April 19, 1912 - Birth of Glenn T. Seaborg, the Nobel Prize winner who discovered 12 chemical elements

Glenn T. Seaborg, Premio Nobel en Química, nace el 19 de abril de 1912

Glenn Theodore Seaborg was born in Michigan on April 19, 1912 and died in California on February 25, 1999. Seaborg was a leading American atomic and nuclear physicist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1951 for his "discoveries in the chemistry of transuranium elements. He stands out, above all, for the discovery of ten chemical elements such as plutonium, amarium, curium, berkelium or californium among others, for the development of the concept of actinide element and for being the first to propose the actinide series, which fixed the current arrangement of the periodic table of elements.

He studied at the University of California and from 1939 he served as a professor of chemistry at the university and was an assistant professor in 1941 and a full professor in 1945.

Seaborg joined the Manhattan Project in 1941, when he was already a prestigious researcher at the University of California at Berkeley, where he received his doctorate in 1937. Between 1942 and 1946 he was in charge of nuclear physics and chemistry research related to the Manhattan Project at the University of Chicago Metallurgical Laboratory. He showed that it was possible to isolate large amounts of heavy elements, with the nucleus packed with a high volume of protons. A year later, he achieved enough of a new element, plutonium-239 (proton number), created from the transmutation of a uranium isotope, capable of being seen through a microscope.

Between 1961 and 1967 he was Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission and some time later he served as a professor at the University of California, Berkeley where he was deputy director of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory.

He was awarded the 1951 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, which he shared with the American physicist Edwin McMillan.

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