Science Friday - The Bastard Brigade, Spontaneous Generation. July 5, 2019, Part 2

Episode Date: July 5, 2019

Much has been written about the Manhattan Project, the American-led project to develop the atomic bomb. Less well known is Nazi Germany’s “Uranium Club”—a similar project started a full two years before the Manhattan Project. The Nazis had some of the greatest chemists and physicists in the world on their side, including Werner Heisenberg, and the Allies were terrified that the Nazis would beat them to the bomb—meaning the Allies were willing to try anything from espionage to assassination to bombing raids to stop them. Science writer Sam Kean joins Ira to tell the high-stakes story written in his new book The Bastard Brigade: The True Story of the Renegade Scientists and Spies Who Sabotaged the Nazi Atomic Bomb.  Plus, "spontaneous generation" was the idea that living organisms can spring into existence from non-living matter. In the late 19th century, in a showdown between chemist Louis Pasteur and biologist Felix Pouchet put on by the French Academy of Sciences, Pasteur famously came up with an experiment that debunked the theory. He showed that when you boil an infusion to kill everything inside and don’t let any particles get into it, life will not spontaneously emerge inside. His experiments have been considered a win for science—but they weren’t without controversy. In this interview, Undiscovered’s Elah Feder, Ira Flatow, and historian James Strick talk about what scientists of Pasteur’s day really thought of his experiment, the role the Catholic church played in shutting down “spontaneous generation,” and why even Darwin did his best to dodge the topic. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. I have to admit it, I am an American history buff, especially about World War II, and I thought I had read so much about it. Until I came across a new book about the competition between American and Nazi scientists to build the first atomic bomb, boy, I was hooked. The book is called The Bastard Brigade, and in it, author Sam Kean expertly retraces the race to control the future of the world. It's not only a story of good versus evil, but it's a well-documented story, hundreds of end notes and references of a little-known effort by American and British spies and military to arrest and assassinate some of the top nuclear scientists in Germany before they can actually build an bomb.

And they had free reign to bomb and blow up anything that got in their way. Sam Keane is a writer, author of many books, and this book is the Bastard Brigade, The True Story of the Renegate Scientists and Spies who sabotage the Nazi atomic bomb. You can read an excerpt at ScienceFriiday.com slash atomic bomb. Welcome back to Science Friday, Sam. Hi, thanks for having me back. Nice to have you.

So why did you write this book? As I say, I've read a lot of accounts, but what made you decide to go into this specific detail of the war? I think it was just a story I'd never really heard. before. I was kind of a Manhattan Project buff. I really enjoyed the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb. But this side of it, the idea that Nazi Germany would have been working on their own atomic bomb was something I'd never really heard of before. And it made a lot of sense in some way, considering that Germany really had all of the pieces there to build an atomic bomb. They had the best scientists in the world. They founded their version of the Manhattan Project, the dreaded

uranium club, two full years before we started our Manhattan Project. And they had the best industry in the world, too. So there were a lot of American scientists who were convinced that Germany had the inside track on the atomic bomb during the war. And it absolutely terrified them because they were going to give Adolf Hitler, they feared, atomic weapons. And you know, The Manhattan Project has gotten so much publicity, so to speak, over the decades that it's sort of overshadowed the efforts of the uranium club, hasn't it? Yeah, there were a lot of scientists who were just terrified that, again, Germany was way ahead of us. And the head of the Manhattan Project, Leslie Groves, realized that military intelligence

just wasn't capable of understanding what was going on in the realm of atomic science. They just didn't have enough expertise there. And that's why he put together this team to try to go in and sabotage and spy on. And in some cases, even try to assassinate members of the Nazi atomic bomb project. Can you give this a rundown of who those people were? Yeah, there were kind of three branches that I talk about in the book. There were the people trying to spy on them. It included Boris Pash.

He was born in the U.S., but he grew up in Russia, fought in World War I and the Russian Revolution, both before he turned 18. so very young, a very experienced soldier. And he was kind of in charge of going around the continent trying to hunt down the Nazi scientists and also to gather intelligence on them. Another branch of it was sort of the military branch where they're trying to take out certain specific German targets

that they feared were being used for on atomic weapons. In that case, I talk about the sabotage of a heavy water, plant in Norway. And also I talk about Joe Kennedy, John F. Kennedy, the president's older brother, who actually died on a peripheral branch of this mission to try to stop Nazi atomic weapons. And the last branch I talk about is a very fun character named Mo Berg. You know, kind of a genius. He went to Princeton, the Sorbonne, Columbia, spoke a dozen languages, some people said. And in the meantime, kind of in the rest of the year, he was a major league baseball. So brilliant guy, played Major League Baseball for a bunch of years. But during the war, he joined

the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA, and they trained him to be an atomic spy and later an assassin and actually sent him into Switzerland to try to assassinate Werner Heisenberg, the famous German scientist. And he was such a larger-than-life character, I mean, in real life, that there was even a movie just came out recently about him. The catcher was a spy. Yeah, he's just such an incredible character. He's so much fun, just all of the stories about him. I think maybe one of my favorites was there was a double header they had one day in Detroit, and he was bored, so he sat down, and he started reading this book on non-Euclidean space time in the bullpen, this major league game during the double header, and his teammates

came up, and they said, what the heck are you doing? Why are you reading this book? And he explained to them that he was visiting Princeton in a few weeks, and he was going to drop in on Albert Einstein, and he wanted to have a good conversation with him about non-Euclidean space time. So the guy was just such an amazing character, and it was really fun to kind of dive into the archives, get all this information about him, and kind of bring him to life as this atomic spy, and then later an assassin. Let's talk about the German scientists, the Nazis who were in the uranium club. Who were they?

They were basically the top, mostly physicists of eukemists in Germany who got together in September 1939, so very early on in the war, and they decided they were going to make an effort to first build a reactor and then try to build an atomic bomb after that. And the head of it, kind of the most feared person in the uranium club, was Werner Heisenberg. He had already won a Nobel Prize. He's famous today for the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. And there were a lot of people very angry with Heisenberg. A lot of people in the United States and other countries that Nazi Germany ended up conquering

fellow scientists who felt very betrayed, very angry that he would turn around and then work for the Nazis on something like atomic weapons. But Heisenberg was a very fierce German patriot. And I explained in the book, he was kind of oblivious when it came to politics. I don't think he realized on some level how badly he was hurting a lot of his friends, but he ended up estranged from many of them. Was he vilified after the war? I mean, you know, because he refused to stop working on the atom bomb? He was vilified to some degree, especially in the years after the war. There was another character in the book, a man named Samuel Goudschmidt, who was a physicist, who was over there looking both for atomic weapons, but also trying to hunt down his parents who'd been swept up in a concentration

camp. And he was one of those people who was a very good friend of Heisenberg. And he ended up, yeah, vilifying him a little bit after the war. They later reconciled somewhat. But Heisenberg did end up, the very bad reputation by the war's end. Because I remember you mentioned in the book how he had asked for Heisenberg's help in tracking down his parents. And Heisenberg just shoved it aside as if it didn't mean anything. He kind of blew it off. Yeah. There was someone wrote him and said, hey, you know, your good friend, Goudschmidt, his parents have been in a concentration camp.

Heisenberg had even stayed at their house before eating dinner with them over a holiday once. And Heisenberg just kind of didn't do anything with it. He got the letter, put it off for a few weeks, put it off for a few more weeks. And then finally ended up writing this very mealy-mouthed letter that said, you know, I hear they're experiencing some difficulties in their present situation. I mean, they were in a concentration camp. And it's hard to say. Historians had debated whether he lacked the moral courage, whether he just didn't realize how bad things were.

It's really an open question of why he acted like that. How did the U.S. first get wind that the Nazis were working on an atom bomb? There were always rumors going around. So there were countries like Switzerland or Sweden where German scientists were allowed to travel, and Allied scientists were also allowed to travel. So the German scientists would be working on something. They would go to a neutral country. They would talk about it.

Then those scientists would talk to allied scientists. And basically it was a big game of telephone. So I talked in the book how at one point Werner Heisenberg ended up making uranium reactor. and he had a little accident with it. Uranium can obviously be used in atomic weapons, but it's also a very reactive chemical as well, a reactive substance. Ended up being a big reactor fire. The reactor basically exploded.

And through this game of scientific telephone, by the time the information got back to the United States, all they heard was uranium and explosion, and they jumped to conclusions that Heisenberg had a working atomic reactor that a bunch of scientists had been killed. So these scientists were always, hearing rumors. And then they went to the head of the Manhattan Project, convinced him that things were getting pretty dire in Germany. And that's when they decided they really needed

to put together these teams to go in and try to sabotage and spy on them. I noticed that in warnings to the U.S. government about possible German research on atomic weapons and the bomb, you left out a letter written to FDR by Einstein in 1939, warning him. Did I miss that? Or did you just not think it was that important to put into the book? Well, the book was, I mean, there was so much going on with this. I just sort of left some things out. But yeah, there's that very famous letter that Einstein wrote, kind of kicking the Manhattan Project. Maybe one reason I didn't include it was that Einstein wrote that letter, but it took a long, long time to actually get things going on the Manhattan Project. I think he wrote three times. I think you had to write three times. Yeah. And that's kind of one of the things. The themes in the book is how much work and effort it took to get people, military leaders and

political leaders, to really understand how dire this threat was and to get them going on it. So the Manhattan Project was founded technically in December 1941, but it really took a long time for things to get going with it. And how much carte blanche did they have to do anything they would like to, either the military or the spy divisions? They had a pretty free reign. I call the book The Bastard Brigade in part because this group that was running around, it was called the Allsauce mission, but this group running around basically was not part of the regular chain of command. So they didn't have parent groups. So they called them the Bastard Brigade. It also fit their personalities, coincidentally. They were kind of hard charging. But they basically didn't have many constraints on them. So they were often running behind enemy lines. They were actually the first group of Allied soldiers to enter Paris. They were an open-top Jeep.

They had a little puppy with them, of all things that they'd found on the way. But they just kind of went in there and blew in there because they wanted to get at the people like Frederick Joliette Curie, who was in Paris, and to get at other documents and things before the Nazis that were fleeing could either destroy them or take them with them. So they were basically doing whatever they wanted in a lot of cases behind. enemy lines. We're talking with Sam Kean, whose latest book is The Bastard Brigade about the Nazis' plan to develop the A-bomb and the Allies race to stop them. You mentioned before the break that they went to Paris trying to find the Curies, Irene,

Jolet Curie and her husband. And why were they so important? They were important because they were working on the scientific side ahead of things. So the start of the book, maybe the first five or ten chapters, kind of sets things up scientifically and talks about what was going on. So there were a lot of scientists working on atomic physics, atomic research. And slowly but surely as the chapters progress, it sort of dawns on these scientists how dangerous their research is. But at the same time, they're so fascinated by it, it's almost like they can't help themselves. They can't help but discover these things, even as they're slowly realizing how dangerous it was.

And Irene Juliet-Curie, Marie Curie's daughter, was right in the middle of all these things. So I included her, kind of made her one of the main characters because of the great science she did. She was also kind of an interesting, cool personality. And because she was there in Paris during the war, helping out her husband kind of in the resistance and things like that. So really intriguing character, who was doing some very important stuff. science that sort of sets up the whole story. And I think it's fun for the reader to kind of be in the position of these scientists as they're making these discoveries and they're slowly realizing that, you know, not only is atomic energy a very powerful, very powerful thing, but also you could

harness it and make the most destructive weapons in history. That's one of the great little Easter eggs in your book that I really appreciated. You painted this great big picture of all the actors alive at the same time. And you also give us a terrific layman's explanation of nuclear fission, how the bomb would work. And I like your little hand-drawn sketches that were terrific. As you say, it's important to build up the story to show why, you know, the sequence of events was important to building the bomb and preventing it from being built by the Germans first. Yeah. And I think that's really important to keep in mind is just how much this was really driving them. That sort of fascination, but also that fear at the same time. I think there's a lot of stories in the book

where if you sort of told them in the abstract, these wacky plots, these madcap adventures they had, you would say, well, that was crazy. Why did they ever think that would work? And in some cases, or a lot of cases, actually, it was just that fear of atomic weapons that was driving them. And they were so desperate that they were willing to entertain basically any crazy idea just to keep the bomb out of Hitler's hands. You also talk about the importance of heavy water to the Germans in making their nuclear reactor and their bomb research. I have seen movies. I've seen all kinds of stuff written about the attack on the heavy water plant. And you really bring it vividly out into the open. Tell us why heavy water was so important. So heavy water is a substance that's important

in atomic research, atomic experiments, especially when you're trying to build reactors and really do a lot of the preliminary fundamental science that you need to understand in order to build bombs later. So basically, heavy water is what they call a moderator. When you have a chain reaction, you have neutrons flying around, they get absorbed by uranium atoms, they split, they release a bunch of energy, they throw out more neutrons. Those neutrons go to other atoms. atoms, they split them. It's a chain reaction, a very quickly building series of events that releases a lot of energy. The important part is to make sure that those neutrons hit another atom and that they get absorbed by that atom and that they cause it to split. And for various

technical reasons, if those neutrons are moving too fast, if they have too high a speed, they're not going to be able to split those atoms. Sort of a colloquial analogy would be if you're lining up a golf put, if you say 10 feet away, if you hit that put at a moderate speed, a slow speed, you have a good chance of getting it in. If you wind up and really smack it, you're going to hit it too fast. It's going to sail past the hole. Neutrons are kind of the same way.

There's kind of a sweet spot of a good speed where they're most effective at perpetuating a chain reaction. And heavy water is a certain form of water that slows neutrons down quite well and gets them to the right speed. So it's a vital ingredient for making and being able to do research in atomic reactors and kind of getting that fundamental science nailed out. And there are really two great spy stories and military operation stories in the book about two different attempts to steal the heavy water or to disable the plant where it was made.

You talk about the French deciding to steal it before the Nazis could get their hands on it. And there's a whole bunch of story about the airport hijinks and it falling. and falling into the harbor, it was just fascinating. Yeah, so basically what happened was there was only one plant in the world that was producing heavy water. They were in Norway. Heavy water is very expensive, very energy intense to separate from regular water. So they had a gigantic waterfall there, basically free electricity, and they could use that

to produce heavy water. But they were used to selling heavy water in basically craft batches. They would sell maybe a half an ounce here, a third of an ounce here. Well, right after the war started, the uranium club sent some people up to this plant in Norway, and they said, hello, we would like to buy 400 pounds of heavy water and put up a standing order for 200 more pounds every single month. And these people at the plant were blown away. They'd never even considered making that much heavy water at once.

And because heavy water basically was only useful in atomic weapons research, they knew something was going on here. So basically they got in touch with the French. They got in touch with Irene and Fredig Joliet-Curie, and they helped them smuggle it out of Norway through this airport caper. So basically what they did is they had two planes on the tarmac, and they had some undercover agents. This was a different era.

So they were allowed to buy tickets under false names without really having identification and stuff. And they also created a distraction by bringing someone onto the tarmac with a taxi. and he had a bunch of real luggage, but they put gravel in it to make it feel heavy like heavy water. They were pulling all these switcherooes. Eventually they put all the gravel on one plane, and the Nazis thought that, aha, there goes the heavy water. Well, meanwhile, the heavy water was taking off in a different plane. So they pulled a switcheroo, and got the heavy water out of Norway,

and then eventually they had to smuggle it back out of France, where it ended up, through another caper that ended up involving this guy. He was, they called him Mad Jack. He was an Earl. He was a peer of the realm, but he was also a scientific spy. And I think most scientific spies, or most spies in general, kind of had the idea that it's probably best to lay low and kind of be quiet, keep a low profile.

Mad Jack had the complete opposite theory, which was that he was going to be so flamboyant and so ridiculous than no one would ever expect he was a spy. He was throwing these huge champagne-soaked parties. He had these twin guns that he kept. He called them Oscar in Genevieve. He kept on holsters under his armpits. He had all these tattoos he was always talking about.

And he was the one they put in charge of smuggling the heavy water out of France to England eventually, where it ended up. So when some assistance of the Joliet Carries came down with the heavy water, they went over to Bordeaux to try to get on a boat. and to sneak it up to England. And the boat was getting ready to leave. So Mad Jack came up with a very typical Mad Jack plan, which was he took the crew out, and he got them stinking drunk, more drunk than they'd ever been in their lives, and they were so hung over the next day

that they actually were incapable of pushing off and getting the ship going, which bought him a little bit of time. So the scientist could load the heavy water on there and to do it secretly so that no one would see them doing this. This is kind of what passed for a plan in the world of Mad Jack. And then they got out, they pushed off, they started sailing, and there were German bombs, give me, there were German planes flying overhead, dropping bombs on them, very scary time with the Nazis attacking them. But most people on the ship, there were about 100. Most people remember it as one of

the most fun adventures of their life, because the force of Mad Jack's personality, was so great that he made it seem like just this kind of school-child adventure. He was running around cracking dirty jokes and his terrible French accent. He had all these tattoos on his body, which were this really bizarre affectation then, and he was telling stories about them. He was passing around mugs of champagne, which he considered the best cure against seasickness. So they ended up having the time of their lives while they were sneaking this heavy water away. So he was really an amazing hero who unfortunately died quite young.

His other habit when he wasn't sneaking heavy water around was he liked to diffuse bombs. And he often did this with a cigarette that he had in his hand. So you can imagine some of the cigarette diffusing a bomb. One day he made a bad choice and ended up blowing himself up while he was doing this. But really a colorful minor character in the book. But just someone who was really fun to bring alive. and to show how he had this direct connection to fighting against the Nazi atomic bomb. If you were to cast him in a movie, who would you have play him?

I could see Jude Law, I think, doing it. He's British. I could see him growing out a little mustache and kind of twirling it like Mad Jack had. And he just has that kind of that naughty little twinkle in his eye, I think, that Mad Jack did as well. So that's who I would see. And once the Nazis got wind of the attempts to steal the heavy water, they then redone. their efforts at the Norwegian plant and put a large contingency of military people to protect it. But that didn't stop a couple of attempts to blow up the plant in Norway. Yeah. So the Allies realized that they had to stop the production of heavy water.

It was a crucial ingredient in the Nazi atomic bomb project. There were two missions, one they called Operation Freshman, where they attempted to send a bunch of commandos in, a bunch of British commandos. It was a complete disaster. All of them ended up dying. Many of them ended up in the hands of Nazis. They got tortured. They got killed. All this came out during war, atrocity trials after the war. So amazingly, after this debacle with the first attempt, they made another attempt called Operation Gunner's side. They sent in a much smaller team, and they were a little more low profile. And they did end up going in there and succeeding in blowing up this plant. It was one of the most amazing heroic missions of. of the war, how they snuck in there. It was basically this plant was in the middle of one of the harshest, bleakest places on earth. And they were out there exposed for, some of them were out there for months at a time, exposed, waiting, setting up this mission. But they ended up getting in there, sneaking in there, and without a shot fired blew up this entire room that was making heavy water. Of all the characters in the book, I mean, Moberg aside and all the other really colorful characters, I think that,

the character that I learned most about, and because I'm a child of the 60s, I grew up with the Kennedy family, and we had heard that Joe Kennedy, the oldest brother of JFK, had died in World War II, but it was always under sort of mysterious circumstances that we heard about it. He was a war hero, but we had no idea what happened. We know the JFK was a PT109 captain and was very famous, But you really tell us the story, a really very, very interesting story of Joe Kennedy and what happened to him. Yeah, and the PT109 incident you're talking about was really the key to the story in some ways, in that Jack became a big war hero because of that, very famous. There were magazine profiles about him.

And Joe, Jr., was extremely jealous of Jack for that. He'd always bested Jack in sports, in school, all of those sorts of things. And he couldn't stand it that his little brother was, getting more attention. So he ended up volunteering for a series of almost ridiculously dangerous missions to try to outdo Jack. And one of them, the one I kind of focus on in the book, involved these mysterious concrete bunkers in northern France. So we were monitoring these things. They were gigantic, the size of several football fields, extremely well reinforced. And there were rumors going around that Hitler was going to use them as launch pads, basically, to start lobbing

atomic weapons at London to try to destroy London. And they tried to bomb the heck out of these bunkers. Nothing seemed to work. They couldn't crack them. So what they decided to do was they decided to take a gigantic plane. They decided to strip out everything inside it that they possibly could and to fill it back up with napalm or another explosive. Then they were going to fly this across the channel from England into France. And they were basically going to ram this right down the front door of these bunkers. This was going to be the biggest bomb in history, and this was going to be the key to wiping out what they thought were atomic bunkers there. And they did have enough technology, enough crude technology, where they could fly the plane like a drone across the channel without a

pilot. What they didn't have was any way to get the plane off the ground in a remote way. They needed a pilot to do that. And Joe volunteered to be one of those pilots, to get a plane. To get a plane. get this plane filled with napalm off the ground to set up the remote control in the air, get it pointed toward France, and then ideally eject out of it. And he volunteered to be one of those people. And ultimately, the plane ended up exploding while he was still inside it. And that's why he ended up dying. That is quite a story. That's quite a story. And it's really heartbreaking just here and see what drove the kind of the jealousy between the brothers and to see how this life ended so young.

and kind of kicked off the famous Kennedy Curse that we were dealing with for so long in the 60s, 70s, and in some ways even after that. There's so many different elements about the war that you have tied together. You talk about the bunkers being built to launch an atomic bomb. Coming among the backdrop, as you talk about the launching of V1 and V2 missiles on England, knowing they had the capability of building these rockets, that made it believable that they could do something like that. It did, yeah. Seeing these rockets rain down and knowing how good Germany was with missile technology, and then knowing that Werner Heisenberg, this brilliant scientist, was also working on atomic research. It all really seemed to fit together. And the rockets were one of the big fears that they were kind of tying in to this whole fear of the uranium club and the Nazi atomic bomb. I'm Ira Flato. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. We're talking with Sam Kean.

Latest book is The Bastard Brigade. It really is a riveting wartime drama about the Nazis' plan to develop the atom bomb and the Allies' race to stop them by any means possible. Have you had any calls from Hollywood yet? I mean, I've got to say it. There hasn't been a movie that really captures all that you have captured about this effort. That was the fun part about writing the book, was kind of tying all these things together. There were always hints out there, you know, documents or things you'd come across, mentions of it. But I don't think anyone had really gone in and tried to tie it all together and especially looked at it from the allied side and just how terrified and how scared they were and all the things they were willing to throw at it.

So if there are any producers listening out there, I would love to talk about it. One of the interesting little Easter eggs, some of the wonderful little secrets that you've uncovered for us, was that very late right before, is it, before the end of the war, a few months when Heisenberg, he escapes, spoiler alert, but they eventually capture him. And he scribbles on a piece of paper a design for a bomb that probably could have happened. Well, this was actually during the meeting he had with Neil's board,

in Copenhagen. 1941? Yeah, it was that meeting where he was, and that meeting's been shrouded by a lot of mystery because Bohr and Heisenberg remembered it in much different ways. Boer, though, ended up keeping that piece of paper. And when Boar eventually, you know, he had his own adventures trying to escape Denmark when he eventually escaped, he came to the U.S., went to Los Alamos, was talking with people on the Manhattan Project, he brought that little piece of paper along that Hezenberg had scribbled

down sums or he looked like a reactor or a bomb. No one was quite sure. And he gave that to the people at Los Alamos. And they were, of course, a little startled by this to hear that Heisenberg had been talking that early about doing atomic research, things like that. So having that little piece of paper was a bit startling for them to see. Also, what's interesting in this search for the Iranian club members was the competition and distrust between the military agents, and the spy agencies. Yeah, it was kind of strange in that they were all obviously working for the same thing, but they really didn't trust each other.

There was a lot of suspicion on both sides and just the idea that you really couldn't trust one side of the other. And there was especially a lot of mistrust between the Americans and the British. Leslie Gros, the head of the Manhattan Project, was an idiosyncratic person, to say the least. and for some reason really did not like or did not trust the British. And so a lot of what drove him was disbelieving the British or trying to get around to them. He was just ordering airstrikes kind of randomly on things that the British didn't want him to hit. So there was a lot of mistrust there.

And also eventually a lot of mistrust of the French especially. There's one line in the book, I think, where they were talking about actually bombing French troops in order to keep them away from some area where there were atomic troops. secrets. And this general side, you know, he's like, we can't bomb the French. As much as I would like to, we cannot bomb the French. So there was a lot of that kind of weird mistrust going on for people you would think would be allied and focusing mostly on stopping Germany. Also, very interesting little segment you talk about how Irene Gile Curie carried with her a little vial of radium. That was sort of the family jewels. It was, yeah. So Marie Curie, her mother, had this

vial of radium that she used in a lot of her atomic research. And eventually, she bequeathed it to her daughter, to Irene Juliette Curie. And it's kind of funny that Frederick, actually, Marie did not like Frederick very much. She was a little suspicious of him. And she actually put in their prenuptial agreement that Frederick was not allowed to inherit the gram of radium from her. That was one thing Marie wanted to make clear that Frederick was not to get his hands on this gram of radium. But eventually Marie died, and Irene and Frederick jointly sort of took control of it. But Irene really felt that she was the guardian of it.

And there was one point in the war where she had to go to Bordeaux. She had it in and leaving the radium there. But later during the war, she basically made a run, not quite in her own. She had someone else with her, but she made a run kind of on her own to get this radium back. She had to go into Nazi territory, go undercover, and get this radium. but she refused to let the Nazis get their hand on it. So she was making kind of these heroic runs, these daring runs on her own as well. I find it interesting when we talk about Heisenberg.

He never was remorseful after the war. Was he? Did he actually ever apologize for what he did? No, he didn't. He was so convinced that he had done the right thing that he never really did. And he was a bit of a stubborn person in some ways. And he had kind of that failing, I think, that's. common to a lot of brilliant people when they're brilliant in one area of life, and they think

that their brilliance therefore extends to every area of life. And he really didn't understand that he was a little obtuse when it came to politics and thought himself completely justified the entire time. So no, he never really apologized. And in fact, he would argue with people about, you know, he did not like the Nazis at all. That was very clear. But about, you know, Germany, how the good people of Germany, their name was being smeared. by this. He was just very hard to work with and ended up alienating a lot of his friends, as I said. I find it interesting that both Vernivon Braun and Heisenberg were sort of accepted, right? As you say, they both considered themselves such geniuses that they overlooked the politics

that was going on at the time. Yeah, they almost were thinking we can use the Nazis in order to get the money we want to do the science. That was kind of the reasoning they were using. And over the years, Von Braun, because of the work he did in the space program, and Heisenberg, just because he was sort of a legendary scientist and involved in quantum mechanics, fundamental discoveries, they've both sort of been softened, and the work they did during the war has been sort of overlooked or at least sort of poo-poohed or forgiven in some ways, when really they were both pretty involved in some kind of nasty things. Yeah, I know every author has a deadline they have to work on. If you were given more time,

Would you have put more stuff in the book? I don't think so. It was more a matter of cutting things out and making sure that, you know, I just focused on the main characters, on Moberg, Kennedy, Boris Pash, Irene Jolie, Kri. Just making sure that the other stuff didn't sort of distract from this, the main thrust of the book and making sure those things are there. I did put a bunch of footnotes up on my website as well. So if people are interested and kind of want the asides and digressions, there are some extra notes up there.

So I did feel like I got to kind of hold on to them. Let's talk a little bit more about Moberg and the plot to assassinate Heisenberg. And he was relentless, wasn't he? Yeah, he was. Well, I mean, as most of the people in the book did, he was convinced that this was going to be a complete disaster, Hitler getting an atomic bomb. And he just thought, like, basically the entire war might be resting on his shoulders. So he went undercover into Europe, was involved in various missions, kind of faring out information about Heisenberg and other. atomic scientists. And eventually they decided that they wanted to kidnap Werner Heisenberg to try to

to get him away from Germany for various reasons, in large part due to incompetence and sort of bungling by the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA, who Moberg worked for. The kidnapping plot fell apart, and Moberg was the only one available. So it moved quickly from a kidnapping to a potential assassination. And then they sent Moe, Berg in with a pistol in one pocket and a cyanide pill in the other pocket to a lecture in Switzerland, a neutral country. And he was supposed to sit there in the audience. And if Heisenberg said anything that betrayed that they might be close to getting an atomic bomb working, Burke had orders to stand up and shoot him during this lecture. And had Moberg done this,

this would have been a gigantic international incident. You can't just go into a neutral country and shoot a Nobel Prize winner dead. I mean, Switzerland would have kicked out all of our intelligence people. A lot of our intelligence operations for the entire war would have collapsed. But again, that fear of an atomic Hitler was considered so bad that it was worth that risk to send Moberg in there. And they sent a Jewish ball player to assassinate a German atomic scientist. Yeah, Moberg was really, he was Jewish, and he was driven by this hatred of Hitler. And also, you know, he was known as a baseball player, very smart.

But he wanted to do something more. He wanted to contribute to the war and really do something that he felt was commensurate with his intelligence and his skills. And I guess at the end of his life, he just sort of faded into the background, didn't he? He did. It was really sad ending to him. I don't think he ever quite got over that time where he was considering assassinating Bernard Heisenberg. It was a very wrenching emotional thing for him. And then after the war, he, I think, sort of missed the glory days of the war.

the glory days of playing sports. It's sort of stereotypical that old soldiers and old athletes kind of reminisce on their glory days. And Mo Berg had both, the war and his glory days, and never quite got back on track after the war. Tried to do some work for the CIA and other places, but mostly just kind of drifted around, mooching off his friends, telling old stories. And then by the end of his life, turned a little bit paranoid, started cutting friends out and got to be kind of an odd character. So he kind of died lonely, unfortunately. Sam, how much did the general public know how close the Nazis were to acquiring an e-bomb? The general public didn't know a lot. So radiation, radioactivity had been discovered right around 1900. It's what made Marie Curie famous. So they knew that radioactivity was

around, and by the 1930s, they knew that it could poison people. But they didn't quite grasp the idea that you could take that, make a chain reaction, and build a horrific bomb out of it. That idea was something new. And that was really confined mostly to the scientific world and then a few military people like General Groves and people above him. So that was a very tightly guarded secret, the idea that you could make an atomic weapon using and kind of harnessing the power of radioactivity. And there's not a lot of people outside the scientific and military community that really knew that part. When it was discovered when they captured Heisenberg and they learned about the effort, they were shocked about how little they had progressed, weren't they? They were.

So there's a famous little scene where they are all at dinner, all the German scientists that they captured after the war. They were at dinner in a place called Farm Hall in England, sitting around. And the BBC came on. They were allowed to listen to the BBC. BBC came on and started talking about an atomic weapon. And they were completely flabbergasted that the Americans of all people had been able to build a successful atomic bomb. And in fact, a lot of them didn't believe it. They thought that they were using atomic as sort of a loose adjective to describe something,

like something was so dangerous that it was atomic. They really didn't think they'd actually built a chain reaction. fission bomb. But eventually they realized that the Americans had beaten them, and they had sort of this, I guess, snobbish mentality that they were the best in the world, and that really hit them very hard, that they had been beaten this badly by another team. There's a famous line where Samuel Gouchman, one of the characters, said that until that moment, they thought that they had lost the war, Germany had lost the war, but at least they'd won the war of the laboratory with all the research that they'd done. And at that point, they realized that they hadn't even won the war of the

laboratory. And then they went about making excuses up. Yes, very quickly, you see a few of them, who are a little more politically savvy, come up with ways to excuse their failures, but also to sort of cast aspersions on the American scientists and say, you know, well, we German scientists could have made an atomic bomb if we wanted to, but maybe we didn't want to. And now you see why, because the Americans went and destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So they really, in kind of a clever way, flipped it back on the Americans and tried to make the Americans look like the bad guy and really compromised and made the whole thing much more morally complicated than it would have been. Why did the Manhattan Project then succeed when the Nazis were not able to be given the lead

that they had? Basically, they were willing to put a... all the money and all the effort. And I really do think that without that fear of Germany, I don't think the Manhattan Project probably would have succeeded. I don't think the scientists would have been as driven as they were if they hadn't been so afraid. I don't think Groves, Luzzi Groves and other people would have gambled and put so much money and effort into it had that fear of Nazi Germany getting atomic weapons not been sort of looming over them. And given the expense and the risk involved, because at the start, they really didn't know whether a atomic weapon's not, atomic weapons would work. So given that risk and given the expense, it was $2 billion in 1944-1945 money. So even more today,

I don't know if they would have gotten it done before the war ended, and they might not have even tried after the war. So there's a possibility we wouldn't have atomic weapons today if that fear of Nazi Germany getting the bombs hadn't been sort of looming over them. And they'd basically done a crash effort to try to make the bomb. Sam, it's a great book. Thank you for writing it for us. Well, thanks for having me on the show. I appreciate it. Sam Keane author of The Bastard Brigade, the true story of the renegade scientists and spies who sabotaged the Nazi atomic bomb. And you can read an excerpt at science friday.com slash atomic bomb. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato.

And for the rest of the hour, we're diving into the vaults of science history because the hosts of our podcast Undiscovered. are working on a new series. It's all on one of my favorite subjects, all about science history. And co-host Ella Fedder is here to tell us about it. Hey, Ella. Hey, Ira. Yeah, me and my co-host Annie Minoff are really big science history buffs like yourself. And recently we got thinking about all of the scientific ideas that we used to think were true, you know, that we'd had accepted as good, solid science until one day we didn't believe them anymore. We're thinking about old miracle cures or outdated beliefs about the universe, you know, ideas that are often punchlines today. But we wanted to give them a closer look. You know, why did we believe in these ideas in the first place? What

had us convinced? And then what did it take to change our minds? That's what this upcoming series is all about. And today we're talking about spontaneous generation. It's really fascinating. Yeah. So one of the basic ideas in biology is that every living thing comes from another living thing. You know, a horse comes from horse parents. An oak tree comes from an oak tree's acorn. An amoeba comes from another amoeba that has split in two. And if we work our way all the way back through evolution, all living things come from an original living thing. But for a long time, people believe that some living things didn't have parents.

They just spontaneously sprang into life. We called it spontaneous generation. You might have learned about this in high school. Yeah. So if you kept reading, you would have learned about. how a scientist named Louis Pester disproved this idea, you know, science for the win. But it turns out that history is never that simple. You know, instead of a win for science, this might have been a win for religion.

My guest is here to fill us in on the story behind the story. James Strick is a professor of science technology and society at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Welcome to the show, Jim. Thanks. It's nice to be here. So you were a high school teacher for a while. So you know the textbook version of Spontaneous Generation pretty well. Can you give us the short version of it? Well, Spontaneous Generation really has been used most of the time to mean living things coming into being from non-living starting materials.

The upshot was that life was spontaneously coming into existence. It didn't necessarily have living parents that brought it into being. That's right. So today we think of this as an idea that's been thoroughly debunked. It's very, very wrong, obviously wrong. But for over 2,000 years, a lot of very smart people believed in spontaneous generation, going all the way back to Aristotle. Yeah, Aristotle's certainly the best biologist of his day in ancient Greece and a real astute observer of nature. When he saw things like eels and frogs and, you know, tiny fish emerging from muddy riverbanks in the spring,

it seemed pretty clear to him that you had a case of living things coming into being without parents and that it was, was the influence of the strengthening sun, an element from the sun that he called Numa, that interacted with the mud of the riverbank to make it capable of producing new life when otherwise it wouldn't be. So he was only talking about small living creatures, not elephants and things like that. Nothing larger than frogs or eels, but to many people, that already seems stunning enough in today's context. So you see these creatures coming up out of nowhere, it seems like they are just

spontaneously emerging. But the Catholic Church was very against this idea. Why were they so against it? For most of the history of the Catholic Church, it was not opposed to spontaneous generation. St. Augustine, for example, in the early 5th century, you know, one of the most important and influential church fathers who left a lot of writings had no problem at all reconciling spontaneous generation with Catholic doctrine. He thought that God had put seed principles into certain kinds of matter at the beginning of creation, and that meant that over time they would unfold and develop into living things. But it's only in the late 17th century when there really comes to be a sharp conflict between the dominant Catholic doctrine and the doctrine of spontaneous

generation. Church is moving away from Aristotelian physics because of all the new discoveries of the scientific revolution. But there's also new doctrines of pre-formation and pre-existence to explain where living things come from, they work with Genesis in a way, but not in a way that is compatible with spontaneous generation. It conflicts with this doctrine that all generations of organisms were created at the beginning, serially encased at like Russian dolls within the eggs or the sperm of the very first member of that species. But also, as you get into the early 18th century, spontaneous generation is seen to potentially be an underpinning for philosophical materialism. The idea that matter alone contains everything necessary to generate life, mind,

and that things like the soul and the afterlife are an illusion. So it kind of seems to cut God out of the equation. You can have life coming up from non-life. I could see why they would object to that. So in the 1800s, you get a showdown between two scientists. You have Louis Pestor and somewhat less famous today, Felix Pousche, over this idea of spontaneous generation. What happened? Pusier, in the same year that Darwin's origin of species came out, 1859, Pousche published a book-length report of many, many experiments that he had done that seemed to validate the possibility of spontaneous generation, at least for microorganisms, even if not for anything larger or more complex.

than that. The French Academy of Sciences, the most prestigious body of scientific opinion in France at the time, responded to this by posing a competition. There was a prize of 500 francs for the winner. They said, we challenge every scientist in France to present experiments that can clarify the subject of spontaneous generation. And essentially, Poucher's book, he entered as his entrance into this competition. and the French Academy, I guess, was waiting to see whether somebody would come in on the other side of the story and claim to have experiments that disprove spontaneous generation. That torch was taken up by a young, at the time, relatively little-known chemist named Louis Pasteur. So Pousier had claimed to demonstrate that spontaneous generation was real. What was Pestor's problem with Pouche's demonstration?

Pouche's main line of evidence was what are called infusion experiments. meaning you infuse or soak something in water, you boil it extensively to try to make sure that nothing that might have been previously alive could possibly still be alive in there. You boil it in a sealed container for an extended period of time, and then you let the infusion cool down in the sealed container. And if over time the results in there become turbid, cloudy, then you judge that there's a growth of microorganisms occurring. and in Pousier's case, you claim that that proves those microorganisms must have been produced by spontaneous generation. Pester did not think that Pousier's experiments were sufficiently precise, as he put it. He thought that Pousquet had not adequately sealed his containers to prevent the ability of microbes getting in from the outside. And Pester believed that microbes are widely distributed through nature, riding around for one thing,

on dust particles everywhere. So Pasteur thought that if he could somehow duplicate Pouche's infusion experiments, but find a way to make sure that dust was kept out, that he could show that in those infusions, you'd never see the result turned turbid. There'd never be the growth of microorganisms in there. And he came up with a really bright idea.

He created what we're later called swan-necked flasks. He heated up the neck of the glass. flask that the infusion was in in a Bunsen burner flame while the infusion was boiling and drew the neck out into a long curved shape where it had a dip in the curve before finally opening with a small opening to the outside air. And in those flasks, when Pasteur boiled them, never in any of his publicly reported experiments did he ever see any growth of microorganisms. So the French Academy of Science is pronounced Pasteur's experiments decisive and judged that Pasteur was right that Pousche had not prevented the admitting of dust particles carrying microorganisms because he hadn't adequately

sealed his flasks. And therefore, Pester's experiments proved that spontaneous generation was impossible. So it was a slam dunk then? That is how it is described in most textbooks, and that is how it was described by the French Academy of Sciences at the time. The interesting thing is that scientists at the time split maybe close to 50-50 on whether they found this persuasive or not. An awful lot of scientists, not just Pouchet and his allies, but for example, Richard Owen in Britain, one of the premier comparative anatomists of the day and in some ways an opponent of Darwin in many parts of the evolution debate. Owen said pointedly that it's really interesting. They don't seem to have

proven, Pasteur doesn't seem to have proven anything other than that dust is a necessary ingredient for spontaneous generation, just as Poucher claimed. And the French Academy is premature in declaring Pasteur's experiments decisive. And Owen was not the only scientist in other countries who had that point of view. If it wasn't a slam dunk and a lot of scientists subjected, why did the Academy of Sciences declare this a case closed? This is a time of a politically very conservative government in France that came to power in 1850. And Louis Napoleon, the nephew of the famous Napoleon, he declared himself emperor and was supported by most of the conservative political forces in France, including the Catholic Church. So the Pastor Pousche controversy is taking place at a time of politically a very conservative government in France.

This French Academy of Science is a government-appointed body and therefore under considerable government influence in terms of its point of view, had appointed a jury to judge the Pastor Pousche competition. And a couple of the people on the jury had publicly before stated that spontaneous generation is. absolutely impossible and would be an outrage against all morality in Christian society if it were proven to be true. And yet they were considered to be able to be objective judges on this commission. And they wanted to declare this case closed and settled, even when many scientists considered the experimental evidence, as we say, underdetermined. And it sounds like at the time a lot of people were capitulating to the church.

You mentioned Darwin when we spoke. You know, his book had just come out two years earlier in 1859. And if you read Darwin's book and are half awake, you have to realize by the time you get near the end of the book, you know what this guy is saying is the further back in time you go, the fewer and fewer common ancestors there are. And if you go back far enough, all living things must be descended from someone single common ancestor or at most a tiny handful of original ones. And so the book is kind of begging the question, where did that one come from? Many people perceive Darwin's book to be a project about getting the supernatural out of the life sciences. This question is so loaded, and Darwin avoids it for almost the entire length of the book. And then on page 484, almost to the very end, there's one throwaway sentence on this subject.

And what Darwin says, and I'm quoting, is, therefore I should infer that probably all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from some one primordial form into which life was first breathed. I'm Ira Flato. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. And that's where scientists are now, right? Talking about that mystery chemical soup,

that primordial soup on Earth that could have led to life? That's where modern origin of life research is right now. But imagine what an 1859 audience thought when it read that last expression, someone primordial form into which life was first breathed. I mean, it's clearly biblical language, and it was clearly not selected unintentionally by Darwin. He's trying to dodge the question. He knows he's going to have quite enough difficulty already convincing a Christian audience to accept species change over time, he really doesn't want to tie his doctrine inseparably, this is my argument in my first book, to the argument that you have to believe if Darwin is right, there is no creator God.

I guess in a sense, this is as science history being just a subset of all history, usually the historians or the victors write the history. They sure do. And Pasteur was conclusively declared the victor in France, and a number of people in other countries took up the French Academy of Sciences pronouncement. Textbook writers don't always follow the primary source literature that closely. They just listen to what the authoritative bodies of opinions say are the outcome of these debates. And so for generations of biology textbooks written since the 1860,

it has been, you know, copied practically word for word from the French Academy's pronouncement that these experiments of Pasteur prove once and for all that life can never possibly come into being from non-life. You know, if you're a modern origin of life researcher, obviously that's not right. You obviously believe that under some circumstances and under the conditions that existed on the primitive earth, it must have been possible. Origin of life research in the 1870s, early 1880s, kind of went in the tank for an extended period of time as a result of the French Academy of Sciences pronouncements about the Pester-Poucher debate. That's about all the time we have.

I want to thank James Strick, Professor of Science Technology and Society at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, for joining us. And also Ella Fetter, co-host of our Undiscovered Podcasts, whose hard at work on a new series all about the failed ideas of science history, right? Thanks, Ella. Thanks for having us. And we'll be hitting the road again in August. This August coming to San Antonio. Yeah, join us Saturday, August 10th for Science Friday Live from the Lone Star State. We're going to talk about science stories in the San Antonio area.

And believe me, there are lots of them. Plus, can't go to San Antonio without having live music, more, all kinds of fun. That's Saturday, August 10th, not Friday night. Saturday night, August 10th, info and tickets at ScienceFriiday.com. San Antonio. And if you're saying, hey, what about an event near me? You can visit the events page. Want to know where we're going to be near you? It's on our events page, on our website, or sign up for our events there at the same time. We have a special announcement. We have a new app you can use to add your voice to our shows. It's a way for us to interact with you to get

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ask it to play Science Friday whenever you want to, sitting around, lounging around. We'll play it. And you can email us. Yes, SciFri at ScienceFri.com. Have a great weekend. I'm Ira Plato in New York.