Martin Kamen

Martin David Kamen (born August 27, 1913 in Toronto , † August 31, 2002 in Montecito, Santa Barbara ) was a Canadian-American physicist. He is best known for co-discovering the synthesis of the long-lived carbon isotope C-14 with Sam Ruben at the University of California's Radiation Laboratory in 1940.

Kamen was the son of Russian immigrants and grew up in Chicago , where he studied chemistry, with a bachelor's degree in 1933 and a doctorate in physical chemistry in 1936. He then went to the Radiation Laboratory of the University of California, Berkeley , from Ernest O. Lawrence , where he turned to nuclear physics and nuclear chemistry. There he synthesized in 1940 with Sam Ruben C14 in a targeted search on the cyclotron for carbon isotopes as a tracer for experiments on photosynthesis. In 1943 he worked in the Manhattan Project at Oak Ridge National Laboratory . He then returned to Berkeley, but was released in 1945 when he was suspected of having committed nuclear espionage for the benefit of the Soviet Union . The allegations later turned out to be untenable, but at the time put him in a desperate position, so that he even attempted suicide. In 1955 he won a trial against the Chicago Tribune , which had accused him of Soviet espionage in 1951. Because of the allegations, he couldn't find a job for a long time until Arthur Holly Compton brought him to Washington University to produce tracers for research on the cyclotron. There, interest shifted from Kamen to biochemistry. Among other things, he examined cytochromes . In 1957 he went to Brandeis University , and from 1961 until his retirement in 1978 he was a professor at the University of California, San Diego .

In 1958 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , 1962 to the National Academy of Sciences and 1974 to the American Philosophical Society . In 1989 he received the Albert Einstein World Award of Science . In 1996 he received the Enrico Fermi Prize .

He played the viola , among others with his friend Isaac Stern .

literature

• Kamen Radiant Science, Dark Politics: A Memoir of the Nuclear Age , University of California Press 1985 (autobiography)
• Kamen, Ruben Long-Lived Radioactive Carbon: C14 , Physical Review, Volume 59, 1941, pp. 349-354

Web links

• Obituary in the Guardian
• Literature by and about Martin Kamen in the bibliographic database WorldCat

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Member History: Martin D. Kamen. American Philosophical Society, accessed October 17, 2018 .