Photo: Photographer: unknown Restored by: Bammesk, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Glenn Theodore Seaborg was born in Ishpeming in 1912. His father was a machinist, and the family spoke Swedish at home. When he was 10 they moved to the Los Angeles area.
He studied chemistry at UCLA and earned a Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley.
New elements
In 1941 Seaborg and colleagues at Berkeley identified plutonium. He went on to work on the Manhattan Project in Chicago.
He was involved in discovering or isolating plutonium and nine other elements, including americium, curium and californium. He also reorganized the periodic table by placing the actinide series in its own row.
He shared the 1951 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Edwin McMillan.
Public service
President Kennedy named him chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission in 1961, and he served into the Nixon administration. He also served as chancellor of UC Berkeley.
In 1997 element 106 was named seaborgium. It was the first element named for a living person. He died in 1999.
Ishpeming has remembered him with a historical marker near his birthplace.
