Fortunate Failures I Don't Regret

Scientists like to succeed. They like to get the results they hope for, to be recognized for what they have done. But they also know that the greatest success may come from something unexpected, including failure. For example, the failure of Michelson and Morley to detect ether drift was a magnificent failure, which upset classical physics and helped advance Einstein's revolutionary ideas. At the other extreme are the dismal failures that do nothing but consume time and energy and erode the spirit. In my career as a scientist I have had many failures; often they have been unproductive, but several have led me in new directions. When I went to Cambridge in 1935 to study physics, I also worked with the Cambridge Scientist Anti-War Group, which was concerned with how science was being used for mass destruction. I was asked to verify by experiment a report from the war in Spain that incendiary bombs, landing on the top floors of high buildings, could burn their way down to the bottom. I made incendiary bombs and set up some flooring in the garden of WA. Wooster's, one of my lecturers. However hard I tried, I could not get the bombs to burn through the floorboards. I was very disappointed, because we were keen to show that the Spanish report was right. Wooster took such a grave view of my failure that he advised me that, whatever I did after graduating, I must not do experimental science. Later during the war I closely observed fires started by incendiary bombs, and realized that in Cambridge I had got the right result-fire travels up, not down. We had been too prejudiced to recognize that my result was correct. At Cambridge I also had a more important failure. Partly because I had spent much time with anti-war groups, I got only a low second-class degree and no one in Cambridge would take me on as a research student. Not to be able to stay in Cambridge seemed to me a disaster, but in time I real ized that there were other universities in Britain. I remembered that Marcus Oliphant, who had been Rutherford's deputy director of research, had become head of physics at Birmingham University. He remembered me, and was able to arrange for me to work on luminescence of solids. When the war began, the staff at Birmingham was in the thick of the most exciting war research in Britain. Oliphant, with foresight, had secured the best contract for radar development; when that became less urgent for Britain's defense he moved to the atomic bomb. In contrast, physicists at Cambridge were largely dispersed to service establishments. Thus, failing to stay at Cambridge turned out to be very fortunate for me. When I heard that. the radar work was being phased out I immediately asked Oliphant for a job on the bomb; if I was going to do war research, I wanted to do big war research. I had no qualms about it.; we were surrounded by excellent people who had fled from Hitler, and at that time it seemed right, that everything science could give should be used against the Nazis. I had known for some time that there was atom bomb work at Birmingham. Rudolf Peierls and Otto Frisch, both enemy aliens and forbidden to know about the radar work, were then making extremely important fission calculations. They showed that a uranium bomb could only be made from U235 whereas natural uranium contained just 0.7 percent of the isotope. Schemes to isolate the U235 involved using volatile UF6, but Francis Simon at Oxford thought it might be worth trying to evaporate U metal itself and thus avoid contamination from fluorine. Oliphant asked me to try this. I had very limited research experience. The problem was not easy, because the vapor pressure of uranium was known to be low even at temperatures approaching the melting point, of tungsten. Oliphant suggested that I make a small vacuum furnace heated by a tungsten coil and surrounded by molybdenum radiation shields. The uranium needed to be heated above its melting point in a crucible. But what crucible would stand such high temperatures? Little seemed to be known about ceramics for very high temperatures, but it seemed that rare earth oxides had possibilities, so I was sent to the Potteries to see a scientist who knew about such things. The Potteries, world-famous for china and earthenware, was a strange group of 19th-century industrial towns in Britain's Midlands where family businesses carried on old traditions using ancient techniques. I enjoyed seeing beautiful china being made, but the tiny crucible I was given seemed rather miserable. Was this another hopeless task, like trying to burn floorboards? I also had many vacuum problems. The furnace was too large and too hot for the small vacuum pumps then common in British labs. I suspected that the oxide crucible was reacting with the uranium, but nothing was clear because so much gas came out of the metal of the furnace and the glass walls of the vacuum chamber. Oliphant had gone to the United States and his staff at Birmingham made little progress. After much time had been wasted, the Americans overcame their security fears and our whole team was moved to E.O. Lawrence's laboratory at Berkeley, where big cyclotron magnets were being used to develop electromagnetic separation of uranium isotopes. I was amazed by the giant vacuum pump I was given for my furnace. The pump cleared up all vacuum difficulties, but crucible trouble continued. U235 production was going ahead well at a vast factory using UF6 in isotope separators developed at Berkeley, but Lawrence thought I should continue to try to evaporate uranium metal. He suggested that I give up crucibles and try to evaporate uranium by bombarding it with ions. I had no success until Lawrence took over the controls and, with skill like that of a racing driver, turned up the voltage so that a massive but stable ion current hit the uranium. Soon we had teams of scientists working day and night evaporating uranium. But in the end, breakdowns due to distortion of the uranium blocks could not be overcome. Thus, my work did nothing to help the bomb being made. In fact, the whole program at Berkeley was not of much direct use; although the Hiroshima bomb used uranium made by the Berkeley method, later bombs used plutonium. I do not regret my failure to contribute to the Manhattan Project. When I visited Hiroshima a few years ago I wrote in the visitors' book at the memorial to the atom bomb victims that I regretted what I had done on the project. If my work had been more successful I would have had more to regret. The project was inspiring when one saw so many scientists working enthusiastically together with almost unlimited resources, but it was disturbing that our enthusiasm diverted us from thinking enough about the long-term consequences of our work. For example, when Germany was defeated. I do not remember anyone arguing that we had to continue because the Japanese might be making a bomb. I am glad I was not involved in really important work like that at Los Alamos, because I do not believe that nuclear weapons keep the peace. Later, when I took up biological research, I became involved with work on DNA that prepared the ground for genetic engineering. Such study concerns some people; at present, apart from weapons research, I am not much worried by it. I hope the time will not come when I will regret my work on DNA too. Wilkins, now emeritus professor of biophysics at King's College, London, shared the 1962 Nobel Prize with James Watson and Francis Crick for their discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA.

Fortunate Failures I Don't Regret

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Maurice Wilkins

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February 1988

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