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Born in Ealing in the United Kingdom on August 4, 1908, he
received his Doctorate in Physics from Imperial College of Science and Technology
in London in 1937. He did graduate work during the 1930s in Copenhagen and
Berkeley. While at Berkeley he worked with E. O. Lawrence on the
cyclotron in the Radiation Laboratory and was the discoverer of the radioisotope
gallium-67 (Physical Review 54, 649, 1938), which is still in use
in nuclear medicine. His mentor at Imperial College was G. P. Thompson
the British physicist in charge of the Tube Alloys project during the war years
(the British nuclear program that was later incorporated into the Manhattan
Project). He had Mann assigned to the British Embassy in Washington and to the
Chalk River Laboratory in Canada. In 1951, Wilfrid Mann came to the National
Bureau of Standards as the head of the Radioactivity Section. For the next
30 years Wilfrid Mann was the most influential radionuclide metrologist in
the world. During the early 1950s, he had a keen interest in the national
standards for radium-226 and undertook microcalorimetric experiments to
intercompare the national standards (Hönigschmid
standards) of the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and Germany. He
retired from NBS in 1980. His several texts include Radioactivity and Its
Measurement, 1980 (Mann, Ayres, and Garfinkle), A Handbook of
Radioactivity Measurements Procedures, NCRP Report 58, 1985 edition, and
Radioactivity Measurements: Principles and Practice, 1988 (Mann, Rytz,
and Spernol). |
