| Summary: | The scientific endeavors that took place at Hanford Engineer Works, beginning in World
War II and continuing thereafter, are often overlooked in the literature on the Manhattan
Project, the Atomic Energy Commission, and in regional histories. To historians of
science, Hanford is described as an industrial facility that illustrates the perceived
differences between academic scientists on the one hand and industrial scientists and
engineers on the other. To historians of the West such as Gerald Nash, Richard White,
and Patricia Limerick, Hanford has functioned as an example of the West's
transformation during in World War II, the role of science in this transformation, and the
recurring impacts of industrialization on the western landscape. This thesis describes the
establishment and gradual expansion of a multi-disciplinary research program at
Hanford whose purpose was to assess and manage the biological and environmental
effects of plutonium production. By drawing attention to biological research, an area in
which Hanford scientists gained distinction by the mid 1950s, this study explains the
relative obscurity of Hanford's scientific research in relation to the prominent, physics-dominated
national laboratories of the Atomic Energy Commission. By the mid 1960s,
with growing public concern over radiation exposure and changes in the government's
funding patterns for science, Hanford's ecologically relevant research provided a
recognizable and valuable identity for the newly independent, regionally-based research
laboratory. With funding shifts favoring the biological and environmental sciences in the
latter half of the twentieth-century, Hanford scientists were well prepared to take
advantage of expanding opportunities to carve out a permanent niche on the border of
American science. === Graduation date: 2003
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