Franco Rasetti was an Italian physicist, paleontologist and botanist born in 1901. He worked with Enrico Fermi in Rome, studying neutrinos and other processes leading to nuclear fission, though Rasetti notably later refused to work on the Manhattan Project. Rasetti also studied the Raman effect, or the imprint on scattered light of the vibrational levels of a medium's molecules.
After leaving Italy in 1939, Rasetti taught at Laval University in Quebec City until 1947, when he moved to the United States to teach at Johns Hopkins University. There, he began to more thoroughly study geology, paleontology, entomology, and botany; specifically, the Cambrian geological era. He became a naturalized United States citizen in 1952– the same year he won the Charles Doolittle Walcott Pre-Cambrian Research Medal from the U.S. National Academy of Sciences– and remained at Johns Hopkins for the rest of his career.
Rasetti died in 2001, at the age of 100.
Ca. 1,500 items.
Presented by Franco Rama Rasetti, 1966; accessioned, 1969.
Presented by Franco Rasetti, 1966.
