Nuclear science has been good to John Boyle.
The retired chemist spent his entire career in Oak Ridge, learning about the effects of nuclear radiation and how it impacts the environment. Now 97, he thinks of himself as lucky. "I enjoyed my work, frankly," he says. "A lot of people would probably find it boring, but I was always anxious to get back to work and find out how my results were turning out."
Still,there's a part of him that wishes the secrets of atomic energy had never been discovered. "They first learned how to control it," he says. "Then they learned how to kill people with it."
As a doctoral student during the early days of World War II, Boyle was among the first scientists recruited to participate in the Manhattan Project, the top-secret government initiative to develop the world's first nuclear weapon. He was also among a small group of Americans who understood the destructive power of the bombs that fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki .
"I was well aware of the poor Japanese that were killed," he says. "It was terrible. It was terrible."