Astrid Viciano

Shortly before Hitler's rise to power in 1933, the young scientist Wolfgang Gentner and his French colleague Frédéric Joliot-Curie meet at the Institut du Radium in Paris. It was a time of groundbreaking discoveries in physics, from Albert Einstein to Marie Curie. Gentner researches artificial radioactivity together with Curie's daughter Irène and her husband Frédéric. Experiments that would earn the Joliot-Curies the Nobel Prize.

In 1940, Gentner returned to Paris on behalf of the German uranium project. He was to supervise Joliot-Curies' research and provide the Nazis with important findings for the construction of the atomic bomb. But his French colleague begins to work undercover for the Resistance, and his laboratory becomes the center of the resistance. Gentner seemingly cooperates with the Nazis, constantly coming up with new pretexts to prevent the Germans from entering the laboratory and to secure the release of French resistance fighters from the clutches of the Waffen SS - a double game in which Gentner risks everything and saves the lives of his friends several times over.

Astrid Viciano presents a new biography of Wolfgang Gentner, the long-time director of the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg, and sheds light on a dark period in which science was suspected of being contaminated during the Third Reich - as exciting as a thriller!

Astrid Viciano has been a science journalist for more than 20 years. She has worked as an editor for Stern, Die Zeit and Süddeutsche Zeitung , among others. Her work has won several awards, including the Holtzbrinck Prize for Business Journalism. She lived for several years in Sceaux, the suburb of Paris where Marie Curie lived with her family.

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