Isadore Perlman was an American chemist.
Perlman was born on April 12, 1915 in Milwaukee. He received a B.S. and a Ph.D. in Physiology from the University of California, Berkeley. It was during his time in college that Perlman first met fellow Manhattan Project scientist Glenn Seaborg. Perlman would go on to join Seaborg’s research group at Berkeley, which had recently discovered the element plutonium. At the time, Seaborg recorded in his journal, “He is an outstanding scientist with a thorough understanding of chemistry and will be a great help in overall direction of the work of the group.”
During World War II, Perlman helped develop plutonium extraction methods at Berkeley before going to work at the Chicago Met Lab. He would also work on reactor development at Oak Ridge and at Hanford.
After the war, Perlman returned to Berkeley where he taught chemistry and worked at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Together with Seaborg, Perlman published the first table of isotopes in 1948. For his work, Perlman would receive the Ernest O. Lawrence award from the Atomic Energy Commission in 1960. Perlman also went on to work at the Institute of Archeology at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where he researched the use of neutrons in archeological dating.
Perlman died on August 3, 1991, in Los Alamitos, California.