Scientists can’t keep politics out of their labs

There's a scene in the movie “Oppenheimer” in which Ernest Lawrence, the inventor of the cyclotron and head of his own lab at UC Berkeley, reacts angrily when he discovers his friend J. Robert Oppenheimer trying to recruit lab assistants to a communist-linked campus labor union.

- Michael Hiltzik, Tribune News Service

It’s one of the tragedies of Lawrence's life and career that he ultimately was unable to keep his lab politics-free. He would be swept up in UC's capitulation to the 1950s red scare in California, which culminated in the mandate that all faculty sign an anticommunist loyalty oath.

It’s one of the few scenes in this largely factual film that may actually have downplayed the real event. Lawrence was beyond furious at Oppenheimer for bringing politics — and left-wing politics at that — into the lab. For Lawrence — whose personal journey would transform him from New Deal liberalism to solid Republican conservatism — a scientific lab was no place for anything but pure science, uninfected by politics. It’s one of the tragedies of Lawrence's life and career that he ultimately was unable to keep his lab politics-free. He would be swept up in UC's capitulation to the 1950s red scare in California, which culminated in the mandate that all faculty sign an anticommunist loyalty oath.