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If you think of bespectacled white men like J. Robert Oppenheimer when you think of the Manhattan Project, you're not alone. But you're also missing out on a critical part of the equation.
In fact, one of the most important contributors to the atom bomb was a Chinese woman named Chien-Shiung Wu.
Before she took her place as "the world's distinguished woman physicist of her time," Chien-Shiung Wu was an enthusiastic student in Shanghai. Though her school only went through the fourth grade, she managed to transfer to a boarding school, where she graduated at the top of her class before going on to receive her degree in physics from National Central University in Nanking in 1934.
Wu emigrated to the United States to pursue a postdoctorate education in physics and earned her doctorate in physics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1940.
But given Wu's gender and her nationality, her road as an American physicist was a rocky one. Anti-Asian sentiment during World War II made it hard for her to find a job on the West Coast, so she went east. But the war that limited Wu's opportunities ended up expanding them, too.
She was offered jobs replacing MIT and Princeton faculty who had been called up for war work, and eventually recruited into Columbia University's super-secret Manhattan Project.
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She wasn't the only woman there. As Maia Weinstock notes, "Contrary to public perception, a fair number of women — many hundreds, certainly, and possibly thousands — were involved in the technical reaches of the Manhattan Project. They were chemists, technicians, doctors, mathematicians, and more. But Wu was one of the very few women who contributed at the highest levels of physics research for this critical war effort."
Wu helped develop a process that used gaseous diffusion to isolate radioactive uranium isotopes for the Manhattan Project. Her initial experiments became the basis of huge separation efforts at the project's Oak Ridge, Tennessee facility and eventually helped fuel the bomb.
But the Manhattan Project wasn't Wu's only accomplishment in physics—in the 1950s, Wu performed experiments that led to the abandonment of the law of parity. And though the Nobel Committee gave the 1957 Nobel Prize in physics to her colleagues instead, her accomplishments were nothing to sneeze at.
This testimony from one of her colleagues when she died gives a sense of just how respected Wu was in her time: "C.S. Wu was one of the giants of physics. In the field of beta decay, she had no equal."
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