NEWS RELEASE, 08/24/98


Nobel Laureate Glenn Seaborg honored as one of the "Top 75 Distinguished Contributors to the Chemical Enterprise"

By Greg Butera, Chemistry

BERKELEY -- Nobel Laureate Glenn T. Seaborg, professor emeritus of chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, has been named one of the "Top 75 Distinguished Contributors to the Chemical Enterprise" by Chemical & Engineering News, one of the major publications in the field.

His selection through a reader poll was marked at a ceremony yesterday (Sunday, August 23) celebrating the 75th anniversary of the journal. The event, held at the American Chemical Society national meeting in Boston, was hosted by ACS President Paul H. L. Walter and ACS Board chairman Joan E. Shields. The honorees were presented with a medal signifying their contribution to the chemical enterprise.

Nominations were open to any chemist - living or dead - anywhere in the world who conducted research in the last 75 years. Seventy-five names were chosen from 1,200 nominations. Seaborg received the third highest number of votes in the balloting process, surpassed only by Linus Pauling and Robert B.Woodward.

Seaborg's major contributions to the field include co-discovery of plutonium-238 and -239 (for which he won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1951); heading the Manhattan Project group that devised the chemical extraction processes used in its production; co-discovery of nine other transuranium elements, including element 106, seaborgium; and proposing a revision of the periodic table to reposition the actinide series relative to the other elements - a revision subsequently adopted.

Joining Seaborg in the list of the top 75 chemists were longtime UC Berkeley professors Melvin Calvin, Joel Hildebrand, Gilbert Newton Lewis and George Pimentel, and UC Berkeley alumni Henry Eyring, Dudley Herschbach, Henry Taube and Harold Urey.


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