http://www.theage.com.au/world/us-atom-bomb-scientist-tended-cows-in-china-20100614-ya5k.html
US atom bomb scientist tended cows in China June 15, 2010 JOAN CHASE HINTON PHYSICIST, DEFECTOR 20-10-1921 - 8-6-2010 By WILLIAM GRIMES JOAN Hinton, a physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project, which developed the atom bomb, but spent the rest of her life as a committed Maoist working on dairy farms in China, has died of an abdominal aneurysm in Beijing. She was 88. During the McCarthy era in the 1950s, her name surfaced as a possible spy and spiller of nuclear secrets after she spoke at a peace conference in Beijing. Hinton was recruited for the Manhattan Project in February 1944 while still a graduate student in physics at Wisconsin University. At the secret laboratory at Los Alamos in New Mexico, where she worked with Enrico Fermi, she was assigned to a team that built two reactors for testing enriched uranium and plutonium. When the first atom bomb was detonated near Alamogordo on July 16, 1945, Hinton and a colleague watched from about 40 kilometres away: ''We first felt the heat on our faces, then we saw what looked like a sea of light,'' she said. ''It was gradually sucked into an awful purple glow that went up and up into a mushroom cloud. It looked beautiful as it lit up the sun.'' Hinton believed that the bomb would be used for a demonstration explosion to force a Japanese surrender. After the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, she became an outspoken peace activist. She sent the mayors of every major city in the United States a small glass case filled with glassified desert sand and a note asking whether they wanted their cities to suffer the same fate. In 1948, alarmed at the emerging Cold War, she gave up physics and left the US for China, then in the throes of a Communist revolution she wholeheartedly admired. ''I did not want to spend my life figuring out how to kill people,'' she said. In China, she met her future husband, Erwin Engst, a Cornell-trained dairy cattle expert, who went on to work on Chinese dairy farms as a breeder while she designed and built machinery. During the Cultural Revolution, they were editors and translators in Beijing. Hinton applied her scientific talents to perfecting a continuous-flow automatic milk pasteuriser and other machines. For the past 40 years, she worked on a dairy farm and an agricultural station outside Beijing, tending a herd of about 200 cows. Hinton was born in Chicago. Her father, Sebastian, was a patent lawyer who invented the jungle gym in 1920; her mother, Carmelita, founded a progressive coeducational secondary school where her daughter excelled as a skier, qualifying for the US Olympic team for the 1940 games; those games, however, were cancelled. Hinton earned a doctorate in physics at Wisconsin University in 1944. At Los Alamos, she was assigned to practical work, piled beryllium blocks around the core of the site's first reactor and constructed electronic circuits for the counters. She then helped design and construct the control rods for a second reactor. In her spare time, she played violin in a string quartet whose members included the physicists Edward Teller and Otto Frisch. After the war, she studied with Fermi as a fellow at the Institute for Nuclear Studies at Chicago University before leaving for China, where she met and married Engst, who died in 2003. Hinton is survived by two sons and four grandchildren. NEW YORK TIMES
