Commentary: Scientists always strive to be apolitical, but they can't keep politics out of their labs

0:00 0:00 1x

This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here .

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.

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