Glenn Seaborg

Glenn Seaborg (1912-1999), American chemist and Nobel laureate, known for his discovery of new chemical elements. Glenn Theodore Seaborg was born in Ishpeming, Michigan, and moved with his family to California at the age of ten. After graduation from the University of California at Los Angeles, he transferred to Berkeley, where he received a Ph.D. in 1937. He taught chemistry at the University of California at Berkeley after 1939, becoming an assistant professor in 1941 and a full professor in 1945. In 1954 Seaborg was named associate director of the university’s radiation laboratory, then headed by Ernest O. Lawrence, and in 1958 he was made chancellor of the university. He served as chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission from 1961 to 1971, when he returned to the faculty at Berkeley. From 1942 to 1946, during World War II, he received a leave of absence from the University of California to conduct research at the Metallurgical Laboratory of the University of Chicago in connection with the Manhattan Project, the undertaking to build a nuclear weapon.

Seaborg is known particularly for his discovery and characterization of many radioactive isotopes (see Isotope) and for his share in the discovery of such elements as plutonium, americium, curium, berkelium, californium, einsteinium, fermium, mendelevium, and nobelium. Seaborg shared the 1951 Nobel Prize in chemistry with American physicist Edwin McMillan for their discovery of plutonium and other transuranium elements. His writings include Nuclear Properties of the Heavy Elements (1964) and Nuclear Milestones (1972). In 1997 the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry announced that the chemical element with atomic number 106 would be given the name seaborgium (Sg) in his honor.