Discovery of rutherfordium

Rutherfordium was the first element beyond the actinides, with atomic number 104, to be synthesised, and its discovery was disputed for decades. In 1964 a team at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna in the Soviet Union, led by Georgy Flerov, reported making it and proposed the name kurchatovium. In 1969 researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, led by Albert Ghiorso, made it by a different method and suggested rutherfordium. The disagreement over priority and names, part of the so-called Transfermium Wars, was finally resolved in 1997 by the international chemical authorities, who adopted rutherfordium in honour of the New Zealand-born physicist Ernest Rutherford. The element is radioactive, with isotopes that exist for only seconds, and it has been made only in small quantities in laboratories.

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