The Nobel Tradition at Berkeley
Glenn T. Seaborg
Chemistry, 1951
By Russell Schoch
1984
Glenn Theodore Seaborg was born April 19, 1912, in the small mining town of
Ishpeming, Michigan. His parents, Swedish immigrants, moved the family to Los
Angeles when Glenn was 10. Seaborg attended high school in Watts with ideas of
studying literature in college. But he discovered, in his junior year, that in
order to qualify for the tuition-free University of California, he needed a
lab course. He took a chemistry class taught by an inspiring teacher who
kindled Seaborg's life-long dedication to the field.
Seaborg entered UCLA in the Depression year 1929 and worked
his way through school by serving as a stevedore, apricot picker, and
apprentice linotype machinist. He was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in his third
year. In a modern physics course, he received a second infusion of inspiration
when the professor spoke of the new cyclotron at Berkeley and of the results
being obtained there. The excitement of these ideas sparked the young
scientist to pursue graduate work at Berkeley.
"When I came to Berkeley," he later recalled,
"it was indescribably exciting. It had an air of magic about it, and
seeing top-notch chemists every day on campus ... made me feel as if I were
walking among giants. I was at the center of the universe, and big things were
happening here."
It wasn't long before Seaborg himself began to make things
happen. After earning his Ph.D. in 1937, he turned down overtures from
industry in favor of a moderately paying job as a research assistant to
Gilbert N. Lewis of Berkeley's chemistry department. Within two years, he was
making his mark in the bright new field of nuclear chemistry: working with
physicist Jack Livingood, he discovered the radioactive isotopes iodine-131
and iron-59. Many of the isotopes discovered in that period and since had
medical applications, but the identification of iodine-131 meant the most to
Seaborg because treatment with that isotope helped to extend his mother's life
far beyond what it would have been without it.
In 1942, Seaborg was called to the University of Chicago
Metallurgical Laboratory, where he and a large group of researchers developed
chemical methods necessary for producing the plutonium bomb that shortened the
war with Japan. Seaborg has said that the development of the bomb was
necessary under the circumstances, but he was among the first to argue against
its use on civilians.
After the war, he returned to Berkeley as a full professor and
was placed in charge of nuclear chemical research at the Radiation Laboratory.
He became associate director of the lab in 1945 and was named Chancellor of
the Berkeley campus in 1958. Three years later he was nominated by President
Kennedy to head the Atomic Energy Commission, a sensitive and powerful
position he filled with distinction for 10 years.
Seaborg and his colleagues have identified more than 100
isotopes, many of which are essential today in medicine and research. He is
co-discoverer of plutonium and eight other transuranium elements. For their
discoveries in the chemistry of transuranium elements, Seaborg and Edwin
McMillan shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1951.
Voted Alumnus of the Year at both his undergraduate (UCLA) and
graduate (UC Berkeley) schools, Seaborg continues to be active in scientific
research and education. He has been a leading spokesman for scientific
literacy and for improvement in secondary school science teaching, pointing
out that "the intelligent citizen can no more ignore science in the world
of today than the inhabitant of the medieval world could ignore Christianity
and the feudal system."
__________
Schoch, Russell. "Glenn T. Seaborg:
Chemistry, 1951." The Nobel Tradition in Berkeley:
University of California, Berkeley. UC Berkeley
Development Office: UC Press,
1984, p. 14.
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