Chemistry Nobelist Glenn Seaborg Dies
Glenn T. Seaborg, the multifaceted scientist who won the Nobel Prize for his discovery of the radioactive element plutonium and who became the first scientist to head the Atomic Energy Commission, has died.
The UC Berkeley nuclear chemist died Thursday night in the Bay Area community of Lafayette, where he had been convalescing since suffering a stroke in August. He was 86.
During his remarkably productive career, Seaborg participated in the discovery of 10 elements that did not exist in nature, as well as the discovery of more than 100 isotopes of existing elements--several of which are widely used in medicine.
In many cases, he identified the new materials by performing chemical reactions on samples far too small to be seen and using tools that could be seen only through a microscope. The 1994 designation of element 106 as seaborgium marked the only time such an honor has been bestowed on a living person.
Seaborg played a key role in the World War II Manhattan Project, which produced the atomic bomb, by developing the technique that was used to isolate and purify the plutonium required for the bomb.
Although chemistry remained his primary love, Seaborg also found time to become chancellor of UC Berkeley, a tireless promoter of educational reform, recycling of scarce resources and nuclear disarmament, and a co-founder of the Pacific 10 athletic conference. The diversity of his activities was indicated by his onetime citation in the Guinness Book of World Records for having the longest entry in Who’s Who.
A Reputation as a Superb Organizer
He was not noted as a towering intellect, but rather as a superb organizer who was able to direct the activities of large numbers of people while retaining a firm grasp of the minutiae involved in each of their projects. Albert Ghiorso, his longtime colleague and a physicist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, said: “He was a good administrator. He somehow got people to work for him, to put out more than they would have otherwise.”
During World War II, Ghiorso said, “He had about 100 PhDs directly under him. It was unbelievable how he could follow the work of all 100, plus their assistants, and know what was going on. . . . I was always amazed how he would know more about what I was doing than I would.”
Seaborg’s scientific forte was the study of radioisotopes, unstable forms of elements that release radiation. When he began his graduate study at Berkeley in 1934, few radioisotopes were known and the heaviest element known was No. 92, uranium.
New radioisotopes were formed by using the Berkeley cyclotron to bombard thin metal foils with elementary particles, such as protons or neutrons, or with the nuclei of atoms. Atoms in the target would capture the bombarding particles and thereby become transmuted into new elements, most of which were normally radioactive.
These new elements and isotopes could then be separated from the target atoms because they underwent different chemical reactions.
Seaborg said he got into nuclear chemistry in 1934 “almost by accident.” Physicist Jack Livingood “literally handed me a ‘hot’ target, just bombarded [by the Berkeley cyclotron], and asked me to process it chemically to identify the radioisotopes that had been produced.”
Discovery Extended His Mother’s Life
Working in a custodian’s closet equipped with “tap water, a sink, and a small workbench,” and using essential equipment “bootlegged” from the chemistry department, he isolated the new radioisotopes and began a collaboration that lasted five years. During that period, Seaborg and Livingood discovered or characterized iodine-131, iron-59 and cobalt-60, all of which had medical applications.
Iodine-131, in particular, is widely used for the diagnosis and treatment of thyroid disease and the diagnosis of other disorders. This discovery was especially satisfying, Seaborg later wrote, because “my own mother had her life extended by many years as a result of treatment with iodine-131.”
While Seaborg was discovering these isotopes, a young Berkeley physicist, Edwin W. McMillan, created the first synthetic element--neptunium, No. 93--by bombarding uranium in the cyclotron. When McMillan was called away from Berkeley in 1940 to help develop radar, Seaborg inherited his research.
Within six months, his group had discovered that neptunium decayed radioactively into still another new element, No. 94, which they called plutonium. Shortly thereafter, they discovered that one isotope of plutonium would undergo fission and release enormous quantities of energy when bombarded with neutrons.
The potential for use of plutonium to construct a new bomb of unprecedented power was obvious to Seaborg and others, but that prospect was dimmed by the fact that no one had yet isolated even a speck of the material.
Even if plutonium could be synthesized by bombarding uranium, many scientists believed, its separation from the uranium in large quantities would be virtually impossible because of its great radioactivity.
On Dec. 6, 1941, three leaders of the Manhattan Project, Arthur H. Compton, Vannevar Bush and James B. Conant, met in a Washington restaurant to discuss whether the project should aim for a uranium or a plutonium bomb. Bush and Conant both thought the plutonium problem hopeless and favored uranium.
Compton, however, told them of his conversation with a brilliant young chemist from Berkeley: “Seaborg tells me that within six months from the time the plutonium is formed he can have it ready for use in the bomb.”
Conant’s reply, Compton later wrote, was: “Glenn Seaborg is a very competent young chemist, but he isn’t that good.”
Nonetheless, Seaborg went to the University of Chicago’s Metallurgical Laboratory in April 1942 with a mandate to isolate plutonium in the amounts required--although the scientists hedged their bets by simultaneously working on a uranium bomb.
By August of that year, Seaborg’s group had isolated enough plutonium for it to be seen under a microscope, and by Sept. 10 they had enough to weigh. By December, they had worked out a production process for the element based on a 10-billion-fold magnification of their original experiments.
In December 1944, full-scale production of plutonium began at the massive new Hanford plant in southern Washington, which had been based on Seaborg’s separation scheme. Within just two years, cranes had replaced tweezers in plutonium processing. The bomb that devastated Nagasaki in 1945 was built with plutonium produced at Hanford. (The Hiroshima bomb, used first, was made from uranium.)
As his own role in the Manhattan Project slowed after plutonium production began at Hanford, Seaborg turned back to his research and soon made his most important contribution to physics theory. That was his development of the concept of the “actinide series,” a family relationship among heavy elements, which enabled him to predict the chemical properties of the elements beyond uranium.
His Group Identified More Elements
Based on that concept, his group discovered two more elements--americium, No. 95, and curium, No. 96--before the end of the war. Equally important, the theory allowed a redesign of the periodic table, which shows the chemical and physical relationships of all the elements. Seaborg thus became the only person to restructure the periodic table since it was devised by Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev in 1869.
After the war, Seaborg returned to Berkeley as a full professor, taking most of his group with him. By 1950, they had discovered two more elements--berkelium, No. 97, and californium, No. 98.
Ghiorso recalled that “When we found 97, when it became clear what we had done, [Seaborg] fainted. We worried about it, but it was nothing. The same thing happened with 98. He knew that this would be the final push in getting the [Nobel] Prize.”
It was, and in 1951 Seaborg and McMillan received the Nobel in chemistry for their discoveries.
During the 1950s, Seaborg’s group discovered element Nos. 99 through 102, but his personal interests also enlarged. He had always been an avid sports fan and, in 1952, Clark Kerr, who had just been appointed the first chancellor at Berkeley, asked him to be the university’s faculty representative to the Pacific Coast Intercollegiate Athletic Conference.
Seaborg served as both a press spokesman for the conference and a delegate to the National Collegiate Athletic Assn. during a period marked by the discovery of widespread rules violations in the conference and its eventual breakup. He then played a pivotal role in creation of the new Athletic Assn. of Western Universities, which has since become the Pac-10.
In the summer of 1958, Kerr became president of the university and selected Seaborg to succeed him as chancellor. Many nonscientists on the faculty worried that he would not give full support to other disciplines, but he moved to reassure them of his strong belief in the unity of all intelligence.
“There is a beauty in discovery,” he said in a speech. “There is mathematics in music, a kinship of science and poetry in the description of nature, and exquisite form in a molecule. Attempts to place different disciplines in different camps are revealed as artificial in the face of the unity of knowledge. All literate men are sustained by the philosopher, the historian, the political analyst, the economist, the scientist, the poet, the artisan and the musician.”
Led U.S. Atomic Energy Commission
As chancellor, Seaborg was responsible for the major long-range plan for the physical development of the Berkeley campus, a blueprint that still guides campus growth. Other developments during his tenure included the establishment of the College of Environmental Design, development of the Space Sciences Laboratory, conception and planning of the Earl Warren Legal Center and the Laboratory of Chemical Biodynamics, and the establishment of the Humanities Institute and Humanities Research Professorships.
Seaborg also began the CHEM Study project, which developed a new curriculum for teaching chemistry in high schools throughout the country. Despite his involvement in these many activities, characteristically, he kept a weekly office hour for any student who wished to come see him--and many came just to see if it was for real.
Early in 1961, President John F. Kennedy appointed Seaborg to head the Atomic Energy Commission. He held the post for 10 years, being reappointed by Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon. In that position, Seaborg traveled throughout the country promoting the peaceful uses of nuclear energy--even though he also remained a firm proponent of renewable sources of energy, such as solar power.
He also negotiated skillfully and overcame powerful opposition to bring about the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which banned tests in the atmosphere and under the sea. He also played a key role in attaining the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which limited the spread of nuclear weapons. His 1982 recounting of the negotiations, “Kennedy, Khrushchev and the Test Ban,” was cited by The Times as “a powerful and saddening book.”
As head of the Atomic Energy Commission, Seaborg also served as a kind of roving science ambassador, traveling to 63 countries and making several trips to the Soviet Union. He also led two U.S. delegations to United Nations Conferences on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy.
His endurance, grasp of detail and remarkable memory were spotlighted on these trips. “I went on an expedition to Russia with him and nine others to look at a whole bunch of sites--reactors and so forth,” Ghiorso said.
“Very often it was Glenn who was asking the important technical question that got to the core of the matter,” he said. “It got wearing after two weeks. At the end of the period, he got us together and assigned all the topics that each one would handle. After we had written, he would go over it carefully and make sure each one of us was right. He had amazing energy, and he was very meticulous about details.”
Stepping down as commission chairman in 1971, Seaborg returned to Berkeley and his first love. In the succeeding years, his group discovered element Nos. 103 through 107, as well as 109, and conducted a still fruitless search for the so-called superheavy elements with numbers above 115.
In recognition of his contributions, his Berkeley colleagues in 1994 named element 106 seaborgium in his honor.
But Seaborg was not a remote eminence resting on his laurels. He taught freshman chemistry, like many other senior members of the faculty, and was a freshman advisor. His lanky 6-foot, 3-inch frame was a common sight as he hiked up and down what came to be known as the “Seaborg Steps” on the steep hill connecting his office and the classrooms on campus.
He had also served as president of the American Chemical Society and the American Assn. for the Advancement of Science, two of the largest and most powerful scientific organizations in the country, as well as of Science Service, a small Washington-based group that publishes the weekly magazine Science News and holds a yearly Science Talent Search.
In the talent search, the winners of the top 40 high school science fairs around the country gather in Washington to compete for $100,000 in scholarships. Seaborg always helped judge the fair and interviewed each of the 40 himself.
He performed this task, which many other noted scientists disdained, because “the education of young people in science is at least as important, maybe more so, than the research itself,” he told the New York Times.
Mentored Young Science Students
Seaborg’s mentoring of young science students was a direct reflection of the help he got in his own youth. Born in Ishpeming, Mich., he moved with his family to Southern California in 1922 and settled in an area that is now part of South Gate. He attended local public schools, played football, mowed lawns and delivered newspapers. He showed no real interest in science until Dwight Logan Reid, an enthusiastic teacher at his high school, inspired him with an interest in physics and chemistry.
When Seaborg graduated from high school in 1929, he was first in his class and valedictorian. He went on to UCLA, paying his tuition by taking a series of jobs that included stevedore, apricot picker, laboratory assistant for a rubber company, farm laborer and apprentice Linotype machinist for the Los Angeles Herald.
“In those days,” he said, “people worked their way through school or just didn’t go.”
He maintained a high scholastic average at UCLA and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in his junior year. Encouraged by his professors in his senior year, Seaborg decided to pursue a career in nuclear chemistry. After getting his bachelor’s degree in 1934, he transferred to Berkeley.
Played Sports With Neighbor Children
Seaborg’s private life was nearly as busy as his public life. In 1942, he took time out from his work on the Manhattan Project to return to Berkeley and marry Helen Giggs, who was secretary to Ernest O. Lawrence, inventor of the cyclotron. After the war, they designed and built a sprawling redwood home in Lafayette, which they eventually populated with six children.
Seaborg played baseball, volleyball and basketball with his own children and with a pack of neighborhood children who called him Glenn even while their parents addressed him as Dr. Seaborg. His popularity was further ensured when he and then-neighbor Isadore Perlman built a swimming pool in their two yards and opened it to all comers.
Seaborg loved to hike and generally did so for 10 to 15 miles every weekend he was home. In 1979, he laid out a series of 12-mile hikes stretching from San Francisco to the Nevada border. These paths represented the California leg of a cross-country hiking trail put together by the American Hiking Society, at least partly at Seaborg’s urging.
The legacy Seaborg had hoped to leave behind was a total ban on nuclear testing, but he was destined to fail. Nonetheless, he strongly supported the peaceful uses of atomic energy and never regretted his role during World War II. In a 1985 interview, he concluded:
“You have to separate the use of radioisotopes from the development of nuclear weapons. Nature made nuclear weapons possible, and so it was in our national interest to be in the forefront with the atomic bomb. We had no choice. I see no advantage for Hitler to have gotten the bomb first.
“But if you’re asking me, do I wish the laws of nature were such that it would not have been possible to make nuclear weapons, my answer is: God, yes.”
Seaborg is survived by his wife of 56 years and five of their children.
Details of a memorial service will be announced later.
