Leona Woods Marshall Libby, who was instrumental in the preparation of the first ever atomic bomb, was an American physicist. She was also part of the research team that built the first nuclear reactor in America. She was mentored by Enrico Fermi, the famous Italian physicist who won the Nobel Prize. She was born in Illinois and completed her BS Degree in chemistry at a young age of 18 (Libby, 1979). Later, Leona wanted to pursue her higher education in physics and approached Robert Mulliken, a future Nobel laureate to become one of his graduate students. He accepted her and guided her doctoral research. She was proud of being a student of Mulliken as he, who hardly praised his students, praised her ability a few times.
In 1942, when she was about to complete her doctoral work, most of her fellow students had gone to fight in World War II. At that time, she got an opportunity to meet Herbert Anderson, a fellow colleague of Enrico Fermi (Libby, 1979). Anderson understood that she was interested in vacuum technology that had many practical applications in physics. After Leona completed her PhD, Anderson hired her to work in a project related to the study of boron trifluoride that finds several applications in the field of nuclear physics. It was during that time Fermi’s team developed a nuclear reactor as part of the famous Manhattan Project in which Leona got associated in due course. She was the only woman working in the entire team braving the threat of atomic radiation. She married John Marshall in 1943 while she was still working in the dangerous project. Even as she became pregnant soon after marriage, she did not reveal it to others in the team fearing her ouster from the project. She covered her belly with loose fitting clothes and after a few days of her boy child’s birth in 1944 she went back to work.
Leona was one of the youngest members of Enrico Fermi’s team that developed nuclear bombs during World War II. As the Manhattan project was very secretly carried out, she was the only woman member to be part of the team. She took up this challenging task even though she was advised to quit the job by many of her well-wishers. However, Leona later on accomplished a lot in the fields of physics, chemistry, geophysics, astronomy and environmental studies. In 1944 Leona moved along with her husband Marshall to work in the Hanford nuclear plant and her assignment involved overseeing the functioning of the first ever nuclear reactor in America. One day the reactor shut down abruptly. The team members stood around and looked at each other without any idea about powering up the nuclear reactor again. However, Leona along with another colleague, John Wheeler discovered the reason for the shut down. The reason happened to be xenon-35, a rare isotope fed into the reactor accidentally (APS News, 2014).
After the end of World War II, Leona along with her husband moved to the University of Chicago, where she continued her work along with Fermi. She separated from her husband Marshall in 1954 and worked at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton before moving off to the Brookhaven National Laboratory. Later on she served as a faculty at New York University. She married Willard Libby, a chemist after her marriage with Marshalls ended in a divorce in 1960. In 1973 she joined her husband Willard Libby at UCLA and worked as a professor in engineering and environmental science. At UCLA she conducted several research studies in nuclear physics and formulated various new methods for studying the pattern of climate changes each year. She used the carbon found in tree rings and isotope ratios of oxygen found in the atmosphere to estimate the annual temperature change. She also employed nuclear physics to irradiate food and preserve them from contamination. She also suggested preserving fruits by treating with gamma rays as against treating with chemicals.
References
APS News. (2014). This month in physics history, Retrieved from https://www.aps.org/ publications/apsnews/201411/physicshistory.cfm
Libby, Leona Marshall (1979). The Uranium People. New York: Crane, Russak.
