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Alvin Graves insisted that Elizabeth be allowed to work at Los Alamos as a condition of his participation in the project. According to Howes and Herzenberg in 2003, even if Alvin had not insisted, Elizabeth “probably would have been recruited anyway.”

She worked on selecting a neutron reflector to “surround the core of the atomic bomb.”

Colleagues described her as a “very” hard worker and someone who was “very good at her job.” Despite having what was described as a conventional outlook, she was an independent thinker and was able to assert her point of view when she thought it necessary. She was said to have a sense of humor. A story from her colleagues goes that she once had a bet with them that she could persuade a “very proper” European physicist to go through a door before her (it was customary for males to allow a woman through a door before them.) She won the bet by telling the man that she had ripped her dress and “that modesty dictated that he go first.”

On the day of May 21, 1946, Elizabeth was confronted with a disturbing incident. Her husband, Alvin Graves, was in the room with seven other men when Canadian physicist Louis Slotin accidentally slipped and filled the room with a “blue ionization glow” during a routine test. Slotin knew he had absorbed a fatal dose of radiation and is believed to have saved the lives of the other scientists in the room. Alvin Graves was standing the closest to Slotin when the incident occurred. He developed acute radiation sickness and was hospitalized for several weeks (Albuquerque newspaper) He survived but had chronic neurological and vision problems. (Albuquerque newspaper). Alvin became temporarily bald and developed cataracts in addition to numerous other symptoms related to exposure to neutrons. Louis Slotin asked Elizabeth to calculate whether or not a human could survive that dosage of radiation, referring to Elizabeth’s husband, without telling her about the accident. Elizabeth was a self-proclaimed stoic, reportedly once dismissing Hiroshima as nothing worse than napalm, but “she froze when she learned who the subject of her calculation was.”

Atomic injuries fatal to scientist, Louis Slotin (radiation) (1948) 2. (1946, May 31). Retrieved May 08, 2020, from https://www.newspapers.com/clip/4814567/atomic-injuries-fatal-to-scientist/

Howes, R., & Herzenberg, C. (2003). Their Day in the Sun: Women of the Manhattan Project. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

Kline, Graves & Perlman seek compensation for radiation exposure (1948). (1948, January 28). Retrieved May 08, 2020, from https://www.newspapers.com/clip/4814954/kline-graves-perlman-seek/