National Defense Research Committee Research Articles

Perforation studies of concrete panel under high velocity projectile impact based on an improved dynamic constitutive model

The finite-depth concrete panels have been widely applied in the protective structures, and its impact resistance and dynamic fracture failures, especially the scabbing/perforation limits, under high velocity projectile impact, are mainly concerned by protective engineers, which are numerically studied based on an improved dynamic concrete model in this study. Firstly, based on the framework of the KCC (Karagozian & Case concrete) model, a dynamic concrete model is proposed which considers an independent tensile damage model and a continued transition between dynamic tensile and compressive properties. Secondly, the strength surface, equation of state and damage parameters of the proposed model are comprehensively calibrated by a triaxial compressive test with high confinement pressure, the rationality of which is further verified based on the single element tests, e.g., uniaxial and triaxial compression as well as uniaxial, biaxial and triaxial tension. Thirdly, a series of projectile high velocity impact tests on thin and thick concrete panels are simulated, which indicates that the projectile residual velocity and dynamic fracture failures are reproduced satisfactorily, while the KCC model underestimates both the spalling and scabbing dimensions severely. Finally, based on the validated concrete model and finite element analyses approach, the validations of the existing five empirical formulae are evaluated, in terms of the depth of penetration (DOP) and scabbing/perforation limits of concrete panel. Both the Army corps of engineers (ACE) and modified National Defense Research Committee (NDRC) formulae are recommended in the design of the protective structure to avoid scabbing failure.

Ahead of the Curve: The Arc Institute Aims to Reshape the Biomedical Research Landscape

Ahead of the Curve: The Arc Institute Aims to Reshape the Biomedical Research Landscape

Beyond the burn: Studies on the physiological effects of flamethrowers during World War II

Flamethrowers are widely considered one of warfare’s most controversial weapons and are capable of inflicting gruesome physical injuries and intense psychological trauma. Despite being the last of the major combatants in World War II (WWII) to develop them, the United States military quickly became the most frequent and adept operator of portable flamethrowers. This gave the U.S. military ample opportunity to observe the effects of flamethrowers on enemy soldiers. However, while most people in modern times would consider immolation by flamethrower to be an unnecessarily painful and inhumane way to inflict casualties, immolation was, at one point during World War II (WWII), referred to as “mercy killing” by the U.S. Chemical Warfare Service (CWS). This mischaracterization arose from a series of first-hand accounts describing what were believed to be quick, painless, and unmarred deaths, as well as from a poor and incomplete understanding of flamethrower lethality. As a result, indirect mechanisms such as hypoxia and carbon monoxide poisoning were generally absent from accounts of the flamethrower’s fatal effects. It was not until several years after flamethrowers were introduced to the frontlines that the CWS and National Defense Research Committee (NDRC) conducted a series of tests to better understand the physiological and toxicological effects of flamethrowers. This article examines how the initial absence of scientific data on the physiologic effects of flamethrowers led to an inaccurate understanding of their lethality, and bizarre claims that one of history’s most horrific instruments of war was considered one of the more “humane” weapons on the battlefield.

A method for evaluating the local failure of short polypropylene fiber-reinforced concrete plates subjected to high-velocity impact with a steel projectile

This study investigated the local failure of short polypropylene (PP) fiber-reinforced concrete (PPFRC) plates that were subjected to high-velocity impact using a steel projectile. To examine the differences in the mechanical properties of the PPFRC obtained under static and dynamic loadings, static and rapid-speed uniaxial compressive and tensile tests were conducted. Subsequently, high-velocity impact tests were conducted to investigate the impact resistance performance of the PPFRC plates. In a series of tests, a steel projectile, with a mass of 46 g, collided into a PPFRC plate, with a thickness of 60 mm or 80 mm. The impact velocity was set between 190 m/s and 420 m/s to examine the variation in the failure modes of the PPFRC plate. The experimental results revealed that the scabbing damage induced by the impact was significantly suppressed for the PPFRC plate compared with that of a plain concrete (PC) plate. High-velocity impact tests were also conducted on short PP fiber-reinforced mortar (PPFRM) plates to investigate how the matrix type influences the local failure. To evaluate the scabbing and perforation limit thicknesses of the PPFRC plates, we proposed an assessment method, in which the modified formula, developed by the US National Defense Research Committee (NDRC), is multiplied by a reduction factor. Furthermore, the relationship between the limit thickness of a PPFRC plate and the kinetic energy of a projectile was formulated based on the proposed method.

PENETRATION DEPTH STUDY FROM PREVIOUS EMPIRICAL FORMULA OF MODIFIED FOAMED CONCRETE SLAB UNDER LOW IMPACT LOAD FROM A NON-DEFORMABLE IMPACTOR

The Modified Foamed Concrete (FC) was acheived by replacing sand with Rice Husk Ash (RHA) and experimental result has shown an increased in the compressive strength compared to conventional FC. This increase in compressive strength is required by FC to withstand impact loading. The experimental parameters from the modified FC subjected to impact loading were incorporated into previous empirical formula's, such as National Defense Research Committee (NDRC) [8], [18]), Ammann & Whitney [8], and Hughes [9] formulas. The calculation showed differences in results due to its variation and multiple approaches of the empirical formula. However, it is noted that the modified FC did not produce much differences with the conventional FC when it is subjected to impact loading. The calculation of previous formulas have indicated and highlighted these findings.

The Sound Lab at Fort Trumbull, New London, Connecticut, 1945–1996

The Navy Underwater Sound Laboratory was formed in 1945 when the U.S. Navy merged on-going efforts of Columbia and Harvard Universities to combat the German U-boat threat in the North Atlantic. Prior to that time, the Division of War Research of Columbia, housed in a single building at Fort Trumbull, was sponsored by the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC) while the Harvard Underwater Sound Laboratory was doing similar work in Cambridge, Massachusetts. For the next 50 years, until it was formally closed in 1996, the “Sound Lab” continued to support virtually all aspects of Naval Warfare technology. This talk will attempt to describe the rich scientific culture and technological contributions of the New London Sound Lab.

The Human Being as a Fundamental Link in Automatic Control Systems

Introduction by David Mindell Norbert Wiener’s popular 1948 book, Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, is often cited as originating the analogy between people and machines, and between feedback control and human behavior. Wiener always presented it as the work of his lone genius, but there were important precedents to Cybernetics, as well as other currents of a similar nature, already flowing in engineering. Consider, for example, Harold Hazen’s 1941 memo, “The Human Being as a Fundamental Link in Automatic Control Systems,” (see Figure 1) duplicated in its entirety starting on page 34. The memo shows an earlier synthesis of such notions, already pervasive among a group of researchers working on wartime technology—researchers who were approaching problems of humans and machines with engineering techniques. In 1941, Harold Locke Hazen was professor and head of the Department of Electrical Engineering at MIT. In the 1930s, while a graduate student and then a young professor in the department, he worked closely with his advisor, Vannevar Bush, on the development of a computer called the “Differential Analyzer”—what we would today call an analog, mechanical computer. While addressing some of the practical difficulties of that machine, Hazen had written a seminal paper on “Theory of Servomechanisms,” which showed how the phenomena of regulating systems—what would later be called “feedback mechanisms”—were common across numerous types of machinery, from governors on steam engines to voltage regulators in electric power systems. In a well-known move that laid the groundwork for much of the U.S. science and technology efforts in World War II, Bush moved to Washington, D.C. in 1939 to become head of the Carnegie Institution. The following year, he received Franklin Roosevelt’s personal approval to set up an innovative research and development agency, the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC). Among other accomplishments, the NDRC established a “uranium committee” that would morph into the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb. A key early component of the NDRC Document

Becoming MIT: Moments of Decision (review)

Reviewed by: Becoming MIT: Moments of Decision Matt Wisnioski (bio) Becoming MIT: Moments of Decision. Edited by David Kaiser. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2010. Pp. v+207. $24.95. The historical record belies Becoming MIT’s opening conceit, while supporting its central argument. “MIT has always been a forward-looking place,” David Kaiser writes, “rarely dwelling on its past.” (p. 1). In fact, MIT took its first backward glance at the World’s Columbian Exposition, emphasizing its “Foundation, Character, and Equipment.” The Great War resulted in the 1920 750-page homage to the institutional coordination of mens et manus, Technology’s War Record. When MIT again retooled for global conflict, John Burchard—architect, National Defense Research Committee administrator, and future dean of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences—acted as scribe. As president Susan Hockfield notes in the present volume, MIT got serious about its legacy for the 1961 centennial, establishing the Institute Archives. The forward-looking committee reports at the heart of Becoming MIT likewise mined the past, even as they concluded there was no going back. This pattern of introspective recalibration suits the most successful land-grant college in the United States; and, as Kaiser et al. show, it has generated a pattern of achievement that almost defies belief. With characteristic nostalgia and futurism, MIT’s sesquicentennial looks to surpass all previous efforts. Spanning 150 days, the celebration includes an online archive of interviews with ninety-seven institutional luminaries and counting (http://mit150.mit.edu/infinite-history). Linked to the festivities, Becoming MIT targets a readership of alumni, students, and professional historians. Alumni will learn that they make up one-third of American space travelers and may be horrified when Bruce Sinclair describes how on more than one occasion Harvard tried to acquire MIT in a merger. They can also reflect on the personal meaning of global change when they read Deborah Douglas’s tale of a physics student during World War II, re-created from a collection of journals and artifacts recently donated to the MIT Museum. Individual chapters are sure to appear on syllabi at institutions seeking to emulate the MIT model. Best for this purpose are Merritt Roe Smith’s masterful telling of the institute’s founding, John Durant’s account of the rDNA controversy as a story of community engagement, and Lotte Bailyn’s analysis of the 1999 MIT Report about gender discrimination among the professoriate (accompanied by a postscript from the study’s chair, biology professor Nancy Hopkins). Much of Becoming MIT will be familiar to specialists. It is nonetheless worth seeing how Kaiser, Christophe Lécuyer, and Stuart W. Leslie reshuffle the deck. Lécuyer’s chapter on the Technology Plan, moreover, provides what may be the best encapsulation ever written of competing visions of science, engineering, and industry in the interwar years. [End Page 859] Becoming MIT eschews the encyclopedic, seeking instead to “interrogate those moments of decision that have helped to define the institute we know today” (p. 8). This approach chronicles a century and a half of change through the eyes of presidents, committees, and entrepreneurial visionaries. It also supports the authors’ ambition to provide a usable past by showing how MIT’s leaders responded to recurring tensions of government funding and private investment, the profound impact of military service, the boundaries between fundamental science and engineering know-how, and the pedagogical innovations that filtered administrative decisions into student check-sheets. There are notable absences that might have highlighted additional dimensions of the choices MIT faces today. Roe Smith, for example, is the lone author to account for the School of Architecture. The Sloan School appears only as the home of Howard Johnson and William F. Pounds. The Media Lab receives passing mention. Finally, beyond reference to Open-CourseWare, there is no explanation for how MIT cultivated its international reach. Kaiser clues the reader to these alternative moments in his introduction and, to be fair, scholarship on them is in its relative infancy. However, as origin stories for contemporary scientific labor in a global context, the erosion of disciplinary identities, and new organizational forms of commercialized science, these omissions point to potentially different commitments than the lens of...

Lauriston S. Taylor, DSc

Lauriston S. Taylor, DSc

Oliver Cecil Simpson

Oliver Cecil Simpson

Improbable warriors: women scientists and the U.S. Navy in World War II

At the outbreak of World War II, four scientists left their comfortable college teaching positions to work for the government. Three served in uniform, the fourth oversaw contracts for the Navy. Such dramatic changes in life styles during the period were common -- for men. But these established scientists were women, and each made significant contributions to a Navy embroiled in a modern, science-dependent war. Mary Sears, a Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution planktonologist, headed the Hydrographic Office's Oceanographic Unit. Grace Hopper, a Yale-trained mathematician, went to the Bureau of Ships Computation Laboratory at Harvard where she worked on one of the first computers, churning out essential data for ordnance and other projects. Florence van Straten, a New York University chemist, served as an aerological engineer analyzing the use of weather in combat. Mina Rees was the chief technical aide to the applied mathematics panel of the National Defense Research Committee. This book firmly places the women within the context of their times. Deeply rooted in previously unexamined primary sources, the work helps readers understand the personal and professional experiences of women in the military and the attitudes they faced, and fully appreciate the educational and occupational barriers faced by women scientists in the 1930s and 1940s.The author focuses on their efforts during the war, but also discusses the women's skills and training, tells how they came to war work, and examines the contributions they made once there. She further considers how the war changed their lives, especially their professional lives, and how it affected their future careers. While other books havebeen written about women in the military, this is the first to focus on Navy women scientists.

Persa Raymond ‘P. R.’ Bell

Persa Raymond “P. R.” Bell, one of the founders of nuclear medicine and a versatile electronics expert, died 10 January 2001 of heart disease in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.Born on 24 April 1913 just outside Fort Wayne, Indiana, P. R. graduated in 1936 with a BSc in chemistry from Howard College (now Samford University) in Birmingham, Alabama. He repaired radios in several northern Alabama towns to earn enough money to enter graduate studies in physics at the University of Chicago, which he began attending in 1938.In 1940, P. R. joined the National Defense Research Committee’s Project Chicago as a staff member. He worked on high-speed counters for the project. In 1941, he was recruited from Chicago to MIT’s Radiation Lab, which worked in secret to develop radar. While there, he discovered the photoelectric effect in silicon. After the war ended, P. R. joined Clinton National Laboratory, now Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), where he applied his ingenuity in electronics to invent—with Walter Jordan—the famous A-1 amplifier. In the late 1940s, P. R. built some of the earliest crude spectrometers using organic scintillators. The first significant units, poor in resolution but still capable of resolving quite complex spectra, used 1.5-inch diameter by 1-inch thick thallium-doped sodium iodide crystals. Development of these units soon led to the use of scintillation spectrometry in the emerging field of nuclear medicine imaging. In 1966, P. R. helped design the large low-background spectrometers used in the Lunar Receiving Laboratory in Houston, Texas.In 1957, P. R. became an associate director of ORNL’s thermonuclear division, where he was instrumental in the design and operation of the DCX-2 mirror machine experiment. By connecting DCX-2 to a new Linc-8 computer from Digital Equipment Co, he did some of the first computer monitoring of plasma physics machines. Although strong radio-frequency oscillations eventually resulted in the termination of the DCX-2 experiment, P. R. noted that the experiment led to important research into the study of vacuum arcs—carbon, lithium, and deuterium—an important tool for work in space.During a leave of absence from ORNL from 1967 to 1969, P. R. was the manager of the Lunar Receiving Laboratory and chief of the lunar and Earth sciences division of NASA’s Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston when the first samples were taken from the Moon during the Apollo 11 mission. In 1969, the lunar material was returned in rock boxes and then studied in a containment vacuum system, which P. R. helped to develop. His innate enthusiasm was evident as he interacted with geologists and chemists during those studies.P. R. returned to ORNL in 1970 as the assistant director of the Molecular Anatomy Project. In 1974, he became a member of ORNL’s health and safety research division, within the biology division. In both capacities, he was concerned with the computer processing of nuclear medicine images. After retiring from ORNL in 1978, P. R. joined the Institute for Energy Analysis at Oak Ridge Associated Universities. There, during the 1980s, he began studying, and lecturing on, the problem of global climate change. He was one of the first scientists to point to the melting of methane hydrates as a contributor to greenhouse warming.P. R.’s accomplishments were recognized in 1964, when he received the Edward Longstreth Medal from the Franklin Institute for his pioneering work in nuclear medicine. In 1976, the bicentennial celebration calendar of Mallinckrodt Inc, based in St. Louis, Missouri, acknowledged P. R., citing that he “founded scintillation spectrometry; plotted [the] first scintillation beta spectrum; developed [a] basis for [the] widespread use of sodium iodide gamma counters; originated [the] ‘medical spectrometer’; [and was] active in development of scanning instrumentation.”Although an early onset of macular degeneration left P. R. legally blind throughout his adult life, he considered this just a minor obstacle to the pursuit of his goals. He was a man of broad interests: Everything in nature interested him, and he threw himself into each project with tremendous energy and enthusiasm. He wanted everyone to share in the wonders of this world and was well known locally for his down-to-earth talks to civic clubs and organizations. He had a great love of music and, in younger days when his eyesight was better, sketching and woodcarving.P. R. will be remembered for his love of science, his unassuming ways, the love he gave to his wife and son, his kind and gentle nature, and his happy disposition. Persa Raymond “P. R.” Bell PPT|High resolution© 2001 American Institute of Physics.

James Samuel Owens

James Samuel Owens, an optical spectroscopist, ceramic scientist, and industrial manager, died in Venice, Florida, on 26 October 2000 of congestive heart failure.Owens was born on 27 March 1908 in McKinney, Kentucky, and raised in the nearby town of Hustonville. He earned a BS degree in physics from the University of Chattanooga in 1928 and then began graduate studies in physics at the University of Wisconsin, where he worked as a research assistant to L. R. Ingersoll from 1928 to 1929.Owens considered transferring to electrical engineering, so he spent the summer of 1929 working for Western Electric in Chicago. Having decided that he preferred physics, he then accepted a research assistantship at the University of Michigan, earning his MS (1930) and PhD (1932) degrees in physics there. His doctoral thesis was entitled “The Quenching of Mercury Resonance Radiation by Hydrogen, Carbon Monoxide, and Nitrogen.” His thesis adviser was O. S. Duffendack, who remained a lifelong friend and mentor.From 1933 to 1939, Owens was a research physicist at the Dow Chemical Co in Midland, Michigan, where he worked in optics, spectrochemical analysis, and photochemistry and reported to J. Donald Hanawalt. From 1939 to 1943, Owens was assistant chief chemist with the Armstrong Cork Co in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, using spectroscopic techniques to study glass chemistry.Returning to the University of Michigan, he worked from 1943 to 1946 for Duffendack as chief technical aide in the infrared section of the National Defense Research Committee, Office of Scientific Research and Development. Owens was responsible for developing infrared equipment and systems for the detection of personnel, vehicles, and ships, and also for communication. For this work, carried out in industrial and university laboratories across the country, he received the Presidential Certificate of Merit from President Harry S Truman (in 1948).Owens joined Ohio State University in 1945 as a professor of physics and as executive director of the university’s Research Foundation in Columbus. As executive director, he was responsible for carrying out, in the university’s departments and colleges, the research programs sponsored by industries and government agencies.In 1951, he moved to Detroit to join the Champion Spark Plug Co as assistant to the manager of the ceramic division. He was named general manager of the division in 1954 and was elected a vice president of the company in 1971. Owens retired in 1973, but remained active in the Engineering Society of Detroit and the Detroit Section of the Society of Automotive Engineers until 1982, when he and his wife moved to Florida.Owens was president (1974–75) of the Metropolitan Detroit Science and Engineering Fair, president (1973–74) of the Engineering Society of Detroit; president (1967–68) of the American Ceramic Society; and president (1965–66) of the International Association of Torch Clubs. He was also a Kentucky Colonel. This recognition, which particularly pleased him, was granted by the governor of his home state. He was the inventor or coinventor on 11 patents. Owens thought like a physicist and taught others the excitement of quantitatively understanding the natural world and the operation of complex systems, even though his own career was not primarily in research. Rather, he organized and guided the engineering and manufacturing skills of others to produce many kinds of useful and practical ceramic materials and devices. James Samuel Owens PPT|High resolution© 2001 American Institute of Physics.

Leon Madansky

Leon Madansky, Alonzo Decker Professor Emeritus at the Johns Hopkins University, whose research interests included nuclear physics and fundamental particles, died suddenly of a heart ailment on 18 March 2000 in London, England; he collapsed after attending a play at a West End theater on the last day of a week-long vacation.Madansky was born in Brooklyn, New York, on 11 January 1923. He received three degrees in physics from the University of Michigan: a BS in 1942, an MS in 1944, and a PhD in 1948. His doctoral research with Marcellus Wiedenbeck involved studies in nuclear isomerism. During his graduate education, he was an assistant in a National Defense Research Committee war project. From 1944 to 1945, he was an ensign in the US Navy, assigned to the Naval Research Laboratory to conduct research in millimeter-wave radiation. In 1948, Madansky was appointed an instructor in the physics department of the Johns Hopkins University. He served there for the rest of his life, although he spent two sabbatical leaves (in 1969 and 1974) at CERN on Guggenheim and NSF fellowships. Madansky was active in research in nuclear, condensed matter, and particle physics. In 1950, he and his Hopkins colleague Franco Rasetti introduced the idea of forming beams of thermal-energy positrons. Their idea revolutionized low-energy positron research in the study of solids, surface, and atomic physics, and their hypotheses about positronium formation and positron diffusion were demonstrated in the decades that followed.In 1964, Madansky and his Hopkins colleague George Owen established the feasibility of producing negative hydrogen and deuterium ion sources, in which the metastable atoms are polarized and then ionized. This work effectively opened up opportunities for subsequent research with polarized proton beams, a subject in which Madansky maintained an interest.Madansky served as department chairman from 1965 to 1968; during that period, Hopkins started its now-thriving astrophysics program. In addition to his work at Hopkins, Madansky spent many summers conducting research at SLAC. He was also a scientist at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL), where he was a member of the Solenoid Tracker at RHIC (STAR) collaboration.In 1980, in his work at the BEVALAC at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, Madansky used the power of highly segmented arrays of almost 4π solid-angle detectors in heavy-ion physics to characterize central collisions. With this equipment, he made the first measurements of neutral pion production with Tim Hallman, his graduate student at the time. Madansky energetically advocated dilepton measurement as the signal of the early hard-scattering stage of collisions. This measurement was first implemented at the BEVALAC in the early 1980s and now incorporated in the HADES experiment at GSI, a heavy-ion research center in Darmstadt, Germany, and the PHENIX experiment at the RHIC. In 1989, Madansky also pioneered another unique research technique in relativistic heavy-ion collisions at the BNL Alternating Gradient Synchrotron (AGS): the use of lambda polarization as a probe of the origin of strangeness production, which is thought to be a sensitive indicator of the possible transition in heavy-ion collisions from hot hadronic matter to a deconfined quark–gluon plasma. Madansky, who was always fond of polarization as a unique tool in particle and nuclear physics, was the first to make feasibility measurements to test the possibility of making this measurement, and in fact, he measured the first lambdas observed in relativistic heavy-ion collisions at the AGS.In the early 1990s, Madansky was a major force behind the addition of the electromagnetic spectrometer in STAR for the study of spin physics with polarized proton beams. This concluded his study of polarization phenomena, which began with his efforts to produce polarized proton beams in the 1960s.His long-term interest was in the development of experimental methods, especially particle detectors. As early as the 1940s, he worked on parallel plate detectors, the precursors of the spark chambers of the 1960s.Popular with faculty and students, Madansky was instrumental in hiring many of the leading staff members of the department. A man of vision who started a number of the department’s programs, he passed on his knowledge by describing the latest results and challenging listeners to think about the questions those results raised. He was one of the most intuitive of physicists in a number of fields—a true generalist. He would ask colleagues about their current work and ideas and suggest additional research. Although he frequently provided seminal ideas, he would be reticent about being part of the publications that incorporated those ideas.Madansky was a good conversationalist and a highly cultured man who enjoyed the arts. He was an amateur painter and often spent free time at art museums. He attended plays and the opera, particularly enjoying the music of Verdi and Puccini. He will be sorely missed by us all. Leon Madansky PPT|High resolution© 2001 American Institute of Physics.

Anechoic wedge design and development/anechoic chamber qualification testing

The initial research conducted at Harvard University’s Electro Acoustic Laboratory for the development of the anechoic chamber will be reviewed in this presentation. These findings, which were originally presented in the Office of Scientific Research and Development National Defense Research Committee Report No. 4190 (OSRD, No. 4190), will be discussed. The research conducted by Leo L. Beranek and his colleagues during WWII established the basic design and construction for anechoic wedges and chambers for years to come. Contemporary design and materials used in anechoic wedge construction have evolved to encompass a variety of room acoustic treatments, to include fiberglass, foam, and metallic wedges. Design and construction of current commercially available chambers and wedges will be reviewed. The second half of the presentation will focus on the development of anechoic and hemianechoic chamber qualification procedures to current ISO and ANSI standards. The use of various sound sources will be discussed as well as the correlation between these standards and other test methods in determining chamber performance.

John Northrop—Definitive Study of Enzymes

John Howard Northrop, an American biochemist, shared the 1946 Nobel Prize in chemistry with 2 other biochemists, James B. Sumner (1887-1955) and Wendell M. Stanley (1904-1971), for successfully purifying and crystallizing certain enzymes, thus allowing the chemical nature of these substances to be determined. Stanley crystallized and studied the tobacco mosaic virus, Sumner isolated and crystallized a protein he considered to be urease, and Northrop isolated and identified several enzymes. Northrop was born on July 5, 1891, in Yonkers, NY. His father was a zoology instructor at Columbia University in New York City, and his mother was a botanist. Just before Northrop was born, his father was killed in a laboratory explosion, and his mother had to resume her position as a botany teacher at HunterCollege in New York City. Northrop attended elementary and secondary schools in New York and graduated from high school in 1908. After graduation, he entered Columbia University and received a BA degree in 1912, an MA degree in 1913, and a PhD degree with a major in chemistry in 1915. After receiving his doctorate, Northrop was awarded a 1-year traveling fellowship that allowed him to work at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (New York City). Subsequently, he was appointed an assistant at the institute, and in 1917, he became an associate to the faculty. During World War I (1914-1918), Northrop served as a captain in the US Chemical Warfare Service and conducted research on fermentation processes suitable for the industrial production of acetone and ethyl alcohol. After the war, he returned to the Rockefeller Institute and resumed his investigations on protein. This work led to the study of enzymes. In 1920, enzymes were relatively mysterious substances, although they had been discovered in 1902 by German chemist Eduard Buchner (1860-1912), who won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1907. Northrop's research on enzymes led to the crystallization of pepsin in 1930. In the course of this work, he established that pepsin is a protein, thus resolving the dispute about whether enzymes were proteins. Using the same chemical methods, he also helped to isolate and prepare in crystalline form the inactive precursor of pepsin pepsinogen (which is converted to the active enzyme through a reaction with hydrochloric acid in the stomach), the pancreatic digestive enzymes trypsin (1932) and chy-motrypsin (1935), and their inactive precursors trypsinogen and chymotrypsinogen. In 1938, he isolated the bacterial virus (bacteriophage) and proved that the virus was anucle-oprotein. From 1916 to his retirement in 1961, Northrop was associated with the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York City. During World War II (1939-1945), he served as a consultant and official investigator for the National Defense Research Committee. His wartime work led to the development of methods for the automatic detection of chemical weapons. From 1949 to 1958, he also served as a visiting professor of bacteriology and biophysics at the University of California at Berkeley and was resident biophysicist at the Donner Laboratory there from 1958 to 1959. Among his many scientific literary efforts was his 1939 book Crystalline Enzymes. On May 27, 1987, at the age of 95 years, Northrop died in Wickenburg, Ariz (about 45 miles northwest of Phoenix). He was honored on a stamp issued by Gabon in 1995.

From radar to nuclear magnetic resonance

As war engulfed Europe from September 1939, and the Axis powers overran most of the western European countries in 1940, the United States undertook to build up quickly its military capabilities. By late 1940, a full year before the U.S. was drawn into war as a combatant, there began a massive move of scientists, especially physicists, temporarily into new organizations set up to develop technologically advanced weapons. One of the first of these, destined to become one of the largest, was the “Radiation Laboratory,” so named with an intent to obscure its purpose, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, established in November of 1940 by the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC). Its mission was to develop radio detection and ranging (to become known as Radar), inspired by the startling performance of the pulsed cavity magnetron revealed to U.S. military officers and members of the National Defense Research Committee by the British “Tizard Mission.” Although magnetrons as generators of electromagnetic energy of short wavelength had been developed in several places many years earlier, the new magnetron was a breakthrough in that it could produce microwave pulses many orders of magnitude more intense than could anything else then in existence. It was an ideal device for the development of radar. The visit from the beleaguered British scientists and high military officers, headed by Sir Henry Tizard, had entered into this exchange of secret new military technology to try to obtain technical help and manufacturing support from US industry, relatively insulated from air attack. The cavity magnetron has been described, in view of its developed use in the war, as possibly the most important cargo ever to cross the Atlantic, although many other secret developments were included in the exchange. For example, the British progress toward releasing nuclear energy was also revealed.

WHAT DID VANNEVAR BUSH REALLY DO?

Over the past five years, the name Vannevar Bush more than any other has hovered over the center stage in debates calling for a new science policy paradigm. He and his 1945 report, Science, the Endless Frontier, are presumed to have set in motion the current paradigms of government support for research. Traditional structures and practices, today's policy rhetoric bewails, have broken down, and new ones—if they exist at all—are being hunted. As director of the Office of Scientific Research & Development (OSRD) during World War II, Bush essentially functioned as science adviser to President Franklin Roosevelt. Bush died in 1974 somewhat disappointed and marginalized as an adviser to government. But for legacy and charisma, the flinty and forceful Bush had no peers. It was OSRD, beginning with its predecessor body, the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC), that established the current research support patterns. NDRC was entirely Bush's invention, established in 1940 soon after Bush, ...

Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century

Reviewed by: Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century* Ross Bassett (bio) Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century. By G. Pascal Zachary. New York: The Free Press, 1997. Pp. viii+518; illustrations, notes/references, bibliography, index. $32.50. Vannevar Bush has received more attention from historians of technology and science than any other twentieth-century engineer, but until now no biography of him had been published. G. Pascal Zachary’s Endless Frontier admirably fills this lacuna, taking advantage of the existing secondary material on Bush and supplementing it with his own exhaustive research in the primary sources. The result is not so much a fundamental revision of the previous Bush literature as a fuller portrait of the man. Zachary’s main themes will be familiar to readers of Larry Owens’s work (e.g., “The Counterproductive Management of Science in the Second World War: Vannevar Bush and the Office of Scientific Research and Development,” Business History Review 68 [Winter 1994]: 515–76): the tensions between Bush’s personal philosophy stressing the individual, his technocratic impulses, and the larger organizations he dealt with in his career. In 1938 Bush wrote that he would circumscribe the individual “as little as possible” (p. 8). And he spent a lifetime making sure that he was circumscribed as little as possible. Whether by threatening to sue his college for not paying him his wages promptly, forcing his graduate advisor to sign a contract stipulating the work required for his thesis, or launching a petty dispute with tax officials in the middle of World War II, Bush fought to keep his freedom as an individual even if it meant bullying others to do so. Bush’s computing machines reflect the primacy he put on the individual. As Owens has shown (“Vannevar Bush and the Differential Analyzer: The Text and Context of an Early Computer,” Technology and Culture 27 [January 1986]: 63–95), the operation of Bush’s differential analyzer was transparent to the users, inculcating in them a profound understanding of its underlying mathematical principles. Zachary calls the memex, a futuristic data retrieval machine Bush described in the Atlantic Monthly in 1945, “a machine that could amplify the consciousness of a single person, not run an organization” (p. 267). Of course Bush himself ran organizations, most notably the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC) and later the Office of Scientific Research and Development. While Bush’s large-sized personal ambition remained in view, Zachary considers Bush to have been a very effective administrator: “a master at sizing up situations, he worked best when interfered with the least” (p. 347). But Zachary also gives many examples of Bush’s adeptness in dealing with adversaries and the bureaucracy. The early stages of the atomic bomb program perhaps best demonstrate Bush’s skills as a research manager. Although Bush was initially skeptical about the possibilities of a fission weapon, Zachary follows Stanley Goldberg (“Inventing a Climate of Opinion: Vannevar Bush and the Decision to Build [End Page 685] the Bomb,” Isis 83 [September 1992]: 429–52) in assigning Bush a central role in moving the United States to an all-out atomic weapons program. Zachary writes that Bush “brought a fuzzy goal into clear view more quickly than anyone had a right to expect” (p. 209). On the other hand, Zachary notes Bush’s lack of support for both missile research and the ENIAC, explaining both cases by a lack of vision on Bush’s part coupled with his hunch that neither would be ready before the end of the war. Zachary claims that after the war Bush’s “moment had passed” (p. 380). His power had come from the war and his personal relationship with FDR, and both were gone. Although Bush coveted the secretary of defense position, Truman bypassed him, instead making him the head of the Defense Research Board, where he was powerless to implement his agenda of rationalizing defense research. While Bush continued to hold titles that might suggest power, such as seats on corporate boards or memberships on high level government committees, real power lay elsewhere, and his counsel was frequently ignored. Ever the engineer, he continued his innovative work...

Engineers, psychologists, and administrators: control systems research in wartime, 1940-45

Describes the organisation and work of 2 US wartime scientific agencies, the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC) and its successor and umbrella organization, the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD).< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>