First Betz intern to carry on prairie restoration legacy

Natalie Dierx is the first Betz Intern.

Robert Betz, Fermilab's founding father of prairie restoration, began his mission in 1973 and restored almost 20 percent of the native prairie species on site before his recent passing in April.

This summer, 18-year-old Natalie Dierx will carry on Betz's legacy through a Fermilab-funded internship. Despite growing up in urban and industrial Ontario, Canada, she has taken a passionate interest in the wide-open Illinois prairie and has managed to earn a spot as the first Betz Intern this year.

Encouraged by a high school ecology teacher to learn about environmental science, Dierx, who now lives in the southwest suburbs in Chicago, founded her high school ecology club and worked with other students to build a prairie in her school's courtyard. She now wants to become a conservational biologist after she completes her coursework in Environment and Resource Studies at the University of Waterloo in Ontario.

"I think [the prairie] is something we should preserve," said Dierx. "I want my kids to see a preserved environment."

In the Fermilab fields, Dierx works closely with Roads and Grounds' Bob Lootens and on-call restoration worker Rachel Bridger. Their primary job is to help the area's biodiversity by picking seeds and distributing them to places lacking in certain plant species.

"Natalie is very self-motivated. It's not easy to spend six or seven hours everyday collecting seed, and there is a huge need for her this summer. We are finding and distributing all these seeds that matured this summer, and this means more diversity in Fermilab's prairies and woodlands," Lootens said. "Through this internship, individuals have the opportunity to help us enrich our prairies with species that will mature earlier in the year."

A memorial service honoring the life of Bob Betz and his lasting influence on Fermilab and the region will take place on Saturday, July 7, at 2 p.m. in Ramsey Auditorium. The event will highlight the great contributions that Bob made to prairie conservation and restoration in Illinois, in particular his work at Fermilab and its National Environmental Research Park. Click here for more information.

-- Lauren Younis

Remembering Albert Wattenberg

From the News-Gazette, June 30, 2007

Albert Wattenberg (front row third from left) with Enrico Fermi and other scientists who worked on the first controlled self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction.

URBANA - Albert Wattenberg, 90, retired University of Illinois physics professor, and one of the scientists who worked with Enrico Fermi on the first controlled release of nuclear energy, died June 27, 2007, at Clark-Lindsey Village.

Al was born in New York City, a few days after America entered World War I. He attended public schools in Manhattan, before entering City College of New York, where in the 1930s he first demonstrated his lifelong commitment to peace, freedom and justice by organizing several student strikes. He was president of his graduation class but refused to attend graduation because the officiating officer was friendly with the Italian Fascists. In 1939 he began a graduate program in physics at Columbia University. When Fermi left Columbia to work on what would be the Manhattan project to build an atomic bomb, he recruited Al to accompany him to the University of Chicago, where on Dec. 2, 1942, in a squash court under the stands at Stagg Field, they inaugurated the era of atomic power. In commemoration, the physicists shared a bottle of Chianti and all signed the bottle as a record of who was there. Al kept the bottle for many years before donating it to the national archives.

Al's recollection of the war years always conveyed the urgency the physicists felt as they worked on this project because they feared the Nazis would develop an atomic bomb first, yet he was ambivalent about the course of the Manhattan project as directed by General Leslie Groves. When Fermi left to work on the bomb at Los Alamos National Laboratories in New Mexico, Al stayed in Chicago, and worked with Leo Szilard, who had theorized and patented the idea of a nuclear chain reaction, and who had drafted the letter Albert Einstein sent to President Roosevelt informing him of the possibility of atomic weapons. In 1945, Al was one of the signers of the petition Szilard sent to the government declaring that the unannounced use of nuclear weapons on Japan at that stage of the war would be immoral. After the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Al was one of the founders in September 1945 of the peace-focused organization The Federation of Atomic Scientists, which began publishing the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, with its famed doomsday clock on the cover.