If you were a young chemist and you created a dream career list of accomplishments and achievements, it would probably say Expand the periodic table, advise the president, have an element named after you and win the Nobel Prize. Glen Seaborg, a chemistry and physics mastermind did all of that in his lifetime from when he was born in 1912 to when he passed away in 1999. Seaborg spent most of his life in California, studying chemistry due to a strong passion and desire to improve our understanding of it, earning a doctorate in Chemistry from the University of Berkeley and joining the faculty when he was just 27 years old.

During the time in which he was alive, there were substantial changes, discoveries and triumphs in science and the rest of the world. The world went to war and there was a need for a new powerful weapon that would enable a victor to emerge and to bring an end to all the fighting. This, the introduction of antibiotics and the prevalence of previously uncommon diseases such as HIV caused science to become ever-important, with many aspects of society relying and benefiting from it. There was also a large amount of new scientific knowledge, which enabled a greater understanding of the universe and allowed previously unanswered questions to be answered such as the fact that nuclear fission is possible. New scientific techniques became available, providing the foundations and capabilities for even more new discoveries to be made such as that of antibiotics and contraceptive drugs.

Seaborg worked in a wide variety of different scientific areas, with the core of his life work centring on synthesising and studying elements. Seaborg made the last major change to the periodic table when he realised that many of the heavier elements were on the incorrect position. Instead, based on their expected properties, elements heavier than 89 should have been located in what we now call the actinoid series, under the rare earth elements. Seaborg and his colleagues also discovered, or what I Prefer, created ten transuraniam elements, and a large amount of isotopes used frequently in medicine, industry and nuclear power. Seaborg was able to synthesize 9 elements before they were ever found in nature because they occur so rarely in very small amounts. In case you didn’t know, you can create a new element by adding or removing protons from an existing element’s nucleus, turning it into something new. Although Seaborg’s lab was not the first to do this, he perfected the technique using particle accelerators, nuclear reactors and a large amount of energy. Seaborg contributed to the discovery of more than 100 atomic isotopes and ten elements including americium, californium, fermium and plutonium. The most significant isotope he discovered was plutonium-239 because of the fact that it, alongside