In the spring of 1948, I was able to join the newly created Brookhaven National Laboratory, which was dedicated to finding peaceful uses for atomic energy.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Around 1960, I moved back to Europe, attracted by the newly founded European Organization for Nuclear Research where, for the first time, the idea of a joint European effort in a field of pure science was to be tried in practice.
In 1958, I was a delegate to the Atoms for Peace conference in Geneva.
In 1998, I set up and directed a research group at the Nanotechnology Institute newly created in the Research Center of Karlsruhe. This allowed to offer to former post-doctoral coworkers the opportunity to develop and to progressively set up independent research activities in nanoscience and nanotechnology.
I started the nuclear medicine laboratory at UW Hospitals in 1959 and trained radiology residents in the field. It was 1965 before they found a trained MD (doctor) to take over my role.
I have been connected with the Niels Bohr Institute since the completion of my university studies, first as a research fellow and, from 1956, as a professor of physics at the University of Copenhagen. After the death of my father in 1962, I followed him as director of the Institute until 1970.
General Atomics, the progenitor of General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, started life in 1955 when a major military contractor, General Dynamics, feared that the military hardware market might dry up. It began exploring peacetime uses of atomic energy, but abandoned the effort when cold-war military spending took off.
Although important nuclear physics work was to go on in laboratories such as ours had become - and we had to cut down to a lower energy group - it was not fundamentally opening up new insights on the structure of matter. That required you to be in a higher league.
I was invited to join the newly established Central Chemical Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1954 and was able to establish a small research group in organic chemistry, housed in temporary laboratories of an industrial research institute.
I joined Bell Laboratories at Crawford Hill in 1963 as part of A. B. Crawford's Radio Research department in R. Kompfner's laboratory.
In 1947 I defended my thesis on nuclear physics, and in 1948 I was included in a group of research scientists whose task was to develop nuclear weapons.