Walter Goad died on November 2, 2000, when I was 11. I wish I could have talked with him about the morality of nuclear weapons work, about having a career in science, about other things I was too young to understand. But I am proud to be his grandson and I hope that he would be proud of me ❤️ (15/15)

In 1999, Wen Ho Lee, a Taiwanese-American nuclear scientist, was arrested and accused of selling the crown jewels of America's nuclear secrets to China. Goad filed an affidavit with the court that the government's accusations were overblown. Lee pled guilty to 1 count and the judge apologized (14/n)

By the time he retired in 1990, Walter was serving as an early advisor to the Human Genome Project, and had been named a Fellow of the American Physical Society, AAAS, and LANL. He spent time every summer sailing in British Columbia. It was during this time that he was a big part of my life (13/n)

In 1982, Walter led the funding proposal that led to the foundation of GenBank, one of the world's first nucleotide sequence databases which is now the US national database. He ensured that the database was based outside of the secure area at LANL, giving open access that is maintained today (12/n)

Although he remained at Los Alamos for the rest of his career, by the 60s Walter's interests had turned to biochemistry. Sabbaticals at Colorado and Cambridge (the latter working with Francis Crick) helped this move, and by the 70s he was working on the then-new field of DNA sequencing (11/n)

The stories that I grew up hearing about this time were mostly about the family's wilderness adventures - rafting the Colorado River down Glen Canyon before the dam was built, sailing the Gulf of California in a tiny sailboat. He eventually started building his own sailboat. (10/n)

By 1953, with a baby on the way, Walter rushed to finish his much delayed thesis. The final product was entitled "A Theoretical Study of Extensive Cosmic Ray Air Showers." He spent much of the next decade working on nuclear weapon design while raising three children and building an adobe house (9/n)

Earlier in '52, Walter had met a Stanford grad student named Maxine Steineke who was in a summer program at Los Alamos. They hit it off with a mutual love of climbing and the outdoors, & were married 6 months later. My grandmother had her own fascinating life story, but that's for another time (8/n)

On November 1, 1952, my grandfather was one of only two members of the design team present for Ivy Mike, the first detonation of a hydrogen bomb. (7/n)

Walter's next move would be a fateful one for his career and life. In 1950 Nordheim joined the crash program at Los Alamos to develop the hydrogen bomb, and Goad accompanied him west. He soon joined the H-bomb effort himself, solving some problems in neutron transport. (6/n)

After his short naval career, Walter enrolled in the Ph.D. program in physics at UC Berkeley, but after Oppenheimer left he transferred to Duke. He worked with Lothar Nordheim, which made his grand-advisor Max Born. His doctoral project was on the theory of cosmic ray particle showers. (5/n)

He graduated in 1945 just as the war was ending. Deployed on a minesweeper to the Philippines, his military service was most notable for a run-in with a rabid monkey where his ship depleted the Navy's entire stock of rabies vaccines in Manila. Still, this lead to a lifelong interest in sailing (4/n)

At Union, Walter excelled in his physics classes. This being during World War II, he was selected for the V-12 officer training program, which allowed him to remain at college while still receiving naval training. He also roomed with future Nobel laureate Baruch Blumberg. (3/n)

During this time he developed an interest in radio technology. He earned a radio licence, which ended up being his ticket out of the South as at the age of 17 he got a job at a radio station in Schenectady, NY. At his employer's suggestion, he enrolled at nearby Union College. (2/n)