Eugene Rabinowitch was a Russian-born American biophysicist who is known for his work inphotosynthesis and nuclear energy. He was a co-author of the Franck Report and a co-founder in 1945 of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a global security and public policy magazine, which he edited until his death.
Early life
Rabinowitch was born Evgenii Isaakovich Rabinovich in Saint Petersburg; his parents were a lawyer and pianist. During WWI Rabinowitch studied chemistry in St. Petersburg. Initially a supporter of the Russian Revolution, he and his family fled to Kiev and then Warsaw with the onset of the Red Terror in late 1918. Ultimately fleeing to Germany, Rabinowitch was able to take a course Einstein taught on relativity, and attend academic events that included Max Planck and Max von Laue. He later worked with James Franck at Göttingen. After the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, Rabinowitch worked for a year with Nils Bohr in Denmark, before finding a job in London. In 1932 Rabinowitch married Russian actress Anya Rabinowitch, and in 1934 the couple had twins, Victor and Alexander Rabinowitch.
During World War II, Rabinowitch worked in the Metallurgical Laboratory, the Manhattan Project's division at the University of Chicago. At that time he was a member of the Committee on Political and Social Problems, chaired by James Franck. Rabinowitch wrote what became known as the Franck Report. The report recommended that nuclear energy be brought under civilian rather than military control and argued that the United States should demonstrate the atomic bomb to world leaders in an uninhabited desert or barren island before using it in combat. The social and ethical concerns expressed in the Franck Report translated into the guiding principles of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, founded by Rabinowitch and fellow physicist Hyman Goldsmith. In the twenty-fifth anniversary issue of the Bulletin, Rabinowitch wrote that the magazine's purpose "was to awaken the public to full understanding of the horrendous reality of nuclear weapons and of their far-reaching implications for the future of mankind; to warn of the inevitability of other nations acquiring nuclear weapons within a few years, and of the futility of relying on America's possession of the 'secret' of the bomb." Over the years, Rabinowitch wrote more than 100 articles for the magazine, most of them editorials. According to the historian of the Pugwash Conferences, In 1959 he re-issued Explaining the Atom that Selig Hecht had written in 1947 when nuclear energy was a novel concept.
