Seaborg's Legendary
Life, In Print
Autobiography
divulges the high-profile tales
of a nuclear scientist
By J. R. Deaton
STAFF WRITER
The Berkeley Voice
October 12, 2001
When the late Glenn Seaborg took the night
train from Los Angeles to Oakland and then arrived in Berkeley in August 1934,
he ate breakfast at a diner near campus where they gave him his change in
silver dollars.
"Almost a sign of how magical this place
was," Seaborg wrote about Berkeley and his new silver dollars.
"Because for me Berkeley was a wonderland. And it was a wonderful time in
the field of nuclear science."
It was a wonderland of top-notch scientists,
instructors, atom-smashers, linear accelerators and almost unlimited
scientific possibilities. The legendary chemist G.N. Lewis assembled his staff
and did not suffer fools gladly at his afternoon seminars. The Radiation
Laboratory on campus was filled to overflowing with the apparatus of
discovery, and Ernest Lawrence had his 27-inch cyclotron.
Seaborg's autobiography, "Adventures in
the Atomic Age: From Watts to Washington" ($25 Farra, Straus and Giroux),
written with the help of his son, free-lance writer Eric Seaborg, was the
topic of discussion last week at the UC Berkeley Faculty Club.
Eric Seaborg was on campus to talk about the
book and his father's extraordinary life.
Glenn Seaborg and colleague Edwin McMillan
jointly won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1951 for their 1941 discovery of
the element plutonium, as well as other work.
Seaborg and others at Berkeley before and after
WWII used the university's cyclotrons, scientific daring and hard work to
enlarge the periodic table of the elements and expand our universe.
One of the elements discovered at Berkeley,
element 106, was named Seaborgium in his honor in 1997.
Seaborg collaborated with Jack Livingood and
others to discover and research radioactive iodine isotopes that are used in
the nuclear medicine departments in today's hospitals. He also served as
chancellor of the Berkeley campus from 1958 through 1960 and was chairman of
the Atomic Energy Commission for 10 years from 1961 to 1971.
During the Kennedy administration, he helped
draft the Limited Test Ban Treaty with the Soviet Union, which banned nuclear
weapons tests above ground. He was a tireless arms-control advocate, and an
adviser to nine U.S. presidents.
In the early 1980s, Seaborg was a guiding force
for the "A Nation at Risk," report on America's crisis in education.
As an advocate of civilian nuclear power, Seaborg's comments about its
efficacy and safety seem prescient in light of the current energy crisis in
California.
The book reminds throughout that Seaborg had a
front-row seat to events and people of the 20th [century] that others only
read about later. Of his time in Chicago during WWII working on the Manhattan
Project to develop a nuclear bomb, Seaborg writes "We were fighting for
survival, pure and simple, and element 94 (Plutonium) might be the one area
where we had an edge. We'd kept our discovery secret and the Germans did not
have a cyclotron powerful enough to make it."
During his tenure at the AEC he got to know
presidents, and writes about the annual dinner of black-eyed peas and southern
cooking at President Johnson's Texas ranch, helicopter flights over the Nevada
Test Site with President Kennedy and strained meetings with President Nixon.
During his time as chancellor of UC Berkeley,
Seaborg says "I met the leading lights in every field, as well as
visiting lecturers and dignitaries ranging from the English writer C.P. Snow
to Queen Frederika of the Netherlands.
In a lighter moment, Seaborg recalls Clark
Kerr's quip that the three main problems of running a campus are "athletics
for the alumni, parking for the faculty and sex for the students."
At one point in the book, Seaborg recalls
President Kennedy's White House dinner for Noble laureates, "I think that
this is the most extraordinary collection of talent that has ever been
gathered together at the White House ..." Kennedy told the assembled. We
all puffed up our chests proudly," Seaborg recalls. But then Kennedy
added: "With the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined
alone."
Eric Seaborg said his father was a lucky man
and a hard worker.
"He said he was always surrounded by people
who were smarter than he was," Eric said. "He found that he could
keep up with them by working hard."
"I have led a fortunate life," Glenn
Seaborg writes in his autobiography.
"I was given a chance through an excellent
system of public education and I did my best to make the most of my
opportunities."
__________
Deaton, J. R. "Seaborg's Legendary Life,
In Print." The Berkeley Voice. (12 October
2001), pp. 1 & 8.
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