Prior to 1940 the periodic table ended at uranium, element number 92. Since that time, no scientist has had a greater effect on the periodic table than Glenn Seaborg.
In 1940 Seaborg, Edwin McMillan, and coworkers at the University of California, Berkeley, succeeded in isolating plutonium (Pu) as a product of the reaction between uranium and neutrons.
Between 1944 and 1958, Seaborg and his coworkers also identified various products of nuclear reactions as being the elements having atomic numbers 95 through 102. All these elements are radioactive and are not found in nature; they can be synthesized only via nuclear reactions.
For their efforts in identifying the elements beyond uranium (the transuranium elements), McMillan and Seaborg shared the 1951 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
From 1961 to 1971, Seaborg served as the chairman of the US Atomic Energy Commission (now the Department of Energy). In this position he had an important role in establishing international treaties to limit the testing of nuclear weapons.
Upon his return to Berkeley, he was part of the team that in 1974 first identified element number 106. In 1994, to honor Seaborg’s many contributions to the discovery of new elements, the American Chemical Society proposed that element number 106 be named seaborgium (Sg).
After several years of controversy about whether an element should be named after a living person, the IUPAC officially adopted the name in 1997. Seaborg became the first person to have an element named after him while he was alive.
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