Willard Frank Libby

Noted chemist Willard Frank Libby was born in Grand Valley, Colorado, on December 17, 1908. His family moved to California when he was still a child, He attended the University of California-Berkeley, graduating in 1931 and attaining is PhD in 1933. Becoming an instructor at the university in that year, he also did much research on radioactive materials and the behavior of neutrons. His work was well received in his field, and resulted in his being involved with Columbia University's division of the Manhattan Project, which was involved in he development of the atomic bomb. While there he developed a gaseous-diffusion method to separate the isotopes in uranium. With the project having successfully completed the development of the atomic bomb in 1945, Libby went to the University of Chicago, where he became a Professor of Chemistry and a member of the Institute for Nuclear Research. He conducted experiments that proved that neutrons reacting with nitrogen produced radioactive carbon 14. In 1949 his work in this field resulted in the process known as radiocarbon dating, which proved to be a revolutionary method of determining the age of organic matter--an invaluable asset in the work of geologists, archaeologists and forensic scientists. Libby was a member of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) from 1955-1959, and in that year became the director of the Institute of Geophyhsics and Planetary Physics at the University of California-Los Angeles. In 1960 he received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his work in radiocarbon dating.