Glenn T. Seaborg
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Glenn Theodore Seaborg (April 19, 1912 – February 25, 1999) was an American chemist, who was prominent in the discovery and isolation of many transuranic elements (including plutonium, during the Manhattan Project), for which he won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1951. He was later the chairman of the United States Atomic Energy Commission from 1961 until 1971.
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Early life
Of Swedish ancestry, Seaborg was born in Ishpeming, Michigan, grew up in South Gate, California (a suburb next to Watts in Los Angeles), took his A. B. degree at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1934, where he joined Alpha Chi Sigma, and his doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley in 1937. He lived most of his retired life in Lafayette, California.
He followed Frederick Soddy's work investigating isotopes, and discovered many new isotopes of common elements.
A graduate student
As a graduate student in the 1930s doing wet chemistry research for his advisor Gilbert Newton Lewis, Seaborg devoured the text Applied Radiochemistry by Otto Hahn, of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry in Berlin. For several years, Seaborg conducted important research in artificial radioactivity using the Lawrence cyclotron at Cal Berkeley. He was excited to learn from others that nuclear fission was possible -- but also chagrined, as his own research might have led him to the same discovery.
Seaborg also became expert in dealing with the great Berkeley physicist Robert Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer was so quick and knew so much, he had a habit of answering a junior man's question before it had even been stated. Often the question answered was more profound than the one asked, but of little practical help. Seaborg learned to state his questions to Oppenheimer very quickly and succinctly, and this habit of asking succinct questions stood Seaborg in good stead all his professional life.
Career
In 1939 he became an instructor in chemistry at UC Berkeley, was promoted to professor in 1945, and served as chancellor from 1958 to 1961. (In an amusing quirk, his last name is an anagram of the popular Berkeley cheer, "Go Bears!")
He is credited for discovering and isolating plutonium, americium, curium, berkelium, and californium at Berkeley and, with Edwin McMillan, shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1951 for the creation of the first transuranium elements.
In the same year in which he produced plutonium, 1941, he also discovered that the isotope U235 undergoes fission under appropriate conditions. He therefore was responsible for two different approaches to the development of nuclear weapons. At this time he was transferred to the Manhattan Project and was part of Enrico Fermi's team which achieved the first nuclear chain reaction in 1942.
On April 19, 1942, Seaborg reached Chicago, and joined up with the chemistry group at the Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago, where Fermi and his group had already learned how to convert U238 to plutonium using a chain-reacting pile. Seaborg's role was to figure out how to extract the tiny bit of plutonium from the mass of uranium.
Seaborg was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1948.
Seaborg served as chairman of the United States Atomic Energy Commission from 1961 to 1971. In 1976, when the Swedish king visited the United States, Seaborg played a major role in welcoming the king.
Marriage
Seaborg got married in 1942, to Helen Griggs, the secretary of Ernest Lawrence.
Under wartime pressure, Seaborg had moved to Chicago. Later, when Seaborg returned to collect Griggs for them to be together, they took the train from Los Angeles to Chicago. They got off in Caliente, Nevada for what they thought would be a quick wedding, but when they asked for City Hall, they found Caliente had none—they would have to go 25 miles north to Pioche, the county seat. Happily, one of Caliente's newest deputy sheriffs turned out to be a recent graduate of the Berkeley chemistry department. He was happy to do a favor for Glenn Seaborg. The deputy sheriff arranged for the wedding couple to ride up and back to Pioche in a mail truck. The witnesses at their wedding were a clerk and a janitor.
He had six children with Helen, of whom the first, Peter Glenn Seaborg, died in 1997. The others were Lynne Seaborg Cobb, David Seaborg, Steve Seaborg, Eric Seaborg, and Dianne Seaborg.
Quote
National Commission on Education report in 1983, Glenn T. Seaborg, Chairman.
Our Nation is at risk. Our once unchallenged preeminence in commerce, industry, science and technological innovation is being overtaken by competitors throughout the world.... the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and as a people. What was unimaginable a generation ago has begun to occur--others are matching and surpassing our educational attainments.If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. [1] (http://teidnt3.lbl.gov/seaborg/risk.htm) </blockquote>
Seaborgium
The element seaborgium was named for him in honor of his accomplishments. It was so named while he was still alive, which proved extremely controversial. For the remainder of his life, Seaborg was the only person in the world who could write his address in chemical elements: seaborgium, lawrencium, berkelium, californium, americium (Glenn Seaborg, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California, United States of America).
External links
- National Academy of Sciences biography (http://www.nap.edu/readingroom/books/biomems/gseaborg.html)
Books
- The Actinide Elements (with Joseph Katz) (McGraw-Hill, 1954)
- The Transuranium Elements (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1958)
- Nuclear Milestones (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1972)
- Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Test Ban (with Benjamin S. Loeb) (University of California Press, 1981)
- Stemming the Tide: Arms Control in the Johnson Years (with Benjamin S. Loeb) (Lexington, Massachusetts: Lexington Books, 1987)
- The Atomic Energy Commission under Nixon: Adjusting to Troubled Times (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993)
- The Plutonium Story: Journals of Professor Glenn T. Seaborg, 1939–1946 (Columbus, Ohio: Battelle Press, 1994)
- A Chemist in the White House: From the Manhattan Project to the End of the Cold War (Washington, D.C.: American Chemical Society, 1996)
- Adventures in the Atomic Age: From Watts to Washington (with son Eric Seaborg) (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001) ISBN 0-374-29991-9
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