[VIE] Manhattan Project, To develop "the bomb". UofCA TV production

[Denis Franklin, MD]

The football stadium of which this constitutes the West Stands was named Stagg Field, after Amos Alonzo Stagg, famous Big Ten coach at the University of Chicago.  Little did they know that the edifice would be even more famous than Stagg ever was, as the site of the nuclear pile that in in 1943 produced the first ever earthly self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction.

Just above the heads of the distant group of pedestrians on the sidewalk are the windows of the second-floor classroom in which, in 1951,  I had my first Natural Sciences (Biology) class as a 16-year-old first-year student at the University.  And directly below that in the basement opposite the walkers were the remains of that de-commissioned nuclear pile.

This picture is a still photo I took from the documentary.  It makes me wonder why the fetal pig I dissected there wasn't roast pork by the time I was finished.  Or why I myself wasn't cooked to perfection.

By 1951 it was no longer a secret facility, and we were told about the atomic pile on the first day of class.  But the premises had been cleared by the Health Physics safety team and we were assured there was no danger.

 

Later, I knew that my college sweetheart's grandfather was a Nobel Laureate physicist (James Franck) and that her dad, whom I knew well, was a doctor, but it was only recently that I chanced upon the information that he was the first pathologist ever to do an autopsy on a person who had died from nuclear radiation, and that, for years he was the leading medical expert on the effects of radiation.  When I knew him he went to NYC for a year to work for WHO at the UN, but I had only a vague idea why.

Denis