Born: November 4, 1908, Lodz, Russian partition of Poland (presently Poland)
Died: August 31, 2005, London, England
Summary. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995 in conjunction with the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, an organization of scientists of which he was secretary general from its founding until 1973, for their efforts towards nuclear disarmament.
Early days. He was the fifth of seven children of a paper merchant. His father's business was ruined by World War I. Despite of not receiving a formal education and working as an electrician, Rotblat managed to win a free place in the physics department of the Polish Free University (Wolna Wszechnica Polska) and a position as a junior assistant. He received a MA in 1932 and became a Research Fellow of Radiological Laboratory of Scientific Society of Warsaw in 1933. He became Assistant Director of the Atomic Physics Institute at the Polish Free University in 1937 and became a doctor of Physics at the University of Warsaw in 1938. In 1937 he married Tola Gryn.
Research career. In early 1939, he went to the University of Liverpool to work with Sir James Chadwick, the discoverer of the neutron. Because his stipend was small, he left his wife, Tola, in Poland. In the summer of 1939, shortly before Germany invaded Poland he returned to Poland to bring his wife to England, but she was ill and could not travel. He returned alone and never saw her again (she was murdered by the German Nazis). He never remarried. In 1940 he became a lecturer.
Early in 1944 Rotblat went with Chadwick's group to work on the Manhattan Project to build the first atomic bomb. He always had strong reservations about the use of science to develop such a devastating weapon and he resigned in December 1944 when it became apparent that Nazi Germany was no longer seeking a nuclear weapon, the only physicist to do so (though others refused to work on atomic bombs after the defeat of Japan). He was barred from the United States and on departure from New York, his research notes and correspondence mysteriously disappeared. He later discovered in his dossier in the United States a statement claiming that he wanted to join the Royal Air Force so that he could fly to Poland and defect to the Soviet Union.
After the war, Rotblat became interested in the medical and biological uses of radiation, and in 1949 became Professor of Physics at St Bartholomew's Hospital, London, shortly before receiving his PhD from Liverpool in 1950. He also worked on several official bodies connected with nuclear physics, and arranged a major exhibition for schools on civil nuclear energy. In 1955, he demonstrated that the contamination caused by the fall out after a Bikini Atoll nuclear test by the United States would have been far greater than that stated officially.
Rotblat believed that scientists should always be concerned with the ethical consequences of their work. He became one of the most prominent critics of the nuclear arms race, was the youngest signatory of the Russell-Einstein Manifesto in 1955, and chaired the press conference that launched it. Then, with Bertrand Russell and others he founded the influential Pugwash Conferences in 1957 and continued to work within their framework until his death. Despite the Iron Curtain and the Cold War, he advocated establishing links between scientists from the West and East. Just as the Hippocratic Oath provides a code of conduct for physicians, he thought that scientists should have their own code of moral conduct. He nominated Mordechai Vanunu, who had disclosed the extent of Israel's nuclear weapons program, for the Nobel Peace Prize every year from 1988 to 2004 when he was president of the Pugwash conferences. Central to his view of the world were the words of the Russell-Einstein Manifesto with which he concluded his acceptance speech for the Nobel prize: Above all, remember your humanity.
To the end of his life Rotblat spoke fluently Polish and emphasized that he is “a Pole with a British passport.”
Honorary Degrees Hon. DSc, University of Bradford, 1973
Hon. Fellow, University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology, 1985
Dr. Honoris causa, University of Moscow, 1988
Hon. DSc, University of Liverpool, 1989
Honors and awards. Commander of the British Empire (CBE), 1965
Foreign Member, Polish Academy of Sciences,1966
Honorary Foreign Member, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1972
Bertrand Russell Society Award, 1983
Commander, Order of Merit (Poland), 1987
Gold Medal, Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, 1988
Order of Cyril and Methodius (1st Cl.) (Bulgaria), 1988
Knight Commander's Cross, Order of Merit (Germany), 1989
Distinguished Citizen Award, Int. Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, 1989
Honorary Member, British Institute of Radiology, 1990
Albert Einstein Peace Prize, 1992
Honorary Professor, University of Blagoevgrad, 1993
Foreign Member, Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, 1994
Nobel Peace Laureate, 1995
Fellow of the Royal Society, 1995
Copernicus Medal awarded by Polish Academy of Sciences, 1996
Knighted, 1998
Professional. Over 300 publications, including 20 books, Editor-in-Chief of the journal 'Physics in Medicine and Biology' and president of several institutions and professional associations. Co-founder and member of governing board of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute; member of the Advisory Committee on Medical Research of the World Health Organization.
This article uses, among others, material from the Wikipedia article "Jozef Rotblat" licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. :
Wikipedia
supplemented with information from other sources:
Dr.Peter Gessner, Polish Academic Information Center
Nobel Prize
Interview; audio
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