Gilman Goes to War
In 1942, the Berkeley campus became quite involved in the war effort of World War II. The top floor, or "attic," of Gilman Hall was fenced off for classified work in nuclear chemistry. Half of the rooms in the attic had small balconies that could be used as outdoor hoods, but the actual hoods in Gilman Hall were not equipped with fans. They operated only as chimneys, with a burner flame that produced a draft. For the war work, electrically powered fans were finally installed to vent the hoods.

Plutonium research in Gilman Hall, directed by Eastman and Latimer, was part of the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb. The majority of the workers on these projects were recent Berkeley Ph.D.s, including John W. Gofman, Robert E. Connick, and Leo Brewer.

In 1942, Glenn Seaborg left Berkeley to join the Manhattan Project in Chicago. He returned to Berkeley after the war and directed the university's nuclear chemistry research. He shared the 1951 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with McMillan for their discoveries in the chemistry of the transuranium elements.