Top: At the first international conference on nuclear physics in Rome, Robert Millikan (left) speaks with Marie Curie while Arthur Compton listens. Vi

The Human Genome Project and a Question of Consent

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2024-07-09 12:30:05

Top: At the first international conference on nuclear physics in Rome, Robert Millikan (left) speaks with Marie Curie while Arthur Compton listens. Visual: AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Goudsmit Collection

W olfgang Pauli was in something of an agitated state. The Austrian scientist found himself in Rome in 1931, in a seething mixture of nervousness, excitement, and consternation.

Only 31, he was already a rising star in the new and rapidly developing field of quantum physics, working with luminaries such as Niels Bohr in Copenhagen and Max Born in Göttingen, and appointed a professor of theoretical physics at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich in 1928. He had already worked out some of the fundamental precepts of the quantum physics revolution, most famously what had become known as the “Pauli exclusion principle,” and most recently had come up with a controversial explanation for a nuclear process called beta decay, proposing the existence of a new particle with no mass or electric charge and therefore almost impossible to detect.

The accompanying article is excerpted and adapted from “Splinters of Infinity: Cosmic Rays and the Clash of Two Nobel Prize-Winning Scientists Over the Secrets of Creation,” by Mark Wolverton. (MIT Press, 280 pages.)