MILWAUKEE — Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster biopic “Oppenheimer ” has turned the national spotlight back onto the Manhattan Project — the unprecedented development and production of the world’s first confirmed nuclear bomb. Did you know that a Wisconsin scientist was an integral part of the process?
Wisconsin’s Afternoon News welcomed Professor Megan Pickett of Lawrence University on the program to discuss the legacy of Elda Anderson — a renowned physicist from Wisconsin who worked on the Manhattan Project at the Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico.
Anderson, who was born in Green Lake, Wisconsin in 1899, received her Physics degree from Ripon College on her way to a PhD from the University of Wisconsin. She eventually became a professor at Milwaukee-Downer College, where her advanced studies drew the attention of national leaders around World War II.
“Long before there were computers in physics, where she used the light of element to try and tease out the structure in particular of metal like nickel and cobalt,” Pickett explained. “It was that kind of precision that caught the attention of the War Department after World War II started.”
She continued her research at Princeton University, where she was eventually recruited to join the Los Alamos Laboratories in New Mexico, where the first atomic bombs were researched, built and eventually, detonated in the Trinity Test. Pickett explained that Anderson’s focus on studying cross sections — more specifically, “the likelihood that a neutron might split uranium nucleus and start the fission that’s responsible for the bombs.”
Although she was not specifically represented in Nolan’s film, Anderson’s groundbreaking research was crucial to the entire project during a time in which women were not nearly as common in such research positions. She was present during the Trinity Test and went on to use her experience in a positive light.
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“The Manhattan Project, of course, employed thousands of people. About 600 women were part of the Manhattan Project — about a tenth of the total workforce — but of those 600 women, only a few dozen were scientists,” Pickett explained.
Life After Los Alamos: Wisconsin’s groundbreaking physicist uses her knowledge to inform the future
Following the completion of the Manhattan Project, Anderson turned her focus back on teaching. She went on to launch a Health Physics program at the Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee, where she researched the ramifications of the project she worked on. Her studies in the long-term impacts of nuclear weapons was pivotal for years to come.
Anderson returned to Milwaukee-Downer to discuss the project and her role in it after the fact. The college’s student newspaper recorded that she warned of the looming Cold War in 1947 while maintaining a profound focus on the intersection of health and physics.
“After the war, she was called to work on this new field of physics that helped to define what happens to the human body, what are the implications of the work that she had done as part of the war effort,” Pickett said. “She was very much a proponent of people educating themselves about the implications and the dangers of this new age that she helped to create.”
In 1961, Anderson died from a yearslong battle with Leukemia — a form of cancer that Pickett theorized could have been caused, in part, due to Anderson’s proximity to nuclear research including the Trinity Test itself.
Like many women of her era, Anderson’s story was deeply impactful to world history despite not being thrust into the spotlight as many of her male counterparts were. Pickett is doing her part to ensure that Anderson’s story does not go untold — even despite her omission from the critically acclaimed film.
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