Seaborgium

Seaborgium was created in 1974 at Berkeley by a team including Albert Ghiorso and Glenn Seaborg, by bombarding californium with oxygen ions. It was named after Seaborg himself, who had led the discovery of ten of the transuranium elements. Seaborgium is an intensely radioactive synthetic metal, existing only for moments and studied a handful of atoms at a time. Its longest-lived isotopes survive only seconds to minutes, yet in a remarkable feat chemists have shown, working with single atoms, that seaborgium behaves like a heavier relative of tungsten and molybdenum, exactly as its place in group six predicts.

Seaborg's own career is one of the most decorated in the history of chemistry: beyond co-discovering plutonium and nine other transuranium elements, he chaired the United States Atomic Energy Commission, advised ten American presidents, and received honours including the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1951, so that by the time seaborgium was proposed he had already spent half a century helping to build the very corner of the periodic table that would come to bear his name. He reportedly kept a periodic table on his office wall with his own name already pencilled into element 106, years before the international dispute over naming it was finally resolved.

Seaborgium's naming broke a long-standing convention and caused real controversy, because Glenn Seaborg was still alive when it was proposed, making it the first element ever named after a living person. Some argued this was improper, and the international chemistry body initially ruled the name out, only to reverse itself after protest, so that seaborgium was formally accepted in 1997 while its namesake lived to see it, a distinction that delighted him. Seaborg's own work in reorganising the lower rows of the periodic table, the actinide concept, had made sense of the very elements among which his namesake sits.

Seaborgium has no ancient or esoteric tradition, being a synthetic element with no chemistry beyond the laboratory; its whole story is the naming itself, and the unprecedented honour of an element bearing a living scientist's name. IUPAC's initial objection rested on an existing guideline against naming elements after people still living, a rule adopted, in part, precisely to avoid this kind of situation; the eventual reversal effectively amended that convention, and Seaborg, who died in 1999, enjoyed roughly two years in which an element carried his name during his own lifetime, a distinction still shared by no one else.