Glenn Theodore Seaborg was an American chemist whose involvement in the synthesis, discovery and investigation of ten transuranium elements earned him a share of the 1951 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Glenn Theodore Seaborg was born in Ishpeming, Michigan, on April 19, 1912. He entered the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1929, and received the degree of Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1937. He stayed on at Berkeley as the personal laboratory assistant of Gilbert N. Lewis from 1937 to 1939. He also collaborated at Berkeley with physicist Jack Livingood to isolate a number of radioactive isotopes, including iodine-131, which later saved his mother’s life and is now used for the diagnosis and treatment of thyroid disorders. At Berkeley he was, successively, research associate, instructor, and assistant professor (1937–45), becoming professor of chemistry in 1946. He served as Berkeley’s chancellor from 1958 to 1961. He received the National Medal Of Science in 1991.