Abelson, Philip Hauge (1913–2004) American physical chemist Abelson, who was born in Tacoma, was educated at Washington State College and at the University of California at Berkeley, where he obtained his PhD in 1939. Apart from the war years at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, he spent most of his career at the Carnegie Institution, Washington, serving as the director of the geophysics laboratory from 1953, and as president from 1971 to 1978. He subsequently became the editor of a number of scientific journals including the important periodical Science , which he edited from 1962 to 1985.

In 1940 he assisted Edwin McMillan in creating the first transuranic ...