Seaborg, Glen

Seaborg, Glen T. (1912-1999). An American chemist who won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1951 along with McMillan. He did research in nuclear chemistry, physics, and artificial radioactivity. He discovered the elements plutonium, americum, berkelium, californium, einsteinium, fermium, and medelevium with his colleague. He codiscovered numerous isotopes and radioisotopes. His Ph.D. is from the University of California at Berkeley. 

The element was synthesized in 1950 by S. G. Thompson, A. Ghiorso, K. Street, and Glen T. Seaborg, It was named after the state of California. Californium does not occur in nature. It can be synthesized only in microgram amounts in a nuclear reactor. The principal compounds of the element that have been synthesized are the cahfomium trifluoride, CfFs californium trichloride, CfCls californium oxide, Cf203 californium oxychloride Cf(OCl)3 and cahfomium hydroxide Cf(OH)3. The element has not yet been obtained in metalhc state. 

Glen Seaborg wrote in his diary of Wednesday, February 28, 1940. At the evening Nuclear Seminar, I learned that Sam Ruben and Martin Kamen... 

The study of electron transfer reactions began in earnest when radioactive isotopes, produced for nuclear research and the atom bomb program during World War II, became accessible. Glen Seaborg, in a 1940 review of artificial radioactivity, noted the first attempt to measure the self-exchange reaction between aqueous iron(III) and iron(II), equation (1.9).1"... 

Element 106, named seaborgium to honor Glen Seaborg, was created in 1974 by the Flerov Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions in Dubna, in the Soviet Union, and at the Lawrence Berkeley and Livermore Laboratories, in the United States. Seaborgium isotopes are created using a cyclotron and can exist from about 0.9 seconds up to about 20 seconds before they decay into other elements. This is enough time to determine the properties of seaborgium and to confirm that it qualifies as an element. 

From left J. Robert Oppenheimer, Professor. H. D. Smythe, General Nichols, and Glen Seaborg in 1946 looking at a photograph of the atomic blast at Hiroshima. The atomic bomb was developed in the Manhattan Project. 

There finally seems to be some agreement on the name for element 106 most are willing to call it seaborgium, after American fusion-research pioneer Glen Seaborg. Nielsbohrium,... 

Glen Seaborg. Photo from Emilio Segre Collection, by permission. 

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