Chemistry Professor
University of California, Berkeley
(profile at the time of induction in 2000)
When she enrolled at Iowa State University in the 1940s, Dr. Darleane C. Hoffman planned to become a commercial artist. But the influence of an extraordinary female professor in a required chemistry course diverted her into a scientific career that would make her one of the leading experts on nuclear and radiochemistry of the heaviest elements.
In the 1950s, the personnel department at the Los Alamos National Laboratory told her "We don't hire women in that division." Undeterred, Dr. Hoffman went on to work at the Isotope and Nuclear Chemistry Division at Los Alamos for the next 30 years; she became the division leader before leaving to become professor of chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, and group leader of the Heavy Element Nuclear & Radiochemistry Group at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
In the 1970s, Dr. Hoffman discovered traces of primordial plutonium 244 in natural ores. Until then, the radioactive element had been thought to be only man-made. She is also a pioneer in the study of elements 104, 105, and 106. Her group recently reported the observation of evidence for the SuperHeavy Elements 114, 116, and 118. In 1991, she helped establish and became the first director of the Glenn T. Seaborg Institute for Transactium Science at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. She served in that position until 1996. She won the President's National Medal of Science in 1997 and the Priestly Medal (the highest honor conferred by the American Chemical Society) in 1999.
Dr. Hoffman believes it will be possible to learn the limits of nuclear stability through her studies of how heavy elements divide through spontaneous fission and decay. Her work is critical if we are to deal successfully, economically and rationally with the safe storage of radioactive waste and its isolation from the environment.
