Glenn T. Seaborg

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Seaborg is an IBM SP RS/6000 supercomputer located at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory named after Glenn T. Seaborg. [1]

Image:Glenn T. Seaborg.jpg Glenn Theodore Seaborg (April 19, 1912 – February 25, 1999) was an American chemist 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 the chairman of the United States Atomic Energy Commission from 1961 to 1971.

He followed Frederick Soddy's work investigating isotopes and discovered many new isotopes of common elements.

In 1980, Seaborg literally transmuted several thousand atoms of lead into gold at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. His experimental technique, using nuclear physics, was able to remove protons and neutrons from the lead atoms. Seaborg's technique would have been far too expensive to enable routine manufacturing of gold from lead, but his work is the closest to the mythical Philosopher's Stone.

Contents 1 Early life 2 A graduate student 3 Career 4 Marriage 5 Quote 6 Seaborgium 7 External links 8 Books

Early life

Of Swedish ancestry, Seaborg was born in Ishpeming, Michigan, the son of Herman Theodore (Ted) and Selma Erickson Seaborg. He had one sister, Jeanette. When Glenn Seaborg was a boy, the family moved to a subdivision called Home Gardens in an area that would later become South Gate, California, a suburb of Los Angeles.

He kept a journal from the time he was in high school until he suffered a stroke in 1998. As a youth, Seaborg was both a devoted sports fan and an avid movie buff. He did not take an interest in science until inspired by a chemistry teacher at David Starr Jordan High School in Watts.

He graduated from Jordan in 1929 at the top of his class and received a bachelor's degree in chemistry at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1934. He took his doctorate in chemistry (even though his dissertation was in physics) at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1937. He was a member of the professional chemistry society, Alpha Chi Sigma,

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!")

In his early research, he utilized cyclotron bombardment to create more than 50 atomic isotopes including several still used in medical applications today. He is credited for discovering and isolating plutonium, americium, curium, berkelium, and californium at Berkeley (the last four of which he codiscovered with Albert Ghiorso) and, with Edwin McMillan, shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1951 for "their discoveries in the chemistry 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 contributed to the science enabling two different approaches to the development of nuclear weapons.

On April 19, 1942, Seaborg reached Chicago, and joined up with the chemistry group at the Metallurgical Laboratory of the Manhattan Project at the University of Chicago, where Enrico Fermi and his group would later convert U²³⁸ to plutonium in the world's first controlled nuclear chain reaction 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's theory of the actinide series resulted in a redrawing of the Periodic Table of the Elements into its current configuration with the actinide series appearing below the lanthanide series.

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. Seaborg returned to UC Berkley here he was awarded the position of University Professor. He also served as Chairman of the Lawrence Hall of Science. In 1976, when the Swedish king visited the United States, Seaborg played a major role in welcoming the king.

In 1980, he transmuted several thousand atoms of lead into gold at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. His experimental technique, using nuclear physics, was able to remove protons and neutrons from the lead atoms. Seaborg's technique would have been far too expensive to enable routine manufacturing of gold from lead, but his work is the closest to the mythical Philosopher's Stone.

Seaborg lived most of his retired life in Lafayette, California, where he devoted himself to editing and publishing the journals that documented both his early life and later career.

On August 24, 1998, while in Boston to attend a meeting by the American Chemical Society, Seaborg suffered a stroke, which led to his death six months later.

Marriage

In 1942, Seaborg married Helen Griggs, the secretary of Ernest Lawrence.

Under wartime pressure, Seaborg had moved to Chicago, Illinois while engaged to Miss Griggs. Seaborg returned to collect Miss Griggs; their friends expected them to take the train directly from Los Angeles to Chicago, and to get married in Chicago. But, eager to be married, Seaborg and Griggs impulsively got off the train in the town of Caliente, Nevada for what they thought would be a quick wedding.

When they asked for City Hall, they found Caliente had none—they would have to travel 25 miles north to Pioche, the county seat. With no car, this was no easy feat but, happily, one of Caliente's newest deputy sheriffs turned out to be a recent graduate of the Cal Berkeley chemistry department who was only too 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 the Seaborg wedding were a clerk and a janitor.

Glenn Seaborg and Helen Griggs Seaborg had six children, 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. [2] </blockquote>

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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).

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External links

• National Academy of Sciences biography
• Annotated bibliography for Glenn Seaborg from the Alsos Digital Library

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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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