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A Pioneer. "For especially meritorious contributions" in exploring the atom, Dr. Ernest Orlando Lawrence, 56, the University of California's pioneering nuclear physicist, last week won the Atomic Energy Commission's $50,000 Enrico Fermi Award.
For Physicist Lawrence, the award was the latest in a long string of honors including the 1939 Nobel Prize. In 1930, working with a brilliant California graduate student named Stanley Livingston, Lawrence developed the cyclotron, which accelerates atomic particles to tremendous velocities by giving them a series of electric shoves as they whirl around in a closed chamber.
At the start of World War II Lawrence was one of the scientists appointed to weigh the possibility of building the atomic bomb. Lawrence is now director of California's topnotch Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley, but he has done no laboratory work for almost a decade. "I'm just sort of the chairman of the board," he chuckles. "As you get older, you realize research needs younger men.''