The Price of Altruism (14 page)

On the afternoon of May 7, 1945, Julia and George ran out of the lab and rushed to the quadrangle. With its armies in total collapse and its cities in rubble, the Third Reich had finally been defeated. The campus was abuzz. From the lofty gray stone tower of Rockefeller Memorial there floated a melody, the university magazine would later report, “more majestic than a thousand muffled drums.” The earth literally “shook under the iron clangor of the mammoth Bourbon bells.” In the chapel students crowded in the pews, seated, knees hugged to chin, before the altar, clinging to vantage points in the balconies. The sunlight poured into the vast chamber from the multicolored Gothic windows, as two thousand people stood to sing the “Star-Spangled Banner.” The war in Europe was over.
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Just as people were getting used to the newfound peace in Europe, in August the United States dropped a uranium bomb on Hiroshima, and three days later, a plutonium one on Nagasaki. That week George’s uncle and namesake died in the Midwest. “From what I have learned from the next world,” Alice now wrote to him from New York about her brother:

It seemed a rather strange way to express her thoughts about the most momentous event of the century. But then she added: “Hurrah, George, Hurrah! Wonderful to have it come so soon, and that is what all you chemists did for the world. I’m so proud of you, not yet 23, that you had something to do with it.”

George was not amused. “Please do not ever again write to me or speak to me about ‘vibrations,’ ‘batteries,’ ‘guides,’ about dead people throwing you around the room, or anything else of that sort. I do not ever want to hear you refer to such things again, and I just won’t reply to any letter in which you mention supernatural phenomena.”
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A few months later the Coffee Shop on campus reopened.
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Even though the war was over, George couldn’t yet tell anyone about what he was doing. In August 1946 he handed in his thesis: “Fluorescence Studies of Uranium, Plutonium, Neptonium, and Americium.” “I concluded my writing,” he summarized to a friend,

The previous April the University of Chicago had accepted a letter contract from the government to operate an Argonne National Laboratory, as yet unnamed and not yet in official existence. On July 1 the name of the Met Lab was officially changed to the Argonne National Laboratory. And on August 1 President Harry S. Truman signed the Atomic Energy Act, ushering in the age of civilian nuclear power.

At convocation that summer at the end of the month, Vice President Lawrence Kimpton spoke on “Science and the Humanities” followed by the singing of the “Alma Mater.” It was a happy occasion, but there was something weighty and somber about it, too. Between the verses (“Of all fair moth-ers, fair-est she / Most wise of all that wis-est be”) George could take a moment to consider his future. He had taken a number of courses as an undergraduate in physiology and on the nervous system, and although the problems of biology interested him more, he felt a much greater aptitude for physics. Kicked out for his grades five short years earlier, he was set to return to Harvard as a chemistry instructor, and had secured an Argonne consultancy at $2.50 an hour. The arrangement would give him a lot of free time to think even if it wouldn’t make him rich. He was ponderous as he packed up and got on the train for Cambridge. “Without the atomic bomb the prospects of civilization would be dubious enough,” President Hutchins wrote that fall in his reports to the friends of the university. “Now that we have it, they are black,” and civilization is “on the brink of catastrophe.”
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On June 28, 1947, Julia and George were married in a small ceremony in Munising. George’s childhood auburn hair had turned darker, and with his glasses and suit and tie, he looked more grown up. He was dashingly handsome—in spite of the slacks pulled up slightly too high. Julia’s Irish family expressed concern that he wasn’t Catholic, and in the face of his atheism made him agree to raise his future kids in the Catholic Church.
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He had spent the last year as an instructor of chemistry at Harvard, living like a student in the dorms at Winthrop House. Now the newlyweds were on their way back to Cambridge, to settle in a small home on Linnaean Street, just a ten minute walk north from George’s office at the Mallinckrodt Chemical Laboratory Building.

Almost everyone in the department was a big name: There were Professors Woodward and Bartlett and Fieser in organic; Rochow and Lingane in inorganic; and Kistiakowsky, Wilson, and Doty in physical. The atmosphere was serious, matter-of-fact. At least three young fellow instructors of chemistry—Walter Gensler, Edward King, and Leonard Nash—would go on to long and distinguished careers in academia. But George was different. He’d left behind his strange antics and was becoming more withdrawn. A “loner who kept to himself,” he was hardly known in the department. Academic life, with its teaching and administrative work, wasn’t for him. To his colleagues he seemed “wholly disengaged.”
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Looking for a way out, he found an opening in a childhood pastime. The university chess team required two faculty members; his old Harvard classmate Lloyd Shapley, now doing economics, invited him to join as Top Board. It was a godsend. There was practice and there were meets. And then there was the Argonne consultancy, which would take him on weekends to Chicago—anything to keep him away from the department.
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In January the Atomic Energy Commission had designated Argonne National Laboratory its principal reactor-development center. Work on a liquid-metal-cooled, fast neutron reactor, dubbed “Zinn’s Infernal Pile,” together with the first nuclear submarine plant, was already under way.
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George was making only $3,500 a year at Harvard, and the pocket change from Argonne wasn’t much of a boost. And so when Annamarie Louise Barbara Juliet Price came along on May 4, 1948, he began to feel the pressure of the provider. He knew that Julia didn’t like him traveling so much—increasingly she let him know it. Besides, the real action at Argonne was in energy and reactors, not in measuring fallout in people’s urine.

Other pastures suddenly seemed a lot greener. That summer of 1948 Claude Shannon published the first part of a general theory using mathematics to quantify information.
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Immediately it caught George’s attention. He liked things like that: It was elegant and precise. It was simple. It got rid of clutter, told it like it was, altogether cut to the matter. More important, it seemed to be leading in the direction the world was heading, and George wanted in.

In August he and Julia and Annamarie packed up at Linnaean Street and headed down to Morristown. With an offer doubling his salary, and far from the pressure and tedium of students and examination papers at Harvard, George was going to work for Bell Labs.
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Morristown, New Jersey, was a small town but its history was rich. It was there in 1777 that George Washington encamped with his Continental Army, to rest and spread the news to the world of their victories at Trenton and Princeton. There Samuel F. B. Morse, together with Alfred Vail, built the first telegraph at the Speedwell Ironworks in 1838, sending the first-ever telegraph message: “A patient waiter is no loser.” And it was there that George and his family now settled, to join the new information revolution.
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Just a few miles down the road, at Murray Hill, Bell Labs were shaping the way people live, work, and play. In the 1920s the first public demonstration of the fax, the invention of the synchronous-sound motion picture system, and the very first long-distance transmission of television images (of Herbert Hoover from Washington to New York) had all been gloriously accomplished. Then came Karl Jansky and the amazing discovery that radio waves were being emitted from the center of the galaxy. In 1933 stereo signals were transmitted live from Philadelphia to the capital, and four years later Bell researchers won the Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of electron diffraction, laying the foundation for solid-state electronics. Then, in 1939, came the world’s first binary-digital computer, and, after the war, the transistor.

It had been John Bardeen, together with Walter Brattain, who observed that when electrical contacts were applied to a crystal of germanium, the output power was greater than the input. With the help of William Shockley, also at Bell Labs, the three men had conceived and invented the transistor, for which they would win the Nobel Prize. George was already hard at work mapping germanium surfaces, grinding off the surface, reetching, polishing, then remap-ping. His experiments were yielding “unambiguous information,” he wrote, regarding the relative importance of surface treatment and bulk properties in determining transistor characteristics. This was electrical-engineering stuff, applied short-term research. He’d been contracted to work on long-term basic science in the Chemistry Department but was pursuing his own interests. Meanwhile Bardeen and Shockley wanted to know more about temperature effects on transistor properties, and had turned to George to do the measurements.
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The photos that survive from 1948–50 are a picture of small town living: A lawn, an asphalt path, a dog, a two-storied redbrick home with hatched roof and shuttered windows; George in white pressed shirt with tie, Julia in colored dress and lipstick, Annamarie with a balloon, everyone smiling. A second daughter, Kathleen Barbara Elizabeth, had arrived in late summer of 1949. The war was over, the fifties just under way. The Prices were living the American dream.

It was a lie. Beneath the facade, cracks had begun to emerge. George’s quirkiness had started off endearing, but his unorthodoxy was growing maddening. Julia didn’t like being called a “hippopotamus.” She didn’t like the idea of raising Annamarie and Kathleen in a Skinner box. George, for his part, was finding it hard to swallow her religion. “Better the girls become prostitutes than nuns,” he would goad her, pushing Julia into a cocoon of bitter silence.
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She was glum, he thought, and kept in her anger. When it came out in other places, its irrationality drove him up the wall. From the get-go it had been an unlikely union.

George never performed Bardeen and Shockley’s experiments. When his old Manhattan Project boss, Sam Schwartz, invited him to come work with him again, this time in Minnesota, it didn’t take much to persuade an increasingly depressed Julia to pick up and leave. Maybe a change could save their marriage.

Quietly the Prices settled in St. Paul in a quaint two-story cottage with a red roof and two small lawns up front and in the back. Just a short ride in the 1940 Chevy from Fortieth Avenue was the medical school, where George would now be working in the Radioisotope Lab at the Veterans Administration Hospital.
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Minnesota was a powerhouse in medicine. Dr. C. Walton Lillehei, who arrived at just about the same time, was pioneering open-heart surgery, and together with Earl Bakken, a medical equipment repairman, would soon invent the pacemaker and incorporate Medtronic. Work on X-ray diagnosis, radiation therapy, diseases of the liver, “deep-freeze” surgery, and the new specialty, oncology, was considered the top in the country. By the mid-1950s a
Minneapolis Star
editorial referred to the med school “as one of the greatest in the world—in the opinion of some, the best anywhere.”
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For George it was just like during the war, back to uranium fluorescence. But there was now also the Porphyrins, Tumors, and X-Ray group, which met biweekly in Schwartz’s office.

Porphyrins are a group of organic pigments with four linked nitrogen-containing rings that bind to metals, including the heme in hemoglobin. What Schwartz had found was that by localizing the fluorescence of intravenously administered porphyrin in tumor tissues, surgeons could get an idea of the extent of the metastatic spread of a cancer. He also found that porphyrins could either enhance or protect against the effects of ionizing radiation, depending on the type of porphyrin and its dose. If they could figure out a way to administer the right dose with the right pigment, controlled radiation combined with hematoporphyrin could be used to get rid of tumors. The implications were obvious, and Merck and Company were hot on the trail. Once again George’s tinkering genius would be needed.
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