(1905 - 1989)
Emilio Gino Segrè was
an Italian American physicist who, with
Owen Chamberlain, won the 1959 Nobel
Prize in Physics for
“their discovery of the antiproton.”
He was born in Tivoli, Italy and enrolled in the University of Rome
as an engineering student. He switched to physics in 1927 and earned
his doctorate in 1928, having studied under Enrico Fermi.
After a stint in the Italian Army from 1928 and 1929, he worked with
Otto Stern in Hamburg and Pieter Zeeman in Amsterdam as a Rockefeller
Foundation fellow in 1930. Segrè was appointed assistant professor
of physics at the University of Rome in 1932 and served until 1936.
From 1936 to 1938 he was Director of the Physics Laboratory at the University
of Palermo. After a visit to Ernest O. Lawrence's Berkeley Radiation
Laboratory, he was sent a molybdenum strip from the laboratory's cyclotron
deflector in 1937 which was emitted anamolous forms of radioactivity.
After careful chemical and theoretical analysis, Segrè was able
to prove that some of the radiation was being produced by a previously
unknown element, dubbed technetium, and was the first artificially synthesized
chemical element which does not occur in nature.
While Segrè on what
was to be a summer visit to California in
1938, Mussolini's Fascist
government passed anti-Semitic laws
barring Jews from university positions.
As a Jew, Segrè was now rendered
an indefinite émigré. At
the Berkeley Radiation Lab, Lawrence offered
him a job as a Research Assistant — a
relatively lowly position for someone who
had discovered an element — for $300 a month.
However, in Segrè's recollection,
when Lawrence learned that Segrè
was legally trapped in California, he dropped
his pay to $116 a month (which many, including
Segrè, saw as exploiting the situation).
Segrè also found work as a lecturer
of the physics department at the University
of California, Berkeley. While at Berkeley,
he helped discover the element astatine
and the isotope plutonium-239 (which was
later used to make the atom bomb dropped
From 1943 to 1946, he worked
at the Los Alamos National Laboratory as
a group leader for the Manhattan Project.
He was naturalized a U.S. citizen in 1944.
Upon his return to Berkeley in 1946, he became
a professor of physics, serving until 1972.
In 1974, he returned to the University of
Rome as a professor of nuclear physics.
He was also active as a photographer, and took many photos documenting
events and people in the history of modern science. the American Institute
of Physics named its photographic archive of physics history in his
He died at the age of 84 of a heart attack.
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