While I was in graduate school at UC Berkeley, it turned that my lab in Gilman Hall was the Dr. Seaborg’s former lab space. If that name is not immediately obvious to you, then here are a few things he did:

• Co-discoverer of ten elements on the periodic table, including plutonium.
• You know those extra two rows at the bottom of the periodic table? That was pretty much his idea.
• He is an inventor on the only two patents ever issued for chemical elements.
• One of those elements, Americium, is probably in your house right now if you have a smoke detector.
• He and Edwin McMillan shared the 1951 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and the lab in Gilman Hall is now a National Historic Landmark.
• He successfully transmuted bismuth into gold.
• An anagram for Seaborg is “Go Bears!”

That lab (307 Gilman) is now part of the Newman group. While I was there, occasionally we’d get a visit from Dr. Seaborg. On this particular day in March 1998, he visited with a PBS documentary crew to take some film of the lab. We got to say hello and talk a bit about our research. We also got this photo. Shown here are Jeremy Meyers, Rob Darling, Glenn Seaborg, and myself in front of 303 Gilman.