Aie Award
Glenn Seaborg receives Aie Gold Medal Award Last week, at its 50th anniversary meeting in Houston, Tex., the American Institute of Chemists presented its Gold Medal Award to Glenn T. Seaborg. The award is presented annually to "recognize and stimulate activities of service to the science of chemistry or the profession of chemists or chemical engineers." It's difficult to imagine anyone serving his science on a broader front than Dr. Seaborg, or even more fundamentally in a specific area. Dr. Seaborg has played a key role in basic research as codiscoverer of a number of new elements of matter, in applied research in production of fissionable materials, in education as chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, and in scientific administration and diplomacy as chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. He has also recently devoted a lot of interest to the popularization of science. And in that respect, it might be said that he and others of his generation of nuclear scientists were the first to cause the public to really sit up and take notice of science. The making of a major change in the periodic table is about as fundamental a contribution to chemistry as one can imagine. Glenn Seaborg did it, and he's about the only person since Mendeleyev to have done so. He demonstrated that the heaviest naturally occurring elements and the first 11 synthetic transuranium elements form a transition series of actinide elements in a manner analogous to the rare-earth series of lanthanide elements. The concept shows how these and still heavier synthetic transuranium elements fit into the periodic table. He has also extended the periodic table through his key role in the discovery of a number of isotopes and transuranium elements. These include more than 100 isotopes throughout the periodic table, many of which have practical application in research, industry, and medicine—for example, iodine-131, cobalt-57, cobalt-60, iron-55, iron-59, zinc-65, cesium-137, manganese-54, antimony-124, californium-252, americium-241, plutonium-238, and the fissile isotopes plutonium-239 and uranium-233. In 1941, Dr. Seaborg's group at Berkeley discovered element 94, plutonium, the first of nine transuranium elements that they discovered during the next 18 years. In 1951, at the age of 39, Dr. 20
C&EN May 21, 1973
Seaborg was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, with Edwin M. McMillan, for work on the chemistry of the transuranium elements. And mighty few delvers into chemical fundamentals have had the scientific, economic, and political resources of entire nations put behind their work to the extent that Glenn Seaborg has. If all research chemists were as tenacious as Dr. Seaborg in ushering a new product through to its end use, they'd have no trouble rationalizing research expenditures. For example, the discovery of plutonium by Dr. Seaborg and his coworkers has led to one of the most monumental chemical scaleups of all time. During World War II at the University of Chicago's metallurgical laboratory, Dr. Seaborg headed the group that devised the chemical extraction processes used to produce plutonium for the Manhattan Project. This work led to the detonation of a plutonium weapon over Nagasaki, near the end of World War II. The group's first experiments were done with trace amounts as small as a picogram (a million millionth of a gram). According to Dr. Seaborg, production of plutonium has long since reached a point somewhere between megagram and gigagram amounts, an escalation of a billion-billion-fold. Other chemists have discovered fundamental elements of matter. But few have had entire industries spring up around those elements and had global politics become concerned with them. After the war, Dr. Seaborg served under President Truman, from 1946-50 as a member of the Atomic Energy Commission's first general advisory committee, and under President Eisenhower, from 1959-61, on the President's Science Advisory Committee. He served as chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission from 1961-71, having first been appointed by President Kennedy and subsequently reappointed by Presidents Johnson and Nixon. In 1971, he returned to the University of California, Berkeley, where he had been on the faculty since 1939 and was chancellor of the university from 1958-61. He is now University Professor of Chemistry and associate director of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. As AEC chairman, Dr. Seaborg visited more than 60 countries. In 1963, he headed the U.S. delegation to the
U.S.S.R. for the signing of the "memorandum on cooperation in the field of utilization of atomic energy for peaceful purposes," and was in the delegation to Moscow for the signing of the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. In September 1971, he was president of the Fourth United Nations Conference at Geneva on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy. Dr. Seaborg has played a decisive role in discovering and developing the major sources of nuclear energy, whether they be used for peaceful purposes or otherwise. The natural source, uranium-235, is the scarce isotope of natural uranium, which comprises less than 1% of the uranium in nature. The two other sources, plutonium-239 and uranium233, are man-made, and Dr. Seaborg was largely responsible for their making. Plutonium-239 is the key to unlocking energy stored in the abundant but nonfissionable isotope of uranium, uranium-238. And uranium-233 is the key to using abundant but nonfissionable thorium-232. It has been pointed out that in the process of producing electricity, nuclear reactors can produce enough plutonium to destroy civilization, if that plutonium is diverted to making bombs. Dr. Seaborg still hopes that the fear of massive destruction will be the deciding factor in bringing men to choose reason rather than conflict in settling their differences. Perhaps the power of plutonium, as he puts it, will help achieve some of the things essential to world stability— a more widely shared abundance and a lasting peace. "Can man, who now holds his destiny in his own hands, act with enough wisdom, patience, and understanding to choose the right p a t h ? " Dr. Seaborg asks. He believes so. If he had it to do over, would Dr. Seaborg have probed less deeply into the secrets of the universe? "We can never know too much about the world around us," Dr. Seaborg says. "It is not knowledge itself but the use we make of knowledge that brings trouble."
