The Nuclear Bunch
Gibson, Latimer, and Lewis were all interested in nuclear chemistry, and Lewis strongly supported the hiring of E. O. Lawrence by the physics department in 1928. In 1933, Robert D. Fowler and Willard F. Libby were the first nuclear chemists added to the chemistry faculty. Libby had received his Ph.D. with Latimer in 1933; he built one of the first Geiger counters in this country and stayed on as a faculty member until leaving for war work in 1942. In 1960, Libby received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for carbon-14 dating.

The nuclear people often worked in a wooden building, called the Old Radiation Laboratory, built for early Lawrence cyclotrons, just north of Gilman Hall; or they worked in the old annex, which had been built for Lewis. The other nuclear faculty included Samuel Ruben, Joseph W. Kennedy, and Glenn T. Seaborg, all appointed in 1939. Ruben and M. D. Kamen, a physics student, first reported the preparation of carbon-14 in 1941. Their work on photosynthesis was halted by Ruben's untimely death in 1943.

Seaborg received his Ph.D. with Gibson in 1937 on the topic of neutron interactions and then worked with Lewis on generalized acids and bases for two years while pursuing his interest in nuclear chemistry. Seaborg, working with Kennedy, Edwin M. McMillan of the physics faculty, and Arthur C. Wahl, identified the first known isotope of plutonium in room 307 of Gilman Hall in February 1941. This discovery was followed by the preparation of a new fissile isotope of uranium (U-233) by Seaborg, J. W. Gofman, and R. W. Stoughton.