- Person
- Leo Szilard
- Lived
- 1898–1964
- Field
- Nuclear physics
- From
- Hungarian-American
The story
When Hitler became chancellor of Germany on 30 January 1933, Leo Szilard, a Hungarian-born Jewish physicist then lecturing in Berlin, saw sooner than most what was coming. He had already taken German citizenship in 1930 but was uneasy about the political situation. He urged his family and friends to flee Europe while they still could, transferred his savings from Zurich to London and soon moved to England himself, living cheaply in London hotels.
Rather than look only after himself, he threw his energy into helping others. Thousands of Jewish and politically suspect academics were being dismissed from German universities. In April 1933 the economist William Beveridge, shocked by news of the dismissals, set out to launch a rescue operation, and the Academic Assistance Council was born, with Ernest Rutherford as its first president. Szilard was one of those who helped found it. He persuaded the Royal Society to house it at Burlington House and enlisted the help of academics such as Harald Bohr, G. H. Hardy, Archibald Hill and Frederick Donnan.
Often working on his own, and at a cost to his own career, Szilard tracked down positions for colleagues fleeing Germany. In October 1933 the council helped organise a meeting at the Royal Albert Hall attended by ten thousand people, where Albert Einstein, in his last major public address in Europe, spoke about the importance of academic freedom.
The council worked quickly. By the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, it had helped find places for more than 2,500 refugee scholars. In 1936 it became the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning. Sixteen of the academics it assisted went on to win Nobel Prizes, eighteen were knighted and more than a hundred became Fellows of the Royal Society or the British Academy. They included Max Born, a pioneer of quantum mechanics; Ernst Chain, who helped develop penicillin; and Ludwig Guttmann, who founded the Paralympic movement.
The organisation never closed. Renamed the Council for Assisting Refugee Academics in 1999 and the Council for At-Risk Academics in 2014, it still helps scholars in danger to continue their work, whether by relocating to universities abroad or by supporting them in their home countries.
Why it matters
The council saved the careers, and often the lives, of thousands of scholars, and its successor still protects academics at risk around the world today.
About Leo Szilard
Physicist who conceived the nuclear chain reaction in 1933, drafted Einstein’s letter to Roosevelt, co-built the first reactor, then campaigned for the rest of his life against nuclear war.
More about Leo Szilard
- Szilard's advice helped clone the first human cellLeo Szilard gave essential advice that, according to Theodore Puck and Philip Marcus, made their 1955 cloning of a human cell a reality.
- Leo Szilard saw the chain reaction, and rescued scholarsWaiting at a London traffic light in September 1933, Leo Szilard conceived the nuclear chain reaction; that same year he helped found a group that found posts for 2,500 refugee scholars.
- Szilard found a way to make medical isotopesIn 1934 at St Bartholomew's Hospital, Leo Szilard and Thomas Chalmers discovered the Szilard–Chalmers effect, widely used to prepare medical isotopes.
- Szilard co-invented the chemostat for growing microbesAfter the war Leo Szilard and Aaron Novick invented the chemostat for growing microbes and discovered feedback inhibition, a key way cells control their chemistry.
- Szilard first proposed the cyclotron and electron microscopeLeo Szilard filed the earliest known patent applications for the electron microscope (1928) and the cyclotron (1929), and one for the linear accelerator (1928).
- Szilard and Einstein invented a silent refrigeratorBetween 1926 and 1930 Leo Szilard worked with Albert Einstein on a refrigerator with no moving parts, patented in the United States in 1930.
- Leo Szilard linked information and thermodynamicsIn his Berlin research of the 1920s, Leo Szilard showed a deep connection between information and entropy, making him a founding figure of information theory.
- Szilard petitioned Truman not to bomb without warningIn July 1945 Leo Szilard drafted a petition, signed by about 70 Manhattan Project scientists, urging President Truman not to use the atomic bomb on Japan without warning.
- Szilard fought for civilian control of the atomAfter the war Leo Szilard lobbied for changes to the Atomic Energy Act of 1946 that placed American nuclear energy under civilian rather than military control.
Sources
- Leo Szilard Wikipedia
- Leo Szilard Atomic Heritage Foundation / National Museum of Nuclear Science & History
- Council for At-Risk Academics Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.