Back home in Australia after his wartime adventures, MarkOliphant turned his mind to creating a scientific elite in a country more famous for its fine wool and champion cricketers.
It has to be said that MarkOliphant and his like-minded colleagues seemed to be content to work on the bomb, knowing that it would be capable of mass destruction.
For MarkOliphant, the most exciting time of his early career was when he won a scholarship to Cambridge to work with Ernest Rutherford, a New Zealand-born physicist, in whose Cavendish laboratory British scientists first split the atom.