in m e m o r i a m
A LEGEND HAS LEFT US Nobel Laureate Glenn Seaborg, who rewrote the periodic table, dies at 86 Sophie L. Wilkinson C&EN Washington
G
lenn T. Seaborg, a Nobel Laureate chemist who reshaped society with his discovery of 10 elements, passed away on Feb. 25 at the age of 86. He died at homefromcomplications of a stroke suffered last August while he was in Boston for the ACS national meeting. 'There is no doubt Seaborg was one of the dominant figures of 20th-century chemistry, and probably the single most influential individual in the discovery of new elements," says American Chemical Society President Ed Wasserman, science adviser at DuPont Central R&D in Wilmington, Del. 'There are relatively few giants in our field; he was one of
them. There is a whole corner of the periodic table that was initiated by his efforts. And the fact that the element seaborgium was named for the first time for a living individual is a tribute to the high regard in which he was held by the science community," Wasserman says. Seaborg, who had a patent on americium and curium, was also the only person to hold patents on chemical elements. Born in 1912 in what he termed the isolated iron town of Ishpeming, Mich., the gentlemanly Seaborg grew up to serve as science adviser to 10 U.S. Presidents, rewrite the periodic table, and work on the Manhattan Project. This was someone who, as a schoolboy, was too shy to raise his hand in class to ask for permission to use the restroom.
The family moved to the Los Angeles suburbs when Seaborg was 10. He didn't encounter science until his junior year in high school, when he took a chemistry course to fulfill a college entrance requirement. The attraction was immediate and irresistible. "I had the feeling, Why hasn't someone told me about this before?' " he wrote. "From that point forward, my mind was made up. I felt I wanted to become a scientist and bent all my efforts in that direction." Seaborg attributed his subsequent success less to genius than to hard work. "A hardworking individual will succeed where a lazy genius may fail," he noted in a letter to a young scientist pondering her chances in the field. Seaborg attended the University of California, Los Angeles, where, though he "loved physics foremost," he "studied chemistry because chemists could find jobs." He compared graduate school at UC Berkeley to a pilgrimage to a scientific Mecca, and earned a Ph.D. degree there in 1937. After teaching at UC Berkeley for a few years, Seaborg took a leave of absence to serve as chief of the section working on transuranium elements at the Manhattan Project's wartime Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chi-
»îfc,«;Siilliill?,-2i>:i
isliiÎïi^jy 83.7
&»
