This week I read, Brotherhood of the Bomb: The tangled lives and loyalties of Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and Edward Teller primarily because I am interested in Ernest Orlando Lawrence, Nobel Prize (1939) for the invention of the cyclotron, for whom the California Laboratories were named. The context of his life was framed by the development of military sponsorship of research which is so predominant today.

Capital Offense

$$$... ambitious fire of fame
Played out for science acclaim
Hot war transmutted ... cold ...
These ghastly tales here be told
How it became our master
Leading us to face disaster---
Planets may explode and burn
But we will get our just return.

This poem is a reflection on what drove the process as the bomb turned research into a government sponsored enterprise.