Editing Willard Libby (section)

==Atomic Energy Commission==
[[United States Atomic Energy Commission|Atomic Energy Commission]] (AEC) Chairman [[Gordon Dean (lawyer)|Gordon Dean]] appointed Libby to its influential General Advisory Committee (GAC) in 1950. In 1954, he was appointed an AEC commissioner by [[President of the United States|President]] [[Dwight D. Eisenhower]] on the recommendation of Dean's successor, [[Lewis Strauss]]. Libby and his family moved from Chicago to [[Washington, D.C.]] He brought with him a truckload of scientific equipment, which he used to establish a laboratory at the [[Carnegie Institution for Science|Carnegie Institution]] there to continue his studies of [[amino acid]]s. Staunchly conservative politically, he was one of the few scientists who sided with [[Edward Teller]] rather than [[Robert Oppenheimer]] during the debate on whether it was wise to pursue a crash program to develop the [[hydrogen bomb]].<ref name="TIME" /> As a commissioner, Libby played an important role in promoting Eisenhower's [[Atoms for Peace]] program,{{sfn|Seaborg|1981|pp=92–95}} and was part of the United States delegation at the Geneva Conferences on Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy in 1955 and 1958.<ref name="TIME" />{{sfn|Hewlett|Holl|1989|p=446}}

As the only scientist among the five AEC commissioners, it fell to Libby to defend the Eisenhower administration's stance on atmospheric [[nuclear testing]].{{sfn|Hewlett|Holl|1989|pp=278–279}} He argued that the dangers of radiation from nuclear tests were less than that from chest X-rays, and therefore less important than the risk of having an inadequate nuclear arsenal, but his arguments failed to convince the scientific community or reassure the public.{{sfn|Seaborg|1981|pp=92–95}}{{sfn|Greene|2007|p=65}} In January 1956, he publicly revealed the existence of [[Project SUNSHINE|Project Sunshine]], a series of secret research studies to ascertain the impact of radioactive fallout on the world's population that he had initiated in 1953 while serving on the GAC. The project caused controversy after it was revealed to the public and with the revelation it was found out that much of the research involved stealing the bodies of dead children without the parents' consent and doing radioactive experiments on them. Many of the 1,500 sample cadavers were babies and young children, and were taken from countries from Australia to Europe, often without their parents' consent or knowledge.<ref>{{cite web |first=Alice |last=Buck |title=The Atomic Energy Commission |date=July 1983 |publisher=[[United States Department of Energy]] |url=http://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/AEC%20History.pdf |access-date=July 29, 2015 }}</ref> By 1958, even Libby and Teller were supporting limits on atmospheric nuclear testing.{{sfn|Hewlett|Holl|1989|pp=542–543}}