Emilio Segrè

On February 2, 1936, he married Elfriede Spiro, a Jewish woman from West Prussia, who immigrated to Italy following the rise of Hitler in Germany in 1933.

Of their three children, Claudio and Amelia Gertrude Allegra were born in 1937 while Fausta Irene was born in 1945.

After the death of Elfriede in October 1970, he got married to Rosa Mines in February 1972.

He was born on February 1, 1905, in Tivoli, Italy, as the youngest of three sons of Giuseppe Segrè and Amelia Susanna Treves. His father owned a paper mill.

He attended ginnasio in Tivoli, and thereafter ginnasio and liceo in Rome where the family relocated in 1917.

In July 1922 he completed graduation from Ginnasio Mamiani, Rome.

He then joined ‘University of Rome La Sapienza’ to study engineering.

In 1927 he got to meet physics professors Enrico Fermi and Franco Rasetti, who were in search of brilliant students. Segrè also attended lectures of eminent physicists at Volta Conference in Como in September 1927.

In 1932 he was appointed by ‘University of Rome’ as assistant professor of physics, a post he served till 1936.

In 1936 he joined ‘University of Palermo’ where he served as a professor of physics and also became director of the Physics Institute. That year he visited ‘Berkeley Radiation Laboratory’ founded by eminent American nuclear scientist Ernest O. Lawrence. There he got introduced to many American scientists like Franz Kurie and Edwin McMillan. He was fascinated by the radioactive scrap metal which was once used in the lab’s particle accelerator, cyclotron discovered by Lawrence.

A molybdenum strip of cyclotron deflector was sent to him from ‘Berkeley Radiation Laboratory’ by Lawrence in February 1937. It was discharging anomalous radioactivity. Segrè along with mineralogist Carlo Perrier conducted thorough theoretical and chemical analysis and proved that a part of such radiation was being generated by an artificially synthesized chemical element and thereby discovered the first such element not found naturally. They named it technetium in 1947.

Following passing of anti-Semitic laws by Benito Mussolini's fascist government restricting Jews from holding university positions, Segrè was dismissed from ‘University of Palermo’.

He accepted offer of Lawrence to work at ‘Berkeley Radiation Laboratory’ as a research assistant. There he isolated metastable isotope technetium-99m along with Glenn Seaborg, which is at present annually applied in around 10 million medical diagnostic methods.

He was an enthusiastic photographer and many of his photographs that document events and people with regard to history of modern science were given to ‘American Institute of Physics’ after his demise. The photographic archive of physics history of the institute is named in his honour.