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Chemistry at Stony Brook

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Chemistry at Stony Brook CHEMISTRY AT STONY BROOK From SUCOLI to SBU A Memoir by Francis T. Bonner Acknowledgement This memoir has been constructed primarily from my own recollections of events during the formative years of our University and its Chemistry Department in the long ago days of Oyster Bay and Stony Brook. Sidney Gelber’s book, Politics and Public Higher Education in New York State – Stony Brook, a Case History, has been an invaluable reference source, particularly in the reconstruction of time lines. I am grateful to my wife Jane Carlberg, who as First Reader provided helpful criticism and advice every step of the way. I wish also to express deep appreciation to three friends and colleagues, William le Noble, Robert Schneider and Robert Kerber, who read the memoir chapter by chapter and gave me both corrections and valuable suggestions enriched by their own recollections of the early days of Stony Brook. Finally, many thanks to Kristen Nyitray and Jason Torre, of Special Collections & University Archives, for their helpfulness, in particular for unearthing several relevant historical photographs. Francis Bonner Setauket, NY May, 2007 2 INDEX Chapter Page I Prologue 5 II Planting Fields 15 III Trouble in Paradise 25 IV President Lee 31 V The Final Year at Oyster Bay 41 VI The New Campus at Last 51 VII Time Out 63 VIII Bright Future Assured 73 IX Campus Life in the Sixties 81 X End of the Decade 87 XI Epilogue 99 3 On September 17, 1957, State University College on Long Island officially opened its doors and began the fall 1957 semester. 4 I PROLOGUE The institutional life of Stony Brook University began in 1957, under the name State University College on Long Island, at a temporary campus in Oyster Bay. I joined the SUCOLI faculty the following year, and served as founding Chair of the Chemistry Department during its first twelve years of existence, through the academic year 1969-‘70. Our first four years of departmental life, at Oyster Bay, were followed by the University’s move to Stony Brook in 1962. By 1970 we had grown from our original size, three faculty members with three undergraduate chemistry majors and one secretary (shared with Physics), to a size of thirty faculty, 70 graduate students, 25 postdoctoral research associates and 30 support staff members, with teaching responsibility for the needs of a substantial body of undergraduate chemistry majors and others in related programs, in addition to our own graduate students. I will attempt in this memoir to relate how this rapid and successful development took place. Since I led the Department through that formative twelve year period, telling about it is inevitably autobiographical. That being the case, I shall begin here by recalling some of my own personal history and experience during the years leading up to my arrival in Oyster Bay in 1958. I graduated with a BA from the University of Utah in 1942, just a few months after Pearl Harbor, and had been accepted for graduate study at Yale, with the support of a teaching assistantship. After the war began Yale announced its implementation of an accelerated academic schedule, and for that reason I traveled from Salt Lake City to New Haven in June, since course work and teaching were set to begin in July. New Haven was a “far east” destination for me, since at that time in my life I had not gone beyond Evanston, Wyoming in that direction. I had been granted a draft deferment, because there would be naval officer trainees among the undergraduates I was scheduled to teach. In choosing Yale for graduate study, I had been drawn by the presence there of the well known physical chemist Herbert Harned, and it was soon determined that he would be my PhD research advisor. During my first weeks at Sterling Chemistry Laboratory I became fleetingly acquainted with Raymond Davis, a Harned student just then completing his PhD studies. A reserve officer, Davis was about to depart for military duty, and it was his laboratory that I would shortly “inherit.” During my second year at Yale, Professor Harned was urgently asked to carry out a feasibility study of uranium isotope separation by solvent extraction. The request came from Professor Harold Urey of Columbia University, where urgent and top secret Manhattan Project research was under way. A single mass spectrometric measurement at Columbia had suggested a small possibility for 5 separation of the fissionable form U-235 from the dominant isotope U-238 by this method. Under Harned’s direction, assisted by Bernard Weinstock from Urey’s group, I was one of a small group of Yale graduate students that carried out a rapid and intensive experimental program to test this possibility. The results were entirely negative, and it was concluded that the single positive observation at Columbia had been an artifact. “In those days”, I heard it remarked maliciously, “Urey thought God separated isotopes.” It was through this experience that I first learned about the Manhattan Project and the possibility of a nuclear weapon. Under the wartime accelerated schedule, Yale was operating on a three semester academic year. With substantial course work, combined with TA duties in the physical chemistry lab course, it was a busy time, to say the least. After I completed the required courses and comprehensive exams, I was able to devote full attention, day and night, to my dissertation research on the thermodynamic properties of carbonic acid in aqueous solutions of sodium chloride. In the spring of 1944, when the experimental work was nearing completion, my draft board informed me that my deferment had been canceled, and summoned me for a pre- induction physical exam. The circumstance that my draft board was in Salt Lake City but I was in New Haven, and that all correspondence between us took place by slow surface mail, materially assisted my dissertation efforts. Directed to come to Salt Lake for the physical, I wrote back to request a change of location to New Haven. After I passed the delayed physical exam in New Haven I was again summoned to Salt Lake, this time to be inducted. I wrote again, and when at last I received notice from the draft board directing me to appear for induction at a certain location in New Haven on a certain Saturday morning, my dissertation was completed and ready for submission. But shortly before that certain Saturday arrived I received a cryptic call from Columbia University, asking me to come there for an interview. As I suspected might be the case, this turned out be the Manhattan Project. I was interviewed by Willard F. Libby, who then asked me to report for work at Columbia on the following Monday morning. When I told him I had been ordered to report for military duty on the Saturday prior to that Monday, he replied: “Just don’t show up. We’ll take care of it.” When I went to say goodbye to Lars Onsager, one of my favorite professors, I found him with his feet up, reading my dissertation. The Columbia branch of the Manhattan Project, officially called S.A.M. Labs, for “Special Alloy Materials,” was dedicated to research on the gaseous diffusion method for uranium isotope separation. The plant, then called K-25, was under construction in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, while major supporting research was carried out in New York. Much of the work in Libby’s group was devoted to the development of metallic materials suitable for use as diffusion barriers for the volatile compound uranium hexafluoride (UF6), and investigation of the interactions of these materials with UF6 itself and with the related corrosive gases fluorine (F2) and hydrogen fluoride (HF). Located in the upper floors of the Pupin Physics building, we were a dedicated and hard working group. I learned a lot at the outset from two particular members of the group, John Casper and Walter Roth, and enjoyed close working and learning relationships with several 6 others, particularly including Leonard K. Nash, a recent Harvard PhD graduate who returned to a faculty position there after the war. In the spring of 1945 we moved from the Pupin building to new quarters in a former automotive center just north of the Columbia campus, called the Nash Building. In the late days of the project there, I worked closely with Jacob Bigeleisen and had my first experience with the use of radioactive tracers when we carried out some isotope exchange experiments employing fluorine-18 produced in the Columbia cyclotron. Because the Manhattan Project was tightly compartmentalized I knew nothing about Los Alamos, or nuclear reactors, or plutonium. I was therefore greatly surprised on August 5, 1945, when I was on a home visit in Salt Lake City, it was announced that the first atomic bomb had been deployed over Hiroshima. While we knew at S.A.M. that the K-25 plant in Oak Ridge was in successful operation, it seemed not have been long enough to produce enough fuel for a bomb, and I had no idea that there were other options, e.g. the Calutron at Oak Ridge for U-235 separation, and the nuclear reactor at Hanford for plutonium-239 production. After the war ended with the Japanese surrender, the project continued for several months at a greatly reduced pace While devoting careful consideration to my next career move during this period, I also participated actively in the “atomic scientists” political movement that arose spontaneously at most branches of the Manhattan Project, whose immediate objective was to secure civilian control of atomic energy. We called our organization the Association of Manhattan Project Scientists, New York Area, “AMPS” for short.
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