Physicist Albert Wattenberg was poking about in the Chicago branch of the National Archives recently. He was looking for artifacts used by Enrico Fermi and his team of nuclear physicists in achieving the first self-sustaining nuclear reaction in a squash court under the University of Chicago’s football stadium in December 1942.
Articles with Ethics
The world's first nuclear reactor was within a pile of graphite bricks • (Public Domain)
Photo by v2osk on Unsplash
We’re more than the sum of our parts
Charles Sims is in town looking for sperm. Sims is co-founder of California Cryobank Inc., one of the nation’s largest sperm banks.
A human oocyte undergoing IVF • ZEISS Microscopy (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Curiosity and boundaries
“Scientific curiosity is not an unbounded good.” One does not often hear those words, especially uttered by a scientist. They come from an essay by the octogenarian biochemist Erwin Chargaff in the May 21 [1987] issue of Nature.
Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe—Berlin, Germany (Public Domain)
The scientists of Nazi Germany
When I was a kid, my favorite comic strip hero was Captain Marvel. The archvillain of the strip was the mad scientist, Dr. Sivana, who used his considerable powers of intellect in evil plots to dominate the world.