When the United States entered World War II, Ghiorso decided to seek a commission in the U.S. Navy and contacted Glenn T. Seaborg, whom he knew from the radiation laboratory at Berkeley, for a reference. Instead, Seaborg invited Ghiorso to join him at the wartime metallurgical laboratory at the University of Chicago. Only after Seaborg assembled his team could he reveal what their project was: to perform nuclear and chemical research on plutonium, as part of the Manhattan Project. Seaborg had discovered the new element in 1940, but the discovery had been kept secret. Furthermore, although plutonium had been detected by highly sensitive tracers, it had not yet actually been seen, and nothing was yet known about its properties. Drawing on his electrical engineering background, Ghiorso helped develop the methods and intricate instrumentation needed to separate plutonium from uranium and fission products. In the process, he learned nuclear physics and nuclear chemistry.
In 1944, Seaborg decided to extend his work to a search for elements with a higher atomic number than plutonium. (Uranium, with an atomic number of 92, is the last naturally occurring element; elements from atomic number 93 and higher are synthetically produced and are called transuranium elements.) To do this, Seaborg chose two chemists, Ralph A.
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