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

Could you explain to us, in a way we can all understand, how you rearranged the periodic table of elements?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Glenn Seaborg: I took the elements -- the heavy elements, the elements just before uranium, and the transuranium elements, up in the body of the periodic table -- and placed them down below the so-called rare earth elements, and said that they were analogous, element by element, to the rare earth elements, and not analogous to the elements that would have been the case if they would have remained up in the main body of the periodic table. This made it possible to synthesize and identify many of the transuranium elements, because we then knew their correct chemical properties before they were discovered. It's necessary to make a chemical separation when you are doing the discovery experiments, because there are billions of times more radioactivity, radioactive atoms, formed that are not the product that you're looking for. There's just a little bit of a weak radioactivity due to the product that you're looking for. You have to make a chemical separation to identify it, and the actinide concept made it possible to know the chemical properties before the discovery, so you could make the chemical identification.

So that you could zero in on the area?

Glenn Seaborg: Yes. These heavy transuranium elements were analogues of the rare earth elements, element by element. Then you could do a calibration experiment with the rare earth elements and have the heavy transuranium elements come off in the same order in the chemical separation experiment.

So this greatly facilitated the research on additional elements?

Glenn Seaborg: More than that, it made it possible. Without that, it wouldn't have been possible to chemically identify these new elements. So it was a powerful and necessary tool for the discovery of these transuranium elements.

Was it the key that unlocked the door?

Glenn Seaborg: It was the key that unlocked the door. That's a good way of putting it. Of course, now we've gotten to the point where we are beyond the actinide elements ,and the elements with the atomic numbers 104, 105, and 106, they go back up into the body of the periodic table. But again, we know the chemical properties, because then they're truly analogous with the elements in the body of the periodic table. Element 104 is like hafnium, and 105 is like tantalum, and 106 like tungsten, and so forth. These elements have had their chemical properties measured just recently, just within the last few years, and in some cases just this year, here in the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, by a team of scientists led by Professor Darlean Hoffman. These elements have been produced on a one-atom-at-a-time basis, and even though they have very short half-lives, just less than a minute, it has been possible to determine their chemical properties. For example, element 105 is chemically like tantalum. So we're back up in the body of the periodic table now, and then it goes on out to element 118, the next noble gas.

Is there a particular talent that you don't have that you've always admired or wanted to have?

Glenn Seaborg: Yes, I think I would have been pleased to be endowed with more theoretical ability. I don't know that I aspire to be a theoretical physicist, but if I had greater mathematical ability, I didn't lack in that, but if I had greater mathematical ability and greater theoretical insight, I think it would have helped me in my career.

What was it that you wanted to do in theory that you haven't been able to do? Is there something you wanted to explain that hasn't been explained?

Glenn Seaborg: I think that I would have had a better grasp of what I was doing. I could perhaps predict the chemical properties of the undiscovered elements a little better, because you get into rather abstruse concepts in the electronic structure and so forth. I could do that better. I don't think that -- however my brain cells are put together -- they are functioning as efficiently in that area as they have been in the areas where I have made my progress.

In your field, the dynamics of the kind of work you do, is it more important to be a team player or to be your own person?

Glenn Seaborg: I'd say a combination in our field. We are not into this huge team research that you find now in high energy physics. It's still an area where you work with, in our case, just a few graduate students. Of course, it's not an area where one person can do it anymore. It's too involved for that and too much instrumentation and the need for moving quickly from one apparatus to another and so forth. But it's still an area where small teams -- a professor with a few graduate students, Darlean Hoffman here at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, for example, or when I was more active with my graduate students -- an area where a small group can still make the contributions, and I rather like that.

Who is your best critic?

Glenn Seaborg: I guess my wife, Helen. I don't know who else. Maybe my administrative assistant, Sherill Whyte. I can't think of anybody in the scientific area that would qualify.

In part I suppose because you've been out in front of many of your colleagues.

Glenn Seaborg: Yes, that might be it. Or maybe my friends are too polite.

Surely they're not too polite to have criticized something if they thought you were wrong.

Glenn Seaborg: That's right. I think my close colleague Albert Ghiorso perhaps has also fulfilled that function, in our years of collaboration that began in 1942 at the wartime Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago. So it will be nearly 50 years. We're now observing the 50th anniversary of the discovery of the first transuranium elements. We had, in 1990, a symposium at the Washington meeting of the American Chemical Society in August, and we're having a symposium at the Welch Conference in Houston, Texas in October. Then we'll have an observance here on the Berkeley campus on the exact date when the first definite chemical identification of plutonium was made, which was February 23, 1941. So on February 23, 1991 we will have an observance of that.

How did your children feel about your work?

Glenn Seaborg: I think my children suffered from the fact that by the time they came along their daddy was already a well-known scientist and they in general shied away from entering science as a career, but not entirely. One went on in biology and majored in biology. A daughter went on to get a Ph.D. in clinical psychology and is a practicing clinical psychologist, which is a part of science. Another majored in psychology. In general, however, they didn't embrace science, and I think they were influenced in that, unfortunately, by their dad's reputation, which carried into the school. I know my elder son, Peter, recounted for me scenes in the classroom where the teacher would read the roll, come down to Peter Seaborg. "Are you the son of Glenn Seaborg?" And then Peter would have to shrink back and say yes, and so he was behind the eight ball to begin with. So he went into history.

You are, as you mentioned, a full-blooded Swede, and you returned to Sweden to accept the Nobel Prize. Was there anything in particular that went through your mind other than the honor of having your work recognized?

Glenn Seaborg: It was an emotional experience.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. My mother, ever since I was a little boy, told me with pride that I was a descendant of a race that was responsible for these wonderful prizes in science, the Nobel Prizes. And of course that made an impression on me. However, I must say that I was never conducting my research with that in mind, but then when it turned out that my discoveries qualified me for the Nobel Prize, and I was chosen to receive this honor, and I went to Sweden with my wife, Helen, for the Nobel ceremony, it was of course an emotional experience. I met many of my relatives there, on both my mother's and father's side. My mother was born in Sweden and my father's parents were born in Sweden, and it was quite an experience. I responded to the toast that is given to the Nobel Prize winners -- and each one is supposed to respond individually -- I responded in Swedish, and you should have seen the King of Sweden sitting in front of me! He was just sitting there thinking, "Well, here's another ceremony. Here's another dinner." When I began speaking in Swedish, he just jumped up about a foot and turned around and looked at me, and I had his attention for the whole response, which I did in Swedish. Then the next day on the front pages of the Stockholm papers the headline said, of course in Swedish that I'll translate here, "Seaborg responded in the clinging -- klingende they call it -- the "ringing" I guess it would be better to say -- "the ringing dialect of Dalarna." Dalarna is the district in Sweden where my mother was born. And of course, she had communicated with me in her Swedish, the dialect of Dalarna, and I had no knowledge that I was speaking a very strong dialect. Of course that's the Swedish that I used when I responded to the toast. But of course, the Swedish people in the city hall, where this dinner took place following the Nobel ceremony, immediately detected this strong dialect.

Was your mother alive to see you go back to Sweden?

Glenn Seaborg: Yes. I didn't bring her along, I wish I had now, in retrospect; my mother and father were both alive. My children were very small when I received the Nobel Prize, at a rather tender age back in 1951, when my oldest child Peter was five years old and there were three below him, Lynne, David, and Stephen. Stephen was only about three months old. We left them with friends and under the care of a babysitter and it turned out all right. But it was a bit of a problem to leave four small children like that, their mother to leave them for several weeks at that time in their lifetime.

You have pictures on your wall with presidents, other politicians, with famous people of all walks of life, but you were calling my attention to one in particular here a moment ago.

Glenn Seaborg: I have a picture with Ann-Margaret. We were chosen the co-recipients of the Great Swedish Heritage Award of the Swedish Council of America in 1984. I also have a picture with Shirley Temple. She was the chairman of the Commonwealth Club of California where I was a speaker. I also have a picture with Jinx Falkenburg, who you may not remember -- that was about 30 years ago. She was a tennis star who went into television with her husband, Tex McCrary. This was all in the line of duty of course. I have an interesting story to tell about the picture with Ann-Margaret. I brought that home to my wife, Helen, an extra copy, and I said, "would you go out and get this framed so we can have this at home?" Weeks passed -- one week passed with no picture frame, two weeks, three weeks and so forth. I finally said, "Helen, what has happened here? What happened to this picture of me and Ann-Margaret that you were going to take out and get framed?" She said, "Didn't you know, they quit framing pictures." So it hasn't been framed yet.

It sounds like Helen got the last word.

Glenn Seaborg: She did. She's got control. I don't know where that picture is now -- but as you say, one is here on the wall in my office.

In your own retreat it's safe.

Glenn Seaborg: In my own retreat it's safe. I have another office up at the Lawrence Hall of Science. I served as chairman of that science teaching facility and I have another wall of pictures up there, some of which are the same pictures that we have down here.

Well thank you for your time. We really appreciate it. You've been great.

Glenn Seaborg: Fine.

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