‘A serious accusation’: Did Oppenheimer’s apple-poisoning incident really happen? It’s complicated

Plot point in Christopher Nolan film has been criticised by Robert J Oppenheimer’s real-life grandson

Much of Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan’s three-hour biopic about the physicist J Robert Oppenheimer, is rooted in verifiable fact.

The film tracks the life of Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), from his early political activity through to the invention of the atomic bomb, and then the attacks on his reputation after the Second World War.

While much of the film draws from historical record, Oppenheimer begins, controversially, with a sequence in which Oppenheimer injects cyanide into the apple of Patrick Blackett, a Cambridge University tutor he dislikes.

In the film, Oppenheimer eventually changes his mind and is able to prevent the apple from being eaten. However, it is unclear whether this incident occurred in real-life at all.

Oppenheimer’s real-life grandson, Charles Oppenheimer, complained about the scene’s inclusion to Time magazine, describing it as “historical revision”.

The incident was described in the book that inspired Nolan’s film – American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J Sherwin.

American Prometheus claimed that Oppenheimer had “poisoned an apple with chemicals from the laboratory and left it on Blackett’s desk” after becoming “consumed by his feelings of inadequacy and intense jealousy”.

According to the book, Oppenheimer was allowed to stay on at Cambridge thanks to the intervention of his influential parents, though had to undergo psychiatric treatment. American Prometheus also claims that Oppenheimer himself would describe the incident later in life, though it is unclear whether aspects of the poisoning may have been exaggerated.

The nature of the poison used is also contested, with the book suggesting that a non-lethal chemical may have been used instead of cyanide.

Cillian Murphy in ‘Oppenheimer' (Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal)

Ray Monk’s biography of Oppenheimer, A Life Inside the Center, also includes a description of the alleged attempted poisoning. “In what looks like an attempt to murder his tutor, or at the very least to make him seriously ill, Oppenheimer left on Blackett’s desk an apple poisoned with toxic chemicals,” Monk wrote.

However, the biography also notes that Oppenheimer relayed the story “many times in many different versions” to friends over the course of his life, casting doubt over the specifics of the case.

Speaking to Time, Charles Oppenheimer did not point the finger towards Nolan, but instead the source material.

“The part I like the least is this poison apple reference, which was a problem in American Prometheus,” he said. “If you read American Prometheus carefully enough, the authors say, ‘We don’t really know if it happened.’

“There’s no record of him trying to kill somebody. That’s a really serious accusation and it’s historical revision. There’s not a single enemy or friend of Robert Oppenheimer who heard that during his life and considered it to be true.”

Oppenheimer is in cinemas now.