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Wilfrid Basil Mann (4 August 1908 – 29 March 2001) was a
Wilfrid Basil Mann (4 August 1908 – 29 March 2001) was a radionuclide
A radionuclide (radioactive nuclide, radioisotope or radioactive isotope) is a nuclide that has excess nuclear energy, making it unstable. This excess energy can be used in one of three ways: emitted from the nucleus as gamma radiation; transfer ...
metrologist.
He was born in Ealing
Ealing () is a district in West London, England, west of Charing Cross in the London Borough of Ealing. Ealing is the administrative centre of the borough and is identified as a major metropolitan centre in the London Plan.
Ealing was his ...
, Middlesex in the United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and ...
on 4 August 1908, receiving his Doctorate
A doctorate (from Latin ''docere'', "to teach"), doctor's degree (from Latin ''doctor'', "teacher"), or doctoral degree is an academic degree awarded by universities and some other educational institutions, derived from the ancient formalism ''l ...
in Physics
Physics is the natural science that studies matter, its fundamental constituents, its motion and behavior through space and time, and the related entities of energy and force. "Physical science is that department of knowledge which ...
from Imperial College of Science and Technology in London in 1937.
He did graduate work during the 1930s in Copenhagen
Copenhagen ( or .; da, København ) is the capital and most populous city of Denmark, with a proper population of around 815.000 in the last quarter of 2022; and some 1.370,000 in the urban area; and the wider Copenhagen metropolitan a ...
and Berkeley. While at Berkeley he worked with E.O. Lawrence on the cyclotron in the radiation laboratory and was the discoverer of the radioisotope gallium
Gallium is a chemical element with the Symbol (chemistry), symbol Ga and atomic number 31. Discovered by France, French chemist Paul-Émile Lecoq de Boisbaudran in 1875, Gallium is in boron group, group 13 of the periodic table and is similar to ...
-67, which is still in use in nuclear medicine
Nuclear medicine or nucleology is a medical specialty involving the application of radioactive substances in the diagnosis and treatment of disease. Nuclear imaging, in a sense, is " radiology done inside out" because it records radiation emi ...
.
His mentor at Imperial College was George Paget Thomson
Sir George Paget Thomson, FRS (; 3 May 189210 September 1975) was a British physicist and Nobel laureate in physics recognized for his discovery of the wave properties of the electron by electron diffraction.
Education and early life
Thomson ...
the British physicist in charge of the Tube Alloys project during the war years (the British nuclear program that was later incorporated into the Manhattan Project
The Manhattan Project was a research and development undertaking during World War II that produced the first nuclear weapons. It was led by the United States with the support of the United Kingdom and Canada. From 1942 to 1946, the project w ...
).
He had Mann assigned to the British Embassy in Washington DC
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, image_caption = Clockwise from top left: the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall, United States Capitol, Logan Circle, Jefferson Memorial, White House, Adams Morgan, ...
and to the Chalk River Laboratory in Canada. In 1951, Wilfrid Mann came to the National Bureau of Standards (NBS) as the head of the Radioactivity Section. For the next 30 years Wilfrid Mann was the most influential radionuclide metrologist in the world.
During the early 1950s, he had a keen interest in the national standards for radium
Radium is a chemical element with the symbol Ra and atomic number 88. It is the sixth element in group 2 of the periodic table, also known as the alkaline earth metals. Pure radium is silvery-white, but it readily reacts with nitrogen (rat ...
-226 and undertook microcalorimetric experiments to intercompare the national standards (Hönigschmid standards) of the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and Germany. He retired from NBS in 1980.
Mann was obliged to deny claims that he was a member of the Cambridge Spy Ring
The Cambridge Spy Ring was a ring of spies in the United Kingdom that passed information to the Soviet Union during World War II and was active from the 1930s until at least into the early 1950s. None of the known members were ever prosecuted fo ...
in his 1982 memoir ''Was There A Fifth Man?'' Mann had been accused on several occasions of being the "fifth man," based on rumored work at the Embassy and the resemblance between his middle name and the "Basil" of investigative journalist Andrew Boyle's book ''Climate of Treason''. In his memoirs, Mann argued using contemporary correspondence, publications, and verified passport entries that he was incapable of having worked with Donald Maclean in the British Embassy. As part of his hiring at the Bureau of Standards, Mann underwent intense security screening and received a top-level "Q" clearance from the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission.
Mann died in Towson, Maryland in 2001.
Books
Mann's several texts include ''Radioactivity and Its Measurement'', 1980 (Mann, Ayres, and Garfinkel), ''A Handbook of Radioactivity Measurements Procedures'', NCRP Report 58, 1985 edition, and ''Radioactivity Measurements: Principles and Practice'', 1988 (Mann, Rytz, and Spernol).Notes