Glenn Theodore Seaborg

American physicist

• Born: April 19, 1912
• Birthplace: Ishpeming, Michigan
• Died: February 25, 1999
• Place of death: Lafayette, California

Codiscoverer of ten transuranium elements and numerous radioisotopes with wide applications in research, medicine, and industry, Seaborg served under five U.S. presidents in establishing policy regarding the role of science and uses of atomic energy.

Early Life

Glenn Theodore Seaborg was born in Ishpeming, Michigan, a small iron-mining town on the Upper Peninsula. His mother, Selma O. Erickson, came through Ellis Island from Sweden in 1904 to join family members in a predominantly Swedish immigrant section of Ishpeming. There she met and married his father, Herman Theodore Seaborg, whose father and mother had moved from Sweden to Michigan in 1867 and 1869. Young Glenn’s first language was Swedish, and his early years were strongly influenced by Swedish cultural traditions.

When he was ten years old and starting the fifth grade, his parents decided to leave Michigan and move to Southern California to take advantage of a better climate and broader opportunities for their children. They settled in Home Gardens (now South Gate), which, as a brand-new subdivision, did not have any schools during their first year there. Seaborg and his younger sister, Jeanette, attended part of a year of grammar school and, later, four years of high school in the Watts district of Los Angeles. His schoolmates in Watts came from many different ethnic backgrounds: European, Chinese, Mexican, Japanese, black, Filipino. This early exposure to different cultures may have contributed to Seaborg’s later facility in getting along well and communicating effectively with a wide range of people.

Seaborg was urged by his parents to undertake a commercial course in high school, which they believed was the most secure route to a respectable, white-collar job, their fondest dream for the son of a long line of machinists. Seaborg, however, elected to take college preparatory courses and, in his final two years of high school, thanks to the inspiration of a fine science teacher, discovered the excitement of science, in which he would make his career.

When Seaborg started college in 1929 at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), there were only four permanent buildings and much mud at the newly established Westwood campus. There were, however, gifted teachers who encouraged his scientific curiosity and told him about the thrilling new discoveries being made in the field of nuclear science in Europe and at the Berkeley campus. He became determined to work in this new frontier.

After earning his undergraduate degree in chemistry from UCLA in 1934, the tall (six-foot three-inch), lanky young man moved north to Berkeley to undertake graduate work. Berkeley was a mecca for scientists; its chemistry and physics faculties were among the finest in the world, with such notable pioneers as the chemistGilbert N. Lewis and the physicistErnest Orlando Lawrence. Intense and hardworking, Seaborg could hardly believe his good fortune. At weekly seminars, he was enthralled by reports of the results being obtained by Lawrence at the twenty-seven-inch cyclotron and delighted to have the chance of working the graveyard shift to complete experiments for his thesis on the inelastic scattering of neutrons, for which he earned his Ph.D. in chemistry from University of California, Berkeley, in 1937. During the years immediately following, he developed two associations that would have great influence on his life: He served as personal research assistant to Lewis, and he met and courted Lawrence’s secretary, an attractive woman named Helen Griggs.

Seaborg’s career as a published nuclear scientist actually began in 1936 when physicist Jack Livingood asked him to perform the chemical separations on a target just bombarded at the cyclotron to identify the radioisotopes it had produced. During the ensuing five years of collaboration with Livingood, they discovered or identified a number of radioisotopes (iodine-131, iron-59, cobalt-60) that are still widely used in medicine for diagnosis and therapy. In 1938, with Emilio Segre, Seaborg discovered technetium-99m, which is the most widely used diagnostic radioisotope in nuclear medicine.

Seaborg has often described the exhilaration he and his colleagues felt when they learned in 1939 about the experiments Otto Hahn, Fritz Strassman, and Lise Meitner were performing in Germany, which gave the first evidence of a nuclear fission reaction. The next year, Edwin Mattison McMillan and Philip Abelson discovered the first transuranium element, element 93, which they named neptunium. McMillan then began the search for element 94, but was called away in 1940 to work on important war research on the East Coast. As a young assistant professor, Seaborg took over this work and enlisted the help of his graduate student Arthur C. Wahl and a fellow chemistry instructor, Joseph W. Kennedy. In February, 1941, through bombarding uranium with deuterons in the sixty-inch cyclotron, they discovered element 94, plutonium, in the form of plutonium-238. With the added collaboration of Segre, they discovered plutonium-239, which proved to be a fissionable isotope that might serve as the explosive ingredient in a nuclear weapon and as a nuclear fuel. In 1942, John W. Gofman, Raymond W. Stoughton, and Seaborg created and identified a second major source of nuclear energy, the isotope uranium-233, which is the key to the use of the abundant element thorium as a nuclear fuel.

On his thirtieth birthday, April 19, 1942, Seaborg arrived at the University of Chicago Metallurgical Laboratory to join the Manhattan Project as leader of the group working on the chemical extraction of plutonium. This began his long career as a scientific leader, employing his gift for communication and talent for administration as well as his instinct for science.

Life’s Work

Seaborg often described the years in Chicago working on the Manhattan Project as the most exciting and most challenging of his life. The team of dedicated scientists worked around the clock in what they believed was a race against the Nazis to produce the first atomic bomb and, later, an attempt to save thousands of lives in the Pacific theater. In June, 1945, when their part of the project was successfully completed, Seaborg joined six colleagues in signing the Franck report, which recommended that the bomb be demonstrated, rather than used against a civilian Japanese population. Nevertheless, President Harry S. Truman made the decision to go ahead and drop the bomb. The second atomic bomb, dropped on Nagasaki, Japan , on August 9, 1945, was fueled with plutonium. The atomic age had begun, and Seaborg shared the conviction of others that control of nuclear weapons was now the most critical question of our times. He joined in the debate about implications for the future of our planet and served on the first General Advisory Committee to the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), participating in difficult decisions about the development of more advanced nuclear weapons (for example, the hydrogen bomb) and in explorations of the peaceful uses of atomic energy.

During the years in Chicago, Seaborg and his coworkers also discovered two new transuranium elements, americium (element 95) and curium (element 96). He held patents on these elements, making him the only person ever to hold a patent on a chemical element. In 1944, he formulated the actinide concept of heavy element electronic structure, which accurately predicted that the heaviest naturally occurring elements together with synthetic transuranium elements would form a transition series of actinide elements in a manner analogous to the rare earth series of lanthanide elements. This concept, the most significant change in the periodic table since Dmitri Mendeleev’s nineteenth century design, shows how the transuranium elements fit into the periodic table and thus demonstrates their relationships to other elements.

When Seaborg returned to Berkeley in 1946 with his wife, Helen, whom he had married on a brief return visit to Berkeley in June, 1942, he dedicated himself to two efforts: establishing the world’s premier research group working on transuranium elements and starting a family. Now a full professor of chemistry at the University of California and soon to become associate director of the Radiation Laboratory, he brought back from Chicago with him a number of the brightest young scientists in the nation, and together, this team discovered six more transuranium elements, elements 97 through 102. He and Helen were also successful in attaining their goal of a large family they had six children. A highlight of the first years back in Berkeley was the receipt of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with McMillan in 1951 for their work on the chemistry of the transuranium elements. The visit to Stockholm to receive the prize from the king of Sweden was a dream come true for this son of a Swedish immigrant.

In 1958, Seaborg’s talents as an administrator were presented with a new challenge. He became the second chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, and served during a period (1958-1961) of tremendous growth and development at the university. The Master Plan for Higher Education in California (1959) set an ambitious agenda for the state university and college systems. A long-range physical plan was developed for the Berkeley campus, which was undergoing an unprecedented period of building; the College of Environmental Design and the Space Sciences Laboratory were both established at that time. Students were beginning to shake off postwar apathy and became actively involved with such issues as free speech, the draft, and racial discrimination in housing.

Caricatures of Seaborg at this time began to make use of his dramatic bushy eyebrows, yet these depictions were generally in good humor. Seaborg somehow had a talent for keeping people on opposite sides of fences talking to one another and seeking compromise solutions to problems. Some of these negotiating techniques were no doubt the result of experience leading groups of scientists with diverse interests and opinions; his interpersonal skills had been further honed by serving as faculty athletic representative for the Berkeley campus during an era of corruption and controversy in the Pacific Coast Intercollegiate Athletic Conference, which ended with the establishment in 1959 of a new conference: the Athletic Association of Western Universities (now known as the Pac Ten), of which Seaborg was chief architect.

The Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957 provoked a wave of concern in the United States about the need for improved science education for schoolchildren. Chancellor Seaborg, who had always had a particular interest in this area, served as a leader in the movement to improve science education. He served as chair of the Steering Committee for CHEM Study (an innovative new chemistry curriculum still widely used throughout the world), as chair of the Panel on Basic Research and Graduate Education of President Eisenhower’s Science Advisory Committee, as a member of a national committee on the application of the National Defense Education Act of 1958, as a member of the board of directors of the National Educational Television and Radio Center, and as initiator and chair of a committee to establish a memorial for Lawrence (who died in August, 1958) on the Berkeley campus.

In 1961, Seaborg was appointed chair of the AEC, a position in which he served for ten years. The AEC engaged in a wide range of activities: the development and testing of nuclear weapons; the sponsorship of nuclear energy as a source of electricity; the production of nuclear material; the conduct of reactor research and development for the armed services (including the nuclear Navy); the sponsorship of research in high-energy and low-energy nuclear physics, in chemistry, and in biology; the support of educational activities in schools; the production and sale of radioisotopes for use in medicine, agriculture, industry, and research; the licensing of the use of nuclear materials for power plants and other peaceful purposes; and international cooperation in science. Seaborg was responsible for overseeing all these varied activities, supported by a budget of two and a half billion dollars.

As a chief adviser to the president, Seaborg also played an important role in establishing policy regarding arms control agreements. He went to Moscow as a part of the U.S. delegation for the signing of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963, which prohibited the testing of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere, in outer space, and underwater. He also participated in laying the groundwork for the Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1970 by helping to establish safeguards that would assure that nuclear materials intended for peaceful uses were subject to appropriate inspections and controls by the International Atomic Energy Agency and to ensure that they were not diverted for military purposes. During his ten years as chair of the AEC, Seaborg traveled to more than sixty countries, promoting international cooperation in science.

After he returned to his professorship at the University of California in 1971, University Professor of Chemistry Seaborg continued to pursue the goals of international cooperation in science and the attainment of arms control agreements. He helped to establish the International Organization for Chemical Sciences in Development (IOCD), which facilitates collaboration between chemists in developed countries and chemists in developing countries in the search for solutions to problems in the developing world, and became its president in 1981. He wrote and lectured extensively about the need for a comprehensive test ban treaty, which would extend the prohibition of testing of nuclear weapons to underground testing. Among the many books he authored are two on the subject of arms control history: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Test Ban (1981, describing the negotiations during the Kennedy administration for the Limited Test Ban Treaty) and Stemming the Tide: Arms Control in the Johnson Years (1987, featuring a description of the negotiations that led to the Non-Proliferation Treaty).

In 1974, Seaborg’s research group at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory discovered element 106, which was officially named seaborgium in 1997. Seaborg continued to work as an active research scientist, helping to direct a research group in the search for new isotopes and new elements at the upper end of the periodic table, including a search for the “superheavy” elements. The group also investigated the mechanism of the reactions of heavy ions with heavy element target nuclei. Another aspect of the research program was concerned with the determination of the chemical properties of the very heaviest synthetic chemical elements.

Deeply involved in the effort to improve mathematics and science education, Seaborg served as president of Science Service and as head of the Lawrence Hall of Science. He also served on the National Commission on Excellence in Education, which published the much-publicized report “A Nation at Risk” in 1983.

He began keeping a diary at the age of fourteen and maintained a detailed record of his daily activities since that time. This personal historical record (which also contains mundane childhood entries such as “took a bath”) is a valuable resource for his work on the history of science, recording much about critical decisions in the nuclear age. An avid hiker, he also served as vice president of the American Hiking Society; helped establish the Golden State Trail, the California segment of a cross-country hiking route; and was an eloquent supporter of conservation of natural resources and protection of wilderness areas.

Significance

Seaborg’s discovery of several radioisotopes has revolutionized medical science. Some 70 percent of all diagnosis and treatment in the United States employs nuclear techniques. By 1970, 90 percent of the eight million administrations per year of radioisotopes in the United States utilized cobalt-60, iodine-131, or technetium-99m. Technetium-99m is the workhorse of nuclear medicine; in 1985, it accounted for more than seven million diagnostic procedures per year in bone, liver, lung, thyroid, cardiovascular, and brain scanning and imaging. Millions of people have already benefited (including Seaborg’s own mother) and will continue to benefit directly from his research and from his support of research and development during his chairmanship of the AEC through advanced diagnostic and therapeutic applications.

It is impossible to overstate the impact of the discovery of the element plutonium on our times. It has been argued that the existence of weapons of mass destruction has acted as a deterrent and prevented the outbreak of a major conflict between the superpowers for a longer period than at any other time in history. Certainly, knowledge of the potential for destruction of our planet has cast a pall over the lives of all human beings. The other side of the coin is the potential that plutonium has to serve as a virtually inexhaustible source of electrical energy, on which the world depends more each day. Considering the horrifying threat of nuclear war, Seaborg’s efforts to prevent the development of still more potent weapons (the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963) and to limit the spread of ownership of these weapons to more countries (the Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1970) were of critical importance to the world’s future. Seaborg saw the need to control nuclear weapons as urgent. The epilogue of his book Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Test Ban ends thus:

[W]e are negotiating at a higher and more dangerous level. If we allow the present opportunity to slip away, however, the next one, if there is a next one, will be at a level still higher and more dangerous. The hour is late. Let us hope not too late.

Bibliography

Hoffman, Darlean C., Albert Ghiorso, and Glenn T. Seaborg. The Transuranium People: The Inside Story. River Edge, N.J.: World Scientific, 2000. Seaborg and two other scientists describe how they investigated the nuclear and chemical properties of the twenty known transuranium elements.

Seaborg, Glenn T. Nuclear Milestones: A Collection of Speeches. San Francisco, Calif.: W. H. Freeman, 1972. A unique compilation of historical insights with many unpublished photographs of the scientists and laboratories responsible for the nuclear age. In this book, through a selection of speeches he gave while chair of the Atomic Energy Commission, Seaborg tries to present some of the reminiscences and reflections of the scientific accomplishments to advance humankind.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Transuranium Elements. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1958. Seaborg tells for the first time the full and dramatic story of plutonium, with emphasis on the people who did the work.

Seaborg, Glenn T., with Benjamin S. Loeb. Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Test Ban. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981. Seaborg tells the story that made possible the signing of the Limited Test Ban Treaty on August 5, 1963.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Stemming the Tide: Arms Control in the Johnson Years. Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1987. A description of the efforts in arms control during the Johnson administration, including the attainment of the Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1970.

Seaborg, Glenn T., with Eric Seaborg. Adventures of the Atomic Age: From Watts to Washington. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001. Seaborg’s autobiography, which was completed by his son.