Katie Hawkinson ,Jenny McGrath
Sat, July 22, 2023
Maria Goeppert Mayer worked on the Manhattan Project and later won the Nobel Prize in physics.
Bettmann/Getty Images
Nolan's "Oppenheimer" fails to highlight the women who helped make the Manhattan Project possible.
Women worked across the Project, including as explosion techs, librarians, and hematologists.
Several went on to shape their fields later in their careers, with one even winning a Nobel Prize.
Christopher Nolan's "Oppenheimer" explores the work of physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer and his colleagues to create the atomic bomb at a research facility in Los Alamos, New Mexico.
Yet, the film fails to depict a key part of the story, using scientists Lilli Hornig and Charlotte Serber as stand-ins for all the women who contributed their time and expertise to make the project possible.
From a Nobel Prize winner to a chemist who protested the use of the atomic bomb in warfare, the work of these women was essential to the story Nolan sought to tell — and yet, their voices remain mostly absent from the film.
Here are the stories of just six of the hundreds of women that made essential contributions to the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos.
Nolan's "Oppenheimer" fails to highlight the women who helped make the Manhattan Project possible.
Women worked across the Project, including as explosion techs, librarians, and hematologists.
Several went on to shape their fields later in their careers, with one even winning a Nobel Prize.
Christopher Nolan's "Oppenheimer" explores the work of physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer and his colleagues to create the atomic bomb at a research facility in Los Alamos, New Mexico.
Yet, the film fails to depict a key part of the story, using scientists Lilli Hornig and Charlotte Serber as stand-ins for all the women who contributed their time and expertise to make the project possible.
From a Nobel Prize winner to a chemist who protested the use of the atomic bomb in warfare, the work of these women was essential to the story Nolan sought to tell — and yet, their voices remain mostly absent from the film.
Here are the stories of just six of the hundreds of women that made essential contributions to the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos.
Lilli Hornig
Chemist Lilli Hornig first came to the United States in 1933 from Berlin, Germany after German officials threatened to imprison her father in a concentration camp. Hornig first arrived at Los Alamos after Manhattan Project officials tapped her husband to join the effort.
Hornig began researching plutonium — a key element for nuclear technology. However, after her colleagues realized how dangerous the isotope plutonium-240 was, they fired her, citing concerns that the isotope would cause reproductive damage. Hornig told the Voices of the Manhattan Project she recalled trying to point out that men's reproductive systems were more exposed than hers.
Hornig then moved to the explosives team and witnessed the Trinity Test — the world's first detonation of a nuclear weapon, conducted in New Mexico in 1945 — before leaving Los Alamos. Hornig, notably, also tried to stop the actual use of the atomic bomb in warfare, signing a petition urging officials to instead demonstrate the bomb's power on an uninhabited island.
"And we thought in our innocence — of course, it made no difference — that if we petitioned hard enough they might do a demonstration test... and invite the Japanese to witness it," Hornig said in the interview. "But of course the military, I think, had made the decision well before that they were going to use it no matter what."
While Hornig was featured in Nolan's film, she makes just a few appearances, including a scene depicting her speaking out against the US military's use of the bomb in Japan.
Lilli Hornig's ID photo.Los Alamos National Laboratory
Charlotte Serber
Charlotte Serber first went to Los Alamos with her husband, a physicist, in 1942. Serber worked for the Manhattan Project as a scientific librarian — despite not having any formal training — handling various top-secret technical documents throughout her time at Los Alamos, according to the book, "Their Day in the Sun: Women of the Manhattan Project."
Serber eventually became the only female group leader at Los Alamos, overseeing a staff of 12 people.
She also assisted with counterespionage efforts, making trips into nearby Santa Fe to act drunk in local bars and spread rumors that the project was actually an effort to build an electric rocket, according to the book, "Atomic Spaces: Living on the Manhattan Project."
While Serber also makes an appearance in "Oppenheimer," Nolan depicted Serber as Oppenheimer's secretary, removing her essential contributions as a librarian from the narrative.
Charlotte Serber's ID photo.Los Alamos National Laboratory
Floy Agnes (Naranjo Stroud) Lee
Floy Agnes (Naranjo Stroud) Lee was earning her biology degree from the University of New Mexico when she was asked to work at Los Alamos. Lee worked as a hematologist, collecting blood samples from the men who worked directly on the atomic bomb. Her work was essential in monitoring scientists' health at Los Alamos.
In an interview for the Voices of the Manhattan Project — an oral history archive — Lee recalled taking blood from physicist Louis Slotin after he was exposed to severe radiation doses during a 1946 experiment. Lee said she was worried he would die — which he did, just nine days later.
A member of the Santa Clara Pueblo tribe, Lee was one of a few Indigenous women working at Los Alamos. After the war, Lee earned her Ph.D. in zoology from the University of Chicago and went on to pioneer a new method for computer analysis of chromosomes. Lee was also a founding member of the American Indian Science and Engineering Society, an organization that still exists today with the mission of increasing representation for Indigenous peoples in STEM fields.
Joan Hinton
Joan Hinton was a physics graduate student at the University of Wisconsin when she was tapped for Los Alamos. She worked on a team building the first reactor able to use enriched uranium as fuel. Hinton also witnessed the Trinity Test.
Just weeks after the US dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagaski, killing more than 200,000 people, Hinton drove physicist Harry Daghlian to the hospital after he was exposed to a lethal amount of radiation from a plutonium core. He died about three weeks later.
Hinton believed the bomb would be used in a demonstration for the Japanese — which Hornig advocated for as well — and became an ardent peace activist after the war. In protest, Hinton sent the mayor of every major city in the United States a case filled with glassified desert sand — a byproduct of the Trinity Test bomb — alongside a note asking whether they wanted their communities to suffer from a similar fate, according to her obituary in the New York Times.
Hinton emigrated to China in 1948, where she spent the rest of her life working on dairy farms.
Joan Hinton, left, working on a dairy farm in Beijing, China.Reuters Photographer/Reuters
Elizabeth Graves
Elizabeth Graves was an invaluable member of the Los Alamos team because she was one of few physicists in the United States with experience using a Cockroft-Walton particle accelerator, a machine that could produce beams of charged particles and was essential to the development of the Manhattan Project, according to the US Department of Energy.
Graves was also pregnant during her initial months at Los Alamos and even went into labor while conducting an experiment. She did not stop until the experiment was finished, timing her contractions with a stopwatch, physicist Henry Barschall told the authors of "Their Day in the Sun."
Graves and her husband went on to raise their family at Los Alamos, where she continued to research experimental nuclear physics.
Elizabeth Graves' ID photo.Los Alamos National Laboratory
Elizabeth Graves was an invaluable member of the Los Alamos team because she was one of few physicists in the United States with experience using a Cockroft-Walton particle accelerator, a machine that could produce beams of charged particles and was essential to the development of the Manhattan Project, according to the US Department of Energy.
Graves was also pregnant during her initial months at Los Alamos and even went into labor while conducting an experiment. She did not stop until the experiment was finished, timing her contractions with a stopwatch, physicist Henry Barschall told the authors of "Their Day in the Sun."
Graves and her husband went on to raise their family at Los Alamos, where she continued to research experimental nuclear physics.
Elizabeth Graves' ID photo.Los Alamos National Laboratory
Maria Goeppert Mayer
Theoretical physicist Maria Goeppert Mayer contributed to the development of nuclear fission while working at Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence College, and visiting Los Alamos from time to time. Mayer never worked on the atomic bomb under Oppenheimer, rather working with Edward Teller on the related hydrogen bomb at Los Alamos.
Mayer kept her work at Los Alamos a secret from her husband for many years, according to "Their Day in the Sun."
"Keeping from him that awful secret of the atom bomb research I did during World War II for four years was harder on me than all the prejudice of the years," Mayer told Sharon McGrayne for her book, "Nobel Prize Women in Science: Their Lives, Struggles, and Momentous Discoveries."
"We were lucky because we didn't contribute to the development of the bomb, and so we escaped the searing guilt felt to this day by those responsible," Mayer added.
In 1963, Mayer won the Nobel Prize in physics. She was only the second woman — preceded by Marie Curie in 1903 — at the time to receive the award.
'Oppenheimer' review: Sympathy for the destroyer of worlds
Nolan's latest is fascinating, yet disjointed.
Photo by Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures
Devindra Hardawar
·Senior Editor
Updated Sat, July 22, 2023
At one point in Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb dons his iconic uniform — a fedora cap, a smoking pipe, a slightly over-sized suit — like Batman wearing his cape and cowl for the first time. It's a look that serves as a sort of armor against mere mortals, who he woos with a peculiar charisma, as well as the military and political bureaucracy he battles while leading the Manhattan Project. It's also a way for J. Robert Oppenheimer (played by Cillian Murphy) to ground himself as he wrestles with the major conflict around his work: Building an atomic bomb could help win the war, but at what cost to humanity?
Oppenheimer may seem like a curious project for Nolan: Since wrapping up his Batman trilogy with The Dark Knight Rises, he's thrown himself into increasingly complex projects (perhaps to atone for that disappointment). Interstellar was ostensibly a story about a man exploring the cosmos to find a new planet for humanity, but it also wrestled with personal sacrifices as his children aged beyond him.
Christopher Nolan's
Dunkirk was a purely cinematic, almost dialog-free depiction of a famous wartime evacuation. And Tenet was a bold attempt at mixing another heady sci-fi concept (what if you could go backwards through time?!) with bombastic James Bond-esque set pieces. Oppenheimer, meanwhile, is a mostly talky film set in a variety of meeting rooms, save for one explosive sequence.
Take a step back, though, and a film about an intelligent and very capable man wrestling with huge moral issues is very much in the Nolan wheelhouse. Oppenheimer's swaggering genius fits right alongside Christian Bale's Bruce Wayne/Batman, the dedicated magicians in The Prestige or the expert dream divers/super spies in Inception.
The film, which is based on the biography American Prometheus by Martin J. Sherwin and Kai Bird, follows Oppenheimer from his time in Germany as a doctoral student, to his professorship at UC Berkeley. He mingles with notable scientists, including Albert Einstein himself, and makes a name for himself as a quantum physics researcher. We see Oppenheimer as more than just a bookish geek: He sends money to anti-fascists fighting in the Spanish Civil War, he pushes for unionization among lab workers and professors, and he supports local Communists. (Something that will come back to haunt him later.)
It's not too long before he's recruited to the Manhattan Project to build an atomic bomb, and the myth-making truly begins. Like a Nolan heist film, he assembles a team of the brightest scientific minds in America and beyond, and he pushes the government to establish a town doubling as a secret research base in Los Alamos, New Mexico. The film is strongest when it focuses on the specificities of the Manhattan Project: the rush to build a bomb before Nazi Germany, the pushback from scientists terrified about the damage "the gadget" could do.
Christopher Nolan's
The movie firmly focuses on Oppenheimer's point of view, so much so that we mainly see him as a heroic tortured genius. Only he can put the right scientists together and motivate them to work; only he can solve the riddles of quantum physics to keep America safe. Some colleagues criticize his cavalier attitude about building an atomic bomb — they think it can lead to untold disaster, while he naively thinks it may be so powerful it could end all war. But, for the most part, we're left feeling that he was a great man who was ultimately betrayed by a country that didn't care for his post-war anti-nuclear activism.
I wasn't able to see Oppenheimer on an IMAX screen, unfortunately, but sitting front row in a local theater still managed to be a thoroughly immersive experience. That was particularly surprising since it's really a movie featuring people (mostly men) talking to each other in a series of unremarkable rooms. Save for one virtuoso set piece — the build-up and aftermath of a successful atomic bomb test is Nolan at his best — what's most impressive is how cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema makes those conversations utterly engaging. We've never seen Cillian Murphy's piercing blue eyes do so much work in close-up.
Christopher Nolan's
Still, it's an overall disjointed experience. The few featured women — Emily Blunt as Kitty Oppenheimer, Florence Pugh as the Communist activist Jean Tatlock — are sketched thin, even by Nolan standards. And the movie would have benefitted from more insight into Oppenheimer's thinking. It's a surprisingly standard biopic, even though it's three hours long and far more technical than any studio film this year.
At the very least, it would have been interesting to see Oppenheimer reckon more directly with the aftermath of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We see him confront President Harry Truman (Gary Oldman) in a vain attempt to stop building nuclear weapons, and the film points to his very public stance against future bombs. But even those scenes feel self-serving.
At the end of the film, Oppenheimer finally comes to understand something many of his colleagues have been saying from the beginning. Nothing will be the same because of him. There is no peace now, only the undying specter of nuclear annihilation.
Nolan's latest is fascinating, yet disjointed.
Photo by Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures
Devindra Hardawar
·Senior Editor
Updated Sat, July 22, 2023
At one point in Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb dons his iconic uniform — a fedora cap, a smoking pipe, a slightly over-sized suit — like Batman wearing his cape and cowl for the first time. It's a look that serves as a sort of armor against mere mortals, who he woos with a peculiar charisma, as well as the military and political bureaucracy he battles while leading the Manhattan Project. It's also a way for J. Robert Oppenheimer (played by Cillian Murphy) to ground himself as he wrestles with the major conflict around his work: Building an atomic bomb could help win the war, but at what cost to humanity?
Oppenheimer may seem like a curious project for Nolan: Since wrapping up his Batman trilogy with The Dark Knight Rises, he's thrown himself into increasingly complex projects (perhaps to atone for that disappointment). Interstellar was ostensibly a story about a man exploring the cosmos to find a new planet for humanity, but it also wrestled with personal sacrifices as his children aged beyond him.
Christopher Nolan's
Dunkirk was a purely cinematic, almost dialog-free depiction of a famous wartime evacuation. And Tenet was a bold attempt at mixing another heady sci-fi concept (what if you could go backwards through time?!) with bombastic James Bond-esque set pieces. Oppenheimer, meanwhile, is a mostly talky film set in a variety of meeting rooms, save for one explosive sequence.
Take a step back, though, and a film about an intelligent and very capable man wrestling with huge moral issues is very much in the Nolan wheelhouse. Oppenheimer's swaggering genius fits right alongside Christian Bale's Bruce Wayne/Batman, the dedicated magicians in The Prestige or the expert dream divers/super spies in Inception.
The film, which is based on the biography American Prometheus by Martin J. Sherwin and Kai Bird, follows Oppenheimer from his time in Germany as a doctoral student, to his professorship at UC Berkeley. He mingles with notable scientists, including Albert Einstein himself, and makes a name for himself as a quantum physics researcher. We see Oppenheimer as more than just a bookish geek: He sends money to anti-fascists fighting in the Spanish Civil War, he pushes for unionization among lab workers and professors, and he supports local Communists. (Something that will come back to haunt him later.)
It's not too long before he's recruited to the Manhattan Project to build an atomic bomb, and the myth-making truly begins. Like a Nolan heist film, he assembles a team of the brightest scientific minds in America and beyond, and he pushes the government to establish a town doubling as a secret research base in Los Alamos, New Mexico. The film is strongest when it focuses on the specificities of the Manhattan Project: the rush to build a bomb before Nazi Germany, the pushback from scientists terrified about the damage "the gadget" could do.
Christopher Nolan's
The movie firmly focuses on Oppenheimer's point of view, so much so that we mainly see him as a heroic tortured genius. Only he can put the right scientists together and motivate them to work; only he can solve the riddles of quantum physics to keep America safe. Some colleagues criticize his cavalier attitude about building an atomic bomb — they think it can lead to untold disaster, while he naively thinks it may be so powerful it could end all war. But, for the most part, we're left feeling that he was a great man who was ultimately betrayed by a country that didn't care for his post-war anti-nuclear activism.
I wasn't able to see Oppenheimer on an IMAX screen, unfortunately, but sitting front row in a local theater still managed to be a thoroughly immersive experience. That was particularly surprising since it's really a movie featuring people (mostly men) talking to each other in a series of unremarkable rooms. Save for one virtuoso set piece — the build-up and aftermath of a successful atomic bomb test is Nolan at his best — what's most impressive is how cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema makes those conversations utterly engaging. We've never seen Cillian Murphy's piercing blue eyes do so much work in close-up.
Christopher Nolan's
Still, it's an overall disjointed experience. The few featured women — Emily Blunt as Kitty Oppenheimer, Florence Pugh as the Communist activist Jean Tatlock — are sketched thin, even by Nolan standards. And the movie would have benefitted from more insight into Oppenheimer's thinking. It's a surprisingly standard biopic, even though it's three hours long and far more technical than any studio film this year.
At the very least, it would have been interesting to see Oppenheimer reckon more directly with the aftermath of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We see him confront President Harry Truman (Gary Oldman) in a vain attempt to stop building nuclear weapons, and the film points to his very public stance against future bombs. But even those scenes feel self-serving.
At the end of the film, Oppenheimer finally comes to understand something many of his colleagues have been saying from the beginning. Nothing will be the same because of him. There is no peace now, only the undying specter of nuclear annihilation.
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