[cdn-nucl-l] Franco Dino Rasetti, a Nuclear Pioneer, Is Dead at 100

["Adam McLean" <adam.mclean@utoronto.ca>]

Posted on December 25, 2001 in the New York Times and at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/25/obituaries/25RASE.html?ex=1009947600&en=14
5194a110640d32&ei=5040&partner=MOREOVER
A great loss to early advances in nuclear knowledge, worked and lived in
Canada for much of his career.

Adam

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Franco Dino Rasetti, a Nuclear Pioneer, Is Dead at 100
By WOLFGANG SAXON


r. Franco Dino Rasetti, who worked with the Nobel laureate Enrico Fermi and
the select team of Italian scientists that discovered one of the key
processes in nuclear reactions, died on Dec. 5 at a retirement home in
Belgium. He was 100.

The discovery, made in a laboratory at the University of Rome, proved
pivotal for the Manhattan Project and the postwar development of nuclear
energy.

The Fermi group patented the process in Italy in 1934 and in the United
States in 1940, and Dr. Rasetti was the last surviving patent holder.

Fermi, a central figure in the Manhattan Project, had invited Dr. Rasetti to
join that quest for an atomic bomb, but Dr. Rasetti refused on moral
grounds. He told his colleagues that he objected to using nuclear research
for warfare.

Dr. Rasetti specialized in molecular spectroscopy and neutron-induced
reactions. But he was also known as an expert on a large class of fossilized
arthropods like crustaceans, known as trilobites, and on the wildflowers of
the Alps.

After he retired from Johns Hopkins University, where he was a professor for
more than 20 years, Dr. Rasetti donated the trilobite fossils he had amassed
to the Smithsonian Institution.

Dr. Aihud Pevsner, a physics professor at Johns Hopkins, said: "People who
found they could not identify trilobites all over the world would mail them
to him. Every morning he would get a shoe box full of them, and every
afternoon he'd have them all identified and ready to mail back."

Dr. Rasetti was born in Castiglione del Lago, Italy. He was studying
engineering at the University of Pisa when an encounter with Fermi led him
to change his mind. He received his doctorate in physics at Pisa in 1923,
and Fermi recruited him for the University of Rome.

There, Dr. Rasetti found evidence that scientific theories of the
composition of atomic nuclei were incomplete. He used spectroscopy to
buttress his finding, and his experiments were an element in the successful
creation of a nuclear reaction.

Most of the Fermi team left the Rome laboratory in 1939 because of
Mussolini's policies. Dr. Rasetti, who had been a visiting professor at
Columbia University in 1936, went to Laval University in Quebec, where he
remained until he joined the Hopkins faculty in 1947. He retired as a
professor emeritus in 1970.

He also wrote "Elements of Nuclear Physics" (1936), "Middle Cambrian
Stratigraphy and Faunas of the Canadian Rocky Mountains" (1951), "The
Flowers of the Alps" (1980) and many articles on physics, geology and
paleontology.

Dr. Rasetti is survived by his wife of 52 years, Marie Madeleine.