Seaborg, Glenn Theodore

Elder statesman, chemist, and codiscoverer of more elements than any other scientist, Glenn Theodore Seaborg started life in Ishpeming, Michigan, in 

American chemist Glenn Thecxdore Seaborg, corecipient with Edwin Mattison McMillan of the 1951 Nobel Prize in chemistry, for their discoveries in the chemistry of the transuranium elements. Here, Seaborg holds a container of samples of the radioactive elements 94 through 102. 

In an autobiographical account Seaborg divided his hfe into eight periods—a notion that perhaps sprang from his consideration of the eight periods of the present Periodic Table. In that account the first two periods correspond to his childhood and youth and conclude with his graduation from UCLA in 1934. 

Seaborg went on to the University of California at Berkeley for graduate work, obtaining his Ph.D. in 1937. It was around this time that his interest in transuranium elements (elements of higher atomic number than uranium) took shape. His research interest was in nuclear physics but, as he once said, one could get a chemistry Ph.D. in those days doing nuclear physics.  

From 1942 to 1946, Seaborg, on leave from Berkeley, was employed by the Metallurgical Laboratory, at the University of Chicago. It was during this period that he devised chemical processes for the separation and purification of plutonium. Plutonium, critical to the success of the Manhattan Project, was given the code name copper. When actual copper was required in the project, the resulting confusion was eliminated by the use 

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Nuclear chemistry—Textbooks. I. Morrissey, David J. II. Seaborg, Glenn Theodore, 1912- III. Title. 

Ftoffman, Darleane C. Ghiorso, Albert and Seaborg, Glenn Theodore (2000). The Transuranium People The Inside Story. London Imperial College Press. 

For nearly three centuries, a new element has been discovered every two-and-one-half years, on average. Undoubtedly, more will be found. Although their names and their discoveries will fikely involve controversies, their place at the table is already set. see also Alchemy Avogadro, Amedeo Bec-QUEREL, Antoine-Henri Bohr, Niels Cannizzaro, Stanislao Dalton, John Lavoisier, TVntoine Mendeleev, Dimitri Meyer, Lothar Pauli, Wolfgang Ramsay, William Rontgen, Wilhelm Rutherford, Ernest Seaborg, Glenn Theodore Thomson, Joseph John. 

Seaborg, Glenn Theodore. The Actinide Elements. New York McGraw-Hill, 1954. This is Seaborg s popularized presentation on the actinide series that he was the first to formally recognize. 

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