by Kit Chapman
The new elements would be:
101
mendelevium
102
nobelium
103
lawrencium
104
dubnium
105
joliotium
106
rutherfordium
107
bohrium
108
hahnium
109
meitnerium
The new names were a terrible mistake. ‘Joliotium’ had never been used for element 105 before. Niels Bohr’s first name had been hacked off element 107, which made it sound identical to boron, while ‘hahnium’ – an American suggestion – had been plastered on an element discovered indisputably by the Germans. Worse, ‘rutherfordium’ had previously been elements 103 and 104, but it was now sitting as element 106, its third place in the periodic table in 30 years. It soon emerged as the most controversial of IUPAC’s decisions. The US team had announced their choice of ‘seaborgium’ to the world and it had been supported by the Germans. Instead of arguing, IUPAC had, retroactively, decided to create a new rule: elements couldn’t be named after a living person. ‘Seaborgium’ was off the table. As The Economist noted at the time: ‘When it comes to giving things names, scientists have a habit of throwing logic out the window.’
The superheavy community didn’t take the decision lying down. The US National Academy of Sciences, IUPAC’s biggest supporter, allegedly threatened to pull funding if IUPAC didn’t back down on the names and allow ‘seaborgium’ to stand. ‘I don’t know what motivated IUPAC to do it,’ recalls chemist Paul Karol. Today a member of the IUPAC/IUPAP joint working party in charge of deciding when an element is discovered, at the time Karol was so incensed he wrote a White Paper attacking the working party’s choices. ‘I can understand them floating the idea of not naming elements after living scientists, but it had become an edict. They didn’t put it out for public review, so they immediately took heat. Seaborg was universally regarded as a giant in science, he’d made huge contributions. It was stupid.’
Karol felt the Americans were being portrayed unfairly as the bully boys of the element world while the Russians, who had somehow pressured IUPAC to rule out ‘seaborgium’, were getting what they wanted. Karol’s suspicions were correct – although the Russians’ motives were less political and more centred on the gentleman’s agreement they had with Berkeley. ‘It was agreed not to give names from living scientists by the people involved [in the discovery dispute, before they announced seaborgium],’ Andrey Popeko recalls. ‘It was agreed. From Dubna, we agreed to move kurchatovium. We appealed seaborgium because it was agreed! I have nothing against Glenn Seaborg. But. It. Was. Agreed.’4
IUPAC suddenly found itself under assault. Buckling under pressure from their largest backer, the working party quickly dropped the ‘no living scientist’ rule and met again, creating another list of names in 1995. This time, to appease the Russians and ease any soreness about Seaborg’s name appearing, they decided to add Georgy Flerov’s name to the table and mostly adopted the Russian names:
101
mendelevium
102
flerovium
103
lawrencium
104
dubnium
105
joliotium
106
seaborgium
107
nielsbohrium
108
hahnium
109
meitnerium
Bohr had its ‘niels’ back, and ‘rutherfordium’ – previously three different elements – had vanished entirely. Still, the international community screamed for blood. The Americans had ‘seaborgium’ but felt ‘all the rest of the USA-proposed names were being held hostage in return for retaining it’. Comments flew in from chemical societies around the world, with the Chinese and Japanese chemistry communities backing the Americans.
The chaos of the transfermium wars had reignited. In 1996 the Germans decided to hold a celebration for Peter Armbruster’s sixty-fifth birthday and invited the Americans and Russians along. Gottfried Münzenberg told me what happened next: ‘Armbruster had invited Seaborg, Ghiorso and Oganessian. They gave talks, and with Sigurd [Hofmann], we all came together in the evening to discuss the elements. We offered them wine. Ghiorso said: “We won’t drink wine.” So, we ordered sparkling water. Ghiorso said: “We don’t want sparkling water.” So, we brought them still water. Ghiorso said “We want water from the tap!” That was the kind of atmosphere … we were neutral, we had no interest in the names, our aim was to find a solution.’5
In 1997, bloodied and weary by two years of threats, protests, arguments and complaints, IUPAC met in Geneva and put together its final list:
101
mendelevium
102
nobelium
103
lawrencium
104
rutherfordium
105
dubnium
106
seaborgium
107
bohrium
108
hassium
109
meitnerium
The Germans still didn’t like losing the ‘niels’ from ‘bohrium’, but at least they were given the names they had suggested five years earlier. The Americans were mostly satisfied, although still insisted 105 should be called ‘hahnium’. The Russians lost any reference to Kurchatov and Flerov; they were also forced to accept the old Swedish name for element 102. But this time there was no protest. The names were settled.
The choice nearly claimed one victim. Driving along the Californian coast, one of Seaborg’s two living daughters heard the announcement of the new element names on the radio. She knew about the rule that elements couldn’t be named after a living person but had missed that the decision had been reversed. When she heard her dad’s name read out as an element, she came to the only natural conclusion: he was dead. Bursting into tears, she almost swerved off the road before she regained enough composure to pull over and call her (still alive) father.
The transfermium wars were, at last, over. In their span, they had seen three different elements named ‘rutherfordium’, three different names for element 102 and two different versions of ‘bohrium’. Finally, everyone could move on.
Because of the ‘no repeating element names’ rule, some of nuclear chemistry’s pioneers would also never have an element named after them: Frédéric Joliot-Curie and Otto Hahn’s names had been discarded forever. The latter was a poetic twist. Hahn had been remembered by the Nobel Committee when his partner Lise Meitner had been overlooked; now she would appear on the periodic table while he would be forgotten. Chemistry has an odd habit of reaching equilibrium.
For Glenn Seaborg, the story was different: ‘seaborgium’ was confirmed. It was the ultimate honour and, as his colleagues were quick to point out, made him the only person to whom you could address a letter using only chemical elements:
Seaborgium,
Lawrencium Berkelium,
Californium,
Americium.
Despite being 86 years old, Seaborg kept a schedule that would have exhausted a man half his age. He was in the process of writing two books, was still bending the ear of US presidents and had been hammering the cause for science in education, trying to convince California’s governor to make learning a priority. In August 1998 Seaborg flew to Boston for the American Chemical Society’s fall meeting: the biggest chemistry event on the planet. Over the course of a few days, almost 18,000 chemists descended on the city, picking it clean of hotel rooms, conference halls and those little lanyards to hold a name badge. Its delegates represented every discipline: materials science, agrochemicals, organic and inorganic chemistry, analytics, geochemistry, toxicology, medicinal chemistry and more.
There, in front of his peers, Seaborg collected a lifetime achievement award – something not given before or since. The 150,000 me
mbers of the American Chemical Society had voted Seaborg the third greatest chemist of the past 75 years. The other two, Linus Pauling and Robert Burns Woodward, had died; in the eyes of his peers, that made Glenn Theodore Seaborg the greatest chemist alive.
Seaborg collected the award, gave a speech, then descended to walk the hall, signing the new periodic tables that bore his name. That night, as part of the routine he had started 60 years earlier, Seaborg decided to stretch his legs and walk up and down the hotel emergency stairs. There, alone, he suffered a stroke and collapsed. By the time help arrived, Seaborg was almost entirely paralysed. Six months later, on 25 February 1999, bedridden and suffering from arthritis so severe it made any movement agony, he chose to stop taking food and end his life.
With Seaborg, the era of the superheavy element giants passed into history. Of the original element hunters, only Al Ghiorso remained. But the race to the next elements had continued. Throughout the 1990s, Berkeley, GSI and the Dubna–Livermore teams had all continued to push boundaries a young Seaborg could barely have imagined.
On one of his last visits to his friend, Ghiorso even had to honour a $100 bet made decades earlier. It had been Glenn Seaborg’s dream to see the shores of the island of stability. Under Oganessian, the Dubna–Livermore team had discovered a single atom of element 114. It should have been so unstable that it wouldn’t even have met IUPAC’s definition of an element. Instead, it had a half-life of 30 seconds.
‘I wanted Glenn to know,’ Ghiorso would later recall in The Transuranium People. ‘I went to his bedside and told him. I thought I saw a gleam in his eye, but the next day, when I went to visit him, he didn’t remember seeing me. As a scientist, he died when he had that stroke.’
The Dubna sighting of element 114 wasn’t the only superheavy breakthrough of the 1990s. Even as the naming arguments raged, the hunt had continued – and both Dubna and GSI had been busy.
Notes
1 You’ll remember that ‘niels’ was added to distinguish the element from boron (which, in German, is Bor). There was another good reason too: Niels’s son Aage Bohr had won the Nobel Prize in 1975 – the first name settled any confusion about which Bohr they were talking about.
2 Cerium, europium, niobium, selenium, tellurium and vanadium are all named, directly or indirectly, after goddesses.
3 With apologies to Slash from Guns N’ Roses, who is also from Stoke and comes a close second.
4 I couldn’t confirm this agreement with the surviving members of the Berkeley team, but the emphasis here isn’t for show – even 25 years on, the emotions stirred are felt acutely.
5 Hofmann remembers it was Seaborg who demanded tap water, but you get the idea.
PART THREE
The End of Chemistry
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
After the Wall Came Down
Life in Russia in the early 1990s was tough. In August 1991, the same year the TWG’s first report emerged, there was a coup attempt to topple Mikhail Gorbachev. The Russian economy had gone into free fall; male life expectancy had been pegged back eight years.
In Dubna, Yuri Oganessian looked at his diminished staff, trying to work out what to do. Flerov, he conceded, would have known the answer; the old director always achieved his goals through sheer force of will. While the fortunes of other labs at JINR had ebbed and flowed, boomed and busted, Flerov had always found a way to keep the superheavy programme at the forefront of socialist science. But Flerov, the great master of the elements, was gone.
For JINR, the aftermath of the Soviet era had been devastating. The money vanished overnight, advanced research projects were frozen and the specialists who had gathered from across the world began to slip away to other jobs. Nobody blamed them. Life in the private sector was well paid and secure. Those who stayed weren’t being paid at all.
Oganessian worked hard to keep the team’s spirits up. On some nights, the laboratory staff, along with Oganessian’s family and friends, would gather at his home. There, his wife Irina – a violinist who had graduated from the Moscow Conservatory – would play solo recitals. Despite the shortages and worries, her music helped soothe troubles and let spirits soar. The Americans, coming from Livermore, appreciated how hard times were for their new collaborators. When they asked if there was anything their friends wanted brought from the US, the reply was always the same: seeds. Part of the laboratory’s grounds had been surrendered to the earth, claimed as a vegetable patch so the staff and their families could eat. JINR was on the brink of ruin, a hair’s breadth from joining the rusted hulks of the Russian Navy, or the broken and shattered statues of Marxist heroes left on the banks of the Moskva River.
Oganessian was used to solving the impossible. In the 1970s, when the U400 cyclotron – the successor to the decommissioned U300 – had been built, he’d had to come up with a way to construct a 2,100t magnet on site. The iron, delivered from the Krivoi Rog Metallurgical Works, had come in 15m (50ft) sheets. There were no workbenches large enough in Dubna to handle the strips of rolled metal, so Oganessian had arranged for a system of rails and pulleys, moving the tooling machine over the sheet instead of the other way around. The accelerator hall hadn’t been designed for something of U400’s size, and Oganessian had needed to call back to his love of architecture to make everything fit. When it didn’t, the team had simply smashed through the wall, jackhammering a mess of cables through solid concrete. ‘The Russians,’ one of the US chemists joked, ‘are masters of sufficiency.’
The most essential piece of equipment for any modern element hunter was a separator capable of stripping out noise and allowing them to detect the ever-lower cross sections. In 1989 Oganessian had overseen a new gas-filled device 1,000 times more sensitive than anything the Russians had used previously: their cross section limits for detecting new elements were now around 10 nanobarns (10-36 m2). The U400 cyclotron had been improved at the same time and could fire its ions with a beam intensity unmatched anywhere in the world.
With the help of Livermore, the Dubna team were slowing getting ready to go element hunting again. This time, they would use a new technique: hot fusion. This relied on the same principles as the earlier light-ion-induced reactions, but with a beam of the doubly magic, neutron-rich calcium-48. All previous calcium-48 experiments had failed because the technology just wasn’t advanced enough. But by the 1990s the collaboration was confident it could be used to push the known elements onto the fringes of the island of stability.
When Oganessian gathered his scientific and technical staff together, everyone believed it was the end. There was no use for superheavy elements, and people across Russia were queuing for bread. The driving forces of element discovery during the twentieth century – the nuclear bomb, the race to harness the power of the atom and eventually the jingoistic battles of national pride – had all vanished. Science for the sake of science doesn’t pay bills.
But Oganessian refused to surrender. ‘We could weep,’ he told the assembled scientists. ‘We could shed tears. We could find excuses for our own inactivity. Instead, we are going to seek a way out of this difficult situation. We will find new sources of financing and new ways of solving arising problems.’ Already he had written to foreign institutions interested in forging ties with Dubna and private sector companies eager to borrow the Russian accelerator. The new approach would guarantee funds and allow them to continue.
For the rest of the decade, the Russians balanced the need for capital with the pursuit of their dream. First, they explored and probed the regions around element 108 – hassium – to see why it was more stable than its neighbours. The answer seemed to be a smaller island of stability (rock of stability?) due to nuclear deformation – a perfect test to hone their equipment. Ken Hulet had retired, and the team from Livermore consisted of Ken Moody, Ron Lougheed, John Wild and Nancy Stoyer. Later, they brought in Nancy’s husband, physicist Mark Stoyer, as an extra body. ‘It took eight years to improve the apparatus, the beam intensity,’ Mark Stoyer recalls. ‘T
here was a lot that needed to be improved, and while we were doing that we could do a lot of experiments on 108.’ Together, the Dubna–Livermore collaboration discovered a host of new isotopes.
At first, the team focused its search on the next element in sequence, 110. But by 1998 the team had the equipment and beam to leapfrog even further into the unknown: calcium-48 fired into a plutonium-244 target. Despite Oganessian’s optimism, the team never really believed they would find a new element, Mark Stoyer says. ‘We were expecting … OK, we’ve set limits and improved the lowest cross section [we can detect something at], but we might not see something. We were just hoping to set the world’s lowest [cross section] limit.’ Calcium-48 was, however, an ideal hot fusion beam, with its two magic numbers creating wonderful, stable nuclei. With the combined experience of the Russians and Americans, it finally paid off: they produced the single atom of element 114, as Ghiorso had whispered to Seaborg on his deathbed. It wasn’t enough to claim the discovery of a new element – it could have been a random event, a ghost in the machine – but finally the element hunters had a glimpse of the element they had been trying to find for 30 years.
Sadly, the team did not discover the island of stability. While calcium-48 was neutron-rich, the team were only producing element 114 with 176 neutrons: still 8 shy of the magic 184 neutrons needed to hit the island. Even so, Oganessian wasn’t disheartened. ‘If there was no stability,’ he says, ‘[the element 114 atom] would have had a half-life of 10-19 seconds. The effect we saw was a decay we could measure in seconds, 19 orders of magnitude higher.’ The island was real yet remained tantalisingly just out of reach. The results were enough to convince the Dubna–Livermore team they had to continue.