Glenn Seaborg: I can’t say that I ever really sat down and said, “Oh look, I have succeeded where alchemists have failed.” It just was everyday life. You’d come to the laboratory, you’d do your experiments, you’d record it, you’d make your interpretation, and I don’t think we ever stopped to think in those kind of terms. I know we didn’t explicitly think in terms of “Wow, what a discovery we’ve made and what an effect this will have on the world!” This was our research. This is what we were looking for. We’d found it. That’s great. We felt very happy about that, but we never stopped to congratulate ourselves and say what a wonderful thing this is. When we measured the fissionability of the other isotope of plutonium that we found after the first one — the one that we identified on February 23, when we produced large amounts, half a microgram of the daughter of the isotope 93-239, which is 94-239. 93-239 is the McMillan and Abelson isotope. When we produced 94-239 in large enough quantity to identify its alpha particle and measure its fissionability and found that it was fissionable with slow neutrons, just like uranium 235, we began to realize then that it had the potential to be the explosive ingredient for an atomic bomb. I should say that we were doing this as our own research. We kept it secret voluntarily and when we reported this to the people in Washington, this really became the basis for the plutonium part of the Manhattan Project, the atomic bomb project.