Frederic de Hoffmann

Frederic de Hoffmann (b. Vienna, July 8, 1924 – d. La Jolla, October 4, 1989) was a nuclear physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project.^[1] He came to the United States of America in 1941 and graduated from Harvard in 1944.^[1] Upon graduating, de Hoffmann was sent to Los Alamos National Laboratory where he assisted Edward Teller in the development of the Hydrogen bomb.^[1] Frederic de Hoffmann was an advocate of peaceful atomic energy.^[1]

After leaving Los Alamos, de Hoffmann collaborated with Hans Bethe and Silvan Schweber on a textbook called Mesons and Fields and became chairman of the Committee of Senior Reviewers of the United States Atomic Energy Commission.^[2] He received his Ph.D from Julian Schwinger in 1948.^[3]

Frederic De Hoffmann moved to the General Dynamics Corporation in 1955.^[1] That year he was recruited by John Jay Hopkins to found General Atomic and serve as its first president.^[1][4] This organization's purpose was to manufacture nuclear reactors for energy production, and sell them on the open market.^[5] In the late '50s he organized Project Orion, a plan for a spaceship to be propelled by nuclear bombs.^[6]

He helped found the University of California's campus in San Diego.^[4]

De Hoffmann joined the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in 1970 and served as its president for 18 years.^[1] He was also the chairman and chief executive officer of the Salk Institute Biotechnology-Industry Associates Inc.^[5] When de Hoffman retired in 1988 he was named the institute's president emeritus.^[5] He died in 1989 of AIDS,^[1] which he contracted in 1984 from an infected blood transfusion he received during surgery.^[7]

References