Egon Bretscher

Early life

Born in Zurich, Switzerland and educated at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) there, Bretscher gained a PhD degree in organic chemistry at Edinburgh in 1926. Bloch slipped over an icy edge but was saved, as he fell, by the rope joining him to Bretscher. The latter's swift action in driving his ice axe into the ice prevented their combined demise. After raising the alarm, Bretscher returned with a guide and spent the night with Bloch discussing physics. It took guides a further three days to bring Bloch down. Bloch later won the Nobel Prize for physics for his discovery of nuclear magnetic resonance.

Manhattan Project

In 1944 he became a part of the British Mission to the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, New Mexico led by James Chadwick, where he made the first measurements on the energy released in fusion processes. In 1946 in measuring deuterium-tritium (D-T) fusion cross-sections at different energies, he and Anthony French discovered a resonance in the helium-5 nucleus briefly produced during the 2H(t,n)4He reaction. This resonance makes the D-T recipe for fusion a lower energy option than D-D by a factor of approximately 100, making D-T fusion an accessible approach for the fusion bomb and efforts towards modern fusion energy reactors. This resonance was dubbed the "Bretscher state" in 2024. It also explains the preponderance of Helium in the universe, and is crucial for the existence of significant quantities of 12C, on which known lifeforms are based.

During his time in Los Alamos, he took many Kodachrome slides which appear to constitute a unique coloured record of that research site. His pictures, which are now held by the Churchill Archives Centre, include photographs of Enrico Fermi, Edward Teller and the Trinity site in New Mexico after the first atomic bomb was detonated, showing the surface light brown sand turned to a green-blue glass.

Harwell Laboratory

In 1947 he was invited by John Cockcroft to head the Chemistry Division at the newly established Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell, Oxfordshire, England and in 1948 succeeded Otto Frisch as head of the Nuclear Physics Division there. Amongst his colleagues were Bruno Pontecorvo in the Nuclear Physics Division, and Klaus Fuchs who was the head of the Theoretical Physics Division. He was appointed a Commander of the Most Excellent Order (CBE) on retirement from Harwell.

Bretscher died 16 April 1973 in Zurich, Switzerland. Of his two daughters and three sons, Scilla Senior was a computer programmer, Mark Bretscher and Anthony Bretscher are cell biologists, whilst Peter Bretscher is an immunologist.