Luis W. Alvarez, Ernest Lawrence’s tall, ice-blond protégé, a future Nobelist whose father was a prominent Mayo Clinic physician, read it at Berkeley sitting in a barber chair in Stevens Union having his hair cut. “So [I told] the barber to stop cutting my hair and I got right out of that barber chair and ran as fast as I could to the Radiation Lab . . . where my student Phil Abelson . . . had been [trying to identify] what transuranium elements were produced when neutrons hit uranium; he was so close to discovering fission that it was almost pitiful.”1069
