Borst, Lyle Benjamin

▪ 2003

      American nuclear physicist (b. Nov. 24, 1912, Chicago, Ill. —d. July 30, 2002, Williamsville, N.Y.), supervised the construction of the nation's largest atomic reactor at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, N.Y., in 1950. Among his successes at the facility were improvements in how the reactor was cooled, the discovery of a radioactive iodine used to treat thyroid cancer, and evidence that explained how a supernova is created. Borst also worked on the Manhattan Project at Oak Ridge, Tenn. At the dawn of the atomic age, he organized scientists and lobbied the U.S. Congress to stress civilian rather than military uses of atomic energy; he was a founder in 1945 of the Federation of Atomic (later American) Scientists. Borst was educated at the University of Illinois and University of Chicago, where he worked with physicist Enrico Fermi in the early 1940s.

* * *