Glenn Seaborg Interview (page: 5 / 8) Discoverer of Plutonium	Print Interview

What did your parents think when you first began to move into science, when you first told them you had decided to be a chemist?

Glenn Seaborg: They approved. In fact I'd say they liked it. When I found a certain degree of success they were very proud.

Did your parents have any idea what it was that you would be doing as a chemist?

Glenn Seaborg: No. My father would. He was a high school graduate from Ishpeming High School and he took chemistry and physics in high school. He would know what I was doing, but my mother would not have had any experience along those lines and would have to just listen to my explanations of it. She was never in the least unhappy. She could see immediately that I was going on to something better than a bookkeeper and she was very supportive all the way.

How important was that encouragement for you?

Glenn Seaborg: I suppose it was pretty important, but I really had an inherent ambition to go on to things like that. I suppose if I had been discouraged by my parents it would have been more difficult, but I have a feeling I would have gone on anyway. As I remember, right from the beginning I just liked school, scholarship. I might say I excelled. I remember in arithmetic in Ishpeming, they used to give these tests periodically, and I remember in the fourth grade, I went through them so fast they had to give me the fifth grade tests. In high school in all the courses that I did take, I did pretty well. In fact, I was the valedictorian of my class, so I always liked school and scholarship.

We talked about the person who influenced you most, your chemistry teacher. Is there an experience or event that inspired you as a young person?

Glenn Seaborg: I don't recall any.

You mentioned earlier the hard times during the Depression. Did the Depression have any impact on your thinking about how life would unfold and what your ambitions should be?

Glenn Seaborg: I would say it just increased my resolve to get on with my education. It was difficult.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. My father was not able to find employment on any regular basis after the Depression came, and we just had a hard time. My mother had to work. I found jobs of all kinds right from the beginning and very early at UCLA found a position as a laboratory assistant -- I remember at fifty cents an hour and that was even in the middle of my sophomore year. All the way through I earned my money to pay for the -- there was no tuition, but there were incidental fees -- laboratory fees and to buy the books and pay for the transportation.

[ Key to Success ] Perseverance

I suppose that experience would constantly remind you that you have to work hard for what you want?

Glenn Seaborg: Yes. Somehow I don't know that I needed a reminder. It seemed to me that that's what I wanted to do. I had an inherent urge to succeed.

Were there any books you read when you were young that inspired you or caught your attention?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Glenn Seaborg: The book that had a great impact on me was the book Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis. This described the trials and tribulations and successes of a struggling young medical scientist, Martin Arrowsmith. It described how he went back to the laboratory at night and worked all hours to solve the problems and so forth. It also described his romantic life, his first wife who was lost to a laboratory accident actually, and his remarriage and so forth. All of this just made a deep, a tremendous impression on me. I empathized with it. I related to Martin Arrowsmith. I saw him as a prototype that I was trying to emulate.

Because you saw something of your own life in that story?

Glenn Seaborg: I saw myself, yes. It was a struggling young scientist doing research, really for research's sake. For the benefit of humanity, and I was just really impressed. I just loved that book. I was far enough along and already doing undergraduate research at UCLA. There was no graduate work yet at UCLA, so the professors gave undergraduate students the opportunity to do research under their personal direction, and I already was doing that. I just thought it was great, and here was a person who personified everything that I was trying to be.

One of the points of the book was that research can do great things to advance humanity.

Glenn Seaborg: That was one of the great points in Arrowsmith, that he was doing research to advance humanity, to cure disease and so forth. That made an impression, also. I was in another field but in the back of my mind I had in mind such a possibility, too.

When did you read that?

Glenn Seaborg: I would say the early 1930s. I know it was when I was at UCLA, and that would probably be in the early 1930s. I would say probably a year or two after the book was published.

Did that book help you formulate a vision of what you wanted to do with your life?

Glenn Seaborg: Yes. It sort of reinforced my feeling that I was on the right track. By that time I knew I wanted to go on in science and chemistry and physics.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I took a course in atomic physics in my last year at UCLA, in which the professor, John Adams -- who by the way is a lineal descendant of the second president of the United States -- Professor Adams told us about the work at Berkeley: the cyclotron; Ernest Lawrence, the inventor of the cyclotron; and the discovery of artificial radioactivity; the discovery of the neutron, and all of these advances in nuclear science, and I just thought that's the place where I wanted to go. I'd also learned from my chemistry professors that Gilbert Newton Lewis, the most famous physical chemist in the world, was the head of the College of Chemistry at Berkeley, and that was another reason that I wanted to go to Berkeley, and I wound up working for him as his personal research assistant. That was my first job after I received by Ph.D.

Could you describe the evening when you first heard of the discovery of fission?

Glenn Seaborg: This was at the meeting of what they called the Physics Journal Club in Le Conte Hall on the Berkeley campus. I remember it was the last Monday in January of 1939, and somebody reported that two German chemists, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann, had deduced that when uranium is bombarded with neutrons it splits in half, that it underwent fission. This hit me like a thunder clap. I had been thinking about this literally for years. In fact, I'd given a seminar on the other interpretation three years earlier, buying it hook, line and sinker. That is, when the neutron encounters uranium it's captured and forms new elements -- transuranium elements. I just thought, when I heard that at the meeting in January of 1939, how stupid I had been. Why hadn't I been able to figure that out myself? After the seminar, I walked out of the room and spent a couple of hours walking the streets of Berkeley, just sort of castigating myself and saying, "Why was I so stupid? Why couldn't I have come to that conclusion myself?" I had all the information that was necessary.

And you even remember what day it was, more than 50 years ago?

Glenn Seaborg: Yes, yes that's right. That's the impact it made on me. I just felt that I should have been able to come to that conclusion. Of course I wasn't alone. There were many more scientists, more eminent than I, who also had all of that information and were unable to come to the proper conclusion. Namely, that when a neutron struck uranium, it would split it in half, and didn't get captured and go on to form heavier elements. Many famous scientists were not able to come to that conclusion and Hahn and Strassmann themselves hardly believed it. In their publication they say essentially this, "You are not going to believe this, but when a neutron strikes uranium ,it splits it in half and forms isotopes of medium-weight elements. And we hardly believe it ourselves."

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Glenn Seaborg: That was on the last Monday of January in 1939 when the word came that fission had been discovered. The fission of uranium had been discovered by the two German chemists, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann. I had been thinking about the puzzling results that resulted from the bombardment of uranium with neutrons, where they thought they were finding transuranium elements, heavier man-made elements beyond uranium. I was unsatisfied with that explanation, but I couldn't put my finger on what the correct explanation was, and then when I heard that at the seminar, called the Journal Club, in the Physics Department at Berkeley, my attitude was, "Oh my gosh! Why didn't I think of this?" This was so obvious, and after the seminar I walked the streets of Berkeley for hours just ruminating, just thinking, "What a wonderful discovery, but how could I have been so stupid?" For all of this time, having all the evidence at my disposal, and not being able to come up with the interpretation that when the neutron struck the uranium atom it split it in half, instead of being captured to form heavier elements. I just thought that was in retrospect so obvious and I should have been able to come up with that interpretation myself. Of course, there were many other more famous scientists than I who also were not able to come up with that correct interpretation.

Did you spend those hours on the streets scolding yourself?

Glenn Seaborg: I was alternately scolding myself for having missed the interpretation and exulting that two of my fellow chemists had the perspicacity to come out with the correct interpretation -- Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann.

Was this a lesson that you took throughout the rest of your scientific endeavors? Is this something that came back to you later?

Glenn Seaborg: Yes, I think so. I think I was guided a little bit by it. Perhaps examined my results a little bit more carefully and kept trying to come out with a correct interpretation of my experimental results.

How did things start to fall in place for you in your professional life? How hard did you have to work to accomplish the things that you did?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Glenn Seaborg: I had to work pretty hard. I studied every night and on Sundays. But it was never a chore. It was what I wanted to do. I didn't feel sorry for myself, I enjoyed it. I enjoyed learning the material, I enjoyed the examinations, I enjoyed trying to excel. We had competition, there would be a contest for class leadership -- to see who would come out with the highest average at the end of the semester. I enjoyed that competition and quite often succeeded in being at the top of the list. I never regarded it as a sacrifice.

You mentioned competition. How important do you think that is, as an incentive for us?

Glenn Seaborg: It was very important. There was another chemistry major, named Saul Winstein, and he and I were vying together all the time. Usually we were at the top of the class up here, and there was a big gap from the person who came in third. Incidentally, Saul also went on to become a very successful and eminent scientist. Got his Ph.D. degree at Caltech, returned to UCLA and became a member of the UCLA faculty. I was offered a position at the UCLA faculty, too, a couple of years after I received my Ph.D. at Berkeley, but fortunately Professor Gilbert Newton Lewis offered me the same rank in a position at Berkeley, so I chose Berkeley.

You talk about how hard you worked. How much of a role has luck played in your success, do you think?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Glenn Seaborg: I think luck has played quite a role in my success. To have been able to go to the leading nuclear laboratory in the United States at Berkeley and work with the best accelerator there, Ernest Lawrence's laboratory, this made possible so many of my discoveries. The radioactive isotopes, Iodine 131, Technetium 99M, Cobalt 60 and so forth that are used even today in nuclear medicine. The discovery of plutonium and what that led to. Of course, I did help a little bit because I chose to go to Berkeley, but to have known about Berkeley, to be accepted at Berkeley and to be in a position to work in that emerging field of nuclear physics certainly involved a great deal of luck.

It sounds like you had prepared yourself to take advantage of lucky circumstances.

Glenn Seaborg: That's right. I had just the background that made it possible, and I could work in the chemistry department at Berkeley with a teaching assistantship to support myself, but at the same time, work in the Radiation Laboratory at the cyclotron to do all of this seminal work in nuclear physics, transuranium elements and so forth. Certainly luck played a significant role. If I hadn't been prepared, then I wouldn't have been able to take advantage of luck. I was prepared, and I was lucky to be at the right place, the best place in the United States at the right time. To that extent luck played a role.

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