Glenn Seaborg essays

Glenn Seaborg essays There are many great chemists in this world; one of the greatest is Glenn T. Seaborg. Before he reached the age of 40, he won the Nobel Prize, he discovered radioisotopes that are used to treat millions of cancer patients, he founded the element that makes atomic bombs explode, and many people sought out his advice. Seaborg also holds the Guinness Book of World Records for the longest biography in Who's Who in America. There is no doubt that Seaborg was a brilliant man, and will never be forgotten. Seaborg was born on April 19, 1912 in Ishpeming, Michigan. Ishpeming is a small iron-mining town in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Seaborg was of total Swedish decent. His mother was Selma Olivia Erickson, his father Herman Theodore Seaborg. Seeing as how his parents were Swedish immigrants Glenn learned to speak Swedish before he learned English. When Glenn was ten years old his family decided to sell all of their belongings. They bought one-way tickets to California, in hopes of providing a better life for Glenn and his younger sister Jeanette. Seaborg then attended Watts high school, in the suburbs of Los Angeles. The school was racially and ethnically diverse. This helped Seaborg in his later years to be able to interact well with many different people. It was in Seaborgs junior year that he was introduced to chemistry, and found his lifelong love. The man to introduce him to this was his science teacher Dwight Logan Reid. Seaborg worked his way through college. He was able to pay his undergraduate tuition at UCLA by working as a stevedore, a farm laborer, and an apprentice Linotype operator for the Los Angeles Herald. He was elected Phi Beta Kappa in his junior year of college and was graduated in 1934. Seaborg transferred to the University of California-Berkeley for his graduate studies. In 1937 Seaborg received his Ph.D. in chemistry, but it was a year earlier that his career as a nuclear chemist actually begun....