I was born on November 14, 1944. Before I was one year old, President Franklin Roosevelt died, Adolf Hitler committed suicide, Germany surrendered, President Harry Truman approved dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan surrendered, the United Nations was formed, and the Cold War began. 

 

Although we lived in an ordinary midwestern neighborhood far from these events, World War Two and the Cold War shaped our lives. 

 

Oddly, my father was a beneficiary of the terrible war. Without it, he would not have had support for his research and teaching. And I would not have grown up in his university laboratory. The war recast medicine as a national security issue. The need to protect troops from infectious diseases and the government’s growing support for scientific research provided scholarships to take my father from a small town in Indiana to the University of Chicago. Government dollars suddenly supported medical schools and researchers. The development of antibiotics and vaccines lowered the death rate from infectious disease in army camps. Attention then turned to heart disease, cancer, and other chronic illnesses. 

 

Before the war, medical research had been supported mainly by private foundations and universities. Government-supported science research was concentrated in the Department of Agriculture. But President Roosevelt asked his advisor on wartime research, Vannevar Bush, to recommend how to mobilize science for public benefit in peacetime. The president and his advisors settled on support for private universities and hospitals, and for training and research by independent scientists. They aimed to keep politics out of the National Science Foundation, the National Heart Institute, and the rest of the framework that continues to expand 80 years later. 

 

The University of Chicago used federal funds for its hospitals and medical school, and to support researchers like my father. The University provided the two-bedroom apartment at 5715 South Drexel where we lived until I was eight. Its three-story red brick building was located a block from my father’s lab in Billings Hospital. 

 

The war shaped and re-shaped plans. My father began his training in 1939 at the University of Chicago medical school, then put that on hold to do research for the army. He came to medical school to be a country doctor. But wartime needs, funding, and new technology that made possible leaps in knowledge changed his path.  

 

The common thread in his research over the next 50 years was the impact of nutrition on health. The first focus was on how too little food and especially too little protein made people more vulnerable to infectious disease. This was the Depression, after all. Soldiers were failing military physicals or falling sick once inducted. My father helped document the effects of malnutrition on the immune system, supported by the federal government's new war-inspired National Research Council and the military.  He also helped discover how infectious diseases were spread by airborne droplets — coughing and sneezing on troop transport planes and military camps. He wrote later that this research allowed him to contribute to the war effort while staying true to his Quaker pacifist beliefs. He also wrote that it bothered him all his life when people coughed or sneezed on airplanes without covering their mouths. 

 

As national interest turned from infectious diseases to chronic diseases, his research focused on the dietary causes of heart disease. Along with other researchers, he showed that atherosclerosis could be reduced and sometimes reversed with diets with less animal fat, weight loss, exercise, and no smoking. In his 70s and early 80s, near the end of his long career, he headed an international study that concluded that those good habits among young people could help reduce the risk of heart disease as they aged. 

 

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We were also early unwitting participants in exploration of the risks and potential of atomic energy. If Enrico Fermi’s calculations had gone a bit wrong on December 2, 1942, we would not have had a future life in Hyde Park, or perhaps any future at all. In the squash courts beneath the University of Chicago sports stadium, Fermi and his scientists created a secret experiment to see if they could trigger the world’s first controlled, sustainable atomic reaction. (Stagg Field had been the school's football stadium until the University’s contrarian president Robert Hutchins took the school out of big 10 football so that students could concentrate on their studies.)

 

 A year after the United States joined the Allies in World War Two, no one had yet demonstrated that neutrons, liberated by fission of uranium atoms, could split more uranium atoms, creating a new form of perpetual energy. President Roosevelt had given government support to fission research after Albert Einstein and Leo Sziland wrote him about Germany’s progress in developing atomic energy. To speed the experiment, a University of Chicago physics professor working with the Manhattan Project, Arthur Compton, agreed that Fermi could build the experiment at the University (two blocks from our student housing). If the reaction could not be controlled, would radioactive material poison Chicago’s south side or turn the city to ash? Probably no one knew. The scientists did not inform the University’s president, Robert Hutchins, about the experiment because, Compton wrote later, he would have said the risks were too great. 

 

Fermi was one of many European scientists who came to the University to escape the Nazis and the Fascists. He had been born in Rome and educated in Pisa, the third child of a rail executive and a school teacher.  As a child, he taught himself physics with the help of a neighbor who supplied him with books. At age 37, he was awarded the 1938 Nobel prize for discovering new radioactive elements. Instead of returning to Italy from the award ceremony in Sweden, however, he and his wife, who was Jewish, fled to the United States.

 

In the underground squash courts, Fermi and 48 colleagues directed the construction of a 20-foot tower of 40,000 black graphite bricks with uranium cores in a framework of wood planks. There were six tons of uranium and 34 tons of uranium oxide. There was no shield and no cooling system. At 2 pm, Fermi’s team began removing control rods. At 3:25 pm, Fermi declared the reaction self-sustaining. The scientists re-inserted control rods by hand. At 3:53 the reaction ceased. Chicago was not reduced to ash. They passed the word along by phone in code to James Conant, who headed President Franklin Roosevelt’s defense research. “The Italian navigator has landed in the new world.” To celebrate, they opened a bottle of Chianti, drank from paper cups, and signed their names on the bottle’s straw wrapping. (The bottle is in archives at Argonne Lab outside Chicago.) When we were growing up, a plaque at the Field read: man achieved here the first self-sustaining chain reaction and thereby initiated the controlled release of nuclear energy. 

 

Fermi’s experiment was part of our lives as children. Ice-skating “under the stands,” as we called the improvised rink on Stagg Field in the years after Fermi’s experiment, took the edge off of Chicago’s frigid, blustery winter. We were always reminded that we were twirling above the first atomic experiment. We imagined it as a bomb — like the pictures of atomic tests we saw in the newspaper. It didn’t make sense. But as children, there was much that didn’t make sense. 

 

Fermi, a modest man, continued to work and teach at the University. He lived a few doors down from us on Woodlawn Avenue, once my parents bought a house. By that time he was quite sick. He died at age 53 of stomach cancer related to his work with radioactive elements. Like many atomic scientists he had taken a stand. He opposed the development of the hydrogen bomb. And he defended fellow scientist Robert Oppenheimer when he became a target of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s 1950s witch-hunt for communists. Growing up, we knew that story. My parents too were involved in raising funds to defend scientists who were accused by McCarthy. 

 

Quaker values permeated our lives as children. Opposition to violence, guns, and war. Support for equality of opportunity and racial integration. An obligation of public service. Giving away resources we didn’t need. An emphasis on character rather than possessions or fashion. Deflecting attention from oneself to the needs of others. An emphasis on education. 

 

Both my parents came from long lines of birthright Quakers. My father’s family had migrated west from Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, finally settling in Indiana. I remember that my grandparents still addressed people with the traditional “thee” and “thou.” At a time when few women were highly educated, my mother’s mother Hilda Polk and her two sisters graduated from Earlham college in the 1890s. 

 

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At home and at school, the Cold War became part of daily life. I was five when the Soviets tested their first atomic weapon in 1949. Then both countries developed hydrogen bombs and intercontinental ballistic missles. At home, we had a fallout shelter - a small, dank brick room in the basement between the washing machine and the ping pong table. It had cans of food, water, flashlights, batteries. 

 

It was the missiles that led to the sudden disappearance of our favorite park. Since 1909, when Daniel Burnham proposed that Chicago’ lakefront be preserved as a series of parks, the city’s residents had found relief from crowds and pollution there. For the World’s Fair of 1893, Frederick Law Olmsted had designed a series of lagoons, islands, and wooded areas along the lake in Hyde Park. The Promontory, known as the Point, a striking bit of land jutting out into the Lake, was everyone’s favorite place for summer barbecues. I used to go there at sunrise and jump off the rocks, posted with “no swimming” signs, into the icy water. Overnight, in 1954, the Point was closed off by the army. Picnickers were replaced with armed guards in military uniforms who patrolled the new chain link fence. Despite the demonstrations, protests, and lawsuits that followed, all characteristic of Hyde Park, it became a Nike missile base. 

 

The war had also changed our neighborhood. At Ray School, everyone seemed to be from somewhere else. The families of two of my friends had fled Germany and Austria because they were Jewish. One friend had come from China when the communists took over. Other families had migrated from southern states to work in wartime steel mills and other industries. As I look at my first grade picture now, I see that about half the class was African American. I don’t recall that skin color or religion or backgrounds had any significance to us. My parents joined our Unitarian minister in leading the Hyde Park Kenwood Community Conference that aimed to keep the neighborhood racially integrated. Air raid drills were a daily feature as they were at most schools around the country. We hid under our desks or lined up in the windowless hall of the school basement. These drills did not inspire fear. The teachers seemed to view them as routine, therefore so did we.