State

The financial picture is painted in more detail in table 5.1. We have rehearsed the causes of the increasing contribution of the state: the high valuation of applied science in California, Sproul's special interest in Lawrence, Birge's concern to maintain Berkeley's standing in physics, and Lawrence's rising reputation. State support jumped by a factor of four in consequence of the Harvard offer (or by a factor of six, if the average of the early years is taken as basis). Between 1936/37 and 1940/41, when the University pledged another fourfold addition to the Laboratory's regular budget to secure the Rockefeller million, its direct support increased only marginally. (The large sum for 1937/38 included $17,000 for power lines to the Crocker Laboratory.) The most important benefit on the margin was provision of adequate secretarial help in the person of Helen Griggs, an English major who

worked part-time for Lawrence in 1938 and full-time beginning in May 1939. Griggs was a blessing to the Laboratory's historians as well as to its founder. Lawrence had worked through the secretaries in the Physics Department and kept track of expenditures himself. He would run up large overdrafts in the Comptroller's Office, or, what was worse from the University's point of view, bypass the Comptroller altogether; and he did not keep track

systematically of the Laboratory's staff and visitors.^[9] Griggs transformed the bookkeeping. From her time, that is, from AY 1938/39, we have systematic lists of grants received and appointments made and accounts of salaries and other expenditures. In 1939/40, she handled over $70,000 worth of business, more apart from salaries than passed through the Physics Department. Lawrence calculated that she was worth more than $1,200 a year. But Sproul, who had given her initial salary without hesitation, declined to raise it, lest the precedent undermine the exploitative principles regulating secretarial life. This, and refusals of requests for campus parking permits for the Laboratory's senior non-academic staff, indicate the level on which Sproul thought it safe to deny Lawrence anything.^[10]

What we would call the Laboratory's hard-money budget represented perhaps half of the state's ongoing investment in Lawrence's work. There were also the indirect costs of the building and its maintenance, and of the use of the Physics Department's shops and supplies; as well as the salaries of Lawrence, his graduate students holding teaching assistantships or university fellowships, and, in time, of assistant professors McMillan, Alvarez, and John Lawrence, who obtained a post in the University's Medical School, and Glenn Seaborg and Samuel Ruben, who had appointments in the Chemistry Department. The indirect costs elude quantification; the total in salaries ran at some $10,000 a year from 1932 to 1936 and at perhaps twice that from 1936/37 to 1939/40. To this accounting should be added the interest on the $17,000 investment in power lines; the University gradually recovered its outlay by reselling to Lawrence at 0.02 cents a kwh the power it bought from PG&E at half that amount. Much of the money Lawrence scurried to raise from outside sources went for electricity, around $10,000 annually in the late 1930s.^[11] Literally and figuratively, Lawrence paid for his power.

The state's was not the only public money that nourished the Laboratory. Both at its beginning, when it did physics and engineering, and after its entry into biomedicine, agencies of the federal government made critically important contributions. The magnet of the 27-inch cyclotron, valued at $30,000, had been paid for by the navy, although, as we know, it came as a gift from the Federal Telegraph Company. The navy further provided an electrical generator worth $500; not, perhaps, an important anticipation of the military-academic complex, but an indication of possible further benefactions. So much for the beginning. At the end, the Laboratory had two most important grants from the National Cancer Institute on the recommendation of the National Advisory Cancer Council (NACC). Lawrence was one of the institute's very first grantees.

Established by act of Congress in August 1937, the institute was authorized to support research projects that aimed at understanding or treating cancer. In early November a member of the NACC, Arthur Holly Compton of the University of Chicago, where two of the Laboratory's veterans were building a cyclotron, assured Lawrence (who had been lobbying him and his fellow councilman Conant) that something would be forthcoming. Lawrence notified the council's executive secretary of the "immediate and very pressing need" to complete the equipment of the Crocker Laboratory. Shielding, remote-control safety devices, and clinical furnishings would cost $18,000; the personnel to install and operate the equipment, another $12,000; in all, $30,000, which the council recommended at the end of November. It also appointed Lawrence and Compton a committee of two to propose ways to spend between $50,000 and $100,000 a year on the improvement of cyclotrons. (The National Cancer Institute had about $400,000 to spend annually.) Within a week Lawrence returned suggestions for the scattering of $96,500 among the country's cyclotron laboratories.^[12]

The $30,000 allowed completion of the medical cyclotron, but not its application to tumors. Lawrence returned to the NACC with his standard gambit—"It is almost unthinkable that the manifold new radiations and radioactive substances should not greatly extend the successful range of application of radiation therapy"—and a request for $23,000 for AY 1939/40. The sum, half of which went to salaries and a fifth to electric power, was awarded within a month of application.^[13] Lawrence had smoothed the way, again by lobbying council members Compton and Conant and by mobilizing colleagues and philanthropists close to the council: Karl Compton of MIT, Warren Weaver of the Rockefeller Foundation, and Francis Carter Wood of Columbia's Crocker Institute.^[14] The second NACC grant made possible the commencement of the clinical program of the Crocker Laboratory. Just as the medical application of the cyclotron was not foreseen when the 27-inch began to operate in 1932, the source of support for the clinical program was not foreseen—indeed, it did not exist—when the medical cyclotron was planned in 1936.

The federal package had two unwelcome trappings. For one, it came wrapped in red tape. The grant could not be processed at first because it was not submitted on forms acceptable to the Treasury. When money did begin to flow, it had to be metered to the dollar, every quarter, on forms that Lawrence had to certify; the press of bureaucratic fiddle-faddle brought Lawrence's secretary a secretary, and eventually the Laboratory its own business office.^[15] Almost as unwelcome, at least initially, were leaks and advertisements to the press of the possible relief from cancer by cyclotrons. Lawrence feared an onslaught of incurables and did receive pathetic letters from moribund cancer victims craving neutron irradiation as their last hope for life. The announcements also brought a rush of radiologists, eager to benefit mankind and

to share the council's money, to see how things were done in Berkeley.^[16]

Between the first big magnet and the last big NACC grant, the federal government assisted the Laboratory through the Work Progress Administration (WPA) and the National Youth Authority (NYA). The first such aid came from FERA, the Federal Emergency Relief Act, in 1934/35. Lawrence asked for support for three graduate students to do odd jobs and for an electrician and cabinetmaker. In 1935/36, Lawrence asked WPA for two instrument makers, a cabinet maker, a draftsman (a graduate engineer), and an electrician (a specialist in radio), to facilitate the Laboratory's work, "which, in turn, has important applications in medicine, particularly to the problems of cancer."^[17] The next year, as the Laboratory expanded its academic staff, it had a parallel increase in WPA manpower: three electricians, who rewired the Laboratory and installed additional electrical services; a carpenter by the name of House, who built a new floor, cabinets, shelves, and tables; two radio technicians, who worked on amplifiers and oscillators; a draftsman, who made all the working drawings for the apparatus and all the figures for published papers; two machinists, who provided auxiliary equipment for research; a clerk, who ordered and typed; and a young lady who autopsied rats and tested the blood of cyclotroneers. These ten free workers, who altogether cost the government some $8,500 a year if they worked halftime, constituted a very important asset, since they not only freed physicists from other work, but also assisted in experiments. Lawrence rated them "exceedingly valuable" and "urgently needed" in the Laboratory's "extended program of work, which may yield such important benefits to all of our citizens, and indeed to the whole world;" the WPA accepted the rating, and continued support at the same level for 1937/38.^[18]

There is no doubt that WPA help considerably advanced the work of the Laboratory. For a time, it supplied its entire shop staff, whose contributions were not only material. Birge had complained that the cyclotroneers tended to use more than their share of supplies and time in the Physics Department's shop, and although Lawrence's WPA shop did not supply all his needs, it helped to ease relations with the Department as well as research in the Laboratory.^[19] An enlightening difficulty then surfaced. WPA administrators desired that Lawrence acknowledge WPA help in papers from the Laboratory. Would the Research Corporation, the Macy Foundation, and the Chemical Foundation like to be thanked along with the emblem of the New Deal, the WPA? It seemed to Lawrence that they would rather not. What he had in mind appears from the reply of the Macy Foundation, which preferred not to share the limelight even with the Research Corporation and the Chemical Foundation and advised that no acknowledgement of WPA be made until after the presidential election of 1936. "For all we know it might be interpreted . . . as being subversive to the spirit of the Constitution and [as an indication that] we have something to do with sinister communistic tendencies."^[20]

Practical Poillon advised Lawrence to secure as much WPA help as he could and not worry further, since none of the foundations would make good the loss of WPA support. This license was what Lawrence wanted: "It seems to me entirely appropriate and in every way desirable to get as much W.P.A. assistance as possible for our work. Indeed, I believe that the Government should provide a great deal more support of scientific research." And then, an unusual disclosure: "Although I hoped and expected that Roosevelt would be reelected, I had no idea that there would be such a landslide. I think that it is really a tribute to the American public that they are not fooled and carried away by demagogu-

ery."^[21] Lawrence's Democratic leaning did not survive the decline in WPA help at the Laboratory, which set in in 1939. Support for laboratory assistants and gofers through the NYA remained constant, however, at about $1,200 a year, beginning in 1937.^[22]