Samuel Ruben and Martin Kamen were doing pure research on the basics of life. How did plants photosynthesize sunlight and turn it into oxygen? Could the answer be carbon? They did experiments using a particle accelerator called a cyclotron. Their experiments ran through the dead of night, because the cyclotron was used for more important things during the day- namely a cure for cancer.
In the early morning hours of February 27, 1940, chemist Martin Kamen sat in a cold, dark police station. Police officers apprehended the disheveled scientist, too tired to protest, outside of his laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley and hauled him to the station for questioning. They accused him of committing a string of murders that took place the previous evening.
But the police couldn’t pin the crimes on Kamen because the scientist had been locked away in his lab for the past three days, lobbing deuteron particles at a tiny sample of graphite with his colleague, the chemist Samuel Ruben. After he was released, Kamen went home for a brief nap, returned to the lab, and then made one of the most important discoveries of the 20th Century: the carbon-14 isotope.
It wasn't the last time Kamen would be accused of a crime, but those stories faded in importance to the discovery of carbon-14, which is used to determine parts of our history, measure the effects of climate change, and even authenticate Scotch whisky. Read that chapter of science history at Popular Mechanics. -via Digg
(Image credit: Department of Energy)