Martin Kamen

Martin Kamen ( born August 27, 1913 in Toronto, † August 31, 2002 in Montecito, Santa Barbara ) was a Canadian- American physicist. He is best known as co- discoverer of the long-lived carbon isotope C-14 with Sam Ruben at the Radiation Laboratory of the University of California, 1940.

Kamen was the son of Russian immigrants and grew up in Chicago, where he studied chemistry, with a bachelor 's degree in 1933 and his doctorate in physical chemistry in 1936. Afterwards he went to the Radiation Laboratory of the University of California, Berkeley, Ernest O. Lawrence, where he joined the nuclear physics and nuclear chemistry turned. There he discovered in 1940 with Sam Ruben C14 when retrieving the cyclotron by carbon isotopes as tracers for experiments on photosynthesis. In 1943 he worked in the Manhattan Project at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Then he returned to Berkeley, but was dismissed in 1945, when he was suspected of having committed atomic espionage for the benefit of the Soviet Union. The allegations were later found to be untenable, brought him back then but in a desperate situation, so that he even made ​​a suicide attempt. In 1955 he won a lawsuit against the Chicago Tribune, who had accused him in 1951 of Soviet espionage. Because of the accusations he was long no work until Arthur Holly Compton took him to the Washington University to produce tracers for research at the cyclotron. There the interest of Kamen shifted towards biochemistry. He examined among other cytochromes. In 1957 he went to Brandeis University, and from 1961 until his retirement in 1978 he was a professor at the University of California, San Diego.

In 1989 he received the Albert Einstein World Award of Science. In 1996 he received the Enrico Fermi Award.

He played viola, among other things, with his friend Isaac Stern.