Leona Woods Marshall Libby was a well-known American physicist and the only woman scientist who was part of the team that developed the first American nuclear reactor. The project was also famously known as the Manhattan Project. She was born in 1919 in Illinois and the tall and active girl who resembled an athlete completed her BS in chemistry in 1938 from the University of Chicago (Libby, 1979). She had a special interest in nuclear physics and after successful completion of her thesis met future Nobel laureate Robert Mullikan who had a passion for molecular research. Mullikan was much impressed by Leona’s academic experience in the field of nuclear physics even as he himself was not exposed to particle physics for which she had a passion. At once, Mullikan signed her for a top secret military project involving nuclear research. She completed her doctoral work in nuclear physics under the guidance of Mullikan.
The Manhattan project in which Leona was the only woman harnessed the power of the atom in the first ever man made nuclear reactor. Enrico Fermi, the famous Italian scientist and Nobel laureate who discovered plutonium led the team of around 50 bright physicists that included the youngest member of the team 23-year-old Leona. Her assignment involved construction of counters with boron triflouride that monitored emission of radiation from the nuclear reactor (Libby, 1979). She married John Marshall while working in the project under hazardous situations braving the possible emission of dangerous radioactive rays. In late 1942, the world’s first nuclear power plant started producing energy from the fission of atomic particles. Leona was engaged in monitoring the radiation emission under the guidance of Dr. Enrico Fermi. Interestingly, when she was overseeing the functioning of reactors at Hanford one of the reactors shut down abruptly. Leona played a key role in fixing the machine. She discovered the reason for the shut down, an inadvertent supply of xenon-135 isotope into the reactor.
The famous Manhattan experiment in which Leona was part of the team that inspired the nuclear chain reaction paved the way for designing nuclear weapons in future. Later, Leona’s team produced plutonium that was used to make the nuclear bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki in 1945 to end the World War II (Rhodes, 1995). Leona got separated from her husband John Marshall in 1954 and held several positions thereafter. For instance, she served at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton for one year and as a scientist at the Brookhaven National Laboratory. While she was working as a professor of nuclear physics at New York University she married Willard Libby. Later, she worked as a professor of engineering and environmental studies at the University of California for more than a decade. At the University of California she applied nuclear physics to study climate change. She studied both the isotope ratios of atmospheric oxygen and carbon content in tree rings to find out temperature change annually. Besides, she discovered the application of radiation to preserve foods. More importantly, she introduced the method of preserving fruits and vegetables for a long time by treating them with gamma radiation instead of using harmful chemicals.
References
Libby, L. W. M. (1979) The Uranium People. New York: Crane, Russak.
Rhodes, R. (1995). The Making of the Atomic Bomb. New York: Simon & Schuster.
