Joan Hinton | Nuclear physicist, 88

Nuclear physicist Joan Hinton, 88, labeled "the Atom Spy Who Got Away" during the anticommunist hysteria of early 1950s America for moving to China in 1948, died June 8 in Beijing. A spokesman for the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Mechanization, which Ms. Hinton had worked with since 1979, made the announcement.

Recruited at 22 for the Manhattan Project to help develop the atomic bomb, she was so repulsed when the United States dropped it on Japan in World War II that she went to China, where she embraced Maoism and ran a dairy farm for much of the rest of her life.

Magazines from the era presented her as engaged in nuclear espionage, an allegation she always denied. In later interviews she said the science she practiced in China was aimed at finding the best way to breed horses and milk cows.

A talent for equations ran in the family. She was a great-granddaughter of George Boole, the 19th-century inventor of Boolean algebra. She was the daughter of the lawyer Sebastian Hinton, who patented the jungle gym, and Carmelita Hinton, founder of Vermont's progressive Putney School, which she attended.

After arriving in early 1944 at the research site at Los Alamos, N.M., Ms. Hinton assisted Enrico Fermi, chief scientist on the project.

She called the Mao Tse-tung years "terrific" even when interviewers noted that many had come to believe Mao's policies caused widespread deaths by famine and violence.

- Los Angeles Times