Lab life has rhythms, riding its own beats and twisting in its own revolutions as people come and go. By the 1970s Berkeley Lab had escaped the shadow of anti-Communist sentiment and evolved into an eclectic mix of experiments that had won eight Nobel Prizes. Under Lawrence and McMillan (who finally retired as director in 1972), the house on the hill had become the undisputed king of experimental physics, computing, energy and even cutting-edge biology. HILAC was gone, metamorphosed into Super-HILAC (the team would have preferred something even more powerful, but the Vietnam War meant funds went elsewhere). Now, Al Ghiorso was running the heavy element show, the lab inflected by his own, unique brand of crazy brilliance. In place of Seaborg’s detailed notes, the lab’s logbooks were home to the group leader’s doodles – abstract, vivid, swirling kaleidoscopes of colours reminiscent of Wassily Kandinsky or Henri Matisse. Ghiorso’s voice was regularly heard down the hall, yelling out liberal gripes in protest at how the military had sucked up all the funding for his research.
Below the Berkeley Hills was much the same: a hive of excitement that was alive with a healthy anti-establishment vibe still lingering from the Summer of Love. Music from David Bowie and John Lennon to Roberta Flack and Stevie Wonder filled the streets; and the nearby Oakland Athletics baseball team won the World Series three times. Across the Bay, you could see the old federal prison on Alcatraz, covered in graffiti after a 19-month occupation of the island by Native Americans in protest at the treatment of certain tribes. Beyond, the Golden Gate Bridge was a world-famous landmark. Things around San Francisco were looking up – and being a scientist was finally cool.
The May 1973 issue of Ebony illustrated how science and style mixed. There were glossy photos full of screaming flares and excessive collars, copious adverts for cigarettes and wonderful, lavish typefaces. The cover star of the month was jazz singer Nancy Wilson. The main feature was on Sammy Davis Jr. singing at the White House. But its profile was a man its staff writer described as ‘relatively obscure, unpretentious yet supremely self-confident […] a sort of hip, scientific [individual].’ His name was James Harris. And he was the first African American to discover an element.1
In 1955 Harris had been a 23-year-old army veteran searching for a job. He was born in Waco, Texas, raised by his mother in Oakland, California (his parents divorced when he was young) and had a degree in chemistry from Huston-Tillotson College in Austin, Texas. Harris knew it would be tough walking back into civilian life but hadn’t appreciated just how ingrained racism in science would be, even in the liberal haven of the San Francisco Bay. He was turned down a dozen times by interviewers shocked when he walked in, or by secretaries insistent he was applying to be the janitor, not a skilled chemist. Once, he was given an aptitude test so simple a child could pass it – basic addition and subtraction. Harris had looked at the sheet, passed it back to the secretary and, firmly but politely, told her he didn’t need a job that badly.
Eventually he found work as a radiochemist for a company in the Bay Area, before moving to Berkeley Lab five years later and joining Ghiorso’s team. Harris was an oddity – like Ghiorso, he never had time to get more than a bachelor’s degree – but he was the man chosen to clean the team’s targets, a process that took 22 arduous chemical separations playing with a mere 60mg of radioactive metal. It was the most delicate part of the Berkeley operation. That meant Harris had to be one of the best chemists in the laboratory and, by extension, one of the best in the world.
Another face found in the Berkeley Lab was Glenn Seaborg. The elder statesman of elements had been away in Washington for 15 years and had become of the most eminent scientists in the world – his biography was the longest entry in Who’s Who. During his Washington tenure, he had also completed his transformation into a consummate politician. During one of his final government hearings, a Louisiana senator had tried to corner Seaborg with a coup de grâce: ‘Dr Seaborg, what do you know about plutonium?’ A younger Seaborg might have retorted that he’d discovered it; older and wiser, he merely smiled and promised the senator he knew a little.
Seaborg was content to let Ghiorso run the element hunt. Instead, he fell into a comfortable routine. Each morning, he would walk up and down his infamous steps. Next, he would return to his office, keeping the door open for any student who popped by. If one did, Seaborg would immediately drop whatever he was working on – often replies to the president of the United States – to help answer their question. If a student suggested a wild, fantastic idea that Seaborg knew wouldn’t work, he still told them to try it; the experiment would fail, but the student would get a chance to understand why. Once his charges were set for the day, Seaborg would then tour the lab, his head poking through the hallway doors and asking in a gruff Midwest voice: ‘So, what’s new?’ Berkeley Lab’s staff ensured there was always something to tell him.
Often the news came from Matti Nurmia. By now, the Finnish researcher was firmly entrenched as Ghiorso’s closest associate. In 1968 Nurmia had also brought over two students from his group at the University of Helsinki, the wife-and-husband duo Pirkko and Kari Eskola, who took over the painstaking work of analysing the endless stream of data from the laboratory computers. The Finnish outnumbered the Americans three to two. Matti Leino, another Finn who later joined the Berkeley team, joked that it took a Nordic scientist (and later, Japanese scientists) to keep pace with Ghiorso.
Figure 8 The Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, Berkeley team, April 1969. From left to right: Matti Nurmia, James Harris, Kari Eskola, Pirkko Eskola, Al Ghiorso.
As with Darleane Hoffman, Pirkko Eskola found the science culture of the US tainted with sexism. ‘Women scientists were not that common, at least not in the US,’ Nurmia recalls. ‘Mrs Eskola was a lovely blonde lady. She’d encounter all kinds of things. She’d call up another lab about scientific matters, and people would ask “Are you a secretary?” A woman in nuclear science was a rare thing.’ Eskola was more than a match for them. She had no trouble standing up to Ghiorso either; while he constantly wanted to try something new, Eskola usually took the scientific high road and wanted more data. The result was, according to Nurmia, ‘rapid-fire discussions’ between the two, often with Eskola walking away the victor.
The element hunters knew how to have a good time. When an element was created and confirmed to Ghiorso’s satisfaction, the team celebrated with a ‘HILAC punch party’ – excessive drinking, joke presentations and a wall-sized game of snakes and ladders. Rumours of crazier exploits still echo in the Berkeley halls to this day; one recounts that Ghiorso used to stuff radioactive material into tennis balls (the rubber was just thick enough to shield the radiation) and bat them between colleagues.
Despite the fun, the search for superheavy elements had run dry. The island of stability and the elements surrounding it seemed like ghosts, and repeated attempts to make them had, like the hunt in nature, failed. The only claims were coming from an Israeli–British team at CERN headed by Amnon Marinov, who were churning out a seemingly endless ream of papers claiming they had discovered element 112. To quote one superheavy researcher: ‘Everyone knew it was bullshit.’2
The problem was neutrons. As mentioned before, the element hunters were using a technique where the nucleus discarded neutrons to stave off fission. This meant that any isotope created would, inevitably, have a relatively low number of neutrons remaining. When looking for the island of stability, this was a disaster. The first viable magic number of neutrons was 184. Even using the best beam and target available, the closest the element makers were likely to get was 173 neutrons: 11 shy of the island. The reactions in the lab were showing a ‘drift to the north’ on the chart of nuclides: instead of approaching the island, they were just making elements too unstable to detect.
The imagined boats navigating the sea of instability had broken rudders – and Ghiorso had run out of ideas.
* * *
Dubna’s JINR had its own scientific rhythms. The teething years had passed, and the institute was proudly claiming scientific victories that won Lenin medals and Nobel Prizes. Staff at Dubna had explained Cherenkov radiation (that blue glow seen in atomic reactors), explored new areas of quantum physics and pioneered Russian computer science. Things were going well.
Even so, life in Russia was vastly different to California, and visitors from the West usually experienced a culture shock on arrival. Scientists would find themselves flanked by stone-faced minders as they walked around town, and tales abounded of how Dubna’s only hotel had an entire floor given over to the KGB, whose spies listened in on the rooms each night. Yet some visitors have also spoken of an incredible, unbreakable bond of companionship away from the prying eyes of the security services. On one research trip, a gaggle of visiting Americans went camping with their Soviet colleagues. Once the group were alone in the woods, the Russians produced a transistor radio and tuned into an illicit frequency. Soon, the entire campsite – Russians and Americans alike – were twisting and jiving to Johnny Rivers’ ‘Secret Agent Man’. ‘Once you get the governments out the way and let scientists speak,’ one American chemist told me, ‘you find that you may have different cultural languages, but the same technical language.’ Johnny Rivers transcends all borders.
Georgy Flerov was still in charge of his laboratory, steering it in his own, inimitable fashion. Heinz Gäggeler laughs as he recalls his first encounters with the Russian element tsar in 1975. ‘He liked to talk,’ Gäggeler says. ‘He was quite often walking up and down in front of his office. If he saw someone, he asked what they were doing.’ Once, after the Swiss researcher briefed him on his project, Flerov asked Gäggeler about his hobbies. ‘I said I was interested in alpinism. Flerov liked mountaineering too. So, I told him I was interested in climbing Lenin Peak [at 7,134m (23,000ft), one of the highest mountains in the Soviet Union]. At that time, you needed the help of the Ministry of Sport in Moscow to go to such an exotic place – I would have had no chance as a foreigner.’ Gäggeler’s passes arrived soon after – and he led a Swiss team to climb the mountain later that year (bad weather prevented them from reaching the summit). ‘Georgy opened the door to the ministry for me. I was a nobody, but he was very famous.’
The person closest to Flerov was Oganessian. By the mid-1970s the duo had worked together for 15 years. Although they weren’t exactly friends, they had formed such a close working relationship that they were, at times, inseparable. ‘He opened me to science, to physics,’ Oganessian told the YouTube channel Periodic Videos. ‘At 6 p.m. I would come home. At 9 p.m. I would get a phone call [from Flerov]: “What are you doing?” I would say I was doing nothing. “Come to me, please.” Every day. And every day, from 9 p.m. to 10 p.m., we’d have an hour’s discussion. Sometimes he called me in the early morning, and he’d just say: “I’m very sorry to call you so early …”’ It was Oganessian’s wake-up call – if Flerov was working, so was he.
Despite his friendliness, Flerov – typically referred to just by his initials, GN – was a stickler for rules. He couldn’t abide independent research and ordered his staff not to ‘dabble in zoology’. Anyone who deviated from his instructions was branded a ‘guerrilla’. ‘If guerrillas were found out or, even worse, proved to be successful,’ the Dubna history warns, ‘GN acknowledged the importance of their work in a cool and indifferent manner, without a hint of encouragement or praise.’
At meetings, Flerov kept a gong; once it had been sounded, the topic was settled and it was onto the next item. ‘He was a single-minded, spirited and straightforward man,’ JINR’s history records, ‘a man who would always rush to the charge rather than try outflanking manoeuvres. A man who did not take kindly to meandering or deviating from the task at hand, a man who jealously guarded his flock from straying.’
The Russians had reached the same stumbling block as the Berkeley team. But, unlike the Americans, one researcher did have an idea about how to rekindle the hunt for superheavy elements. Unfortunately, Flerov refused to accept it. Clang. Onto the next topic.
The idea Flerov had discarded was called cold fusion. But Oganessian thought his mentor had made a mistake. As Flerov had done with his letter to Stalin, Oganessian decided his only option was to gamble his career on being right.
The young Armenian turned guerrilla. ‘Cold fusion, my lovely reaction,’ Oganessian remembers. He smiles at its very name. ‘My cold fusion. This … this was something really new.’
* * *
Cold fusion is a term likely to make most scientists roll their eyes. It’s a name that’s also given to a nuclear reaction that would occur at room temperature – pure science fiction that gripped the world in the late 1980s. In element discovery, however, cold fusion is very real.
The idea first emerged in the mid-1960s from Ya. Maly, a Czech scientist working at Dubna. The concept was simple enough. So far, elements had been created by taking a light element and shooting it at something heavier. But now the technology was available to fire heavier projectiles. Why not use elements closer together on the periodic table?
This wasn’t thought to be as simple as it sounds. The Coulomb barrier gets stronger when two similar-sized nuclei are pushed against each other – much like it’s easier to push a small magnet against a large one than two magnets of roughly the same strength. This, everyone thought, meant you needed to fire your projectile at a higher energy to force it through – and higher energy meant a greater chance of fission.
But what if that isn’t what happens at all? Think about two drops of water splashing into each other. As they come together, there is a moment when the new droplet is forced to change its shape to adapt. The same happens to two nuclei. ‘The microscopic correction to the liquid-drop mass,’ wrote US physicist Ken Moody in The Chemistry of Superheavy Elements, ‘acts as a heat sink, stealing excitation energy away from the compound [newly formed] nucleus.’ This means that the energy required to combine two similar-sized nuclei is actually two to three times less than for lighter ion reactions. Less energy required means less need to evaporate neutrons for the nucleus to become stable. More neutrons mean more stable elements.
Cold fusion has its flaws. If light-ion-induced reactions are a bombastic slamming together of two nuclei, a SWAT team kicking down the atomic door, cold fusion is a surgical ninja strike, stealthily squeezing just under the Coulomb barrier with the minimum energy possible. To succeed, the two nuclei must strike each other perfectly: otherwise, they just end up bouncing off each other. Cold fusion also requires a specific choice of target to make the whole trick work. In practice, this means you can only use targets made of lead or bismuth (lead, especially Pb-208, is doubly magic and thus extra stable; Bi-209 is, obviously, very close and gets some of the same benefits).
Nobody really believed it would work, but in 1973 Oganessian was willing to take the risk. When Flerov went on holiday to Siberia, his right-hand man assembled the team and got to work. ‘He was on a hiking vacation,’ Oganessian remembers, laughing at his mischief. ‘He didn’t believe the idea. But, finding myself in a situation where he was out, I started to do the experiment.’
Oganessian decided his proof of concept would be to make fermium-244, an unstable isotope that has a half-life of around four milliseconds before it completely self-destructs in spontaneous fission. ‘Normally, fermium is produced by neutron capture, through uranium,’ Oganessian continues. ‘We wanted to fire argon into lead. It was thought to be impossible – argon was supposed to be too heavy for fusion. But I made a set-up that allowed me to adjust the intensity of the ion beam.’
Argon pummelled a lead target for five days. ‘The result was amazing and stunning,’ the JINR lab records report. ‘The detectors were riddled with fission fragments.’ As predicted, the fermium had undergone spontaneous fission. But the half-life Oganessian detected wasn’t four milliseconds. It was 1.1 seconds – more than 250 times longer. The team had created an entirely different isotope.
‘It was so big!’ Oganessian exclaims. ‘It was seconds! I was very surprised and excited. Even at the intensity I had to use for the beam, the cross section was a thousand times greater … at that moment, I knew we had cold fusion!’
On Flerov’s return to the lab, he gave Oganessian the same treatment as any other guerrilla. ‘Not only did he not show that he was particularly glad,’ JINR’s records state, ‘but he actually looked indifferent.’ Flerov ordered the lab to go back to its previous programme. Don’t dabble in zoology.
A short time later, the president of the USSR’s Academy of Sciences visited the laboratory. Flerov summoned Oganessian up to his office and motioned to him. ‘He produces [elements beyond uranium] in their tens of thousands,’ he told his visitor, almost offhand. The president realised what it meant and grabbed the physicist by the shoulders. ‘He gave the lucky beggar three kisses on his cheeks,’ the JINR history records. ‘That was his reward for insubordination.’
* * *
With cold fusion, a whole new realm of possibility had opened. In 1974 Oganessian used the technique to shoot chromium ions into lead. The result was spontaneous fission – and the first signs of element 106. Excitedly, the Russians prepared to announce the element at an upcoming conference in Nashville. Although they didn’t say why, they made it known to the world that Georgy Flerov himself would attend.
Almost simultaneously, the Berkeley team were also preparing to announce the discovery of element 106. By now, the team’s composition had changed. Ghiorso was still in charge, with Nurmia at this side, but Harris and the Eskolas had departed. In their place were German-born physicist Mike Nitschke and another married couple, this time from Yale University: Carol and Jose Alonso. Joining them in the chase were a group from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory led by Ken Hulet and Ron Lougheed. Hulet had been a health chemist at Berkeley and had been drawn into the superheavy world as one of Glenn Seaborg’s post-war apprentices.
Livermore was no longer just an offshoot of Berkeley; it was one of the US Department of Energy labs where the US designed its nuclear weapons. Hulet’s interest in superheavy elements wasn’t a full-time pursuit – it was a side hobby, something the government was happy to support if it meant they kept the brightest minds working for them.
The US team’s attempt to find element 106 had started off well. Hulet and Lougheed prepared a californium target, while Ghiorso ran checks on his oxygen-18 beam. Meanwhile, Jose Alonso tested the team’s latest computer by asking it to run over some data from 1971. To his surprise, the computer suggested that the Americans had made element 106 already and failed to notice. This time, when the machine produced an alpha chain that chimed perfectly with known isotopes, the Berkeley–Livermore team spotted it immediately.
Almost simultaneously, the Russians and Americans had discovered the same element – and both wanted to announce it first. The Nashville conference attendees could sense something was happening. Rumours of a new element started to swirl. Tennessee had become the set for a Cold War thriller.
The only member of the Berkeley team in Nashville was Carol Alonso – the rest had stayed home to get more data. On the second day of the conference, she and the other speakers were invited to take a cruise down the Cumberland River on a paddle wheel boat – a majestic floating palace straight from the pages of Mark Twain. Alonso, the only woman on the boat, soon found herself besieged by researchers eager to know if the rumours of element 106 were true. She confirmed them, and, taking position next to the giant wheel at the back of the boat, turned spymaster. From her hiding place, she sent four friends to subtly ask Flerov if the Russians had also made element 106. Flerov was wise to them. ‘No,’ he’d teased one researcher. ‘[We’re announcing] 108!’
That night, back on dry land, Alonso phoned Ghiorso for orders. The maverick decided to hold off announcing the US discovery, telling her ‘it would be better to let the Russians go out on a limb and just watch to see if it got chopped off’. The next day, Alonso – still playing superspy – managed to sneak an advanced copy of Flerov’s paper from the conference organiser and confirm his plans. When Flerov’s speech was delivered and the Russian discovery of element 106 was revealed, Alonso was able to play it cool and ignore the claim entirely. It was a dirty trick – depriving the Russians of the oxygen of the publicity and credibility from the US’s own results – but it worked.
A week later, the Russians visited Berkeley. There, both teams told each other of their element 106 experiments in full. The Russians were impressed by the thoroughness of the US team; the American team were less impressed by the Russian effort, but had no obvious grounds to object to the validity of their claim. For the first time, the discovery of an element had ended in a stalemate.
Figure 9 The Russian and US teams meeting in Dubna, USSR, 1975. From left to right: Yuri Oganessian, Georgy Flerov, V. A. Druin, Al Ghiorso, Glenn Seaborg, Ken Hulet.
The teams had been competing for 15 years. Neither side – Seaborg and Ghiorso, Flerov and Oganessian – had any interest in continuing to fight. Both Berkeley and Dubna agreed that nobody would suggest a name until the results were confirmed.
Element 106 had been discovered, but its space on the periodic table would remain blank. The hot phase of the transfermium wars was over.
Notes
1 He was not the last. In 2009 Clarice Phelps aided in the purification of berkelium, which led to the discovery of element 117 and confirmation of element 115. You can read more about that in Chapter 20.
2 Marinov later claimed to have discovered evidence of element 122 (‘or a nearby element’) in nature from a sample of thorium – a feat of detecting one atom in a trillion. Once again, the superheavy community dismissed his paper.