Frederic de Hoffmann
Frederic de Hoffmann ( born July 8, 1924 in Vienna, † October 4, 1989 in La Jolla ) was an American physicist.
Life
Hoffmann was the son of Otto and Marianne von Hoffmann de Vagujhely. He grew up in Prague, where he attended the German -speaking school, but was prosecuted as a Czech patriot by the Nazis. In 1941 he went to the U.S. (from 1946 he was a U.S. citizen ). He studied physics at Harvard University when in 1944 he was recruited for the Manhattan Project, and it worked until 1946. In 1945, he earned his bachelor's degree from Harvard University, where he received his doctorate in 1948. Then he was back in Los Alamos, where he worked under Edward Teller on the hydrogen bomb, mainly as a theorist ( he checked, for example, calculated the Teller- Ulam design), as well as "right hand" of plate.
In 1955 he went to General Dynamics, which he persuaded the founding of General Atomics, which then developed a civilian nuclear reactor under de Hoffmann as its first president. After the takeover by Gulf Oil, he was there from 1967 to 1969 Manager.
In 1970 he was president of the Salk Institute, which he made one of the leading independent centers for biological research in the United States. Under his presidency, the budget grew from 4.5 to 33 million dollars annually and the number of employees has more than doubled from 200 to 500
He died of an AIDS disease, which he contracted through contaminated blood transfusion in heart surgery in 1984, just before the banked blood tests were introduced to AIDS.