caption death_date death_place birth_name birth_place imagesize birth_date known_for image article_title name occupation death_cause
slotin 's los alamos badge photo 30 may 1946 los alamos , new mexico louis alexander slotin winnipeg , manitoba , canada 282px 1 december 1910 his dramatic death , the dollar unit of reactivity slotin los alamos.jpg louis slotin
 louis alexander slotin physicist and chemist acute radiation syndrome
louis slotin

louis alexander slotin -lrb- 1 december 1910 -- 30 may 1946 -rrb- was a canadian physicist and chemist who worked on the manhattan project .
on 21 may 1946 , slotin accidentally began a fission reaction , which released a burst of hard radiation .
he received a lethal dose of radiation and died of acute radiation syndrome nine days later .
during world war ii , slotin conducted research at los alamos national laboratory .
he performed experiments with uranium and plutonium cores to determine their critical mass values .
slotin was the second person to die from a criticality accident , following the death of harry daghlian , who had been exposed to radiation by the same core that killed slotin .
slotin was publicly hailed as a hero by the united states government for reacting quickly and preventing his accident from killing any colleagues .
he was later criticized for failing to follow protocol during the experiment .
the accident and its aftermath have been dramatized in several fictional and non-fiction accounts .
