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National Museum of Nuclear Science & History

Donald Ames

ChemistChicago, IL

EngineerManhattan Project VeteranMilitary VeteranPostwar Nuclear ProgramScientistSpecial Engineer Detachment
Donald Ames Listen to Donald Ames’s Oral History on Voices of the Manhattan Project Read Donald Ames Memoirs

Donald Ames joined the Manhattan Project as a G.I. at the University of Chicago in 1943. Ames worked under Nobel Prize chemist Glenn Seaborg at the Metallurgical Laboratory, where he helped determine the chemical properties of plutonium and developed a rapid method for measuring the radium concentration in solutions.

After the war, Ames directed the McDonnell Douglas Research Laboratories in St. Louis, Missouri. There, Ames worked on the Gemini Project and helped design the space capsule for the spacecraft.

Donald Ames’s Timeline
1944 May1945 Joined the Manhattan Project at the University of Chicago, where he worked under Glenn Seaborg in the New Chem Building on the chemistry of plutonium.

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