Brookhaven’s big showpieces in the late 1940s and 1950s were its nuclear reactor — the first to be constructed in the United States after WWII— and its particle accelerator, the ‘Cosmotron.’ But this did not mean that there were no life sciences at Brookhaven. The lab’s biology department was part of the institution from the very beginning. By 1950, it was made up of 45 people: 21 scientists, 20 technicians and four clerical workers. It grew substantially over the years. In 1960, there were over 40 scientists in the department, including postdocs and visiting scholars. In the 1940s and 50s, biology research centered around using radioactive tracers to explore how biological systems function and subjecting plants, animals and micro-organisms to radiation. Irradiating living things was a way of studying basic biological processes — through disturbing the normal processes of an organism through irradiation, scientists could learn how these processes functioned. It also had potential, and potentially disturbing, practical applications: in the event of a nuclear attack, scientists would have learned what to expect in terms of effects of radiation on plant and animal life.
Photo Credit: Image courtesy of Brookhaven National Laboratory.