The Price of Altruism (13 page)

“The disorders of our civilization,” he opined that fall, “result in part from our conviction that the advance of technology will solve all our problems.” Not even sure that it might help to win the war, Hutchins was certain that it could never buy moral understanding.

“We must have something more,” he declared, and instituted two new graduate programs. The Committee on Communications was to “undertake to unite public opinion on the war, to develop an intelligent national morale, and to prepare the nation for a rational approach to post-war problems.” The Committee on Social Thought was to concern itself with the issues at the base of social and political organization. And so, in the spirit of his president, George added a general course in social sciences alongside the advanced chemistry and mathematics that he was now taking—and acing—in the fall.
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It was shortly after he joined the wrestling team that year that he met Al Somit in the weight room. Al was an angular-jawed, wisecracking Jewish kid from Chicago whose Ukrainian-born father, just like George’s, had died when he was four. He had arrived that summer from college in Kentucky, where he had belatedly learned, two days after his arrival on a music scholarship, that something called “chapel” was mandatory. Promptly back in town, and with a growing sense of both his musical and technical limitations, he enrolled at the University of Chicago as a political science and history major.

In the weight room, Al could see that George had a wiry body and worked harder and sweated more than anyone. Intense hazel eyes planted beneath a broad forehead made contact in unsettling bursts. Even before he spoke, you’d pick him out as different, but when he did his voice was high and squeaky and started and stopped in spurts. He had a baby face, which was confusing. He flexed his muscles weirdly in front of the mirror. Eccentric, unscripted, he was a one-off.

Some felt uncomfortable in his presence. There was something brutally honest about his gaze. You couldn’t escape it. It made you search for words, look at your feet, wonder whether he saw completely through you. Toting around his Harvard bag he seemed smug, above it all, juvenile. But there was a truth in him you walked away from at your peril: George Price knew things. He never said anything familiar. He was strange, and the way in which it was unclear whether he knew this or not somehow lent weight to his glances and opinions. Al was intrigued by his defiant obliviousness and boldness. George’s genius for numbers provided a confidence he lacked in himself. Both loved to argue and, even more, to win an argument. They were lanky and opinionated and had a quirky sense of humor. Before long they were rooming together in a dank basement off Fifty-fifth Street.
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Sensitivities on campus were at an all time high. The secret constitutions of Chi Rho Sigma and other fraternities barred Jews and Negroes from the organizations. “Such discrimination pulls a Pearl Harbor on campus democracy every day that it continues to exist,” the
Daily Maroon
attacked with language that seemed most salient. Many co-ops had sprung up, fighting back against “restrictive covenants.” Only in 1948 would a Supreme Court decision render such covenants illegal. Meanwhile, race and religion were on everyone’s mind.
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On warm days George would make the thirty-minute walk from the university down to Lake Michigan and offer to apply girls’ sun lotion as they lay bathing on its shore. He was an oddball, Al thought, an oddball among oddballs, never quite grasping his relation to the world. In the fall he joined the Ellis Eating Co-Op, made up mostly of Jewish students. Al would soon be leaving for the Engineer Corps, and besides, $4.83 was a good deal for twenty meals ($.03 extra charge for additional beverages).
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“What do you expect of Jews?” George would say loudly while waiting in the queue, somehow missing the point that anti-Semitic jibes might actually off end anyone, not to mention Al. At first it seemed meaningless enough, just kind of strange, really. After a while, though, it was pissing people off. The more irritated the Ellis gang became, the more George pursued them. In a move that baffled every one, he declared a “battle against the non-Aryans,” and then proceeded directly to join the Jewish Ellis Housing Co-Op.
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He was taking dancing lessons, alone, at Arthur Murray’s. Angular and off rhythm, he seemed lost in a weird and mechanical internal world. Some put it down to geekiness compounded by the trauma of losing a father, and let it go, but most found it difficult to “get” him. Whether oblivious or spiteful, detached or goading, to George it all seemed like one big game. He was positively titillated by attention, even when it was negative. In the spirit of their off beat humor, Al counseled his friend to plead freedom of speech when the constitution-touting co-op finally put up a vote to oust him. It didn’t help. George was a contrarian; he got his kicks from pushing the limits just as hard as he possibly could.
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Sometimes Al wondered whether his friend was slightly nuts. Then he’d shrug the thought away with a forgiving smile. Between manic bench-pressing, supercilious racism, and all-nighters crutched on Benzedrine, George, he knew, was “just George” and that was that. When he’d question him about his offensive remarks George would offer an innocent glance and shrug his shoulders. He knew that people thought him awkward, but it didn’t bother him, he claimed. Sometimes deeper feelings would escape, like slivery rays of sunlight penetrating a cloud. “It helps my morale,” he wrote to a friend, “to learn that everyone doesn’t dislike me.”
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In the spring the “Mecca of the caffeine addicts,” the Coffee Shop, was appropriated by the army, and with it the “last vestige” of peacetime campus life.
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In the short time that George had been at Chicago, the university had undergone momentous changes. It had shifted from support from endowment to tuition fees, from individuals to corporations, from private donors to government funding. By 1944, 198 federal contracts had been executed, all on a not-for-profit basis. The university budget had tripled. Civilian enrollment was down 30 percent from the prewar level, and the normal ratio of three men to two women had reversed itself, and worse.
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But things were beginning to change. With America already well mobilized, university training programs across the country began to close one by one. As the G.I. Bill came in, the army units went out, and regular university life at Chicago, it seemed, was actually returning to normal.

Or so people thought. In truth enormous resources were now being spent on a top-secret underground project. In 1939 Albert Einstein had sent a letter to President Roosevelt, urging him to call upon the nation’s resources to develop atomic weapons to fight the Nazis. Roosevelt complied, and within a year scientists at Cal Tech and Columbia had theoretically demonstrated the awesome explosive potentials of the isotope uranium 235 and an element just recently discovered called plutonium. Soon after Pearl Harbor a group led by the Nobel laureate Arthur H. Compton was set up by the government for consolidating plutonium research at Chicago. The outfit, called the Metallurgical, or “Met,” Lab, was the cover given to Compton’s facility, and it was tucked away behind the ivy-covered sandstone facade and glistening rectangular windows of unassuming Eckhart Hall.
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The Manhattan Project charged Compton with producing chain-reacting “piles” of uranium to convert to plutonium, with finding ways to separate the two, and, ultimately, with building an atomic bomb. As George had been innocently taking his undergraduate Organic Combustion Analysis and Differential Equation examinations, Glenn T. Seaborg and his team at the university secretly isolated the first weighable amount of plutonium from uranium, irradiated in cyclotrons.

But there was still the business of building uranium-and-graphite piles (later called reactors) that could be brought to critical mass in a controlled, self-sustaining nuclear reaction. When a labor strike prevented such work at a designated laboratory at the Argonne Forest thirty miles southwest of Chicago, the famed Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, together with Martin Whittaker and Walter Zinn, set out to build a pile in a squash court under abandoned stands in the west wing of Stagg Field. The pile was a crude construction, made of black bricks and wooden timber, but, miraculously, it worked. On the bitterly cold day of December 2, 1942—unknown to George, his fellow students and professors at Chicago, and practically everyone else in the world—the pile went critical at 3:53 in the afternoon. The nuclear age had dawned.
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George graduated in September 1943, Phi Beta Kappa. A star in the Department of Chemistry, he was awarded the Eli Lilly Fellowship and invited to continue for his doctorate. Starting off on enzyme chemistry, his project quickly changed. He’d be working now under the supervision of a Dr. Samuel Schwartz, he was told, and joining the Manhattan Project.

A medical doctor and research scientist from the University of Minnesota, Schwartz was the son of Russian Jewish immigrants who had grown up poor in north Minneapolis. One of seven children, he sold candy and ice cream as a boy to help his family, and after high school snagged a job washing beakers in a lab at the university. The head of the lab, C. J. Watson, was a bigwig at the medical school, and, noticing his quick mind, took Schwartz under his wing. Watson sent him to medical school, and the investment paid off. Now at the Manhattan Project at the Met Lab in Chicago, the bearded, broad-smiling Schwartz headed a twenty-five-man team studying the biological effects of atomic radiation and metals. Day in and day out, George would walk up the sandstone steps of the George Herbert Jones Chemistry Building, nodding hello to the namesake’s bronze bust as he whisked through the entrance hall and down to the lab.
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His new project was technical and had nothing to do with enzymes. If an atomic bomb was built and ended up being used, small traces of toxic uranium would find their way into human bodies. In order to be able to treat such people, a sensitive method had to be devised to help detect the traces of uranium. A generation earlier a pair of researchers at the Carnegie Institute had shown that the intensity of uranium fluorescence is greatly increased by fusion with sodium fluoride, and that its light, therefore, could be measured. The method was all right but needed to be made better. It was a needle-in-a-haystack problem, and George would try to solve it.
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He went to work under a veil of secrecy. How to best detect these tiny amounts of harmful substance? Besides the chemistry of the analytical procedure there was also the construction of suitable photoelectric fluorophotometers. It was a task that brought back childhood memories of Display and challenged his talents as a physicist and tinkerer. Various Manhattan Project teams across the country were working on the problem, and the pressure was on. Identical sets of thirty urine samples containing known amounts of uranium were prepared at the Rochester Project, and sent for analysis to seven of the strongest competitors. In March 1945 a uranium analysis conference was held at the University of Rochester, New York, to present the results. Six of the groups had completed the analysis. Of these, one employed spectroscopy and the rest fluorescence. Statistical analysis showed that the method devised by the Chicago group was the most sensitive and accurate, and George returned to Eckhart Hall with a winning smile. Aloof and often indifferent to people, he had emerged the champion of sensitivity with molecules and photons.
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But science and life, by some mysterious osmosis, were beginning to leak into each other. It was around this time that he met Julia Madigan, a dark-haired zoology graduate of the University of Michigan who had arrived at the Project after two years in medical school. On her mother’s side, it was thought, she was the daughter of immigrant German Jews who had converted on the boat, and on her father’s of Roman Catholic Irish who’d fled the great potato famine in the 1850s. Raised in the small paper mill town of Munising, Michigan, Julia’s mother, Barbara Kinde, was the telegraph operator in the Upper Peninsula town of Marquette, and her father, James, the train station manager. With the help of two of his younger brothers, Frank and Michael, James bought the local hardware store, and before long the Madigans had secured profitable Forest Service contracts revolving around the logging trade with Canada. The Madigans were hardworking community people, and gave thanks for their prosperity by generously donating to the local church. When she came of age they sent little Julia to attend Sacred Heart with the nuns.

When Al Somit heard from his best friend that he was beginning to fall for her, he rubbed his eyes in disbelief. Julia was sexually conservative, George naturally prurient; Julia was a devout believer, George a militant atheist; Julia was mercurial, George a prankster; Julia respected convention, but George reveled in extremism. Working together at the Manhattan Project, the two couldn’t even agree on the bomb (George was for, Julia against). What was worse, they were both opinionated and stubborn as goats. Still, a Madigan family legend had it that a cadaver’s hand had slipped and grazed her chest in med school: “Julia could even raise the dead,” the professor had said to the class. When she had arrived in Chicago looking for a flat, the landlady snapped, “I don’t rent to Jews,” to which Julia responded, “But I’m Irish!” and stormed off. She had high cheekbones, full lips, and black eyes. She was short. She was curvacious. And to George she was absolutely divine.
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