Glenn T. Seaborg

He married Helen Griggs, the secretary of Ernest O. Lawrence, in 1942 and had six children from the marriage named Peter, Lynne, David, Stephen, Eric and Dianne.

Glen Seaborg died in Lafayette, California on February 25, 1999 of stroke complications received in August 1998 during the meeting of the ‘American Chemical Society’.

Glen T. Seaborg was born in Ishpeming, Michigan on April 19, 1912.

His father was Herman Theodore Seaborg and his mother was Olivia Erickson Seaborg. He had a sister two years younger than him named Jeanette.

He graduated from the ‘David Starr Jordan High School’ in Los Angeles in 1929.

He joined the ‘University of California’ at Los Angeles in 1929 and received his B.A. in chemistry in 1934.

He earned his PhD in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley in 1937.

Glen Seaborg worked as a personal laboratory assistant of Gilbert N. Lewis at ‘University of California’ at Berkeley from 1937 to 1939 and was successful with physicist Jack Livingood in isolating ‘iodine-131’ used for treating thyroid problems.

He was appointed an instructor in chemistry at the ‘University of California’ at Berkeley in 1939, became an Assistant Professor in 1941 and a Professor in 1945.

In 1940 he discovered the ‘element 94’ later named ‘plutonium’ with the help of his colleagues, Joseph Kennedy, Edwin McMillan and Arthur Wahl.

From 1941 to 1955 he and his colleagues discovered nine more new elements with atomic numbers 95 to 102 and 106.

Seaborg, Louis B. Werner and Burris B. Cunningham first isolated plutonium on August 20, 1942.

Glenn T. Seaborg’s books ‘The Transuranium Elements’ and ‘Man-Made Transuranium Elements’ were published in 1958 and 1963 respectively.

‘Nuclear Milestones: A Collection of Speeches by Glenn T. Seaborg’ was published in 1972.

‘A Chemist in the White House: From the Manhattan Project to the end of the Cold War’ was published in 1998.