Je connaissais (très) bien Sakharov, mais pas (du tout) Luria
Why did the FBI track Nobel-winning microbiologist Salvador Luria?
▻https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-04153-x
Selya’s description of the United States during the cold war has eerie similarities with communist East Germany. The FBI recruited friends and colleagues to dish dirt; Selya obtained the reports through the Freedom of Information Act. Most informants commented on Luria’s liberal-mindedness but fell short of alleging that he was a member of the Communist Party. The agency illegally monitored his post, Selya writes. Most suspicious were two letters from New York, signed ‘SA’. The sender? The magazine Scientific American.
FBI officials interviewed Luria about Pontecorvo, with whom he had minimal contact in the United States. They questioned others about Luria’s loyalty, including physicist Ugo Fano, a childhood friend who had fled Italy in 1939 and helped Luria when he arrived (another section of the book where brevity left me with questions). In 1952, Luria was denied a passport to attend a scientific meeting in Europe and to visit his ill mother. (He finally got one in 1959.) He was also barred from federal funding review panels.