Glenn Theodore Seaborg (1912–99) was an American atomic scientist. This winner of the 1951 Nobel Prize in Chemistry is celebrated for isolating and identifying transuranium elements (those heavier than uranium.)
Born in Ishpeming, Michigan, Seaborg was educated at the University of California at Los Angeles and at Berkeley, where he became an instructor in chemistry in 1939, a professor in 1945, and chancellor 1958–61.
Following the work of the English radiochemist Frederick Soddy, Seaborg worked on isotopes, discovering many previously unknown isotopes among the common elements. His principal work was with Enrico Fermi’s team, which achieved the first chain reaction in uranium-235 in 1942. It was his laboratory, which, in 1945, produced enough plutonium for the first atomic bomb.
Seaborg and his team continued research on further transuranic elements and, in 1944, synthesized americium and curium. In 1950, by bombarding these with alpha rays, they produced berkelium and californium. They later produced einsteinium, fermium, mendelevium, and unnilhexium. His work in this area also led to his development of the actinide concept and the arrangement of the actinide series in the periodic table of the elements.
In 1951, Seaborg shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with American physicist Edwin Mcmillan. He was chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission 1961–71, then a professor of chemistry at Berkeley 1971–99. Seaborgium was named in his honor—he was the only person for whom a chemical element was named during his lifetime.
Seaborg’s many publications include The Transuranium Elements (1958,) Man-made Transuranium Elements (1963,) Nuclear Milestones: A Collection of Speeches by Glenn T. Seaborg (1972,) and A Chemist in the White House: From the Manhattan Project to the End of the Cold War (1998.) His Stemming the Tide (1987) focused on arms control during the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Glenn T. Seaborg
There is a beauty in discovery. There is mathematics in music, a kinship of science and poetry in the description of nature, and exquisite form in a molecule. Attempts to place different disciplines in different camps are revealed as artificial in the face of the unity of knowledge. All literate men are sustained by the philosopher, the historian, the political analyst, the economist, the scientist, the poet, the artisan and the musician.
—Glenn T. Seaborg
I believe that one of the characteristics of the human race – possibly the one that is primarily responsible for its course of evolution – is that it has grown by creatively responding to failure.
—Glenn T. Seaborg
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