Foreword by Edwin M. McMillan

I first met Martin Kamen in 1937, when he came to Ernest Lawrence's Radiation Laboratory at the University of California in Berkeley as a newly minted Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of Chicago on a research fellowship. To set the stage for that event I should say something about what the laboratory was like then. It bore no resemblance to any modern research establishment. It had one building, an old wooden structure that had been scheduled for demoli- tion until Lawrence prevailed on Robert G. Sproul, then president of U.C., to save it for him. In this building worked a small group of dedi- cated people, some of them faculty, some graduate students, some visitors and fellows, under Lawrence's direction. There was no formal organization and no set program of research, and a newcomer like Martin pretty much had to find his own way. The fact that he was a chemist in a group dominated by physicists was no problem; there was plenty of chemistry to be done in the identification and purification of radioactive isotopes, and anyhow the kind of chemistry that he had. learned under William D. Harkins at Chicago had a large component of nuclear physics mixed with it. Then, too, there was Martin's friendly and cheerful personality, with its many facets and some eccentricities, such as his refusal to learn to drive a car. His stories of life in the seamier parts of Chicago added a touch of exotic interest, as did his tales of life as a graduate student with some dictatorial professors of the old school. Life at the Radiation Laboratory had its relaxed moments, such as the summer

ix X FOREWORD vacations at Don Cooksey's place in the Trinity Mountains and the parties at Di Biasi's restaurant, and at these Martin was a star per- former with a line of stories that became famous. I have not mentioned his musical interests, which were so impor- tant in his life, nor will I go on about his later career and achievements, but I do wish to emphasize what I consider his most important single contribution to science, the discovery of carbon 14. This took place before I left the Radiation Laboratory in November 1940 to do radar research, and I was in Berkeley and interested in the work while it was going on. The use of radioactive tracers to follow the course of chemi- cal reactions was a subject of great interest and high promise at that time, and new radioactive isotopes were being discovered almost daily. The most desired of all was a long-lived isotope of carbon, the key element in organic chemistry. Already known was carbon 11, with a half-life of twenty minutes, and Martin with his colleagues Sam Ruben and Zev Hassid were al- ready trying to study the process of photosynthesis using this as a tracer, a frustrating procedure at best, since the tracer isotope was decaying away rapidly while they were carrying out the required chemical manipulations. The obvious cure was to find a long-lived carbon isotope. With the strong encouragement of Professor Law- rence, Kamen and Ruben set out on a concerted search for this bo- nanza, and they found it. The consequences of their discovery are without limit, and others have received high awards for researches made using carbon 14, while its discoverers have not been rewarded on a commensurate scale. The reason for this I believe lies in the sad circumstance that one of the two co-workers suffered a fatal accident while working with phos- gene in the laboratory, so that what might have been a joint award was no longer possible. I also believe that an award to Kamen alone would not be inappropriate. I knew both men well, and in fact have published joint papers with both of them. It was Kamen who had the spark of originality and the initiative to propose lines of attack, and Kamen with whom one had the stimulating discussions. In my mind, at least, I think of Martin Kamen as the discoverer of carbon 14, as well as being a man of wide talents in many fields, and I am honored to have him as a friend.