Philippe Halban

BiologistBritain

CanadaFrance

Family Member of Manhattan Project Veteran

Listen to Philippe Halban’s Oral History on Voices of the Manhattan Project

Philippe Halban is a European cell biologist. He received his PhD from the University of Oxford and then pursued an academic career in diabetes research at the University of Geneva, Switzerland and Harvard University, USA. He is currently an Emeritus Professor of Medicine in Geneva, where he lives.

Philippe Halban is the son of Austrian Physicist Hans Halban. His father passed away when Philippe was 14, but the fact that his father was a scientist inspired Philippe to pursue and become a scientist in his own right.

Related Profiles

Ernest Rutherford

Britain

Ernest Rutherford (1871 – 1937) was a New Zealand-born British physicist and recipient of the 1908 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Darol Froman

Los Alamos, NM

Darol Froman (1906-1997) was an American-born, Canadian physicist. In 1939, Darol Froman studied waveguides and radar as part of a McGill group dedicated to helping the Canadian war effort.

Hans Halban

France

Hans von Halban (1908-1964) was an Austrian born French physicist. He finished his studies in 1934. He joined nuclear physicist Niels Bohr in Copenhagen, where he and Otto Frisch discovered that heavy water had very little neutron absorption compared to normal water.

John Cairncross

Britain

John Cairncross (1913-1995) was a British literary scholar, civil servant, and Soviet atomic spy. In the 1990s, Cairncross was identified as the “fifth man” in the Cambridge spy ring, which consisted of four other Soviet double agents: Anthony Blunt, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, and Kim Philby.