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by Retric 1116 days ago
Los Alamos got kickstarted in WWII when the government literally got to tell physicists where to go and it became a major hub of such research.

That might work if the NIH wanted to spend 50% of it’s budget in one location, but their proposal was to spread across not just one second tier city but dozens of such locations.
1 comments
tomjakubowski 1116 days ago
Were Manhattan project scientists really ordered around like that? Was anyone working at Los Alamos against their will?
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Retric 1116 days ago
I don’t know.

The scientists apparently had some wiggle room: An offer was made to the Princeton team to be redeployed there. "Like a bunch of professional soldiers," Wilson later recalled, "we signed up, en masse, to go to Los Alamos.”

But the subtext was there was a draft going on and most of them would be eligible unless they were working on such a critical project.

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