The Disappearing Spoon: Chapter 7: Extending the Table, Expanding the Cold War Summary & Analysis

In 1950, The New Yorker reported that two new elements had been discovered at UC Berkeley, named berkelium and californium. The article teased the scientists in question for this naming choice. However, naming new elements was no joke—it was a serious dimension of the Cold War. Glenn Seaborg was a Nobel Prize-winning Berkeley professor who had been a team leader on the Manhattan Project and advised a long list of presidents. However, his first major breakthrough was simply thanks to “dumb luck.” In 1940, a colleague of Seaborg named Edwin McMillan created “the first transuranic element,” which he called neptunium. Following this, he sought to investigate if element 93 could decay into 94.

McMillan’s research was interrupted when he was conscripted by the U.S. military to work on radars for the war effort. Seaborg was left behind and he succeeded in getting element 93 to decay into 94, which was named plutonium. This discovery propelled Seaborg to fame and shortly after he was called to work on the Manhattan Project. He brought a technician with him named Al Ghiorso; after the project was over they returned to Berkeley and together discovered more elements than any other scientist. Although the general population did not display much interest in their discoveries, the pair kept at it. Their crowning achievement was the creation of element 101.

The process of creating element 101 was extremely tricky. It involved conducting half of the experiment in one lab and the other in another lab that was miles away. Ghiorso had to quickly drive the sample between labs himself. The experiment finally succeeded after many tries in February 1955. The new element was named mendelevium, after Dmitri Mendeleev, which was politically bold in light of the ongoing cold war. Meanwhile, only two elements were discovered in Russia: ruthenium and samarium. In the early decades of the Soviet Union, the government poured a large amount of money into science, hoping to reverse the impression of Russia as a “backward” nation. This attracted the attention and envy of people around the world.

However, once Joseph Stalin came to power, the flourishing of Russian science faltered. Stalin ruthlessly ruled against what he called “bourgeois” forms of science, and scientific knowledge in the country took a retrograde, irrational turn. Many scientists were arrested and sent to forced labor camps, where they worked on nickel mines. Stalin considered physics “bourgeois” and thus considered forcefully shutting down the whole field—however, he then realized this would jeopardize the Soviet nuclear weapons program. One of the physicists in this program was named Georgy Flyorov, a man who paid close attention to German and American research on uranium fission in the 1940s and tipped Stalin off that these countries were perhaps trying to build a nuclear bomb. The government rewarded Flyorov with the gift of his own research lab.

During the race to create new elements and fill out the periodic table, the Berkeley scientists largely “won.” However, Russia did have a triumph in the form of element 104. Seaborg and Ghiorso rushed to make 104 themselves, but by that point, the Russians had already made 105. The opposing teams produced 106 in 1974 at almost the exact same time. The teams would not agree on the names of these new elements, each developing their own respective names for them. The competition lasted into the 1990s, when a West German team also joined in. An international ruling body stepped in to adjudicate, ultimately awarding the naming rights to the Berkeley scientists. However, by the 1990s, the Berkeley team fell far behind the Germans and Russians.  

Berkeley’s “comeback” came in the form of a daring experiment that resulted in the production of not one but two new elements: 116 and 118. Yet when the Russians and Germans tried to repeat the experiment, they did not get the same results: a member of the Berkley team, Victor Ninov, had faked the data, inputting false positives. Ninov was fired and Berkeley was forced to take back their claim to have found 118. To make matters worse for Berkeley, the Russians have now found 118, and while at the time of writing official approval is still pending, Kean has no doubt that it will pass.