An ISU professor is trying to bring awareness to a little-known episode in Iowa State’s history by challenging his students to create a fake memorial to honor the late Frank Spedding, professor of chemistry, one of the fathers of the atomic bomb and founder of the Ames Laboratory, and his research team.

John Cunnally, associate professor of art and design, assigned the task of creating the memorial to his Design Studies class and said he hoped the project would raise awareness of Iowa State’s role in the Manhattan Project.

“We are coming to Iowa State’s sesquicentennial, which is supposed to celebrate great achievements that this institution has done in its past 150 years,” Cunnally said. “As far as I can see, there’s no acknowledgment or ceremonies or any kind of public statement about this particular incident, so I thought that my students and I might correct this neglect and oversight and make some people aware of this interesting incident in Iowa State’s history.”

Cunnally said there is, currently, a marker for the “Little Ankeny” house, a small, wooden shack on campus where more than 1,000 tons of uranium were made to during World War II, but he wishes it was more visible to the ISU community.

“There is a marker for the spot where this important scientific achievement took place, but it’s very inconspicuous – just a small granite boulder with a bronze plaque. I think 99.9 percent of the people on campus have never even seen it or have any clue what it marks,” Cunnally said.

Cunnally recognizes some people may find it immoral to build a memorial for a project that worked on developing the atomic bomb, but he doesn’t think the university’s contribution to this technology should be repressed. Cunnally assigned this project to his students in order to “raise people’s awareness about this particular achievement of ISU technology,” and feels the university should memorialize it in the future.

“It’s an imaginary memorial. It’s basically an exercise in how to design a memorial. We have no great hope that anyone is actually going to want to fund it or will take it seriously as an actual design proposal,” Cunnally said.

The memorial will honor Frank Spedding and Harley Wilhelm, both of whom developed a process for producing large quantities of purified uranium metal for the Manhattan Project during World War II. The uranium was used in the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

“There are many people who think that the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was wrong and immoral. I’m not saying whether this incident was moral or immoral – what I’m saying is it is important, and even if we think it’s immoral it’s something we should think about and not try to repress,” Cunnally said. “I think it’s wrong to glorify the science of military destruction, but I also think it’s wrong to ignore it as well.”

Cunnally said students studied other memorials, such as the new memorial for the Sept. 11, 2001, victims at the World Trade Center, as they worked on their own proposals.

Cunnally said he wanted students to think about the moral and ethical implications of the activity.

“No doubt, I have many students who think the development of the atomic bomb itself was not ethically right, but they understand that a memorial is important to remember – if not Dr. Spedding and his group, certainly the memorial – should remind us of the hundreds of thousands of people who perished at Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” Cunnally said. “Many of the proposals submitted acknowledged the destruction of life and they were almost memorials to the victims of the atomic bomb as much as to the scientists that developed it.”

Kevin Marquardt, freshman in pre-architecture, said he worked to design a project that was inventive and fit in with other landscapes throughout Iowa State’s campus.

Brandi Denne, freshman in art and design, said even though the memorial was controversial, she wanted to commemorate the Manhattan Project and all the uranium made at Iowa State.

“Even though the whole thing was for an atomic bomb, all the people that were involved and all the people that gave their dedication to that specific project deserve to be remembered for that certain product because it ended a war eventually,” she said.