Purchase
of a Cyclotron; the Manhattan Engineer District's Early Biomedical
Program
FRIEDELL: Obviously, all
of the shots were really being called by General Groves from
Washington. Often, General Groves would call on me to do things. One of
the anecdotes is
that--I have written it up--was that he asked me to go to Boston to
Harvard [University] to buy
their cyclotron. The reason for asking me to do it--and I was still at
Chicago--the reason for
asking me to do it was: they wanted to camouflage the idea that the
Army was buying a
cyclotron--well, that the Manhattan Engineer District was buying a
cyclotron.
Ostensibly, the cyclotron--actually--the cyclotron was being purchased
for Los Alamos.85 We
used the facade of my representing the [Army's] Medical Corps, which
wasn't true, and that I
wanted it for medical purposes. We were going to treat lots of
leukemia, some polycythemias,
and use it for the usual medical reasons: iodine preparation for
possible therapeutic studies and
iodine for diagnostic studies, and so on. I made this pitch as best I
could. I'm not sure that they
really believed it. But nevertheless, we adhered to it, and they
finally agreed to it.
What isn't known--if you look through the records, you'll find that
Robert Wilson, who later
became director of the Fermi Lab [National Accelerator in Batavia,
Illinois], had written up this.
But one of the things he didn't realize, didn't know, was that [Harvard
President] James [Bryant]
Conant had written a letter, a handwritten letter, to General Groves,
saying, "We will transfer
this to you for one dollar," or something like that. The reason I know
about it is that General
Groves asked me to come to Washington first. And then he explained to
me what he wanted
done. In fact, he didn't explain it to me, he directed me. He gave me
this letter to read, which
outlined what was going to happen. We were going to get the cyclotron,
no matter what. We
wanted to purchase it.
He told me, "When it comes to money, ignore that. Whatever they
[(Harvard's negotiators)]
want, you agree to, because they're not going to get it, anyway." Then
they apparently had Robert
Wilson, [in] the group was a finance officer, a legal officer; Robert
Wilson; and myself. I did
most of the talking because I was trying to convince them that this was
going to the Medical
Corps. I think--I've forgotten the name of the chairman of the
Department of Physics, who was a
well-known, towering individual in physics--he must have had an inkling
of what was going on,
because some of his staff had already disappeared to Los Alamos, Ken
Bainbridge,86 for
example--so he may have been aware of this, but he didn't dare say
anything. I think he wasn't
the chairman; the chairman was a professor of History or
Administration. The names are there
someplace.
In any event, we finally agreed that it would be done. Robert Wilson
was an expert on [the]
cyclotron, and he knew how to dismantle it and put it together; and he
was going on to Los
Alamos anyway. I think they shipped it to the medical depot to further
obscure what was
happening, and then got it from there on.