Duffield was secretary to Oppenheimer
Oppenheimer. Fermi. Bethe. Bacher. Teller. These names are tied intimately to the early history of Los Alamos.
Priscilla Duffield may not be as well known to current or past Laboratory employees. But like the scientists who came to the Jemez Mountain plateau to work on Project Y, the secret, crash program to build the world's first atomic bomb, she had firsthand knowledge of the daily workings of the highest administrative and technical leadership level of war-time Los Alamos.
Duffield was J. Robert Oppenheimer's secretary. She came to Los Alamos with the Laboratory's first director in the early 1940s. At 1:10 p.m. April 19, Duffield will give her perspective on Los Alamos, from its conception to the last days as Project Y, during a Heritage Series lecture. The talk is in the Physics Building Auditorium at Technical Area 3 and is open to all Laboratory badge holders.
Priscilla Duffield, a 1939 graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, started out with E. O. Lawrence at the Berkeley Radiation laboratory during the earliest days of the Manhattan Project. She soon joined Oppenheimer in the planning stages for a laboratory to design the first nuclear weapons. She was with Oppenheimer when he transferred from Berkeley to New Mexico and ran his office, first in Santa Fe and then in Los Alamos.
Duffield was involved in every stage of the nuclear development and witnessed first hand Oppenheimer's almost daily interactions with all the top scientists, including Robert Bacher, Hans Bethe, Enrico Fermi, John Manley, Robert Serber, Edward Teller, Robert Wilson and others. She also had a rare personal view into Oppenheimer's private life and knew socially his whole family. She is the last surviving member of this very important leadership team.
Duffield married a young chemist at Los Alamos named Bob Duffield, who later became director of Argonne National Laboratory and then returned to Los Alamos to lead projects in the former Energy (Q) Division.
Duffield worked at Los Alamos until June 1946. She is now retired and lives in Norwood, Colo.
The talk will be broadcast through the Lab's Media Theater.
For more information, contact Alan Carr of Information, Records and Media Services (IM-9) at 4-0870.
