Manhattan Project scientist Donald Hornig dies at age 92
BY Wire reports
Thursday, January 24, 2013
1/24/13 at 4:33 AM
Donald F. Hornig, a scientist who was a key figure on the Manhattan Project, an adviser to three U.S. presidents and president of Brown University, died Monday in Providence, R.I. He was 92 and had suffered from Alzheimer's disease.
Hornig, a Harvard-trained physical chemist, worked from 1944 to 1946 on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos Laboratory, which developed the atomic bomb during World War II.
He was one of the youngest group leaders and designed the firing unit that triggered the simultaneous implosion of the bomb's plutonium device.
Hornig sat in a tower with the bomb the night before the first test of the weapon amid a thunder and lightning storm. In a 1968 interview, he recalled the moment the bomb was detonated.
"The minute the firing needle dropped off and I knew it had detonated, I dashed out the door in time to see the fireball rising into the sky," he said. "I was awestruck, just literally awestruck. This thing was more fantastic than anything I had ever imagined."
After the war, he joined Brown as a chemistry professor in 1946. He moved to Princeton in 1957.
Hornig was a member of the President's Science Advisory Committee for Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy and a special assistant to the president for science and technology for Lyndon Johnson.
He was named Brown's president in 1970 and assumed leadership of a school that was in poor financial shape. When he arrived, the Ivy League university was running a $4.1 million deficit for the 1970-71 school year, a Brown spokesman said.
He instituted an austerity program, but he also established degree-granting graduate programs in the medical sciences that became the foundation for Brown's medical school, his family said. By the time he left, the school was restored to financial health.
Upon leaving Brown, Hornig joined Harvard University's School of Public Health, where he was founding director of its Interdisciplinary Programs in Health, which focused on health, the environment, and public policy. He retired in 1990.
Hornig was born in Milwaukee and was the first in his family to go to college. His son Chris Hornig said he was able to achieve what he did out of a love of learning and of patriotism and that much of his life was about applying science to solve problems.
