This month, scientists at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the global governing body for nuclear energy, finished compiling a 12-point action plan for how to prevent future leaks from nuclear power plants in post-earthquake Japan.
For the IAEA, there is no question today that nuclear energy can be harnessed; it just has to be done with far more caution. But more than half a century ago, when phrases such as 'international atomic security' were being newly coined in the wake of the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, six international scientists - among them J.Robert Oppenheimer, who led the US team that created the atomic bomb - had the responsibility of determining whether nuclear energy could be used for peaceful purposes.
For three years, as part of the newly formed United Nations Atomic Energy Commission, they researched and debated: could the immense power of the atom be controlled by man?
Their verdict: yes, nuclear power was technologically manageable. But it was up to the world's governments to figure out the politics of using this energy for humanity.
The man chosen to present these findings to the United Nations Security Council, which eventually led to the creation of the IAEA, was a Chinese scientist - in fact, China's first nuclear physicist with a graduate degree, Dr Wei Hsioh Ren.
This year, his eldest daughter, Dr Betty Wei, a historian living in Hong Kong, completed a memoir on her father to be published in English and Chinese. Her research took 20 years; though her father was instrumental in the creation of a major international nuclear organisation and was a prominent Chinese scientist and educator of his age, his name is not known to many in this generation.
