A few months ago I was scrolling through trivia riddles online, half paying attention, when one stopped me cold: “Over 92 Star Trek cyborgs on the open ocean?” The answer was a scientist’s name, and I genuinely couldn’t work it out. I’m not proud of how long it took me. The trick, it turns out, is in the pun — “sea” plus “Borg,” the assimilating cyborg species from Star Trek. The scientist who discovered 10 elements on the periodic table has a name that doubles as a riddle, and somehow I’d never heard of him before that night.
Who Is the Scientist Who Discovered 10 Elements?
His name is Glenn Seaborg, and by any reasonable measure he should be a household name. Born in 1912 in Ishpeming, a small mining town in Michigan, to Swedish-speaking parents, he showed no particular interest in science as a child. The family moved to Los Angeles when he was 10, and it wasn’t until high school that a chemistry class caught his attention enough to redirect the rest of his life. He earned his undergraduate degree in chemistry from UCLA in 1934 and a PhD from UC Berkeley in 1937, and stayed on at Berkeley as an instructor.
The Discovery That Changed the Periodic Table
In 1940, Seaborg’s Berkeley colleague Edwin McMillan discovered element 93, neptunium, the first element ever found heavier than uranium. McMillan then left the project to work on radar research for the war effort, and Seaborg — who had helped refine the technique used to isolate it — asked for permission to keep going. In February 1941, using Berkeley’s 60-inch cyclotron, Seaborg and his team bombarded uranium and produced a new element entirely: element 94, plutonium.
Plutonium would go on to become one of the two paths to a functioning atomic bomb. Seaborg spent the years from 1942 to 1946 on leave from Berkeley, leading the plutonium chemistry work for the Manhattan Project at the University of Chicago, devising the actual chemical process used to separate and concentrate plutonium at industrial scale for the Hanford production site.
Nine More Elements, and a Complete Rewrite of the Periodic Table
Most scientists spend a career hoping to discover one thing worth remembering. Seaborg wasn’t finished after plutonium. Over the following two decades, he and his research groups identified 9 more transuranium elements — americium, curium, berkelium, californium, einsteinium, fermium, mendelevium, nobelium, and element 106. That’s a total of 10 elements bearing his name on the discovery record, a number no other person in history has matched.
To make room for all of them, Seaborg proposed something genuinely bold: a full restructuring of the periodic table itself, adding a new row — the actinide series — beneath the existing layout. It was, by most accounts, the most significant revision to the table’s structure since Dmitri Mendeleev first arranged it in 1869. I keep thinking about this from the angle of someone who’s had to refactor a legacy codebase that nobody wanted to touch: the original design worked fine for decades, right up until it didn’t, and somebody had to be the one willing to restructure the whole thing rather than duct-tape one more exception onto it.
The Element Named After a Living Man
In 1951, Seaborg shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with McMillan for their work on the transuranium elements. But the detail that actually stopped me mid-scroll that night was element 106: seaborgium, officially named in his honor in 1997 — while Seaborg was still alive to see it. Naming an element after a living scientist is exceptionally rare; it typically only happens posthumously, or not at all. He reportedly said that this recognition would outlast even the Nobel Prize, since it would be sitting on chemistry classroom walls “even after they’ve forgotten who Napoleon was.”
There’s something almost uncomfortable about being told your own name will outlive Napoleon’s. Most of us are lucky if our name survives the next reorg.
A Second Career Nobody Expects From a Chemist
Seaborg didn’t retreat into a lab for the rest of his life. He served as chancellor of UC Berkeley from 1958 to 1961, and was then appointed chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, a role he held for a full decade under three different presidents — Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. In that position, he helped negotiate the treaty that banned atmospheric nuclear weapons testing, using the same scientific understanding that had once helped build the bomb to help limit its worst consequences.
According to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s biography of Seaborg, he also holds the record for the longest entry in Who’s Who in America — a small, strange footnote to a career built almost entirely out of things too large to summarize in one line.
Why This Name Never Made It Into the Family Dinner Conversation
I mentioned Seaborg to my kids over dinner not long after I first read about him, expecting at least a flicker of recognition. Nothing. Everyone in the house could name Einstein, most could name Curie, nobody had heard of the man with an element named after him while he was still walking around to enjoy it. I don’t think this is really a mystery — Einstein gave us a strange, poetic idea anyone can half-understand at a dinner table. Seaborg gave us plutonium, a restructured periodic table, and a decade of arms control policy, which is enormously important and almost impossible to compress into a sentence a 10-year-old finds interesting.
Some of the most consequential work in science just doesn’t come with a story simple enough to survive.
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Seaborg’s discoveries answer a question our earlier pieces left hanging. Enrico Fermi thought he’d created a transuranium element back in 1934, a claim Ida Noddack correctly challenged years before anyone believed her. It would take Seaborg and his colleagues, starting in 1940, to actually get there for real — and to keep going nine more times after that.