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Ernest Orlando Lawrence, 56, University of California's Radiation Laboratory director, invented the atom-smashing cyclotron—which has been called "as useful in research as the microscope." Born in Canton, S.D., where his father was a superintendent of schools, Lawrence worked his way through local Midwestern colleges selling aluminum ware from door to door, and successfully so, despite the fact that the cakes he baked, as part of his presentation, usually caved flat as a platter. A Ph.D. (Yale, 1925), he spent his early career studying the phenomenon of ionization, began working on the cyclotron as early as 1930. He first demonstrated it that year with a crude but scientifically overwhelming do-it-yourself kit: a kitchen chair, clothes tree, toy-sized four-inch magnet, pie-sized vacuum chamber made of window glass, brass and sealing wax. Nobel Prizewinner (1939) Lawrence is a humorous, vigorous man who steams around his labs with—as nucleonics folk term it—all rods in. He plays tennis, fiddles with television (he invented a color TV tube in his garage), explains: "You don't have to have genius to be a scientist— just character. All you have to do is work hard and figure things out."
J. (for nothing) Robert Oppenheimer, 53, . director and professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, is "the father of the atomic bomb," i.e., the superb organizer and catalyst who, during World War 11, kept the high-strung, fenced-in Los Alamos colony working with desperate single purpose on the first Abomb. The son of a prosperous German immigrant, he was born in New York City, got his first taste of science at five, when he was visiting his grandfather in Germany and received a gift box of minerals. At Manhattan's Ethical Culture School he completed a year's chemistry course in six weeks—"and then I fell in love with physics because of the sweep of its laws, I suppose. In physics you get glimpses of such harmony and order!" After his Ph.D. (from Gottingen University, Germany) at 23, he taught physics, ranged into relativity, quantum theory, cosmic rays and nucleonics. In 1954 his security clearance was revoked after an airing of past Communist associations and his anti-H-bomb campaign as chairman of the General Advisory Committee to the AEC. Oppenheimer moved full-time to the institute in 1947, where he has been "trying to understand the existence, properties and behavior of the fundamental particles of which all matter is composed."