Two years later they had to retract their claim, and a firefight broke out that cost a star scientist his career and sullied the reputations of several others. The University of California’s Berkeley campus had been a world leader in the discovery of new elements since 1940, when Edwin McMillan discovered element 93, neptunium. The university’s most famous element hunter was Glenn Seaborg, who discovered plutonium (element 94) in 1941 and followed it up with nine more elements, culminating in 1974 with the one that was named, in his honour, seaborgium (element 106). McMillan and Seaborg shared the 1951 Nobel Prize for Chemistry, but many other Berkeley scientists also played important roles in this work. These included Stanley Thompson, who helped discover most of the new elements up to element 101, and Albert Ghiorso, who shared credit for many of the elements discovered from the mid-1940s onward. The use of the term ‘discover’ in this context is slightly odd. Darleane Hoffman (also a Berkeley Lab scientist since 1984) and others did discover minute amounts of plutonium and neptunium in natural uranium ores, but none of the other ‘transuranium’ elements exist in the natural world, unless perhaps in some distant supernova.
