When the late
Glenn Seaborg took the night train from Los Angeles to Oakland
and then arrived in Berkeley in August 1934, he ate breakfast at
a diner near campus where they gave him his change in silver
dollars.
"Almost a sign of
how magical this place was," Seaborg wrote about Berkeley and
his new silver dollars. "Because for me Berkeley was a
wonderland. And it was a wonderful time in the field of nuclear
science."
It was a
wonderland of top-notch scientists, instructors, atom-smashers,
linear accelerators and almost unlimited scientific
possibilities. The legendary chemist G. N. Lewis assembled his
staff and did not suffer fools gladly at his afternoon seminars.
The Radiation Laboratory on campus was filled to overflowing
with the apparatus of discovery, and Ernest Lawrence had his
27-inch cyclotron.
Seaborg's
autobiography, "Adventures in the Atomic Age: From Watts to
Washington" ($25 Farra, Straus and Giroux), written with the
help of his son, free-lance writer Eric Seaborg, was the topic
of discussion last week at the UC Berkeley Faculty Club.
Eric Seaborg was
on campus to talk about the book and his father's extraordinary
life.
Glenn Seaborg and
colleague Edwin McMillan jointly won the Nobel Prize in
chemistry in 1951 for their 1941 discovery of the element
plutonium, as well as other work.
Seaborg and
others at Berkeley before and after WWII used the university's
cyclotrons, scientific daring and hard work to enlarge the
periodic table of the elements and expand our universe.
One of the
elements discovered at Berkeley, element 106, was named
Seaborgium in his honor in 1997.
Seaborg
collaborated with Jack Livingood and others to discover and
research radioactive iodine isotopes that are used in the
nuclear medicine departments in today's hospitals. He also
served as chancellor of the Berkeley campus from 1958 through
1960 and was chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission for 10
years from 1961 to 1971.
During the
Kennedy administration, he helped draft the Limited Test Ban
Treaty with the Soviet Union, which banned nuclear weapons tests
above ground. He was a tireless arms-control advocate, and an
adviser to nine U.S. presidents.
In the early
1980s, Seaborg was a guiding force for the "A Nation at Risk,"
report on America's crisis in education. As an advocate of
civilian nuclear power, Seaborg's comments about its efficiency
and safety seem prescient in light of the current energy crisis
in California.
The book reminds
throughout that Seaborg had a front-row seat to events and
people of the 20th [century] that others only read about later.
Of his time in Chicago during WWII working on the Manhattan
Project to develop a nuclear bomb, Seaborg writes "We were
fighting for survival, pure and simple, and element 94
(Plutonium) might be the one area where we had an edge. We'd
kept our discovery secret and the Germans did not have a
cyclotron powerful enough to make it."
During his tenure
at the AEC he got to know presidents, and writers about the
annual dinner of black-eyed peas and southern cooking at
President Johnson's Texas ranch, helicopter flight over the
Nevada Test Site with President Kennedy and strained meetings
with President Nixon.
During his time
as chancellor of UC Berkeley, Seaborg says "I met the leading
lights in very field, as well as visiting lecturers and
dignitaries ranging from the English writer C. P. Snow to Queen
Frederika of the Netherlands."
In a lighter
moment, Seaborg recalls Clark Kerr's quip that the three main
problems of running a campus are "athletics for the alumni,
parking for the faculty and sex for the students."
At one point in
the book, Seaborg recalls President Kennedy's White House dinner
for Noble laureates, "I think that this is the most
extraordinary collection of talent that has ever been gathered
together at the White House . . ." Kennedy told the assembled.
We all puffed up our chests proudly," Seaborg recalls. But then
Kennedy added: "With the possible exception of when Thomas
Jefferson dined alone."
Eric Seaborg said
his father was a lucky man and a hard worker.
"He said he was
always surrounded by people who were smarter than he was," Eric
said. "He found that he could keep up with them by working
hard."
"I have led a
fortunate life," Glenn Seaborg writes in his autobiography.
"I was given a
chance through an excellent system of public education and I did
my best to make the most of my opportunities."
__________
Deaton, J. R.
"Seaborg's Legendary Life, In Print." The Berkeley Voice.
(12 October 2001), pp. 1 & 8.
