Stan Thompson
Element Trainer

Stan Thompson

From Seaborg's Retrospective Journals

Thompson as portrayed by Glenn Seaborg's Autobiography

In a classic case of "the medium is the message," Glenn Seaborg revised his life in a series of books which contained convenient contextual  misrepresentations. He claimed the series of volumes were his "journals."  The word "journal" suggests a contemporaneous record of events. When the Webmaster studied college chemistry, the lab journals were expected to be written in ink contemporaneously with the experiment.  Were any editing done, the original text was to be neatly lined out so that the record of initial impressions in the lab was never lost. Seaborg did not follow this convention in his memoirs.  Yet, his lengthy series of government subsidized autobiographical "journals" include a considerable amount of information on the movies and sporting events he attended as well as the socializing he did with his friends.  That is, enough extraneous personal material was included to give the impression that the observations in each book were recorded contemporaneously with the events they describe. It is, at best, a writing style that is misleading and self-serving. 

Among other of Thompson's accomplishments, Seaborg failed to devote much (if any) space in his autobiographical "journals" to 

• Thompson's pre-war contributions to the work Seaborg did with Kennedy and Wahl which led to the "discovery" of plutonium

• Thompson's post-war definitive "discovery" of americium and curium

• Thompson's responsibilities in the creation of the "hot" lab at Berkeley.   

However, the Seaborg's social life with Stan and Alice Thompson is  documented very thoroughly. Seaborg also described off-site briefing sessions with Thompson as if they were golfing vacations. He made Thompson's progress reports about the building of the new hot lab sound like just drinking a beer with a pal on a Saturday afternoon. From reading the relevant text from Seaborg's "Journals" from 1939-1942 and 1946-1947, the reader may draw his or her own inferences about Seaborg's motives for minimizing Thompson's contribution's to Seaborg's career. 

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The Internet is a wonderful vanity press. It is a bully pulpit that costs the author of a website almost nothing. Therefore, it falls on the reader to exercise increased vigilence while browsing websites because the the layers of "editors" and "publishers" have been removed from the information transfer process and so that anybody can say most anything without regard for the facts or truth. This website is no exception. For that reason, I have tried to provide copies of enough of the original materials so that the reader can make his or her own interpretations of the source documents that led me to the conclusions expressed here. 

Last Edited 07/21/15 --Comments to Webmaster