Genius (34 page)
Authors: James Gleick
Stresses were tightening, too, between the security staff and the scientists, and Feynman had lost his eager spirit of cooperation. A colleague had been interrogated for more than an hour in a smoky room, questions fired by men sitting in the dark, as in a melodramatic movie. “Don’t get scared tho,” Feynman wrote Arline, “they haven’t found out that I am a relativist yet.” Fear sometimes clutched Feynman now. His intestines suffered chronically. He had a chest X ray: clear. Names rushed through his head: maybe Donald; if a girl, maybe Matilda. Putzie wasn’t drinking enough milk—how could he help her build her strength at this distance? They were spending $200 a month on the room and oxygen and $300 more on nurses, and $300 was the shortfall between income and expenditures. His salary as a Manhattan Project group leader: $380 a month. If they spent Arline’s savings, $3,300 plus a piano and a ring, they could cover ten more months. Arline seemed to be wasting away.
Letters went back and forth almost daily. They wrote like a boy and a girl without experience at the art of love letters. They catalogued the everyday—how much sleep, how much money. Macy’s sent Arline an unexpected mail-order refund of forty-four cents:
I feel like a millionaire … I.O.U. 22¢.
His sporadic bad digestion or swollen eyelid; her waning or waxing strength, her coughed-up blood and her access to oxygen. They used matching stationery. It was a mail-order project of Arline’s—soon most of her relatives and many of Richard’s friends on the hill had the same green or brown block letterhead from the Dollar Stationery Company. For herself she ordered both formal (Mrs. Richard P. Feynman) and informal, with the same legend she had once caught Richard slicing from her pencils:
RICHARD DARLING,
I LOVE YOU
PUTZIE
She decorated the envelopes with red hearts and silver stars. The army decorated them with tape:
OPENED BY U. S. ARMY EXAMINER
.
They called each other “Dope” and then worried about whether they had given offense.
You’re never that
—
just silly
&
cute & lots of fun
—
you know what I mean, don’t you coach?
Alone in her cramped sanatorium room, decorated with a few pictures and knickknacks received as wedding gifts, Arline worried about Richard and other women. He was a popular dancer at Los Alamos parties; he flirted intently with nurses, wives, and a secretary of Oppenheimer’s. All it took to set Arline’s mind racing was an offhand mention of the wife of a colleague. Or worse: the scientists were in an uproar over the appearance of M.P.’s around a women’s dormitory (the army had discovered an active prostitution trade there), and for some reason Richard had been chosen to lead the protest. He reassured her continually.
Everything is under control
—&
I
love you only.
She explained and reexplained the facts of their love like an incantation: he is tall, gentle, kind, strong; he supports her, but once in a while can lean on her, too; he must confide everything in her, as she has slowly learned to confide in him; we have to think in terms of us, always; she loves the way he stretches casually to open a high window beyond her reach, and she loves the way he talks babytalk with her.
Not until the beginning of this grim year did they make love. Their gingerly discussions had led nowhere. He was afraid of taking advantage, or afraid of harming her, or just afraid. Arline grasped ever more tightly her sense of romantic love. She read
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
(“No!” she said. “Love me! Love me, and say you’ll keep me. Say you’ll keep me! Say you’ll never let me go, to the world nor to anybody!”) and a popular 1943 book,
Love
in America
. “I do not know—although there are those who profess to know with mathematical accuracy—whether sex is all-important in the life of a man or a woman,” the author wrote provocatively. Americans lag Europeans in such matters. “We have developed no concepts of love as an art or a rite… . We do not seem to realize that woman’s love is not prompted by good deeds on a man’s part or by Boy Scout conduct; that neither gratitude nor pity are love; that loving lies in demanding as well as in giving; that the woman who loves yearns to give and give again.”
Arline herself finally made the decision and set aside a Sunday when she would allow no other visitors. She missed him spiritually and physically, she told him.
Darling I’m beginning to think that perhaps this restlessness I feel within myself is due to pent up emotions—I really think we’d both feel happier and better dear if we released our desires.
She wrote Richard a few days before to tell him it was time. She could not sleep. She clipped a phrase from a newspaper advertisement: “
OUR MARRIAGE COMES FIRST
.” She reminded him of the future that waited for them: just a few more years in bed for her; then he would be a
renowned professor
(
physicist
still did not denote a profession with stature) and she a mother. She apologized, as she so often did, for being moody, for being difficult, for saying hurtful things, and for having to lean on him without respite. Her thoughts rambled.
… We have to fight hard—every inch of the way—we can’t slip ever—a slip costs too much… . I’ll be all a women would be to you—I’ll always be your sweetheart & first love—besides a devoted wife—we’ll be proud parents too—we’ll fight to make Donald real—I want him to be like you… . I am proud of you always Richard—your a good husband, and lover, & well, coach, I’ll show you what I mean Sunday.
Your Putzie
Her health continued to fail. “Drink some milk!” Richard wrote in May. Her weight had fallen to eighty-four pounds. She looked like a woman starving.
You are a nice girl. Every time I think about you, I feel good. It must be love. It sounds like a definition of love. It is love. I love you.
I’ll see you in two days.
R. P. F.
More and more they talked of medical tests. They needed optimism. He was near despair.
Time passes fast. Maybe we should start looking for another doctor… . Why don’t you drink an extra bottle of milk right now while you are thinking of it.
The scientific knowledge that empowered the physicists seemed to mean nothing on the soft soil of medicine. With the final desperation of the dying, Richard and Arline reached out for slender possibilities. He had heard about a new drug, sulf-something—he was not sure—and had written to researchers in the East, who told him apologetically that studies of sulfabenamide were in the most preliminary stage. The discovery that substances of the sulfonamide family retarded bacterial growth was not yet a decade old. They were destined to prove poor substitutes for true antibiotics.
Now Richard was writing to faraway doctors again. It seemed that Arline was pregnant. After ending the celibacy of their marriage, she had immediately missed her menstrual period. Was it possible? They were frightened and jubilant at once. Richard did not tell his parents, but he told his sister, now a college student. Joan was dazzled at the prospect of becoming an aunt. They talked about names and began making new plans. Yet to Richard it still seemed that Arline was wasting away. He thought he saw symptoms of starvation. Perhaps no rational observer could have construed the cessation of menses at this stage of the disease as a sign of pregnancy, but that was how they construed it. The alternative was so grim. Their doctors saw little reason for hopefulness. The chief physician from the sanatorium in Browns Mills, New Jersey, advised urgently that any pregnancy must be “interrupted”—“have it done by a specialist.” Then a pregnancy test gave a negative result after all. They did not know what to think. A doctor at Los Alamos told Richard that the tests were notoriously unreliable but that they could try again at an Albuquerque laboratory. He thought the laboratory had the necessary rabbits for the Friedman test.
The same doctor said he had heard of a new substance made from mold growths—“streptomicin”?—that seemed to cure tuberculosis in guinea pigs. If it worked, the doctor thought it might soon become widely available. Arline refused to believe the negative pregnancy result. She wrote cryptic remarks about “P.S. 59-to-be.” The same day a nurse wrote Feynman from the sanatorium to say that Arline had been spitting blood. He opened his encyclopedia yet again. Nothing. He drifted through the pages:
tuberculosis
,
tuff
,
tularemia
… Tuff was a kind of volcanic rock; Tunicata an animal group. He wrote Arline another letter. “Tumors you know about & Turkey, the country, also.” Some days she was now too weak even to write back. He grasped his uncertainty. Not knowing was frustration, anguish, and finally his only solace.
“
Keep hanging on,
” he wrote. “
Nothing is certain. We lead a charmed life.
”
In the midst of their private turmoil came V-E day and then Richard’s twenty-seventh birthday. Arline had prepared another mail-order surprise: the laboratory was flooded with newspapers—handed about and tacked to walls—proclaiming with banner headlines, “Entire Nation Celebrates Birth of R. P. Feynman!” The war in Europe, having provided so many of the scientists with their moral purpose, had now ended. The bloody circle was closing in the Pacific. They needed no threat of a German or Japanese bomb to urge them onward. Uranium was arriving. There would be one test—one last experiment.
At the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota another kind of experiment was under way, the first clinical trial of streptomycin, a substance that had been discovered nearly two years before, in August 1943. The population participating in the trial: two patients. Both had been near death from tuberculosis when the experiment began in the fall of 1944; both were improving rapidly. Even so, it was not until the next August that the Mayo trial had expanded to as many as thirty patients. The doctors could see lesions healing and lungs clearing. A year after that, the study of streptomycin as an antitubercular agent had become the most extensive research project ever devoted to a drug and a disease. Researchers were treating more than one thousand patients. In 1947 streptomycin was released to the public.
Streptomycin’s discovery, like penicillin’s a few years earlier, had been delayed by medicine’s slow embrace of the scientific method. Physicians had just begun to comprehend the power of controlled experiments repeated thousands of times. The use of statistics to uncover any but the grossest phenomena remained alien. The doctor who first isolated the culture he named
Streptomyces griseus
, by cultivating some organisms swabbed from the throat of a chicken, had seen the same microbes in a soil sample in 1915 and had recognized even then that they had a tendency to kill disease-causing bacteria. A generation had to pass before medicine systematized its study of such microbes, by screening them, culturing them, and measuring their antibiotic strengths in carefully labeled rows of test tubes.
In its infancy, too, was the branch of science that would have to devote itself to the safety, short-term and long-term, of humans in the presence of nuclear radiation. The sense of miasmic dread that would become part of the cultural response to radioactivity lay in the future. The Manhattan Project’s researchers handled their heavy new substances with a breeziness that bordered on the cavalier. Workers handling plutonium were supposed to wear coveralls, gloves, and a respirator. Even so, some were overexposed. The prototype reactors leaked radioactive material. Scientists occasionally ignored or misread their radiation badges. Critical-mass experiments always flirted with danger, and by later standards the safety precautions were flimsy. Experimentalists assembled perfect shining cubes of uranium into near-critical masses by hand. One man, Harry Daghlian, working alone at night, let slip one cube too many, frantically grabbed at the mound to halt the chain reaction, saw the shimmering blue aura of ionization in the air, and died two weeks later of radiation poisoning. Later Louis Slotin used a screwdriver to prop up a radioactive block and lost his life when the screwdriver slipped. Like so many of these worldly scientists he had performed a faulty kind of risk assessment, unconsciously mis-multiplying a low probability of accident (one in a hundred? one in twenty?) by a high cost (nearly infinite).
To make measurements of a fast reaction, the experimenters designed a test nicknamed the dragon experiment after a coolly ominous comment of Feynman’s that they would be “tickling the tail of a sleeping dragon.” It required someone to drop a slug of uranium hydride through a closely machined ring of the same substance. Gravity would be the agent in achieving supercriticality, and gravity, it was hoped, would carry the slug on through to a safe ending. Feynman himself proposed a safer experiment that would have used an absorber made of boron to turn a supercritical material into a subcritical one. By measuring how rapidly the neutron multiplication died out, it would have been possible to calculate the multiplication rate that would have existed without boron. The arithmetical inference would have served as a shield. It was dubbed the Feynman experiment, and it was not carried out. Time was too short.
Los Alamos hardly posed the most serious new safety challenges, for all its subsequent visibility. These belonged to the vast new factory cities—Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Hanford, Washington—where plants thrown up across thousands of acres now manufactured uranium and plutonium in bulk. Compounds and solutions of these substances were accumulating in metal barrels, glass bottles, and cardboard boxes piled on the cement floors of storerooms. Uranium was combined with oxygen or chlorine and either dissolved in water or kept dry. Workers moved these substances from centrifuges or drying furnaces into cans and hoppers. Much later, large epidemiological studies would overcome obstacles posed by government secrecy and disinformation to show that low-level radiation caused more harm than anyone had imagined. Yet the authorities at the processing plants were overlooking not only this possibility but also a more immediate and calculable threat: the possibility of a runaway, explosive chain reaction.
