Harold Melvin Agnew (1921-2013)

摘要

Harold Melvin Agnew, one of the last surviving members of the team that began the nuclear age, died on 29 September. Equipped with only an undergraduate degree, Agnew helped to set in motion the first controlled, self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction, worked on the atomic bomb, and witnessed the bombing of Hiroshima in Japan from inside an aircraft that was part of the strike operation. A native of Colorado, Agnew studied chemistry at the University of Denver. There, he pitched on a championship soft-ball team and earned a scholarship to pursue graduate studies at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. Early in 1942, Agnew accepted a position as a research assistant at the Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago in Illinois, where the world's first nuclear reactor was taking shape under the stands of an athletic field. On 2 December 1942, he witnessed the first controlled nuclear reaction.