Helen L. Seaborg

Who was Helen L. Seaborg?

Helen L. Seaborg was an American child welfare advocate and the wife of Nobel Prize chemist Glenn T. Seaborg.

Born March 2, 1917, in a Florence Crittenden home for unwed mothers in Sioux City, Iowa, she was adopted by George and Iva Griggs. After her father's death, Helen Griggs and her mother moved to the Santa Ana, California area.

While working a number of jobs, she earned an A.A. from Santa Ana College and a B.A. in English from the University of California at Berkeley in 1939.

Helen became the personal secretary to Ernest O. Lawrence, who was director of what is now the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics. While working part-time for Lawrence in 1938, she met Glenn T. Seaborg, a scientist who frequently used Lawrence's cyclotrons to create new chemical isotopes, including several with applications in nuclear medicine. Seaborg dictated a telegram to Helen that was to be sent to Physical Review. Prior to the US entry in World War II, Seaborg led a team that discovered plutonium. Seaborg was recruited for the Manhattan Project while he was dating Griggs. He proposed marriage. They were married in Nevada in 1942 on their way to work in the Chicago "Metallurgical Project" of the Manhattan Project. Helen worked as an administrative assistant to the scientists working in Chicago.