As the author herself put it, this is "the lives of men and women who lived and worked in grim secrecy to hasten the end of the war." It is the story of stressful lives, cryptic conversations between husbands and wives, leaky faucets and water shortages, censored mail, and sharing a post office box with every other person in town PO Box 1663, Santa Fe, NM. Life was filled with difficulties, but it was also filled with determination to overcome the hardships and reach a goal. Tying it all together was a sense of pride, of patriotism, and communal spirit that surpassed anything they knew before or after those days of the Manhattan Project.

Dorothy Ann Scarritt was born 12 December 1897 in Kansas City, Missouri. Her parents were William Chick Scarritt and Frances Virginia Davis. She graduated from Smith College in 1919. She married Joseph Chambers McKibbin (1893-1931), son of Joseph McKibbin and Mary Henderson Dorsey, 5 October 1927. They had one son, Kevin. She raised her son in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she became secretary for the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory from 1943 to 1963. She died in 1985.

This story began before I was born, when my father, Ellis P. Steinberg, and uncle Bernard Abraham worked on the secret undertaking that developed the first atomic bombs. The result is this book-part memoir, part discussions with siblings and cousins, and part interviews with a dozen others who had a parent who worked on the Project.

Code-named the Manhattan Project, the detailed plans for developing an atomic bomb were impelled by urgency and shrouded in secrecy. This book tells the story of the project's three key sites: Oak Ridge, Tennessee; Hanford, Washington; and Los Alamos, New Mexico.

Why are the fields of science and technology still considered to be predominantly male professions? The Madame Curie Complex moves beyond the most common explanations - limited access to professional training, lack of resources, exclusion from social networks of men - to give historical context and unexpected revelations about women's contributions to the sciences. Exploring the lives of Jane Good all, Rosalind Franklin, Rosalyn Yalow, Barbara McClintock, Rachel Carson, and the women of the Manhattan Project, Julie Des Jardins considers their personal and professional stories in relation to their male counterparts - Albert Einstein, Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi - to demonstrate how the gendered culture of science molds the methods, structure, and experience of the work. With lively anecdotes and vivid detail, The Madame Curie Complex reveals how women scientists have often asked different questions, used different methods, come up with different explanations for phenomena in the natural world, and how they have forever transformed a scientist's role.

A social history of New Mexico’s “Atomic City” Los Alamos, New Mexico, birthplace of the Atomic Age, is the community that revolutionized modern weaponry and science. An “instant city,” created in 1943, Los Alamos quickly grew to accommodate six thousand people—scientists and experts who came to work in the top-secret laboratories, others drawn by jobs in support industries, and the families. How these people, as a community, faced both the fevered rush to create an atomic bomb and the intensity of the subsequent cold-war era is the focus of Jon Hunner’s fascinating narrative history. Much has been written about scientific developments at Los Alamos, but until this book little has been said about the community that fostered them. Using government records and the personal accounts of early residents, Inventing Los Alamos, traces the evolution of the town during its first fifteen years as home to a national laboratory and documents the town’s creation, the lives of the families who lived there, and the impact of this small community on the Atomic Age.

Their average age was twenty-five. They came from Berkeley, Cambridge, Paris, London and Chicago – and arrived in New Mexico ready for adventure or at least resigned to it. But hope quickly turned to hardship in the desolate military town where everything was a secret, including what their husbands were doing at the lab. They lived in barely finished houses with a P.O. Box for an address, in a town wreathed with barbed wire, all for the benefit of 'the project' that didn't exist as far as the greater world was concerned. They were constrained by the words they couldn't say out loud, the letters they couldn't send home, the freedom they didn't have. Though they were strangers, they joined together – babies were born, friendships were forged, children grew up. But then 'the project' was unleashed and even bigger challenges faced the women of Los Alamos, as they struggled with the burden of their contribution towards the creation of the most destructive force in mankind's history – the atomic bomb. Contentious, gripping and intimate, The Wives of Los Alamos is a personal tale of one of the most momentous events in our history.