Photochemistry

Interview with Ambassador C. Paul Robinson, retired as President of Sandia Corporation. He discusses his advisory work since retirement, and the various ways he has remained connected to Sandia. He recounts his childhood in Memphis and his early interests in physics, and he describes the opportunities that led to his graduate research at Florida State University. Robinson describes his thesis work under the direction of Robert H. Davis, who headed the nuclear accelerator laboratory, where he worked on alpha particle scattering on Calcium 40. He describes his interest in pursuing postgraduate work at Los Alamos, and he explains how the academic and the national security sides of the Lab worked to mutual benefit. He describes the Lab’s early work in internal fusion and laser-induced chemistry, and his steadily rising responsibilities at the Lab, including that for the design and certification of nuclear weapons. Robinson discusses his work on nuclear strategy and policy, and he explains the difference between mutually assured destruction and maintaining a second-strike capability. He explains his decision to leave Los Alamos in 1985, and the circumstances leading to him becoming Head of the US Delegation and Ambassador and Chief Negotiator during nuclear testing talks with the Soviet Union. Robinson discusses how the end of the Cold War reformulated U.S. nuclear weapons policy, and the circumstances that led to him joining Sandia. He conveys his pride in Sandia’s leadership work on technology transfer and applying supercomputing toward energy security. At the end of the interview, Robinson reflects on what he has learned in his career in U.S. national security policy, and he speculates on the threats the U.S. faces in an uncertain future.

In this interview, Enrico Gratton, professor of Biomedical Engineering at the University of California at Irvine, recounts his early childhood in Italy and what it was like to grow up as the son of a prominent astrophysicist. He describes his family’s move to Argentina, and his education at the University of Rome, where he completed a physics graduate thesis on the status of the DNA molecule, condensation, and chromosomes during a time of student uprisings and turmoil in the late 1960s. Gratton discusses his postgraduate work in the Italian oil industry before attaining a postdoctoral and then faculty position in biochemistry at the University of Illinois. He describes his interests in photochemistry and uranium-238 and the circumstances leading to his creation of the Laboratory for Fluorescence Dynamics, and his interest in bringing microscopy to the forefront of physics. He describes the origins of the NIH’s long-term support of the Lab and his formative collaboration with William Mantulin on protein dynamics. Gratton discusses the many clinical and therapeutic aspects of his research, and he explains his decision to move the Lab en masse to Irvine. He describes the many patents he has achieved to advance human health, and he discusses his motivation to start Globals Software and how the Lab has continued to grow and improve over the years given UCI’s strengths in the biological sciences. At the end of the interview, Gratton describes some of the major advances that have occurred in DNA research over the course of his career, and some of the ongoing mysteries surrounding biological aging and sickness.

In this interview, Tony Cox discusses early research into ozone depletion.  Topics discussed include: air pollution; atmospheric chemistry; photochemistry; ozone layer; Paul Crutzen; Harold Johnston; F. Sherwood Rowland; Mario Molina; Chemical Manufacturers Association; chlorofluorocarbons; Noxon cliff theory; John F. Noxon.