Published by the MIT News Office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Mass.

Dr. David H. Frisch Dies

Professor D.H. Frisch Dies
Dr. David H. Frisch, professor emeritus of physics who helped develop 
the atom bomb in World War II and later became active in the disarmament 
movement, died Thursday, May 23, of cancer at his home in Cambridge. 
Professor Frisch was 73.
Services were private. A memorial service will be held Wednesday, June 
5, at 11am in the MIT Chapel.
Dr. Frisch served on the MIT faculty for more than 40 years. Although a 
specialist in the field of nuclear and elementary particle physics, his 
wide-ranging research interests included work on male contraception.
Dr. Frisch was born in New York City on March 12, 1918, and went to 
public schools in San Antonio, Tex. He received a bachelor of arts 
degree from Princeton University in 1940 and the PhD degree from MIT in 
1947. He was a graduate assistant at the University of Wisconsin from 
1940 to 1942 and then did basic research toward the development of the 
fission bomb, at the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, N.M., from 1943 to 
1945. 
He came to MIT as a research associate in 1946, became an assistant 
professor in 1948, associate professor in 1952 and full professor in 
1958. He retired in 1988.
Dr. Frisch was a fellow of the American Physical Society and of the 
American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was the recipient of both 
Fulbright and Guggenheim Fellowships in 1954 to do research at Niels 
BohrÕs Institute in Copenhagen. From 1956 to 1962 he was an Alfred P. 
Sloan Research Fellow, and in 1960 he received a National Science 
Foundation fellowship to work at the European Center for Nuclear 
Research in Geneva. He was Walker-Ames Professor at the University of 
Washington in 1966.
Dr. Frisch served on the Physics Advisory Committee of the National 
Science Foundation, on the Brookhaven High Energy Advisory Committee 
and, as chairman, on the Long-Range Planning Committee of the Fermi 
National Accelerator Laboratory. 
Dr. Frisch wrote many research papers in nuclear and particle physics 
and was co-author of Elementary Particles, published in 1963. Together 
with Dr. James Smith of Illinois, Dr. Frisch made an educational film, 
Time DilationÑan Experiment with u-Mesons, for MITÕs Science Teaching 
Center.
Dr. Frisch had a sustained interest in the field of nuclear disarmament. 
He was active in The Association of Los Alamos Scientists, The 
Federation of American Scientists, The National Planning Association 
Arms Control Committee and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 
Summer Studies, for which he edited the book, Arms Reduction, in 1961. 
He also participated in the Moscow Pugwash Conference in 1960 and in a 
1962 Woods Hole Summer Study on Inspection.
In his later career, Dr. Frisch worked at developing a reversible male 
contraceptive.
Dr. Frisch leaves his wife, Rose, an associate professor in Population 
Sciences at the Harvard School of Public Health; a son, Henry, a physics 
professor at the University of Chicago; a daughter, Ruth (Mrs. J. B. 
Dealy III), an artist in Providence, R.I.; and four granddaughters.