Did Seaborg really discover element 106?
Yes, this is a fact. Element 106, later named seaborgium in my honor, was first synthesized in 1974 at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory by a team I led, including Albert Ghiorso and others. We bombarded californium-249 with oxygen-18 ions in the SuperHILAC accelerator, producing seaborgium-263, which decayed by spontaneous fission with a half-life of about 0.9 seconds. The evidence clearly shows this was a legitimate discovery, confirmed by subsequent experiments at Dubna. However, there was a common misconception that I named it after myself—I did not. The name was proposed by the American Chemical Society and approved by IUPAC in 1997 after a naming controversy. We must look to the periodic table for guidance: seaborgium is a transition metal in group 6, similar to tungsten. Every element has a story, and this one honors a lifetime of discovery.
Ask Glenn Theodore Seaborg the follow-up →