Louis A. Slotin Memorial Fund

Louis Slotin died at Los Alamos in 1946 after being exposed to radiation in a laboratory accident. Following his death, the Louis A. Slotin Memorial Fund was established to raise money to finance lectures in the sciences at the University of Chicago. Most of the soliciting was done by Samuel K. Allison.

Louis Slotin was born in Winnepeg, Canada, on December 1, 1912. From 1927 to 1933 he attended the University of Manitoba, in Winnepeg, receiving the degree of Bachelor of Science with Honors in the fields of Physics and Chemistry in 1932. In the following year he received a Master of Science degree from the same school in physical Chemistry and Physics. For three years of his residency at the University of Manitoba he served as a student assistant. From 1933 to 1936 Slotin studied Physical Chemistry at London, receiving his Doctor of Science degree in 1936. In the years 1935-36 he was Demonstrator in Physical Chemistry for King's College.

Slotin spent the six months after his graduation examining and testing the "Drumm alkaline battery" as a special investigator for the Great Southern Railways, Irish Free State, Dublin. He worked on the construction of the cyclotron at the University of Chicago from 1937 to 1939, and after this began a series of sojourns in various institutions for cyclotron research and for the study of atomic energy. He was involved in the Manhattan District Project, spending time at the Metallurgical Laboratory, at Indiana University working on the cyclotron there, at Oak Ridge, and at Los Alamos. While at Los Alamos, on May 21, 1946, he was in an accident involving fissionable material which resulted in his death nine days later, on Memorial Day. His accident, and the resulting radiation poisoning, present medical science with an opportunity to study this little understood phenomenon at close quarters.