biography
| name: |
Seaborg, Glenn T(heodore)
|
| sex:
| male
|
| lived:
| (1912–99)
|
| biography:
| Chemist, born in Ishpeming, Michigan, USA. After working as an apricot picker, farmworker, laboratory assistant, and apprentice linotype operator to pay for tuition, he received his BA in chemistry at the University of California, Los Angeles (1934), and his PhD in 1937. His early interest was in discovering radioactive isotopes, many of which are used in medical therapy as well as in basic scientific research. In 1939 he turned his attention to the transuranium elements (those with nuclei heavier than that of uranium); working with the cyclotron and his colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, he eventually produced six such artificial elements. During World War 2 he worked on the Manhattan Project to develop techniques for the large-scale production of plutonium, and the the plutonium he produced at a laboratory at the University of Chicago went into the atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki (1945). In 1946 he returned to his research at Berkeley. He served as chancellor of the University of California (1958–61) and then as chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission (1961–71). For his work on transuranium elements he shared the 1951 Nobel Prize for Chemistry with Edwin McMillan. |
|
|
