170 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Lawrence and His Laboratory: A History ofthe Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, vol. 1. By J. L. Heilbron and Robert W. Seidel. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989. Pp. xxvii + 586; illustrations, tables, notes, bibliography, index. $29.95. This book describes the founding, in the early 1930s, and the first decade of development of one of the most important scientific laboratories in the world. The Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (LBL), John Heilbron and Robert Seidel tell us, “was the forerunner of the modern multipurpose national research laboratory, the direct parent of Livermore and Los Alamos, an essential contributor to the wartime work of Oak Ridge and Hanford, [and] the inspiration for the founders of Brookhaven” (p. xvii), its East Coast “rival” set up in the late 1940s. To study it, Heilbron and Seidel adopt a narrative and essentially chronological approach. As is usual, and perhaps inevita ble, a rather sharp distinction is drawn between social, political, and institutional considerations and scientific and technological develop ments. The pace is lively and the text always interesting, although at times one fears that accuracy may have been sacrificed in the interests of using a catchy phrase or witticism. And, although this was not the authors’ explicit intention, the book fairly bristles with information, observations, and insights of interest to historians of technology. The success of the LBL pivoted on its being the Mecca for the construction and development of cyclotrons in the 1930s. This instrument used a combination of a powerful magnetic field and a high-frequency oscillator to accelerate ions that could then be used for a variety of purposes, ranging from basic research into nuclear structure to applied work in chemistry, biology, and medicine. Lawrence’s achievement, for which he won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1939, lay not in thinking of the idea behind the cyclotron—credit for that is due to several others—but in being “the first and only one to have enough confidence in it to try it out” (p. 486) and in inspiring people to put up the money and to work the long hours needed to develop and exploit the technology. Many factors, overlapping and reinforcing one another in complex ways, made his achievement possible. First, there was the state of the field of basic research into the properties and behavior of the nucleus, so exhilarating that in the early 1930s people beginning a career in physics saw the nucleus as “an unstudied frontier, a research land of opportunity, a gold field” (p. 43). In 1932 Cockcroft and Walton, working at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, successfully split the atom. Early in 1934 Joliot and Curie in Paris discovered that radioactive substances could be made artificially. Later that year Fermi and his collaborators in Rome showed that neutrons were a particularly valuable means of activating nuclei. Around the end of 1938 Hahn, Meitner, and Strassman in Berlin concluded that nuclear fission was possible. To TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 171 capitalize on these major discoveries a controlled source of highenergy , high-intensity positive particles was needed. The cyclotron was such an effective means of providing one that “the Americans, with their big machines and high pressure, quickly dominated the field” (p. 43). Two features of the cyclotron made it particularly suitable for studying and exploiting the potential of nuclear transformations: its relatively small size, and its relatively high attainable energy com pared to alternative devices. Another important advantage of the cyclotron was its versatility. Initially built as a tool to do basic research into nuclear transformations, Lawrence was quick to see its potential in more applied areas. The discovery of induced radioactivity in 1934 led to the possibility of using it to create new radioelements and to manufacture them in sufficient quantities for biomedical research and medical applications (e.g., as tracers). Similarly, the high neutron fluxes produced when the cyclotron’s deuterons interacted with an external beryllium target led Lawrence to hope that a new and more efficient treatment than the “softer” X rays had been found for cancer. As a result, in 1936 the LBL began to acquire biologists and physicians. In 1938 neutron therapy began...