Born in Devils Lake, North Dakota, his family moved to Winnipeg in 1920.
In 1943, he was recruited by Atomic Energy of Canada Limited to work at the Manhattan Project's Montreal Laboratory, moving to the Chalk River Laboratories, on the banks of the Ottawa River, in Ontario, at the end of the war.
[1] From 1963 to 1965 he was director of research at the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna.
He married Betty Workman and has two children: Carla Krasnick, and Mark Yaffe.
[2] The McGill University Archives holds a collection of his personal papers and photographs.