Nobel Prize Recipient. Glenn T. Seaborg, an American chemist, received much recognition after being awarded the 1951 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, sharing the award jointly with another American chemist, Edwin Mattison McMillan. According to the Nobel Prize committee, the two men were given the coveted award "for their discoveries in the chemistry of the transuranium elements." Since 1946, he received 24 nominations for the Nobel candidacy. After McMillan's initial contributions of the element with the atomic number of 93, he succeeded in 1940 in creating an element with an atomic number of 94, which was named plutonium. He was co-discoverer of all further transuranium elements through element 102, which were heavier elements than uranium. This new substance became significant for both nuclear weapons and nuclear energy. Born "Glen" Theodore Seaborg into a Swedish family, his family relocated from Michigan to California when he was 10 years old. He became interested in chemistry in the eleventh grade. After graduating valedictorian in his high school class, he entered in 1929 the University of California at Los Angeles, graduating in 1933. He worked in the Firestone laboratory while in school. In 1937 he earned a Ph.D. degree in Chemistry from the University of California at Berkeley with the doctoral thesis on the "Interaction of Fast Neutrons with Lead." From 1937 to 1939 he was the personal laboratory assistant to the Dean of the College of Chemistry at University of California, Dr. Gilbert Newton Lewis, and the two men published three papers on the subject of acid and base. During this time, he helped in isolating Iodine-131, which was used to diagnose thyroid malfunctioning and saved his own mother's life. Among the talented scientists he studied under, he had the opportunity to study under physicist Robert Oppenheimer. Successively, he was appointed in 1939 an instructor in chemistry, in 1941 Assistant Professor, and in 1945 Professor of Chemistry. He was given a leave of absence from the University of California from 1942 to 1946, during which period he headed the plutonium work of the Manhattan Project at the University of Chicago Metallurgical Laboratory. In 1946, he accepted the position of Director of nuclear chemical research at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, operated for the Atomic Energy Commission by the University of California; from 1954 to 1961, he was Associate Director of LRL. He advised ten United States Presidents, Harry S. Truman to Bill Clinton, on nuclear policy, pushing for a peaceful application. In 1961 he was appointed by President Kennedy to the Atomic Energy Commission, when he was designated Chairman of the Commission. From 1958 to 1961, he served as the second Chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley, and from 1959 to 1961, a member of the President's Science Advisory Committee. He was named one of the "Ten Outstanding Young Men in America" by the U.S. Junior Chamber of Commerce in 1947. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1948, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1972, and a Foreign Member of the Royal Society of London in 1985. Besides the Nobel Prize, he received the Perkins Medal in 1957, Enrico Fermi Award in 1959, Franklin Medal in 1963, and a host of other honors. He was the principal author of the Seaborg Report on academic science. In 1983, President Ronald Reagan appointed Seaborg to serve on the National Commission on Excellence in Education after he promoted more science in educational facilities. On the way from California to the Manhattan Project at the University of Chicago Metallurgical Laboratory in 1942, he and Helen Griggs jumped the train and eloped in Lincoln County, Nevada with a janitor and a clerk as witnesses. The couple had seven children, including a set of twins. He was very proud of his Swedish heritage was a member of various Swedish American organizations. In 1989 he suffered a stroke, dying six months later. Seaborgium (Sg), an artificially produced radioactive element in Group VIb #106 was named in his honor.