Nation: GLENN SEABORG: From Californium to the AEC

“I DISCOVER elements,” Glenn Theodore Seaborg once told an interviewer. And he certainly does: in less than 20 years. Chemist Seaborg shared in the discovery of nine new elements, all of them in the heavy, transuranium field. In 1940, when he was just 28, Seaborg and Physicist Edwin McMillan identified plutonium, and with it, the key to the atomic bomb; in 1951 Seaborg and McMillan received the Nobel Prize for their discovery. Working in a University of California laboratory, Seaborg and his associates gradually extended the periodic table of elements, usually named their discoveries for their place of origin (americum, berkelium, californium), or for fellow scientists (curium, einsteinium, fermium). But Seaborg modestly discounts his achievements: “It was just a matter of being there. After all, we had the cyclotron.”

Inelastic Scattering. A tall (6 ft. 3 in.), shambling man, Glenn Seaborg, 49, comes from solidly Swedish stock, was born in the little mining town of Ishpeming, Mich. When Glenn was ten, his father, a machinist, transplanted the family to California. In high school, Glenn at first majored in literature, but during his junior year he took a course in chemistry and found his career. “My God,” he said, “why didn’t someone tell me how wonderful it was?”

Seaborg worked his way through U.C.L.A. with a multitude of jobs ranging from stevedore to apricot picker, then moved on to the University of California at Berkeley for graduate work. He won his Ph.D. in chemistry with a learned thesis: The Inelastic Scattering of Fast Neutrons. After graduation he stayed on at Berkeley, went happily into the laboratory of the late great chemist, Gilbert Newton Lewis, as an assistant. A popular teacher, Seaborg advanced swiftly up the academic ladder, finally becoming chancellor of the university in 1958. At the same time, he was a leading figure in the university’s Lawrence Radiation Laboratory: he served for 13 years as its pioneering director of nuclear chemical research.

With the discovery of plutonium, Seaborg moved into the forefront of nuclear science. In 1942 he went to Chicago as one of the key figures in the development of the atom bomb, spent the war years directing chemical research at the University of Chicago Metallurgical Laboratory—under the Army’s Manhattan Project. Seaborg was largely responsible for the chemical separation processes used in the manufacture of plutonium at Oak Ridge, Tenn., and Richland, Wash., in the tense months before Hiroshima.

After the war, Seaborg served as a member of the General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission, gave his reluctant support to the crash program that developed the hydrogen bomb—a program that split the nation’s scientific community. “Although I deplore the prospect of our country putting a tremendous effort into the H-bomb,” he said, “I must confess that I have been unable to come to the conclusion that we should not.”

Planned Parenthood. Although he is a registered Democrat, Seaborg has been politically passive, served both Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower as an adviser. In 1959 the AEC gave him the $50,000 Enrico Fermi Award—the highest honor the Government can bestow on an atomic scientist. Last January, four days before he took office as President, John Kennedy appointed Seaborg chairman of the AEC—the highest federal administrative post a U.S. scientist has ever attained.

Seaborg is married to the former secretary of the late Dr. Ernest O. Lawrence, one of his campus colleagues at Berkeley, inventor of the cyclotron and a Nobel laureate. Seaborg and his wife agreed that it would be nice to have a family of six children—and they have six, including one boy who was calmly and tidily delivered by his father. With characteristic resourcefulness Glenn Seaborg had already studied obstetrics and knew exactly what to do in such an emergency. Such scientific foresight should serve him well in his present job.