Born: 23 July 1922, United States
Died: 6 March 2018
Country most active: United States
Also known as: NA
The following is republished from the National Park Service. This piece falls under under public domain, as copyright does not apply to “any work of the U.S. Government” where “a work prepared by an officer or employee of the U.S. Government as part of that person’s official duties” (See, 17 U.S.C. §§ 101, 105).
Born in Albuquerque in 1922 to a German-American mother and a father who was a member of the Santa Clara Pueblo, Floy Agnes Lee graduated from the University of New Mexico with a biology degree in 1945. During her college years, Lee worked to pay for flying lessons, with the dream of one day joining the Women’s Air Force.
Lee’s biology research at the university led her to be recruited to work in the hematology lab for the Manhattan Project in 1945. One of the few Pueblo people to work in the Los Alamos laboratory, Lee was responsible for collecting and examining blood samples from project scientists like Louis Slotin, who was exposed to a fatal dose of radiation in 1946. Lee was required to monitor the blood of specific scientists, such as Enrico Fermi, with whom she became good friends.
After the war, Lee enrolled in the University of Chicago’s PhD program in biology; she received her doctorate 14 years later and worked at several labs before returning to the Los Alamos National Laboratory, where she retired. Lee died in 2018 at the age of 95.
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