Nation: GLENN SEABORG: From Californium to the AEC

"I DISCOVER elements," Glenn Theodore Seaborg once told an interviewer. And he certainly does: in less than 20 years. Chemist Seaborg shared in the discovery of nine new elements, all of them in the heavy, transuranium field. In 1940, when he was just 28, Seaborg and Physicist Edwin McMillan identified plutonium, and with it, the key to the atomic bomb; in 1951 Seaborg and McMillan received the Nobel Prize for their discovery. Working in a University of California laboratory, Seaborg and his associates gradually extended the periodic table of elements, usually named...

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