Albert Ghiorso

Albert Ghiorso is an American nuclear scientist who helped discover several elements on the periodic table.

He graduated the University of California, Berkeley as an electrical engineer and was introduced Glenn T. Seaborg through a mutual friendship between their wives who also worked as secretaries at the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory. (Helen Griggs-Seaborg was Ernest Orlando Lawrence's secretary when she met Glenn Seaborg.)

This collaboration was most fruitful in the early days of the cyclotron's products being hard to identify and detect, and resulted in many elements being discovered at UC Berkeley. Glenn Seaborg became Chancellor at Berkeley that led him away from but not removed him from the lab (so is considered a co-discoverer along with Darleane Hoffmann and Greg Choppin, etc.)

Before the mishap about the discovery of element #118 in 2000, the element was proposed to be named Ghirosium by his colleagues.

He was born in Vallejo, California and grew up in Alameda, California and was well known for reaching radio frequency distances that outdid the military in the time while he was just a teenager.