| Citation | In the summer of 1940, E.M. McMillan and P.H. Abelson, using the 60 inch Berkeley cyclotron, discovered that the neutron bombardment of uranium yielded a new element which proved to be element 93. It was named neptunium. In December 1940, Glenn T. Seaborg and his associates took the next step and bombarded uranium (as the oxide) with 16-Mev deuterons and succeeded in isolating the unstable element-93 fraction of the resulting products, which decayed according to expectation, by emitting a beta particle to yield element 94, with a mass number of 238. This element was given the name plutonium.
Further research with plutonium led to the isolation of isotope Pu-239 which was found to be a potential source of nuclear energy. This resulted in Seaborg's translation to the Manhatten project at the Metallurgical Laboratory of the University of Chicago as head of a group responsible for the isolation of plutonium on an industrial scale.
By 1944, Seaborg recognized that the fourteen elements beyong [sic] actinium probably constituted an "ectinide series" analogous to the rare-earth series of lanthanide elements. The "actinide concept" proved to be crucial in the experimental work on the actinides beyond plutonium, and enabled Seaborg and his collaborators in Berkeley after the war to anticipate the chemistry of the heavier elements synthesized during the next decade: americium (95), curium (96), berkelium (97), californium (98), einsteinium (99), fermium (100), mendelevium (101), and nobelium (102).
From 1958 to 1961, Professor Seaborg was Chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley. Later he was Chairman of the United States Atomic Energy Commission from 1961 to 1971, appointed by President Kennedy and subsequently reappointed by Presidents Johnson and Nixon, and served under President Truman, from 1946 to 1950, as a member of the Atomic Energy Commission's first General Advisory Committee, and under President Eisenhower, from 1959 to 1961, on the President's Science Advisory Committee.
Professor Seaborg was President of the American Chemical Society, in its Centennial year, 1976, President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1976 and in 1973 was Chairman of the AAAS Board of Directors. Since 1966 he has been President of Science Service, an organization devoted to the popularisation of science particularly through youth activities.
In addition to the Nobel Prize which he shared with E.M. McMillan in 1951, Professor Seaborg has received numerous awards and honours for his contributions, including the AEC's 1959 Enrico Fermi Award, and the U.S. Department of State Distinguished Honor Award in 1971, In April 1973, he was decorated as an Officier [sic] in the National Order of the Legion of Honor of France.
Professor Seaborg is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and nine foreign national academies including the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. |