The American chemist Glenn Theodore Seaborg (1912-1999) won the Nobel Prize for the discovery of transuranium elements and served as chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission.

Glenn T. Seaborg was born on April 19, 1912, in the iron-mining town of Ishpeming, Michigan to Swedish immigrants Herman Theodore Seaborg, a machinist, and Selma O. (Erickson). At his mother's urging, the family moved to the Los Angeles, California, area when he was ten, in an effort to locate better educational opportunities for the children. In 1929 he entered the University of California at Los Angeles, majored in chemistry, and then went on as a graduate student at University of California at Berkeley (1934-1937).

Berkeley was exciting for a budding scientist of the time. The chemistry department was led by a figure of world renown, Gilbert N. Lewis, while the physics department boasted the young Ernest O. Lawrence, who had invented the cyclotron. Seaborg...