phelps got in touch with Terry Douglas, the chief engineer of the life-sciences division of EG&G ORTEC, a scientific instrument company in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
Long-distance conversations between the two men led to Phelps driving from Saint Louis to Oak Ridge in his Volkswagen Beetle, accompanied by his colleagues Nizar Mullani and Edward Hoffman. They sold Dr. Douglass on the concept and he loaned them some equipment needed for the research effort.
An early prototype of what they called the "positron emission transaxial tomograph" machine -- the "transaxial" would soon fall out, giving the acronym PET -- consisted of a table with a hole in it that was ringed by gamma-ray detectors, but by 1974 the group had built a PET scanner that was modern in form, with the patient on a sliding bed and the gamma-ray sensors arranged as a vertical hexagonal ring. By this time, the researchers and EG&G ORTEC had a partnership going, and the first commercial PET scanner, built by EG&G ORTEC, was shipped to the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1976; Dr. Phelps and Dr. Hoffman had moved to UCLA by that time and were able to arrange the purchase of the device.
EG&G ORTEC sold a very small number of PET scanners for research purposes, but the clique that had developed the technology felt the technology had much more potential. And then, in 1983, it all fell into their lap: EG&G ORTEC decided to sell off the company's life sciences division, so Dr. Douglass and some of his colleagues managed to obtain $2.5 million USD in funding to buy up the PET technology operation, forming a company named "Computer Technology & Imaging (CTI)". Dr. Phelps was an adviser to CTI.
* Just having a whizzy new imaging device wasn't enough to make PET take off, however; other elements of the system had to come into place. One was to use radioactive fluorine-18 as a component of a sugar named "fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG)" and then use the sugar as a tracer. FDG was a very useful tracer, because fluorine-18 has a relatively long half-life -- 109 minutes, five times as long as carbon-11 -- making it easier to obtain and handle. Even more usefully, cells absorb glucose at a rate proportional to their cell activity, and cancer cells generally are very active. A PET scan of a patient dosed with radioactive FDG would provide a map of cancer hot spots in the patient's body.
It took some time to recognize the usefulness of FDG. A team at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, New York, synthesized an FDG radiotracer in 1976, but it took several years for their report to be published in a scientific journal. With the emergence of PET, FDG began to come of age.
However, another major system component had to be put into place to make PET a major success: a cyclotron to synthesize radioactive isotopes. In 1985, CTI bought Cyclotron Corporation, a bankrupt cyclotron maker, and adapted the technology for hospital use. By 1986, CTI could offer a complete system with PET scanner and cyclotron for $2 million USD.
In the meantime, the firm's management was looking around for a major corporate partner to help sell PET scanners worldwide. In 1985, Siemens of Germany bought a stake in CTI for $2.5 million USD, and then a few years later bought a 49.9% stake in the company for $30 million USD. (Siemens would buy out CTI completely in 2005 for about $1 billion USD.) In 1990, General Electric bought out Scanditronix, a Swedish competitor to CTI. That same year, the industry set up a non-profit trade association, the Institute for Clinical PET, to educate the public and promote the technology.
By 1991, the medical press was praising the usefulness of PET, with research showing how useful the technology was for brain, heart, and cancer imaging. However, then regulatory issues began to make trouble for PET. The problem was not really the PET scanner in itself, since it was a passive device, but the radioactive tracers, which required US Food & Drug Administration (FDA) approval. The tracers could be and were used, but without FDA approval Medicare would not pay for PET scans.
The problem was that the FDA required clinical trials for the tracers that were just as thorough as if the tracers were a drug. Unfortunately, the Brookhaven team that came up the FDG tracer hadn't bothered to patent it, meaning it was "open source", and so no company wanted to pay for the qualification. Finally, Dr. Phelps pitched the benefits of PET to his friend, Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, and Senator Stevens decided to go to bat for PET. In 1997, he added a provision to the FDA Modernization Act that instructed the FDA to streamline the agency's procedures for qualification of radioactive tracers, and to allow use of the tracers before qualification was obtained. Medicare soon began to reimburse PET scans.
CTI was advancing along other fronts at the time, having set up the "PETNET", a network of pharmacies that could provide radioactive tracers to hospitals, and once Medicare gave the go-ahead, PETNET was available to support expanded use of PET scanners. PET technology began to take off rapidly.
PET was poised for greater things. In 1994 David Townshend, then an assistant professor of radiology at the University of Pittsburgh, and Ronald Nutt, one of the founders of CTI, applied to the US National Institutes of Health for a grant to develop a combined PET / X-ray CT scanner. A prototype was installed at the University of Pittsburgh in 1998, with the first commercial PET/CT scanners going on the market in 2001. Now PET scanners have been largely replaced in the market by the combined PET/CT scanner. According to Dr. Townshend, a PET/CT scanner provides imagery that is easier to interpret and reduces scanning time.
PET has proven extremely valuable in helping to diagnose cancers, diagnose Parkinson's disease and help treat epileptics. It provides a sensitive tool for tracking the effect of drugs to treat tumors, since it can detect if a tumor has been "shut down" even before it starts to shrink. Although use of PET is still much lower than use of CT, PET is a growth market, with the biomedical community still figuring out everything they can do with it.
* Trying to determine the levels of usage of recreational drugs is troublesome: users are not inclined to cooperate with surveys on the matter, and the statistics obtained from drug busts can only reveal the tip of the iceberg. Fritz Soergel, an environmental chemist and director of the Institute for Biomedical & Pharmaceutical Research in Nurenburg, Germany, has come up with a better idea. He and Vererna Jakob, a doctoral student at the institute, travel to different parts of Europe, where they exchange a stash of 300 100-euro bills with locals in bars and other establishments, trading new notes for old notes.
The trick is that the old notes are contaminated with cocaine, with the level of contamination proportional to the level of cocaine use in a locale. The bills are taken back to Nurenburg, where they are analyzed for their cocaine content. The analysis involves soaking the old bills in methanol to extract the residues and then running the residues through a mass spectrometer. The treatment effectively ruins the bills, but the institute has a deal with a local bank that accepts the damaged bills, disposes of them through the appropriate channels, and hands back nice crisp new bills. Still, the institute has an E 30,000 stake in the game, and wandering around with the stash can be a bit nerve-wracking.
Soergel has been doing this for seven years and has been gradually building up a map of cocaine usage around Europe. Nobody's actually sure how the cocaine ends up in the bills; sometimes cocaine is snorted through a rolled-up bill, and since the paper is absorbent, other bills pick it up when stored in a retailer's till or in a bank's money-sorting machines. The dosage in a contaminated bill is very small, maybe a thousandth or less of a dose of cocaine, but still detectable.
Soergel has been playing this game the longest, but others have picked it up as well. Jonathan Bones and Brett Paull, chemists at Dublin City University (DCU) in Ireland, have been finding some of the highest rates of cocaine contamination in euros obtained from Dublin' banks. Bones says that "people have been in denial that there's a cocaine problem" in Ireland, but the evidence provides a "warning light" that things are not all well on the Emerald Isle.
The limitation of using the bills to track cocaine use is that the approach can only determine relative levels of usage. The data so far, incidentally, matches the general impression from other sources that cocaine use is greatest in Spain, with Italy following and Ireland catching up. Researchers are trying to nail down more of the specifics of how the bills are contaminated to see if estimates of actual use statistics can be obtained from them.
Soergel and Jakob have also been using another approach to test for cocaine use: they obtain samples of clean water in a locale and compare them to samples from the output of sewage-treatment plants. Cocaine residues pass into urine and are not much affected by sewage treatment; in effect the researchers are drug-testing an entire city, or a district of one. The idea was actually invented by Roberto Fanelli, a toxicologist at the Mario Negri Institute for Pharmacological Research in Milan, Italy. Fanelli tried it for the first time in 2005, sampling waters of the Po River near Milan. He was originally looking for usage levels of legal pharmaceuticals, but found out that it would work with cocaine residues as well.
A tonne of cocaine is seized by authorities in Germany each year. Soergel's samplings of 29 German rivers gives him an estimate that the actual usage level is on the order of 20 tonnes a year. Fanelli has sampled the waters of London and estimates that the sampling show the use of a kilo of cocaine per every million Londoners every day, which translates roughly into cocaine use by 4% of Londoners in the age range of 15 to 40. The official rate is 2%, which Fanelli regards as being in the ballpark with his estimate.
Water samplings have taken place in the USA, with the White House's Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) obtaining samples from about a hundred wastewater treatment facilities across America. Some municipalities haven't liked the idea of the Federal government drug-testing their cities, and a discussion is underway about concerns and how to answer those concerns.
The ultimate dream is to make drug testing normal at all municipal sewage treatment plants and link the data into computer mapping systems that can interpret it into national maps. Before that can happen, procedures need to be standardized and subjected to rigorous peer review as well as public comment. Advocates believe that the effort will be worthwhile, allowing authorities to determine the worst trouble spots and focus resources on them.
* EMBRACING THE BOMB: In the UK, work on the atomic bomb was moving much more decisively, thanks to Prof Lindemann -- now Lord Cherwell, having been granted a baroncy through the good offices of Winston Churchill. Cherwell rendered the MAUD report down to a brief memorandum for Churchill, only two and a half pages long -- that was still much longer than the prime minister liked, but Cherwell knew the matter was important, and recommended action in relative detail. Churchill gave the go-ahead for further action on 27 August 1941; the British chiefs of staff added their assent on 3 September.
In the meantime, Mark Oliphant had flown to the United States, primarily to work with the Rad Lab on radar development -- but also to find out why reports on MAUD work sent to the USA seemed to disappear into a hole, with little comment being sent back over the Atlantic. When Oliphant called on Briggs, he found that "this inarticulate and unimpressive man had put the reports in a safe and had not shown them to members of his Committee." When Oliphant then met with the said committee, he found that its members had no clue about atomic bombs, one saying: "I thought we were making a power source for submarines."
Exasperated, Oliphant called Ernest Lawrence, and then flew to California at the beginning of September to meet with him. Oliphant told Lawrence about the final MAUD report, which Lawrence hadn't known about, and Lawrence told Oliphant about the progress of work at Berkeley on plutonium -- it was still generally referred to as "element 94" at the time, but the name plutonium is used here for convenience -- and other atomic research there. Oliphant wrote out a summary of the report for Lawrence, and Lawrence called Bush and Conant to arrange meetings with Oliphant.
Oliphant went back east to get a polite hearing from Conant, then a rushed chat with Bush, with neither giving him much encouragement. Even a chat with Fermi seemed unconstructive, with Fermi coming across as very non-committal. The Australian flew back to the UK wondering if he had accomplished anything at all.
* Actually, Oliphant had given the machinery just enough of a kick to get it moving. After Oliphant left California, Lawrence had called Arthur Compton in Chicago to say that the atomic bomb now seemed possible and that it might be the weapon to win the war. Compton was receptive, but he wasn't the person who had to be convinced. Lawrence was scheduled to give a speech in Chicago on 25 September, the same time that Conant would be town to accept an honorary degree. Compton set up a evening meeting at his house with the two men in hopes that Conant might be brought over to their point of view.
When the trio met that evening, Lawrence delivered an impassioned pitch to Conant, with Compton adding his weight on to Lawrence's persuasion. Conant started to turn around, but he still had to test Lawrence: "Ernest, you say you are convinced of the importance of these fission bombs. Are you ready to devote the next several years of your life to getting them made?"
Lawrence was startled -- obviously he hadn't thought out that issue -- but only hesitated for a moment before replying: "If you tell me this is my job, I'll do it."
It would be less accurate to say that Conant was convinced than that he was no longer opposed. He returned to Washington DC and discussed matters with Bush; the two then decided to revise the NAS committee once again to obtain a second report. The committee was expanded by the addition of W.K. Lewis, a chemical engineer with a legendary understanding of the implementation of lab processes on an industrial scale, and a Ukrainian expatriate named George Kistiakowsky, an NDRC chemist from Harvard.
A few weeks later Kistiakowsky told Conant: "It can be made to work. I am 100% sold." Conant accepted Kistiakowsky's judgement as definitive. Conant's conversion obviously influenced Bush, but in early October Bush also obtained the final copy of the MAUD report. It clinched the matter in Bush's mind: on 9 October 1941 he met with President Roosevelt and Vice-President Wallace. The message Bush carried was that atomic bombs were perfectly possible; it remained up to the president as to what to do about it.
Roosevelt regarded it as his decision and his decision alone. He saw, justifiably, the development of the atomic bomb as a military measure and so within his authority as Commander in Chief. What would become known as a "Top Policy" group would advise him on the matter, with the group consisting of Vice-President Wallace, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall, plus Bush and Conant. None of the scientists involved in atomic bomb research were included in the Top Policy group.
The conclusion of the meeting was that Bush was to expedite research but not move on to implementation until instructed by Roosevelt. The immediate problem was one of funding, which as Roosevelt said "would have to come from a special source available for such an unusual purpose ... " The president added: "I can arrange this." The wheels of government were finally starting to turn.
* BUILDING AN ATOMIC PILE: In the meantime, Szilard and Fermi had been working on their first atomic pile. To have a sustained chain reaction, at least one neutron ejected from the fission of a uranium atom needed to cause the fission of another uranium atom. In more formal terms, as Fermi put it, the "reproduction factor k" had to be at least one.
Studies had shown that on average, uranium releases 2.5 neutrons per fission event, which put the maximum value of k as 2.5. Although that was much more than needed for a self-sustaining chain reaction, neutrons were invariably lost during the fission process, and so obtaining a chain reaction was not simple. Complicating the matter was the fact that nuclear processes occur very quickly, and even a reproduction factor slightly greater than one would cause a chain reaction increasing exponentially, cascading out of control in a hurry. There had to be some way of producing a chain reaction but keeping it under control.
Fortunately, research showed that a small fraction, less than a percent, of the neutrons emitted by the fission process were "delayed" neutrons. These delayed neutrons were emitted by the fission fragments after a certain time delay, instead of being emitted by the fission action itself. The time delay involved was surprisingly long, on the order of ten seconds. This means that if the value of k was between 1 and 1.01, the delayed neutrons decided the balance of the chain reaction, and the reaction was slow enough to be controlled.
A large room where the pile could be set up was found in one of Columbia's halls. The pile was built around cubic cans of uranium oxide, 20 centimeters (8 inches) on a side and surrounded with graphite to form cubic "cells" 40 centimeters (16 inches) on a side. There were 288 cans in the pile. It was hard work, and members of the Columbia's football team were hired on to haul the heavy cans of uranium oxide around. Fermi, always a trooper, tried to do his bit with the manual labor but he was outclassed. The first pile was completed in September 1941; it wasn't really expected to demonstrate a chain reaction, instead being seen as a demonstrator to help build a better pile that would be able to do the job. It would also help keep the funding coming in.
A radium-beryllium radioactive neutron source was placed at the bottom to try to promote fission. The neutron flux from the source fell off exponentially through the pile, and so the prototypes was known as an "exponential pile". Adding uranium reduced the slope of the exponential curve by increasing the neutron flux through fission. To perform measurements, strips of rhodium foil were inserted into slots in the graphite blocks. Rhodium becomes radioactive under neutron bombardment, allowing the neutron flux to be measured. The value of k obtained by the first pile was only 0.87 -- not good enough, but definitely a step in the right direction.
* PLANNING FOR THE BOMB: The money wasn't flowing into atomic bomb development yet, but it would soon. Bush and Conant asked Arthur Compton to produce a third report under the umbrella of the NAS to nail down what needed to be done to build an atomic bomb. Compton's first stop was Columbia University in New York City, where he spoke with Fermi to find out how much fissionable material would be needed for a bomb. Fermi's estimate gave the worst-case amount as no more than 45 kilograms (100 pounds). It was an answer that Compton liked hearing.
There was then the big problem of figuring out how to obtain that fissionable material by isotope separation. While at Columbia, Compton also spoke to Columbia chemist Harold Clayton Urey, who had won the 1934 Nobel prize for isolating deuterium. Urey and several of his Columbia colleagues had been thinking over isotope separation for the previous few years, with Urey initially focusing on a centrifugal process -- converting uranium to a gas by combining it with some other element and then running the gas through a centrifuge, which would tend to separate the heavier uranium-238-based gas molecule from the uranium-235-based molecules. However, gaseous diffusion was beginning to seem more appealing. Urey was able to assure Compton that isotope separation would be feasible.
Compton then chatted with Eugene Wigner at Princeton, who pushed ideas Fermi had for producing plutonium and emphasized, almost in tears, that America needed to build an atomic bomb before the Nazis got there first. Finally, Compton spoke with Glenn Seaborg, who came out to Chicago from Berkeley for the meeting. Seaborg had ideas for separating plutonium from uranium and thought it perfectly practical.
* With all this information accumulated, Compton called a meeting of the various players in the NAS review effort, to take place on 21 October in Schenectady, New York. Lawrence brought along Robert Oppenheimer, a brilliant Berkeley physicist who Lawrence felt would be an asset to the effort. He would actually become central to it, but for the moment he was a newcomer.
Lawrence kicked off the meeting by reading off the notes Oliphant had given him concerning MAUD, with Compton adding a summary of what he had been told during his recent travels. Oppenheimer and Kistiakowsky added their optimistic views of the possibilities, but to Compton's frustration the engineers on the committee were unable to provide any suggestion as to how long development would take or how much it would cost. How could they? Nothing like it had ever been done before, there was absolutely no engineering data. Compton, unable to get an answer, asked them if it would be reasonable to say development might take from three to five years and cost hundreds of millions of dollars. They had no objection. The committee members then went their separate ways.
Compton now had answers to most of the basic questions about atomic bomb development, though some of them were a bit vague for comfort. There was one big question left unanswered, however: just how big of a bang would an atomic bomb make? Compton found locating help on the matter frustrating, but finally he obtained assistance from Oppenheimer, the two scientists having known each other for fourteen years. The third NAS report was released at the end of October 1941 and essentially summarized Compton's findings -- though the expected yield of an atomic bomb was speculatively offered as the equivalent of a few hundred tonnes of TNT. This would turn out to be thinking way too small.
* While the American atomic bomb development program began to accelerate, the war was not standing still. There had been concerns that Hitler would defeat the Soviets, but the German offensive into the USSR had bogged down as winter approached. On 5 December, the Red Army began a counterstroke that would send the Germans rolling back from the gates of Moscow.
Soviet dictator Josef Stalin had been able to stage the counterattack by pulling troops from the Siberian Far East. He could do this because he didn't fear a Japanese attack from that direction. Thanks to a spy in Japan, Stalin knew something that Roosevelt didn't: Japan was preparing to attack the United States, and wouldn't be able to make trouble for the USSR.
On the morning of 7 December 1941, the Japanese Imperial Navy attacked the US Navy base at Pearl Harbor, inflicting massive damage. The United States declared war on Japan. There was no mandate for America declaring war on Germany as well, but Hitler fixed that problem by declaring war on the USA on 11 December. America had expected to be at war sooner or later, but when it came, it hit like a thunderclap. The next six months would be news of one disaster after another.
* In Germany, Werner Heisenberg was conducting experiments that convinced him an atomic bomb was possible. At the end of October 1941, he attended a physics conference in occupied Copenhagen, and managed to swing a visit with his old mentor, Niels Bohr. The meeting did not go well. Bohr understood clearly enough that the Nazis seemed to be on the trail of the atomic bomb -- Heisenberg passed him a rough sketch of a nuclear pile using heavy water as a moderator -- and Bohr was shocked. He was all the more shocked because Heisenberg seemed to be asking for help, and Bohr was appalled at even the hint that he would collaborate with Nazi atomic bomb research. Heisenberg left feeling reproached and hurt, but though the meeting was a loss for him, it would actually end up adding force to the Allied atomic bomb effort.
* THE MET LAB / NAZI BOMB RESEARCH DISCONTINUED: The US atomic bomb effort had already built up momentum before Pearl Harbor; the abrupt entry of the US into the war stepped up the pace. Arthur Compton, who was effectively in charge of the effort at that time, estimated that over the short term he would need over a million dollars -- what seemed like an astonishing sum of money to him at the time, since all the experiments he had conducted to that time had cost only thousands of dollars each.
Compton wanted to centralize atomic bomb research, leading to a debate among the players as to the best site -- Columbia, Princeton, Berkeley, the University of Chicago were among the candidates. Everybody lobbied for their own site, with few being willing to move, but in late January Compton, seeing no possibility of obtaining a consensus, simply declared the University of Chicago as the winner. The new organization was given the cover name of the "Metallurgical Laboratory" or just "Met Lab" for short.
Players like Fermi weren't happy at the move but understood the necessity. Before Fermi went west, he helped put together a second pile at Columbia. Szilard hadn't been able to obtain purer materials by that time, but the second pile featured a number of design improvements: the uranium oxide was no longer packed into cans, since their neutron absorption was too great, instead being pressed into cylindrical lumps about 7.5 centimeters in diameter and 7.5 centimeters tall (3 by 3 inches). About 2,000 were plugged into the new pile.
By the end of April 1942 a k of 0.913 had been measured. At the University of Chicago, physicist Samuel Allison had also put together a pile and measured an encouraging k of 0.94. In the meantime, Glenn Seaborg had finally left Berkeley to set up shop at Washington University in Saint Louis, heading a team working on plutonium separation.
* While Allied work on the atomic bomb built up steam, German efforts towards that end drifted. The Soviet counteroffensive of December 1941 faded out in a few months, but the Wehrmacht was badly pressed for a time, and the result was that resources had to be diverted from research programs towards supporting the immediate war effort. The Nazi atomic bomb effort was hit by funding cutbacks. The physicists tried to lobby for more money, but a presentation by Heisenberg and others to senior Nazi officials on the importance of atomic bomb research fell flat: due to a paperwork mixup, attendance was sparse, and though Heisenberg spoke of the possibilities of nuclear power and atomic bombs, there was no one there to listen.
The really key figure to convince was Albert Speer, Nazi Minister of Armaments and War Production. He didn't attend the February meeting and didn't get word of the notion of the atomic bomb until spring. He discussed the matter with the Fuehrer and attended a second presentation on 4 June 1942, in which Heisenberg again spoke of nuclear power and the atomic bomb. However, this did not result in German atomic bomb research shifting into high gear; in fact, it had almost the opposite effect.
Although Speer had further discussions with Hitler on the matter, the Fuehrer didn't take the idea very seriously, and when the physicists then told Speer that it might take three or four more years to build an atomic bomb, the only conclusion was that it wasn't worth the bother over the short run. Hitler remained confident of winning the war quickly, and the conflict would be over by the time a German bomb might be available. There was no reason to rush. Hitler also had misgivings about such a powerful weapon: he wanted to dominate the world, not blow it up.
The Germans gave up on the development of the atomic bomb, even as fears of what the Nazis were up to pushed Allied work into high gear. Research continued on the use of nuclear power to propel submarines and other naval vessels, with the focus on development of a nuclear pile using heavy water as the moderator.
TO BE CONTINUED
* FOOTNOTE -- DARWIN & HITLER: Critics of Darwin hold eugenics against him, and indeed Darwin discussed some of the underlying ideas of the movement in the second subchapter of chapter 5 of THE DESCENT OF MAN (emphasis added):
BEGIN QUOTE:
In the last and present chapters I have considered the advancement of man from a former semi-human condition to his present state as a barbarian. But some remarks on the agency of natural selection on civilised nations may be here worth adding. This subject has been ably discussed by Mr. W. R. Greg, and previously by Mr. Wallace and Mr. Galton. Most of my remarks are taken from these three authors. With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.
END QUOTE
This is often cited by his critics, but they rarely cite the following paragraph:
BEGIN QUOTE:
The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated, more tender and more widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, if so urged by hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature. The surgeon may harden himself whilst performing an operation, for he knows that he is acting for the good of his patient; but if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with a certain and great present evil. Hence we must bear without complaining the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving and propagating their kind; but there appears to be at least one check in steady action, namely the weaker and inferior members of society not marrying so freely as the sound; and this check might be indefinitely increased, though this is more to be hoped for than expected, by the weak in body or mind refraining from marriage.
END QUOTE
Darwin comes back to the theme in the last pages of THE DESCENT OF MAN, again suggesting that a choice of mate might involve a consideration of the healthiness of the match -- a notion that was far from new in the 19th century and not unknown today -- as well as reiterating that potential mates might well "refrain from marriage in they are in any marked degree inferior in body or mind." He was then, cautious as always, quick and in hindsight extremely accurate to add that "such hopes are Utopian, and will never even be partially realized until the laws of inheritance are thoroughly known." He concluded with an observation that many who saw him as a prophet of a new morality conveniently chose to ignore:
BEGIN QUOTE:
Important as the struggle for existence has been, and even still is, yet, as far as the highest part of man's nature is concerned, there are other agencies more important. For the moral qualities are advanced, either directly or indirectly, much more through the effects of habit, the reasoning powers, instruction, religions, etc., than through natural selection; though to this later agency may be safely attributed the social instincts which afforded the basis for the development of the moral sense.
END QUOTE
Darwin has been accused of being a racist. His views on the various peoples he met during his travels on the BEAGLE are very mixed. He regarded the Fuegians as little better than beasts, though he thought Jemmy Button merry, pleasant, and keen-eyed. He found the Aborigines and Maoris almost as savage. As far as the extermination of the unfortunate Tasmanians went, he described "this most cruel step" in an equivocal fashion as:
BEGIN QUOTE:
... quite unavoidable, as the only means of stopping a fearful succession of robberies, burnings, and murders, committed by the blacks; and which sooner or later would have ended in their utter destruction. I fear there is no doubt, that this train of evil and its consequences originated in the infamous conduct of some of our countrymen.
END QUOTE
In VOYAGE OF THE BEAGLE he commented: "I do not think it possible to describe or paint the difference between savage and civilized man. It is the difference between wild and tame animals ... " In DESCENT OF MAN he wrote:
BEGIN QUOTE:
At some future period ... the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace the savage races of the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes ... will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state ... even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of, as now, between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.
END QUOTE
As far as women went, he wrote in THE DESCENT OF MAN: "Man is more powerful in body and mind than woman ..."
On the other hand, he was very taken with the health and gentleness of the Tahitians, finding their tattooed figures elegant, observing how pale and unpleasant an Englishman looked next to them, "like a plant bleached by a gardener's art compared with a fine dark green one ..." He praised the work of the missionaries in civilizing them, saying that any traveler worried about shipwreck on a foreign shore "will most devoutly pray that the lesson of the missionary may have extended thus far."
Darwin was also very taken with the "noble-looking figures" of the Indians exiled to Mauritius, saying that many had been sent there only because of their adherence to religious beliefs that contradicted English law and that such men were "generally quiet and well-conducted". He was clearly appalled by slavery and condemned it at length in the last chapter of THE VOYAGE OF THE BEAGLE: "I have stayed in a house where a young household mulatto, daily and hourly, was reviled, beaten, and persecuted enough to break the spirit of the lowest animal ... Those who look tenderly at the slave owner, and with a cold heart at the slave, never seem to put themselves into the position of the latter ... It makes one's blood boil, yet heart tremble, to think that we Englishmen and our American descendants, with their boastful cry of liberty, have been and are so guilty ... "
In short, anyone who wants to make a case for or against Darwin on a personal basis has citations to work from. To the extent that some of his statements are unacceptable to modern propriety, it can be said, in mitigation if not in defense, was that his attitudes were ordinary for an upper-class Victorian Englishman. Still, Darwin was also a Victorian gentleman, and unlike many who would adopt his ideas to their own ends, he never made the blunder of believing that scientific knowledge trumped moral vision. In fact, he was clearly careful in his work to try to avoid any such implications -- for the simple reason that they would have weakened the scientific credibility of his argument. The last thing he ever wanted to do was write another ZOONOMIA or sound as loopy as his grandfather Erasmus Darwin.
* Galton was more blunt and less guarded in his notions and, unlike his cousin Darwin, never suspected just how half-baked his ideas about selective breeding really were. It is impossible to deny that there were people following Galton who took Darwin's ideas off into directions that Darwin himself had repudiated, and that Nazi eugenics ideas were heavily influenced by this movement. However, it should be noted that though Hitler's autobiographical tract MEIN KAMPF takes Social-Darwinist ideas to a pulp-fiction extreme -- spending a good deal of time discussing the struggle for survival between "superior" and "inferior" races, and outlines concepts of eugenics that could have been taken out of the mouths of its American advocates -- it does not mention the name "Darwin". Hitler did mention "evolution", if mostly to condemn the notion of race mixing:
BEGIN QUOTE:
If Nature does not wish that weaker individuals should mate with the stronger, she wishes even less that a superior race should intermingle with an inferior one; because in such a case all her efforts, throughout hundreds of thousands of years, to establish an evolutionary higher stage of being, may thus be rendered futile.
END QUOTE
This has a clearly Darwinian sound to it, but he also described race mixing as a "sin against the will of the Eternal Creator", which doesn't, and he also described Aryans as "the highest image of God among His creatures", which has a vaguely creationist sound to it. The fact is that Hitler was a scientific illiterate who lived on a diet of tabloid ideas and adopted whatever slogans fit his agenda. He even had the nerve to cite divine authority to support his atrocities, writing in MEIN KAMPF: "Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord."
In other words, thanks to his long, windy, and unbalanced ramblings Hitler can be invoked as a smear tactic -- "reductio ad Hitlerum" as it's called -- by almost anyone who wants to do so. However, the ploy is very common, being the common terminal point of "flame wars" on internet forums, and the only people who don't find it tiresome are those trying to play the Hitler card. The reality is that racism, authoritarianism, militarism, imperialism, and thuggery have been around for a very long time, and in the absence of any reference by Hitler to Darwin, it is difficult to provide any substantial reason to show that Hitler would have been much different had Darwin never existed -- though Hitler might have used slightly different rhetoric.
* Incidentally, some of Darwin's critics also link him to Karl Marx. Marx actually was a fan of THE ORIGINS OF SPECIES, it appears for the fact that it undermined traditional religious views. It is hard to see much specific influence Darwin had on Marx's thinking, since Marx's COMMUNIST MANIFESTO doesn't mention "Darwin" or even "evolution", and DAS KAPITAL only references Darwin in a few footnotes relevant to specialization in industrial production -- for example:
BEGIN QUOTE:
[XIV.2] In Birmingham alone, 500 varieties of hammer are produced, and not only is each adapted to one particular process, but several varieties often serve exclusively for the different operations in one and the same process The manufacturing period simplifies, improves, and multiplies the implements of labour, by adapting them to the exclusively special functions of each detail labourer.
FOOTNOTE: Darwin, in his epoch-making ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES, chapter 5, remarks, with reference to the natural organs of plants and animals: "So long as one and the same organ has different kinds of work to perform, a ground for its changeability may possibly be found in this ... "
END QUOTE
Anyone seeking any shocking or even particularly interesting references to Darwin in DAS KAPITAL will be stretched to find them. Marx was clearly taken with Darwin's ideas, but they were of very little relevance to the social and economic case Marx was trying to make, and whatever else might be said about Marx, he was absolutely no Social Darwinist. The USSR would later play up Darwinism on occasion to show the "progressive" nature of the Soviet state, but as discussed later Stalin's regime would demonstrate an extreme lack of sympathy for Darwinism in practice.
It is true that in 1873 Marx sent a copy of DAS KAPITAL to Darwin, who replied with a characteristically polite thank-you note -- and never read through the book, its pages being found mostly unseparated after Darwin's death. A story still circulates that Marx had offered to dedicate DAS KAPITAL to Darwin, as demonstrated by a letter from Darwin very politely turning down the request. In reality, the letter was to Marx's son-in-law, Edward Aveling, who had offered to perform such a dedication for his own book. Marx's daughter had her father's letters and the reply from Darwin to Aveling, which in itself did not name the recipient, got mixed in with the lot.
A Soviet scholar started the rumor in the 1930s. The matter would be too trivial to mention except for the interesting comments about Darwin's attitudes toward religion in his reply:
BEGIN QUOTE:
Moreover though I am a strong advocate for free thought on all subjects, yet it appears to me (whether rightly or wrongly) that direct arguments against christianity and theism produce hardly any effect on the public; & freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men's minds, which follow from the advance of science. It has, therefore, always been my object to avoid writing on religion, & I have confined myself to science. I may, however, have been unduly biased by the pain which it would give some members of my family, if I aided in any way direct attacks on religion.
END QUOTE
That Darwin was a religious skeptic is undeniable. That he was considerate of the beliefs of the devout is just as undeniable, and as indicated by the last sentence of the quote above he had an obvious motive for doing so: to attack religion would have been to attack his dear Emma. If Darwin's work undermined the doctrines of traditional religions, it was not something he did as part of a conspiratorial agenda. If he had, it would have certainly made his burial in Westminster Abbey more than a bit ironic.
Darwin's work has been used by a wide range of ideologues since his time to support various agendas, sometimes completely at odds with each other; it has been commented that such interpretations resemble the depression on a sofa of the bottom of the last person who sat on it. One might just as well use the law of gravity for ideological justification.
* As far as eugenics goes, it was an unpleasant episode in the history of evolutionary biology that shouldn't be and won't be forgotten. There are critics outside the community who see the eugenics movement and Social Darwinism as fundamental faults of Darwinism, and indeed there were prominent evolutionists who jumped on such bandwagons. Fortunately, much to the relief to modern evolutionists, Darwin himself was careful to repudiate such notions, or at a minimum keep them at arm's length. He might well not have: had he not been cautious and conservative to almost a fault, he might have been tempted to go over to the dark side himself.
In any case, the failure of eugenics and Social Darwinism say nothing about the technical validity of Darwin's core ideas. After all, those so inclined might make a moral case against physicists for their development of nuclear weapons, that it was a perversion of science as bad or worse than the Nazi Action T4 program, and argue that nuclear weapons ought to be banned -- but no sensible case can be made that the physicists were wrong in any technical sense. Like it or not, the bombs worked as designed, and nobody could convincingly argue that it was by accident, using fundamentally flawed theory.
Darwinism has no technical demonstration of its validity as vivid as that of a mushroom cloud, but the analogy holds: even if, in some alternate universe, Charles Darwin had been actually a brutish thug, a Mr. Hyde instead of a Dr. Jekyll, that says nothing about the truth or falsity of Darwinism as a description of the way the physical Universe works. While Darwinism has implications that definitely need to be discussed, no ideological argument has any relevance to whether Darwinism actually works or not, and credibly claiming that Darwin's theory was technically wrong demands a another approach.
TO BE CONTINUED
* Website additions for the month include:
Updated documents include:
New reviews include:
This last month's online blog entries include items on: road infrastructure, THE MAKING OF THE FITTEST, Chinese social problems, trees & global warming, cybersafety rethought, hemp for victory, DNA analysis for conservation, more on Second Life, bogus statistical analysis in medicine, money transfers for developing-world cellphone users, recycled PCs for the developing world, North Korean intranet, vaccines against recreational drugs, fuels from algae, and varmints in space.
Online update links at: http://www.vectorsite.net/update.html