| Arthur C. Wahl | |
| Birth Name: | Arthur Charles Wahl |
| Birth Date: | September 8, 1917 |
| Birth Place: | Des Moines, Iowa |
| Death Place: | Santa Fe, New Mexico, U.S. |
| Field: | Chemistry |
| Work Institution: | Washington University in St. Louis |
| Alma Mater: | Iowa State University (B.S.) and University of California, Berkeley (Ph.D.) |
| Doctoral Advisor: | Glenn T. Seaborg |
| Known For: | First isolation of plutonium |
| Prizes: | ACS Award for Nuclear Chemistry (1966)[1] |
Arthur Charles Wahl (September 8, 1917 – March 6, 2006)[2] was an American chemist who, as a doctoral student of Glenn T. Seaborg at the University of California, Berkeley, first isolated plutonium (94) in February 1941[3] [4] shortly after the element neptunium (93) was discovered by McMillan and Abelson in 1940.[5]
Wahl was a researcher on the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos until 1946, when he joined Washington University in St. Louis. Beginning in 1952, he was the Henry V. Farr Professor of Radiochemistry; he received the American Chemical Society Award in Nuclear Chemistry in 1966 and retired in 1983.[6] He moved back to Los Alamos in 1991 and continued his scientific writing until 2005.
He died in 2006 of Parkinson's disease and pneumonia.[7]