Floy Agnes Lee | |
|---|---|
 An illustration of Floy Agnes Lee | |
| Born | July 23, 1922 |
| Died | March 6, 2018 (aged 95) |
| Alma mater | University of New Mexico (B.S.) University of Chicago (Ph.D.) |
| Known for | Work on the Manhattan Project |
| Scientific career | |
| Thesis | Effects of X-irradiation on DNA synthesis in regenerating liver (1966) |
Floy Agnes "Aggie" (Naranjo Stroud) Lee was a biologist who worked on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos as a hematology technician.
Floy Agnes Lee was born July 23, 1922, at the Albuquerque Indian School and was the fourth of five siblings. [1] [2] Her mother was a German-American teacher from Indiana who had traveled in the US teaching at different Indian schools including the Winnebago Indian schools in Wisconsin, in Santa Fe, and at the Albuquerque Indian School. Her father was a member of the Santa Clara Pueblo.
Lee grew up at the Albuquerque Indian School, but was sent to St. Mary's Catholic School for her education. She then went on to graduate from Albuquerque High School. In 1945, she graduated from the University of New Mexico (UNM) with a degree in biology. While there, she worked for a professor putting different solutions into each plant to see how they grew. This job made her more interested in doing research. [2] During her college years she also learned to fly planes and worked at a grocery store to pay for flying lessons. She was one flight short of qualifying to become a member of the Women’s Airforce Service Pilots before the program was disbanded in 1944. [3]
In 1945, Lee was asked by professor Edward Castetter, head of UNM's biology department, to do research for him. While she was compiling and recording information on what the Indigenous people of New Mexico ate before colonization, Castetter asked her to postpone a trip that she had planned to see her mother's relatives in order to finish the research. While Lee was continuing this research, Castetter got a call from Los Alamos. They told him that they were looking for a biology student or a graduate to work in the hematology laboratory. [2]
Lee accepted this position at the hematology lab at Los Alamos in 1945. She collected and examined blood samples from Manhattan Project scientists, including Louis Hempelmann, as well as Louis Slotin and Alvin Graves after the criticality accident that exposed Slotin to a fatal dose of radiation. Lee said that she learned how to take blood, read blood cell counts, and identify blood types on the job, but that she excelled at these tasks once taught. She was sent to different sites of the Manhattan Project where she would draw blood from individuals. While working in the hematology lab at Los Alamos, Lee was assigned specific scientists to monitor, including Enrico Fermi.
Lee and Fermi became friends during this time. In Lee's oral history, conducted by the Atomic Heritage Foundation, she elaborated on her relationship with Fermi: "We got to talking about what I liked to do and what he liked to, and we got on the subject of tennis. Now, I did not know that this was Enrico Fermi. I only knew him as a number, because they wouldn’t give names out. So we would play tennis. This was before the bomb was dropped, and then afterwards also. He was a short man, and he had a funny little hat." [2] After the atomic bombs were detonated over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Lee was told that she had been playing tennis with a Nobel Prize-winner for months. She was shocked. She said that her response was: "'Oh, I can't believe that.' Because I was beating him in tennis every time. So when we went out to play tennis later, I didn't beat him. I tried not to. We became very, very good friends." [2]
After the war ended, Fermi encouraged Lee to continue her studies at the University of Chicago. [2] She moved to Chicago, began her doctorate in biology, and worked at Argonne National Laboratory. She continued to study, work at the lab and raise her child after her husband passed away from cancer. After 14 years, she received her PhD. She later worked at the Jet Propulsion Lab in California and returned to work at Los Alamos National Laboratory before she retired. Over the course of her long career, she conducted research on the impact of radiation on chromosomes.[ citation needed ]
Lee died in 2018 at the age of 95. [4]
Enrico Fermi was an Italian and later naturalized American physicist, renowned for being the creator of the world's first nuclear reactor, the Chicago Pile-1, and a member of the Manhattan Project. He has been called the "architect of the nuclear age" and the "architect of the atomic bomb". He was one of very few physicists to excel in both theoretical physics and experimental physics. Fermi was awarded the 1938 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on induced radioactivity by neutron bombardment and for the discovery of transuranium elements. With his colleagues, Fermi filed several patents related to the use of nuclear power, all of which were taken over by the US government. He made significant contributions to the development of statistical mechanics, quantum theory, and nuclear and particle physics.
Los Alamos National Laboratory is one of the sixteen research and development laboratories of the United States Department of Energy (DOE), located a short distance northwest of Santa Fe, New Mexico, in the American southwest. Best known for its central role in helping develop the first atomic bomb, LANL is one of the world's largest and most advanced scientific institutions.
Stanisław Marcin Ulam was a Polish Jewish mathematician, nuclear physicist and computer scientist. He participated in the Manhattan Project, originated the Teller–Ulam design of thermonuclear weapons, discovered the concept of the cellular automaton, invented the Monte Carlo method of computation, and suggested nuclear pulse propulsion. In pure and applied mathematics, he proved some theorems and proposed several conjectures.
Louis Alexander Slotin was a Canadian physicist and chemist who took part in the Manhattan Project. Born and raised in the North End of Winnipeg, Manitoba, Slotin earned both his Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees from the University of Manitoba, before obtaining his doctorate in physical chemistry at King's College London in 1936. Afterwards, he joined the University of Chicago as a research associate to help design a cyclotron.
Robert Rathbun Wilson was an American physicist known for his work on the Manhattan Project during World War II, as a sculptor, and as an architect of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), where he was the first director from 1967 to 1978.
Fat Man and Little Boy is a 1989 American epic historical war drama film directed by Roland Joffé, who co-wrote the script with Bruce Robinson. The story follows the Manhattan Project, the secret Allied endeavor to develop the first nuclear weapons during World War II. The film is named after "Little Boy" and "Fat Man", the two bombs dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, respectively.
Robert Fox Bacher was an American nuclear physicist and one of the leaders of the Manhattan Project. Born in Loudonville, Ohio, Bacher obtained his undergraduate degree and doctorate from the University of Michigan, writing his 1930 doctoral thesis under the supervision of Samuel Goudsmit on the Zeeman effect of the hyperfine structure of atomic levels. After graduate work at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), he accepted a job at Columbia University. In 1935 he accepted an offer from Hans Bethe to work with him at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. It was there that Bacher collaborated with Bethe on his book Nuclear Physics. A: Stationary States of Nuclei (1936), the first of three books that would become known as the "Bethe Bible".
Jack W. Aeby was an American environmental physicist most famous for having taken the only well-exposed color photograph of the first detonation of a nuclear weapon on July 16, 1945, at the Trinity nuclear test site in New Mexico.
Egon Bretscher was a Swiss-born British chemist and nuclear physicist and Head of the Nuclear Physics Division from 1948 to 1966 at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment, also known as Harwell Laboratory, in Harwell, United Kingdom. He was one of the pioneers in nuclear fission research and one of the first to foresee that plutonium could be used as an energy source. His work on nuclear physics led to his involvement in the British atomic bomb research project Tube Alloys and his membership of the British Mission to the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, where he worked in Enrico Fermi's Advanced Development Division in the F-3 Super Experimentation group. His contributions up to 1945 are discussed by Margaret Gowing in her "Britain and Atomic Energy, 1935-1945."
Leona Harriet Woods, later known as Leona Woods Marshall and Leona Woods Marshall Libby, was an American physicist who helped build the first nuclear reactor and the first atomic bomb.
The demon core was a sphere of plutonium that was involved in two fatal radiation accidents when scientists tested it as a fissile core of an early atomic bomb. It was manufactured by the Manhattan Project, the U.S. nuclear weapon development effort during World War II. It was a subcritical mass that weighed 6.2 kilograms (14 lb) and was 8.9 centimeters (3.5 in) in diameter.
Los Alamos is a census-designated place in Los Alamos County, New Mexico, United States, that is recognized as one of the development and creation places of the atomic bomb—the primary objective of the Manhattan Project by Los Alamos National Laboratory during World War II. The town is located on four mesas of the Pajarito Plateau, and had a population of about 19,200 as of 2022. It is the county seat and one of two population centers in the county known as census-designated places (CDPs); the other is White Rock.
Alvin Cushman Graves was an American nuclear physicist who served at the Manhattan Project's Metallurgical Laboratory and the Los Alamos Laboratory during World War II. After the war, he became the head of the J (Test) Division at Los Alamos and was director or assistant director of numerous nuclear weapons tests during the 1940s and 1950s. Graves was severely injured in the 1946 laboratory criticality accident in Los Alamos that killed Louis Slotin, but recovered.
Harold Melvin Agnew was an American physicist, best known for having flown as a scientific observer on the Hiroshima bombing mission and, later, as the third director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Raemer Edgar Schreiber was an American physicist from McMinnville, Oregon who served Los Alamos National Laboratory during World War II, participating in the development of the atomic bomb. He saw the first one detonated in the Trinity nuclear test in July 1945, and prepared the Fat Man bomb that was used in the bombing of Nagasaki. After the war, he served at Los Alamos as a group leader, and was involved in the design of the hydrogen bomb. In 1955, he became the head of its Nuclear Rocket Propulsion (N) Division, which developed the first nuclear-powered rockets. He served as deputy director of the laboratory from 1972 until his retirement in 1974.
Dorothy McKibbin worked on the Manhattan Project during World War II. She ran the project's office at 109 East Palace Avenue in Santa Fe, through which staff moving to the Los Alamos Laboratory had to pass through to obtain security credentials and directions to their new workplace. She was known as the "first lady of Los Alamos", and was often the first point of contact for new arrivals. She retired when the Santa Fe office closed in 1963.
Elizabeth Riddle Graves was an American nuclear physicist who pioneered the physics of neutrons and the detection and measurement of fast neutrons. She served at the Manhattan Project's Metallurgical Laboratory and the Los Alamos Laboratory during World War II. After the war, she became a group leader in the experimental physics division at Los Alamos.
Jane Hamilton Hall was an American physicist. During World War II she worked on the Manhattan Project. After the war she remained at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, where she oversaw the construction and start up of the Clementine nuclear reactor. She became assistant director of the laboratory in 1958. She was secretary of the General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission from 1956 until 1959, and was a member of the committee from 1966 to 1972.
Dwight Smith Young was an American "carpenter, photographer, archaeologist, cook, meteorologist, poet and self-made physicist" who took part in the Manhattan Project. He was given the nickname "The Hermit of Pajarito Canyon" after making his home in an old log cabin in a remote canyon on the Los Alamos testing site from roughly 1946 to 1952.
Kathryn Lee Emanuel Lawson was one of the first few female African American chemists who worked in Sandia National Laboratories. She studied properties of irradiated materials in Crystal Physics research division. She earned her PhD from the University of New Mexico in radiochemistry in 1957.
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
 | This article needs additional or more specific categories .(May 2021) |
