Elements of the 1950's

LBL Building 4 LBL Building 5
We moved back to Berkeley. I'm not going to have time to cover the war years where we worked out the chemical processes for plutonium and discovered two more elements, americium and curium, 95 and 96. We moved back to Berkeley after the war, late 1945 and 1946, into building 4, which is still there. That's sort of the headquarters for the people working on the Advanced Light Source. Here's a picture taken at about that time when we moved back in 1946. Soon after that, Lawrence got the money for building 5, which is still there and where I moved in to have my office because we were still doing work which was at that time secret, so we had a guard there behind the fence. I was sitting at this table in November of 1951 having a brown bag lunch with my colleagues when the phone call came through from Stockholm via a reporter in New York that I had won the Nobel Prize in chemistry.

The four codiscoverers of berkelium (Bk, element 97) and californium (Cf, element 98) in Glenn T. Seaborg's office as part of LBL's 25th anniversary of the discovery. Left to right: Kenneth Street, Jr., Stanley G. Thompson, Glenn T. Seaborg, and Albert Ghiorso. Codiscoverers of einsteinium (Es, element 99, 1952) and fermium (Fm, element 100, 1953) at symposium commemorating the 25th anniversary of their discovery held at the LBL. Left to right (front row): Louise Smith, Sherman Fried, Gary Higgins. Left to right (back row): Albert Ghiorso, Rod Spence, GTS, Paul Fields and John Huizenga. The codiscoverers of mendelevium at the LBL, on the 25th anniversary of discovery. Left to right: Gregory R. Choppin, GTS, Bernard G. Harvey, and Albert Ghiorso.

Now I'm going to run through the next elements quickly. In 1949 and 1950, we synthesized and identified, and I loosely use the word discovered, elements 97 and 98. December of 1949 and January 1950. Ken Street, Stan Thompson, and Al Ghiorso and I, a picture taken on the 25th anniversary of the discovery, January 1975. Here are the discoverers of elements 99 and 100. It involved work by people at the Argonne National Laboratory and the Los Alamos National Laboratory and here. That discovery was in December 1952 for 99 and January 1953 for element 100, and here we are at the 25th anniversary of that discovery.

Mendelevium (Md) party at Larry Blake's: Nelson Garden, Al Ghiorso, Bernard Rossi, Earl Hyde and others at buffet table. The codiscoverers of nobelium (No, element 102) in the HILAC building, LBL in 1958:Albert Ghiorso, Torbjorn Sikkeland, and John R. Walton. Glenn T. Seaborg is absent.

Then we went on to the discovery of element 101 in March 1955, and here we are on the 25th anniversary of element 101. The team, Greg Choppin and Bernie Harvey, myself, and Al Ghiorso. Stan Thompson was also a member of that discovery team but he had died in 1976. This photograph was taken on the 25th anniversary in March of 1980. We celebrated that with a sort of a party at the restaurant, and I just wanted to show here the picture of Nelson Garden who did so much for the radiation protection of our group, and Bernie Rossi who was the operator of the cyclotron, as well as Al Ghiorso.

Here are the discoverers of element 102 in 1958, Ghiorso, Torbjorn Sikkeland, and John Walton. I'm a co-discoverer also, but I wasn't there. By that time I had been put up to be Chancellor and I wasn't in the laboratory when this picture was taken.

The codiscoverers of lawrencium (Lr, element 103), HILAC building, LBL, 1961:Torbjorn Sikkeland, Albert Ghiorso, Almon E. 'Bud' Larsh, Robert M. Latimer.

Now we come to 103. There we have Torbjorn Sikkeland, Ghiorso, and Almon Larsh and Robert Latimer. This was in 1961.