Glenn T. Seaborg, American Nuclear Chemist

Seaborg, holds a historic device: a balance which was used in research during WWII for the first weighing of the new man-made element. The amount weighed was tiny, only about on-millionth of the weight of a dime. Suspended from the upright bar of the balance is a hairlike quartz fiber, too fine to show up in the picture. Glenn Theodore Seaborg (April 19, 1912 - February 25, 1999) was an American chemist whose involvement in the synthesis, discovery and investigation of 10 transuranium elements earned him a share of the 1951 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He was the principal or co-discoverer of ten elements: plutonium, americium, curium, berkelium, californium, einsteinium, fermium, mendelevium, nobelium and element 106, which, while he was still living, was named seaborgium in his honor. He discovered more than 100 atomic isotopes and is credited with important contributions to the chemistry of plutonium, originally as part of the Manhattan Project where he developed the extraction process used to isolate the plutonium fuel for the second atomic bomb. He advised ten US Presidents - from Truman to Clinton - on nuclear policy and was Chairman of the US Atomic Energy Commission from 1961-71, where he pushed for commercial nuclear energy and the peaceful applications of nuclear science

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Alamos Atomic Berkeley Chemists Commission Educator Periodic Physicists Plutonium Prizes Scientists Seaborg Seolink-scientists-01-2020

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