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of a major controversy starting in the 1960s which was only finally resolved in 1997. At issue was the convention that elements are named by their discoverers which led to controversy when multiple groups claimed discovery simultaneously. The three 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, and a German group at the Gesellschaft für Schwerionenforschung (GSI) in Darmstadt.
The names preferred by the Americans were
The names preferred by the Russians were
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. SeaborgGlenn Theodore Seaborg ( April 19, 1912 February 25, 1999) was an American atomic scientist. He was one of the first scientists to produce a transuranium element. Of Swedish ancestry, Seaborg was born in Ishpeming, Michigan, grew up in South Gate, Califor was still alive and handing out autographed periodic tables and hence his name could not be used for an element in accordance with the IUPACThe International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry IUPAC is an international non-governmental organization devoted to the advancement of chemistry. It has as its members national chemistry societies. It is the recognized authority in developing standar rules.
In 1994, the IUPAC proposed the following names
This attempted to resolve the dispute by replacing the name for 104 with a name after the Dubna research center, and to not name 106 after Seaborg.
This was objected to by the American Chemical SocietyFounded in 1876, the American Chemical Society ACS for short, is "a self-governed individual membership organization that consists of more than 163,000 members at all degree levels and in all fields of chemistry. The organization provides a broad range of 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, IUPACThe International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry IUPAC is an international non-governmental organization devoted to the advancement of chemistry. It has as its members national chemistry societies. It is the recognized authority in developing standar 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 104 and 105 for rutherfordium and hahnium, the ACS objected to those names being used for other elements.
Finally in 1997, the following names were agreed to
But in 1999 Glenn T. Seaborg died disputing the name change for #105 and was adamant about it remaining known as hahnium. His reason concerning Dubna in Russia was that he believed that they made a false claim on an element that they got credit for. 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.