Throwback Thursday |The Transfermium Wars: Scientific Brawling And Name Calling During the Cold War | Science History Institute

“The naming of elements 95, americium, through 101, mendelevium, went uncontested. Trouble began to simmer in 1957 when a collaboration among three research institutions—the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, the Harwell Laboratory in Britain, and the Nobel Institute for Physics in Sweden—announced the creation of element 102. They proposed the name nobelium, which was swiftly accepted by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC), the international body in charge of christening new elements.”