Gourt Home::Gourt :: Element naming controversy
The names for the chemical elements 104 to 108 have been the subject of a major controversy starting in the 1960s which was only finally resolved in 1997.
The controversy
At issue was the convention that elements be named by their discoverers in a nationalistic dispute between laboratories attempting to synthesise the elements first, thus earning naming rights for having "discovered" them. Therefore, in this context discovery is synonymous with first synthesis. The controversy arose when multiple groups simultaneously claimed to have discovered the same elements before each other.
Opponents
The four groups which conflicted over elemental naming were:
- An American group at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory.
- A Russian group at Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna.
- A German group at the Gesellschaft für Schwerionenforschung (GSI) in Darmstadt.
- The IUPAC Commission on Nomenclature of Inorganic Chemistry, which introduced its own proposal to the IUPAC General Assembly.
Berkeley proposal
The preferred names for the elements by the American group were:- 104 - rutherfordium
- 105 - hahnium
- 106 - seaborgium
Dubna proposal
The preferred names for the elements by the Russian group were:- 104 - kurchatovium
- 105 - nielsbohrium
Darmstadt proposal
The preferred names for the elements by the German group were(*):- 107 - nielsbohrium
- 108 - hassium
- 109 - meitnerium
IUPAC proposal
Element 104 was named after Igor Kurchatov who was father of the Russian atomic bomb, and this was one reason the name was objectionable to the Americans. The American name to 106 was objectionable to some because Glenn T. Seaborg was still alive and handing out autographed periodic tables and hence his name could not be used for an element in accordance with the IUPAC rules. While it is commonly stated that Seaborgium is the only element to have been named after a living person, this is not entirely accurate. Both einsteinium and fermium, were proposed as names of new elements discovered by Albert Ghiorso, Seaborg and the other American co-discoverers of those elements while Fermi and Einstein were still living. The discovery of these elements and their names were kept secret under Cold War era nuclear secrecy rules, however, and thus the names were not known by the public or the broader scientific community until after the deaths of Fermi and Einstein.In 1994, the IUPAC Commission on Nomenclature of Inorganic Chemistry proposed the following names
- 104 - dubnium
- 105 - joliotium
- 106 - rutherfordium
- 107 - bohrium
- 108 - hahnium
- 109 - meitnerium
This attempted to resolve the dispute by replacing the name for 104 with a name after the Dubna research center, and not to name 106 after Seaborg.
Objections
This was objected to by the American Chemical Society on the grounds that the right of the American group to propose the name for element 106 was not in question and that group should have the right to name the element whatever it wanted to. Indeed, IUPAC decided that the credit for the discovery of element 106 should be shared between Berkeley and Dubna but the Dubna group had not come forward with a name. In addition, given that many American books had already used rutherfordium and hahnium for 104 and 105, the ACS objected to those names being used for other elements.
Resolution
Finally in 1997, the following names were agreed on the 39th IUPAC General Assembly in Geneva, Switzerland
- 104 - rutherfordium
- 105 - dubnium
- 106 - seaborgium
- 107 - bohrium
- 108 - hassium
- 109 - meitnerium
But in 1999 Glenn T. Seaborg died, still disputing the name change for #105 and adamant about it remaining known as hahnium. His reason concerning Dubna in Russia was that he believed that they had made a false claim about discovering the element for which they had been credited. When the Dubna group finally did release some additional data on the experiment, Seaborg claimed that it was a misreading of the decay pattern of their product. Even then, the Dubna group still refused to remove their claim. Some people in the Berkeley group and some others still refer to it as hahnium.
See also
Chemical elements | Chemical nomenclature | History of chemistry | History of physics | Controversies
Elementnamensgebungskontroverse | Controversia sobre la denominación de los elementos
"Element naming controversy"