Foundations

We approach the foundations. We have already explained the sources of income and the purposes of the Research Corporation and the Chemical Foundation. Both foundations had been hit hard by the Depression, and Lawrence deserves our admiration, as it earned him his contemporaries', for "having tapped such an apparently dry well."^[23] In the grand year 1936/37, the Chemical Foundation behaved grandly and offered $68,600 for construction of the Crocker cyclotron, its accessories, and its operation. But it had overreached itself. Its German patents expired in 1937, and it could manage only $20,000; after the war it settled its outstanding obligations at 12 cents on the dollar. (Naturally Lawrence spent the entire pledge and the University had to make it good.) The Research Corporation was more careful. Beginning in 1936/37, it reduced its annual contribution to $5,000, to be used for physics research; it therefore helped importantly in keeping alive investigations of the type for which the Laboratory had been founded.^[24]

Lawrence shrewdly diversified his funding base before his requirements exceeded the resources of his first foundation backers. He openly declared his motives to the two physicists he admired above all others, in order, perhaps, to obtain absolution for deviating from fundamental science. In the summer of 1935 he wrote to Rutherford that he had not experienced the difficulty he had expected in raising expenses for AY 1935/36: "the possible medical applications of the artificial radioactive substances and

neutron radiation" brought what he needed. Late that year he explained the connection to father-confessor Bohr: "I must confess that one reason we have undertaken this biological work is that we thereby have been able to get financial support for all of the work in the laboratory. As you know, it is much easier to get funds for medical [than for physical] research."^[25] We may back this claim with numbers. About 35 percent of the total giving of the 115 largest foundations in 1937, some $13.5 million, went to medicine and public health, including $166,000 for cancer research and treatment; the biological and physical sciences received $2.3 million in all, of which only $17,000 was reckoned as direct support for physics research.^[26]

The angel of mercy and money for 1935/36 was the Josiah Macy, Jr., Foundation, established with a ledger value of $4.5 million in 1930 by Kate Macy Ladd, the daughter of the Quaker banker and philanthropist after whom she named her creation. On the advice of her doctor, Ludwig Kast, the donor expressed the wish that her foundation give special attention to medical problems that "require for their solution studies and efforts in correlated fields as well, such as biology and the social sciences."^[27] Lawrence had lanced Macy's purse once before, in November 1933. He had no idea then, however, of introducing biomedical research into the Laboratory; rather, he wanted Macy's to help pay for the development of apparatus and technique to produce neutron beams as intense as x rays. To what purpose? "There is some justification," the physicist Lawrence instructed the physician Kast, "for the belief that the discovery of neutron rays is of an importance for the life sciences comparable to the discovery of x rays." Kast thought the argument plausible; the Macy Foundation gave $1,000 immediately, another grant of $2,200 in the spring of 1934, and a third (the one mentioned in the letters to Rutherford and Bohr) of $3,300 in June of 1935. All had to do with improving neutron sources. The foundation declined a further request for AY 1935/36 to support "biological studies on

the effect of neutron rays."^[28] After the formal establishment of the Radiation Laboratory and its embryonic medical branch under John Lawrence, Macy did grant money for biological experiments, some $7,000 in AY 1937/38 and something again in AY 1938/39 through the Research Corporation.^[29]

The great neutron rays brought into existence with Macy money made possible biological experiments expensive enough to recommend recourse to the biggest spender of all the scientific philanthropies of the 1930s. The Rockefeller Foundation's Natural Sciences Division gave some $90 million during the decade in support of a single program, designed in 1932 by its director, Warren Weaver, who was trained as a physicist. The program might as well have been designed by Lawrence to meet the needs of the Radiation Laboratory after 1936: it encouraged the application of techniques and methods of physics and chemistry to the study of biology; in Weaver's classification of knowledge, cyclotron programs and isotope manufacture counted as "molecular biology." Moreover, improvement in the foundation's financial circumstances in 1936 and a new administration that favored basic science made it possible for Weaver to encourage even so demanding a supplicant as Lawrence.^[30]

In May 1937 Lawrence visited Weaver, who had visited Berkeley in January and come away impressed by the possibility that neutrons might prove more effective than x rays in the treatment of cancer.^[31] When asked whether the Laboratory might hope for

Rockefeller support, Weaver replied that it would be an honor to help. The honor came gradually, first as stipends for postdoctoral fellows, next, in 1938/39, as a large capital grant of $30,000 to insure safety around the 60-inch cyclotron.^[32] In the spring of 1939, as the big machine neared completion, Lawrence offered the Rockefeller Foundation more honor than it felt it could accept. He asked Weaver for $28,000 for the research program at the Crocker Laboratory for AY 1939/40, to be divided almost equally between the cost of cyclotron operations and the salaries of the staff. That exceeded Weaver's expectations. He knew about the application to the National Advisory Cancer Council and hesitated to pick up the larger share of a long-term project the first year of which cost over $50,000. He tendered instead a total of $50,000 over three years. Lawrence immediately recalculated that he could get by with $6,520 in salaries, $3,146 in supplies, and $7,000 in cyclotron operations, precisely $16,666, for the first year.^[33] He made up some of the shortfall from the John and Mary R. Markle Foundation (established in 1927 on the fortune of a coal dealer), which was similar in purpose to, and, in 1937, about twice as rich as, the Macy Foundation; and from the Finney-Howell Foundation (established 1937), a very modest organization (ledger value $350,000) set up to give fellowships for research on cancer.^[34]

Three miscellaneous sorts of contributions complete our account of the Laboratory's economy during the 1930s. The most evident of these were gifts in kind, for example, the transformer

oil and radio tubes from Federal Telegraph, the generators from PG&E and General Electric, and the lead shielding from American Smelting, which Lawrence and Leuschner obtained for the 27-inch cyclotron. The total market value of these ingredients was about $2,500. It is not possible to strike a total for items given or loaned during the next several years, for the preferential prices offered the Laboratory by electrical manufacturers, or for the expert advice given gratis by engineers at General Electric, Westinghouse, Corning, and Eastman Kodak. An indication of the diversity, scale, and importance of commercial assistance was the concession given by Paramount Studios on the unused ends of cinema film for cloud chamber photography. When the concession of 1 cent a foot, which saved the Laboratory $22.50 a month under the commercial rate, ended, Lawrence mobilized Sproul, who obtained the film gratis.^[35]

The least evident, smallest, and yet the most generous and useful contributor to the Laboratory's finances was Donald Cooksey, who became its associate director in the settlement of 1936. Cooksey's benefactions included subventions to needy students, fees for guest lecturers, tools for the Crocker cyclotron, and gifts to the "Lawrence Fund," a cache for all sorts of expenditures unsupervised by the Comptroller's Office, including grants-in-aid and no-interest loans to the more exploited members of the Laboratory's staff.^[36]

And the most important contribution of all: the labor of the uncompensated staff. As appears from table 5.2, the Laboratory had, on the average, at least three unpaid graduate students, two or three unpaid postdocs, one or two professors on sabbatical leave, and, beginning in AY 1933/34, never fewer than three, and

as many as seven, holders of extramural fellowships. (Only people who spent more than a summer or three months during the school year at the Laboratory are counted.) A minimum estimate of their value may be obtained from the minimum cost of living in Berkeley in the mid 1930s, which was low in comparison to the East Coast: $60 or $70 a month as judged by Lawrence; $870 a year according to the more particular Miss C.S. Wu (whom Lawrence esteemed as "the ablest woman physicist that I have ever known . . . and altogether a decorative addition to any laboratory"); $600 a year in the opinion of the Graduate Division, whose

fellowships in that amount easily provided room and board for the unfastidious ($25 a month per person double occupancy) and plenty of "rather slimy" Chinese dinners at 25 cents a head.^[37]

Postdocs and sabbatical professors needed more for efficient upkeep. A room at the Faculty Club, where many regular and visiting members of the Laboratory lived, rented for $15 or $20 a month; one at the Shattuck Hotel for $17 a month. A decent dinner cost 50 or 60 cents.^[38] Reckoning at $1,000 a man-year, the labor donated to the Laboratory between 1932/33 and 1939/40 came to at least $100,000. A fairer way to count would be to assign to each volunteer a stipend equal to that paid to members of the staff in the same category: graduate student, 75 cents an hour, or about $750 a year for half-time work; technical assistant, $900; postdoc, $1,200; journeyman physicist, instructor, assistant professor, $2,400; associate professor, around $3,600; professor, over $5,000.^[39] Using average values for visitors ($1,800 for fellows, $4,300 for sabbatarians), we make the free-labor contribution at least $155,000. The figure is evidently too low, since it omits the unpaid help of summer visitors, some of whom, like Cooksey, Kurie, John Lawrence, and Segrè before their appointments, contributed more in a few months than a graduate research assistant might in a year; and others of whom, for example, Alexander Allen, G.K. (Ken) Green, and Roger Hickman, learned enough to be able to start cyclotrons at their home institutions.

Table 5.3 compares the total values of goods and services, exclusive of university overhead, cost of buildings, and gifts in kind, during the two four-year periods into which the Laboratory's

early history falls. We arrive at a grand total of around $670,000 for the Laboratory's support during the 1930s. This is roughly equal to the entire sum that went to support all of American academic physics, exclusive of new plant, in 1900; to about half of the average annual value of gifts and bequests received by the University of California during the 1930s; and to about 1 percent of the cost of an up-to-date battleship in 1940.^[40]