Glenn T. Seaborg

Seaborg grew up speaking Swedish at home in Ishpeming, Michigan, and later in the working-class Los Angeles suburb of Home Gardens, where his mother pushed him toward bookkeeping because she thought his reading habits were impractical. He changed the spelling of his own first name from Glen to Glenn at eleven and graduated top of his class at David Starr Jordan High School in Watts in 1929, into the worst possible year to be entering the job market. He worked as a stevedore and a laboratory assistant to pay his way through UCLA, took a chemistry degree in 1933, then a doctorate at Berkeley in 1937 with a dissertation on how fast neutrons interact with lead, a subject with no obvious future in it yet.

On the night of February 23, 1941, working with Edwin McMillan, Arthur Wahl and Joseph Kennedy, Seaborg's team identified a new element, number 94 on the periodic table, and within weeks had shown it was fissile, meaning a bomb could be built from it. He spent the war years in Chicago running the chemistry that separated plutonium from tons of irradiated uranium, then went on to co-discover nine more transuranium elements: americium, curium, berkelium, californium, einsteinium, fermium, mendelevium, nobelium, and element 106, later named seaborgium in his honor while he was still alive to read it. He shared the 1951 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with McMillan, chaired the Atomic Energy Commission under three presidents, and helped negotiate the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty.

He built the raw material for the deadliest weapon ever used, then spent much of the rest of his career arguing for arms control and for civilian nuclear power, a contradiction he addressed directly rather than around. He signed the Franck Report in June 1945, which urged a demonstration of the bomb rather than a strike on a city, and lost that argument along with the other scientists who made it. He kept a daily journal from 1927 until a stroke silenced him in August 1998, entry after entry running to what Guinness once certified as the longest in Who's Who in America. As chancellor of Berkeley, he also presided over the 1958 decision to lift the campus ban on Communist speakers, a small institutional act that helped open the door for the Free Speech Movement six years later.

He suffered his stroke on a trip to Boston in August 1998 and died at home in Lafayette, California, on February 25, 1999, at 86. Element 106 keeps his name on the periodic table permanently, the only element ever named for someone who lived to see it, and Seaborg said it meant more to him than the Nobel Prize, because chemistry students for the rest of history would have to ask why. He was posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2005, and the hiking trail he blazed near his own house in Lafayette is now part of a national trail network, walked by people who mostly have no idea what he discovered.

Glenn T. Seaborg's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Plutonium (element 94) discovery
  Identified with Edwin McMillan, Arthur Wahl and Joseph Kennedy, then shown fissile within weeks 1941
• Wartime plutonium extraction process invention
  Scaled up at Hanford to supply the first atomic bombs 1942
• Element 106 discovery
  Named seaborgium in 1997, the first element named for a living person 1974
• Limited Test Ban Treaty law
  Negotiated as chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission 1963
• A Nation at Risk other
  Contributed to the report as a member of Reagan's education commission 1983

• 1929 aged ~17 Graduates top of his class at David Starr Jordan High School
• 1933 aged ~21 Earns a bachelor's degree in chemistry at UCLA
• 1937 aged ~25 Takes a doctorate in chemistry at Berkeley
• February 23, 1941 aged 28 Co-discovers plutonium
• 1942 aged ~30 Marries Helen Griggs after stopping a train in rural Nevada
• June 1945 aged 33 Signs the Franck Report urging a demonstration rather than a bombing
• 1951 aged ~39 Shares the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Edwin McMillan
• 1961 aged ~49 Kennedy appoints him chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission
• February 25, 1999 aged 86 Dies at home in Lafayette, California

• J. Robert Oppenheimer 1904–1967
  Theoretical physicist who led the Manhattan Project and became known as the father of the atomic bomb. Manhattan Project colleague
• Edward Teller 1908–2003
  Physicist and advocate of the hydrogen bomb whose work and policy influence shaped Cold War science and defense. disagreed with over weapons policy
• John F. Kennedy 1917–1963
  35th President whose brief tenure included the Cuban Missile Crisis and the launch of the Apollo program. appointed him to chair the AEC
• Ernest Lawrence 1901–1958
  Invented the cyclotron and built the Berkeley model of large-scale team physics. Berkeley mentor
• Ronald Reagan 1911–2004
  40th president whose conservative domestic program and assertive Cold War strategy reshaped American politics. appointed him to the education commission