Glenn Seaborg | Biography

Seaborg was born in Ishpeming, Michigan, on April 19, 1912. At the age of 10, he moved with his family to Los Angeles, where he attended public schools. He entered the University of California at Los Angeles in 1930 and earned his bachelor's degree four years later. In 1937, he was awarded his Ph.D. in chemistry from the Berkeley campus of the university. He was appointed to the faculty at Berkeley the same year and eventually served as assistant, associate, and full professor (1937-1958), chancellor (1958-1961) and university professor (1971-date). Between 1961 and 1971, he served as chairman of the United States Atomic Energy Commission under Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon.

Seaborg became interested in the study of transuranium elements while he was still a doctoral student. It is not surprising, therefore, that he soon became involved in research on the first of those elements, neptunium. In fact, when the co-discoverer of neptunium, Edwin McMillan, left Berkeley in 1940 to work on radar, he asked Seaborg to continue his studies on the transuranium elements.

McMillan felt sure that the neptunium samples on which he was working contained at least one more new element. A month after McMillan's departure from Berkeley, Seaborg, A. C. Wahl, and J. W. Kennedy reported the isolation of that second element, which they named plutonium.

The discovery of plutonium came at an opportune time. Research on the atomic bomb had begun only recently, and scientists were exploring methods for using the fission reaction in a nuclear weapon. Seaborg and his colleagues found that one isotope of plutonium, plutonium-239, will undergo fission. That discovery was an important one since, until that time, only one isotope--uranium-235--was known to fission. Of the first two nuclear bombs constructed five years later, one was a plutonium weapon.

Seaborg's early work on plutonium was submitted to scientific journals in 1940 and 1941, but, because of wartime conditions, it was not published until much later. Some sensitive information regarding his work did not, in fact, appear in print for nearly a decade.

By 1944, it occurred to Seaborg that neptunium and plutonium might well be the first two members of a chemical family similar to the lanthanides. By analogy with that family, the anticipated new group was given the name actinides. Over the period 1944-1958, Seaborg was involved at various levels in the discovery of at least six more transuranium elements, americium (1944), curium (1944), berkelium (1949), californium, (1950), mendelevium (1955), and nobelium (1958). In recognition of his work on the transuranium elements, Seaborg shared the Nobel Prize for chemistry with McMillan in 1951.

During the war, Seaborg was assigned to the Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago. There he directed research on the chemical separation of uranium isotopes. In another line of wartime research, Seaborg, J. W. Gofman, and R. W. Stoughton discovered an important principle that may someday be of use in the construction of nuclear power plants. When Thorium 232 is bombarded with neutrons, it eventually decays to form uranium-233. Uranium-233, like its cousin uranium-235, is fissionable. However, its natural occurrence is so low as to make it impractical as a fuel. The thorium-232 reaction, however, presents an alternative to natural sources. And, given the much greater abundance of thorium than uranium in the Earth's crust, that alternative may someday become a practical reality in the construction of commercial nuclear reactors.