Philip Abelson was born in Tacoma, Washington, on April 27, 1913. After graduating from Washington State College (now University) with a bachelor's degree in 1933 and a master's degree in 1935, he went to the University of California at Berkeley, where he worked under Ernest Orlando Lawrence (1901-1958) in the university' s Radiation Laboratory. He earned his doctorate in physics from Berkeley in 1939.

While still a graduate student, Abelson observed nuclear fission and identified about a dozen products of the reaction. However, by the time he fully understood the process that had occurred, Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner had already announced the discovery in Europe.

In 1940 Abelson collaborated with Edwin McMillan on the analysis of a substance with a half life of 2.3 minutes found among the fission products of uranium. Rejecting suggestions that this substance was just another radioactive isotope of an existing element, Abelson and McMillan were able to show that...