Discovery of seaborgium

Seaborgium was first produced in 1974 at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in California by a team led by Albert Ghiorso, with colleagues from the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. They bombarded californium-249 with oxygen-18 nuclei and detected a few atoms of the new element, with atomic number 106. A Soviet team at Dubna reported similar results using a different method, and disagreement over credit and the name continued for years. The element was named after the American chemist Glenn Seaborg, who had co-discovered several other transuranium elements, and the choice caused controversy because he was still alive, though the name was officially adopted in 1997. Seaborgium is synthetic and radioactive, with isotopes lasting seconds, and it is studied only in tiny quantities.

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