Dr. Floy Agnes “Aggie” (Naranjo Stroud) Lee is our choice for #15 installment of Women in Nuclear History series. She was one of few women involved in the Manhattan project as a biologist/hematologist.
1. Floy Agnes Lee was born on July 23, 1922 at the Albuquerque Indian School. Her mother was a German-American teacher who travelled teaching at different Indian schools, her father was a member of the Santa Clara Pueblo tribe. So, she was half-white and half-Native American.
2. She grew up at the Indian School, later she was sent to St. Mary’s Catholic School for better education. Lee graduated from the University of New Mexico (UNM) with a degree in biology in 1945. During the college years she was testing how different solutions would affect plant’s growth.
3. She learned how to fly planes. She was short of qualifying as a pilot to fly planes and became a member of Women’s Air Force Service, but the program was disbanded in 1944. She worked at a grocery store to pay for flying lessons.
4. In 1945 she was working for Edward Castetter, head of UNM’s biology department to do research on indigenous people cuisine before colonization. During that time her professor got an inquiry for a biology student to work in the hematology laboratory in Los Alamos. He asked Aggie to do this job and she accepted.
5. She collected and examined blood samples from Manhattan Project scientists, including Louis Slotin. Slotin was injured in a criticality accident called a “demon core”, when he brought two beryllium semi-spherical plates together too close to the plutonium core, which exposed him to a fatal dose of radiation.
6. She also monitored Enrico Fermi blood and played with him tennis. They become close friends. She said she finally let him win a game after finding out who he was at the end of the war.
7. After the war she continued studies at the University of Chicago and got her PhD in zoology. Then she worked at Argonne National Laboratory, Jet Propulsion Lab in California and returned to Los Alamos, while raising her daughter after her husband died of cancer.
8. Her studies focused on radiation biology and chromosomes, specializing in cancer research and advancing the science of tissue culture and chromosome analysis.
9. She was a founding member of the American Indian Science and Engineering Society. She was also a member of Women in Cancer Research.
10. Lee died on March 6, 2018 at the age of 95.
References:
https://www.energy.gov/articles/five-fast-facts-about-floy-agnes-lee
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floy_Agnes_Lee
https://www.nps.gov/people/women-of-the-manhattan-project-floy-agnes-lee.htm
https://www.aacr.org/professionals/membership/in-memoriam/stroud-lee-agnes-obituary/