by Kit Chapman
James Harris retired in 1988. A tireless advocate for scientists of colour, he also became a champion for access to education in underprivileged communities. A father of five, Harris died in 2000.
Ken Hulet retired for personal reasons shortly after the Dubna–Livermore collaboration began. He died in 2010.
Many of the element makers are still alive today. Matti Nurmia and Matti Leino continue to teach at the University of Jyväskylä in their native Finland, where Kari and Pirkko Eskola still reside.
GSI’s Peter Armbruster enjoys happy retirement in France.
Gottfried Münzenberg and Sigurd Hofmann are largely retired, but both regularly attend superheavy element conferences.
Dawn Shaughnessy is still at Livermore, a dedicated advocate for both women in science and galaxies far, far away. In 2018 she was made a fellow of the American Chemical Society. Nancy and Mark Stoyer are both still there too, living proof that chemists and physicists can get along.
James Roberto and Kevin Smith have retired from Oak Ridge, but the rest of the team keep pulling small miracles from their atomic forge.
All of the Russian and Japanese teams are still involved in the hunt for new elements. They search. They hope. They dream.
Victor Ninov, the scientist alleged to have faked data for the discovery of element 118, never returned to the superheavy community and is no longer in contact with his former friends. He lives in California.
Several personalities who touched the superheavy world achieved their greatest successes away from element discovery. Three of them won the Nobel Prize for their work.
Emilio Segrè used the Berkeley bevatron to discover the antiproton – the proton’s antimatter counterpart. He died in 1989.
Luis Alvarez won the prize for his contributions to elementary particle physics, and is widely regarded as one of the greatest scientists of the modern age. In later life, he developed the Alvarez hypothesis: that the dinosaurs were wiped out as the result of an asteroid impact. He died in 1988.
Finally, Melvin Calvin turned his focus to plant biology. Applying his chemical knowledge to photosynthesis, he mapped out the Calvin cycle – the reactions essential to life on Earth. He died in 1997.
The scientists who paved the way for the element makers have never been forgotten either.
Marie-Anne Paulze Lavoisier survived the French Revolution and went on to marry the British physicist Count Rumford. She kept her first husband’s last name as a mark of her devotion to him until her death in 1836.
Ernest Rutherford, largely regarded as one of the greatest scientists of all time, died in 1937. He is interred in Westminster Abbey.
Frederick Soddy, the co-discoverer of transmutation with Rutherford, had a less dignified end. Although he would go on to win the Nobel Prize for his work on isotopes, in the 1920s he developed controversial ideas about economics and anti-Semitic views. He died in 1956.
James Chadwick was knighted for his work on the Manhattan Project, and later became master of Gonville and Caius College at the University of Cambridge. He died in 1974.
Otto Hahn became one of the most influential figures in the newly formed West Germany. He is seen by many as the model of scientific integrity. Haunted that his discovery of atomic fission had caused nuclear weapons, he became a major advocate for nuclear disarmament.
Lise Meitner was named Woman of the Year by the US National Press Club in 1946 and is arguably the most influential woman scientist since Marie Curie. She remained lifelong friends with Hahn. Both died in 1968.
Laura Fermi went on to write a biography of her husband’s work. Although countless volumes have since been written about ‘The Pope’, hers remains the most intimate and best. She died in 1977, survived by their two children.
Helen Seaborg went on to have seven children with Glenn and is remembered today as a child welfare advocate. She spent so much time walking with her husband that she developed hiking routes across California. Today, you can follow in the Seaborgs’ footsteps as part of the American Discovery Trail. She died in 2006.
Kenneth Bainbridge returned to Harvard University after the Manhattan Project and later became head of the university’s physics department. His experiences with nuclear power convinced him to dedicate the rest of his life to nuclear disarmament. He died in 1996, aged 91.
Maria Goeppert Mayer died in 1972. Her nuclear shell structure model is still the key to much of current superheavy element research. The Goeppert Mayer crater on Venus is named in her honour.
Jimmy Robinson’s daughter, Becky Miller, works to support veterans of the US atomic programme in Florida. Through her, the Robinson contribution to science lives on: Miller’s daughter majored in chemistry.
Ken Gregorich retired from Berkeley in 2018, but Jacklyn Gates continues work at the cyclotron.
Walter Loveland stays involved in the community at Oregon State.
Paul Karol lectures at Carnegie Mellon University and is now a key member of the IUPAC/IUPAP joint working party that decides when an element has been discovered.
David Hinde and Nanda Dasgupta are pushing boundaries at ANU (and yes – they would still like you to fill their fridge with beer if you pop by).
Heinz Gäggeler and Robert Eichler both continue their research in Switzerland.
Darleane Hoffman, now in her nineties, lives in California. She is admired among the chemistry community to the point of reverence. In 2017 Chemical & Engineering News voted her one of 13 women chemists who should have won the Nobel Prize. She never found an element, but given the fondness with which her colleagues remember her, perhaps she found something more.
The names mentioned are only a snapshot of 70 years of discovery. Countless researchers, theoreticians, experimentalists, technicians, professors and students from around the world have contributed days, months and years of research into the superheavy elements. New players are also emerging from China and France, eager to claim an element of their own. Their contributions are not forgotten.
In the next five years, the superheavy community’s broad goals are simple. First, they hope to discover elements 119 and 120. This is a straight race between Dubna and RIKEN, and nobody knows who will come out on top. During my travels I was told several possible names for the new elements by their potential discoverers; these will remain a secret.
The next aim is to edge ever closer to the island of stability; if we can reach it, the superheavy elements will stop being fleeting matter only glimpsed in a laboratory and can become an essential part of our world. Nobody really knows how important this will be.
Last, the element makers want to mass-produce the superheavy elements. This will allow for bigger, bolder chemistry experiments not so dependent on time. With them, we will learn more about our world. Perhaps oganesson is the end of where the periodic table still matters; perhaps it isn’t. We won’t know until we look.
There are dangers. The superheavy community is ageing, with not enough young blood coming through to continue the work. Funding is slipping away. And vital set-ups, such as Oak Ridge’s HFIR, are under threat – the US government has, at present, no plan to replace it as it nears the end of its lifespan. Everyone believes we will have two new elements in the next five years; few are willing to be so bold about the five after that.
Back to the Royal Society. I glance over at Oganessian. Now in his late eighties, he is still the leading name in superheavy elements – the rock star physicist, the man who, more than any other, completed the seventh row of the periodic table. Although Nobel Prize deliberations are supposed to be secret, I know he has been nominated multiple times. His namesake may stay for only the blink of an eye, but his legacy will last forever.
At the start of this journey, I said that most scientists often view the final 26 elements as irrelevant. Some even question whether the superheavies, single atoms so unstable they can vanish in less than a second, are ‘real’ elements at all. They have no use. You can’t hold a superheavy element in your hand. Chances are, as you read
this, many of these elements do not exist anywhere in the universe. They are chemical unicorns.
But they are unicorns we know exist. Something, at the point where science meets the soul, drives people to explore the unknown. It’s how we find the answers to questions we haven’t thought of yet. The search for superheavy elements is the perfect example of this thirst for knowledge.
I can’t help but feel optimistic. The heavy element community weathered the greatest storms of the twentieth century and kept on building the jigsaw of our world. Finally united, it has never been stronger.
This doesn’t feel like the end of the superheavy story.
It feels like the start.
Notes
1 Oganessian was being awarded an honorary fellowship from the Royal Society of Chemistry as part of the UK–Russia Year of Science and Education.
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