Chapter 7 D.S. summary

Leading into the 1950's the discovery and naming of new elements was so frequent that even the New Yorker was making quips about it. Two scientists, Seaborg and Ghiorso, were, for many years, ahead of the rest of the world in discovery and creating new elements at UC Berkeley, and had the honor of naming them with nationalistic names like americium and californium. This mad dash across the globe of scientists wanting to be the discoverers and namers of elements led to much debate across the scientific community - someone would claim to have found an element, someone else reviewed it and found it faulty, the name is retracted, it it discovered years later that it may have actually been a different and still-undiscovered element, etc. In this same race Russian scientists, Flyorov, gained a name for himself in Stalin's eyes after predicting the US' plans for developing a nuclear bomb and with his team bagged 105 and 105. The team at Berkeley hotly contested all of these and desperately tried to regain their lead. After both teams produced 106 just months apart the issue over naming came to a T - both teams were naming the elements they were discovering (the same elements) their own names and it grew to the point where IUPAC had to step in although Berkeley ended up getting most of the names it wanted through stubbornness. This contest went back and forth, with much hasty and faulty evidence, as the Soviet Union and the U.S. tried to out-chemistry each other.