Willard Libby

Everything You Need To Know About Willard Libby

• He won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1960.
• He won the top award for his research and eventual discovery of carbon dating.
• As a Guggenheim Fellow, he also worked on the Manhattan Project, and helped perfect the uranium enrichment process of the first atomic bomb.
• For all his work with radioactivity, he was the first chemist to serve on the Atomic Energy Commission, and was its chief researcher during the height of nuclear testing.

And that's it, that's all you need to know.

Something You Don't Need To Know, But Might Make You Sit Up At Night

When Libby was on the AEC, he was known as a major downplayer of the risks of radiation and nuclear fallout. He even went toe to toe with Nobel Prize winners Linus Pauling and Albert Schweitzer about a report that stated that the typical nuclear test explosion could cause as many as 1,000 additional leukemia deaths due to increased strontium. His response: you were more likely to get sick from a glow-in-the-dark watch!

Also, his wife forever condemned him as a "lousy" bridge player in a TIME magazine article.