Stan Thompson
Element Trainer

Stan Thompson

Stanley G. Thompson:

The man who delivered berkelium and californium (and won a Nobel Prize for Glenn Seaborg).

Stanley G. Thompson: A son of California worth remembering through the haze of time. There are few names on the periodic table of the elements as close to the hearts of loyal sons and daughters of California as the names for the elements berkelium and californium. The scientist who led the teams that discovered and named berkelium[1] and californium[2] was Stanley G. Thompson. He lived until he was 64 and had the misfortune to predecease most of his "transuranium" colleagues by decades. To be a real legend, it helps to walk the halls longer than anyone else. As we enter the golden anniversary celebration of berkelium and californium's synthesis and identification, it seems a good time to remember Stan Thompson. There are many reasons why Stan Thompson should be easy to remember: Thompson was an alumnus (Ph.D., 1948) and career nuclear chemist at the “Rad Lab” (later LBNL) from 1946 until his death in 1976. Thompson mentored 12 graduate students and produced 125 journal articles during his career. He won two Guggenheim Fellowships; one in 1955 to the Nobel Institute for Physics in Stockholm; the other in 1966 to the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen. In life, the American Chemical Society honored him with prestigious ACS Award in Nuclear Chemistry in 1965. After his death, The Stanley G. Thompson Memorial Symposium on Chemistry of the Actinides was held at the 173rd Meeting of the American Chemical Society. More to the point of this paper, Stanley G. Thompson was the UC scientist chiefly responsible for the process of purifying the fissile grade plutonium for the first atomic bomb exploded over Alamogordo, New Mexico (the "Trinity test") in July 16, 1945. The knowledge he acquired separating plutonium from the other newly synthesized isotopes and elements which accompanied its production led him to play the primary role in the identification of the so called "transuranium" elements which have been added to the periodic table of the elements as the actinide series. Thompson was not a rival of Glenn Seaborg, in fact, Seaborg was his friend from high school and Seaborg's papers were the source for much of the information that follows.  

Figure 1 Thompson (on right) before he was misplaced by time.

  Glenn T. Seaborg was a knowledgeable and authoritative source of information about Thompson’s scientific accomplishments. If ever there were a man who could comment on the meaning of the scientific career of Stan Thompson, it was Nobel Laureate and former Cal Chancellor Glenn T. Seaborg at his prime. Seaborg and Thompson were close friends from their 13^th year of life. They might as well have been brothers. Thompson and Seaborg were both members of the Class of 1929 at David Starr Jordon High School in Southern California. Thompson resigned himself to be a truck driver; Seaborg dreamed of a literary career. When they took the same Chemistry class together in their junior year of high school, Thompson was the superior student (although Seaborg went on to become class Valedictorian). The chemistry teacher encouraged Thompson to consider a career in chemistry and the support was welcome. Thompson's and Seaborg's friendship continued into college where they lived together with Thompson's grandmother and commuted together to UCLA as undergraduates. They had plenty of time to get to know one another as they matured. Both Thompson and Seaborg studied Chemistry at UCLA, both had jobs in the Chemistry Department, and both graduated in 1934. 

  Thompson and Seaborg moved to Northern California after graduation. Thompson went to work for Standard Oil in the Richmond refinery laboratory while Seaborg began his graduate work at Cal. Both embraced hard work. They also seem to have enjoyed the same kind of play: they explored California together on their breaks from work and school. During the Second World War, they worked together in Chicago at the Manhattan Project Met Lab C-1 to develop the chemical process to purify fissile grade plutonium on an industrial scale. After the war, both returned to the Berkeley “Rad Lab” to continue their work on the synthesis and identification of the new elements in the actinide (or transuranium) series.

  To demonstrate how close Seaborg and Thompson were, with the exception of two brief periods of less than six months each[3], from the age of thirteen to thirty-nine years old, Seaborg never resided farther from Thompson than a fifteen minute drive or a local telephone call. Professor Seaborg know Stan Thompson’s life and his work intimately.  It is a shame that Seaborg lacked the personal integrity to give Thompson full credit for Thompson's scientific accomplishments and Thompson's significant role in contributing to Seaborg's education and career.  Despite himself, Glenn Seaborg left some impressions of the significance of Thompson’s scientific accomplishments.

The scientific stature and accomplishments of Stanley G. Thompson. In 1978, Seaborg wrote of Thompson's work on the separation of plutonium for the Manhattan Project:

“His radiochemical research during World War II rivals in importance the isolation of radium by Pierre and Marie Curie . . .[4]."

As Professor Seaborg wrote these strong prose, he knew well the careers of Pierre and Marie Curie: The husband and wife team shared the Nobel Prize in physics in 1903 for isolating radium. Seaborg named element 96 after the Curies. According to his statement above, 1 Thompson = 2 Curies. Seaborg’s powerful and unequivocal comparison of Thompson’s work with that of the Curies' was a literary ratification of Thompson's membership in the very highest circle of scientists--Nobel Prize caliber scientists.  

Who better to make that judgment than the man who had accepted the Nobel Prize for the scientific accomplishments of Stan Thompson? The path to grabbing Thompson's prize began in Berkeley but changed within a matter of months to Chicago where Seaborg arrived at the Manhattan Project’s Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago in April of 1942. Owing to the work of Burris Cunningham and L. B. Werner[5], by August, Seaborg’s lab had isolated only one microgram of Pu²³⁹ (a million more samples that size and Seaborg and his colleagues  would have about 1/30^th of an ounce of plutonium). At least he finally had a visible quantity of Pu²³⁹ to show the Army Generals. Still, it was not a very large quantity to use to design a chemical process that had to work on an industrial scale to safely produce Pu²³⁹ in "lots" of pounds per day (day after day). By then, Seaborg was on notice that within ten months, the DuPont Corporation needed a final decision from him on a scalable chemical separation process. The creation of this process was the reason for the existence of Seaborg’s lab. Once a chemical separation process was chosen, it would fix the design of both the pilot plant (at the Clinton Semi-Works in Oak Ridge Tennessee) and the huge facility for the first industrial manufacturing and purification of a man made element, fissile grade plutonium, in Hanford, Washington. Seaborg was an academic chemist, not an industrial chemist. He knew he needed a chemist with industrial experience who understood McMillan's work with plutonium and was bright enough and flexible enough to work with academic scientists. Seaborg knew exactly the man for the job: He called for his confidant and scientific colleague over the previous seventeen years, Stan Thompson. Thompson was exactly the “wet fingered” chemical genius who had the intellectual and laboratory abilities to refine plutonium on an industrial scale. By forming this formal professional partnership with Thompson, Glenn T. Seaborg took the wisest and biggest step on his “administrative route to fame[6].” The route ultimately led him to being awarded the Nobel Prize with Edwin McMillan in 1951.

Upon Thompson’s arrival in Chicago in late 1942, according to Seaborg,

  “Within three months, he [Thompson} conceived and tested experimentally the Bismuth Phosphate Process which was put into successful operation at Hanford, Washington within two years. This process represented the largest scale-up in history, a chemical and technological achievement of enormous proportions. In the course of this very successful development, about whose potential success much skepticism was expressed, he [Thompson] directed the training of hundreds of chemists[7].”

  When the atomic bomb was dropped at the Trinity Test in Alamogordo, New Mexico in 1945, it was filled with the plutonium refined by the chemical process developed by Stanley G. Thompson in the C-1 Met Lab of Glenn T. Seaborg. Thompson and Seaborg were only thirty-three years old. There was more to come as soon as Thompson returned from the Hanford Engineering Works to Chicago. Again, according to Seaborg,  

“ . . .his [Thompson’s] leadership in the discovery of five transuranium elements must rank as among the leading chemical accomplishments of his time[8].”  

Figure 2  Elements attributed to Thompson's leadership by Seaborg outlined in green.

  Immediately upon Thompson’s return to the Met Lab, the pressing scientific issue was differentiating element 95 (later, americium) from element 96 (later, curium). Seaborg stated, “The key to their final separation, and the technique which made feasible the separation and identification of these and subsequent transuranium elements, was the so-called ion exchange technique.[9]  It was a pressing issue because Seaborg had rushed a papers to publication during the War that claimed to have discovered elements 95 and 96 only to discover that his published results were not replicable, even his his own lab! Thompson went to work, isolating and describing the chemical and physical characteristics by in his doctoral disseration (in other words, "discovering" americium and curium). 

In the award of Seaborg's half of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1951, specifically cited as examples of the highest standard of scientific accomplishment were,  “methods were developed for its [Pu²³⁹] production on a large scale” and the “refined ultra-microchemical experimental technique[10]” for identifying the four additional transuranium elements (elements 95, 96, 97, 98) beyond plutonium (element 94).  The ion exchange adsorption-elution method, “conditioned by the war,” and the methods for producing Pu²³⁹ on a large scale belonged without a doubt to the genius of Stan Thompson[11].  

  Seaborg’s allusion to the Curies requires us to note that Marie Curie won a second Nobel Prize in 1911 for describing the chemical properties of radium. Again from Seaborg's (sparse but) unequivocal prose in praise of Thompson (in his eulogy for Thompson), Seaborg identifies Thompson’s scientific accomplishments in the chemical identification of the new actinide elements as demonstrating Thompson was a scientist of Nobel Prize caliber. Giving professor Seaborg the benefit of the doubt, his comparison of Thompson to the Curies was a symbolic acknowledgement; a literary gesture to posthumously share the 1951 Nobel Prize with Thompson. What else could it have been? It is interesting that Thompson's image is included in the Nobel Laureate section of the LBNL Image Archives standing together with Seaborg. Thompson’s achievements were more than worthy of Seaborg’s literary generosity. In addition to his work with Pu²³⁹ ,Am and Cm (as if anything additional were required), Stanley G. Thompson definitively described the chemical properties for at least five more [12] [13] [14] new actinide elements.

Fiat Lux Aurum. Upon the death of his boyhood friend, Seaborg collected Thompson's professional journal articles ("reprints" in those days). He compiled a table-of-contents and wrote a foreword, similar to the tribute, "A Chemist's Chemist." He personally paid for at least two sets of these papers to be bound and then donated them to the University of California Bancroft Library[15].  Again, giving him the benefit of the doubt, Seaborg must have sufferred from considerable guilt at Thompson's death. It was Thompson who had gone to Hanford to supervise the purification of the first plutonium, it wasn't Seaborg. Seaborg seems to have resolved his guilt by trying to remove Thompson as a significant member of the transuranium team. The "journals" (really autobiographies) Seaborg published after Thompson's death make Thompson out to be little more than a social friend with whom he played golf. By any objective or subjective measure, these "journals" are a disgrace to Seaborg although perhaps worthy of someone who would steal the Nobel Prize from his closest and most loyal friend.  

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