Chemical & Chemical Engineering News (80th Anniversary Issue), Vol. 81, No. 36, 2003, Sept. Edited by X. Lu Introduction

In view of the wrangle over the discovery and names of element 104 and other transfermium elements, IUPAC adopted a provisional naming system for these elements based on their atomic numbers. Rutherfordium was named “unnilquadium,” which is the Latin word code for 104 (un = 1, nil = 0, and quad = 4). Its symbol was “Unq.” Seaborg thought these IUPAC names were “unnecessarily cumbersome” and served “no useful purpose” (C&EN, May 13, 1985, page 2). I quoted the letter in the item I wrote for Chemical International in 1985.
Three weeks after my piece was published, I attended the 33rd IUPAC general assembly in Lyon, France. One evening, while relaxing with some secretariat colleagues in the bar of the hotel where we were staying, several members of IUPAC’s Commission on Nomenclature of Inorganic Chemistry joined us.
After some initial pleasantries, they tackled me about the piece, and it soon became obvious that they were unhappy with it. They did not question that it was accurate. What they disliked was that it had been published in IUPAC’s house magazine. They suggested that the magazine was not a suitable forum for raising and debating such highly contentious issues as the discovery and naming of the transfermium elements. I drank another beer while they informed me that IUPAC had formal channels and procedures for dealing with such controversies.
I soon learned that the procedures were, perhaps necessarily for democratic reasons, slow and cumbersome. In 1985, IUPAC and the International Union of Pure & Applied Physics decided to set up an ad hoc working group to consider the competing claims for priority of discovery of elements 101–112. The group first met in Bayeux, France, in February 1988. It published its final report five years later in August 1993.
For rutherfordium, it concluded: “The chemical experiments in Dubna [published in 1969 and 1970] and the Berkeley experiments [published in 1969] were essentially contemporaneous and each show that element 104 had been produced. Credit should be shared.”
In 1994, IUPAC revealed its recommended names for elements 101–109. Element 104 was named “dubnium” after the Dubna group and element 106, “rutherfordium.” Seaborg and colleagues at Berkeley were astonished, calling the names “absurd,” “ridiculous,” “outrageous,” and “almost unbelievable” (C&EN, Oct. 10, 1994, page 4). They wanted element 106, which was undisputedly discovered by the Berkeley group, to be named “seaborgium.”
Controversy and confusion now prevailed. An element that had had an occasional, fleeting, and useless existence now appeared in various English-language publications around the word under five different names: rutherfordium, kurchatovium, dubnium, unnilquadium, and element 104.
In June 1995, the American Chemical Society decided to adopt the names rutherfordium and seaborgium for elements 104 and 106, respectively, for its journals and magazines.
At its 38th general assembly, held in 1995 at the University of Surrey in Guildford, England, IUPAC decided to reconsider its recommended names. Following a further two years of consultation, the union ratified a slate of names for elements 101–109 at its 39th general assembly in Geneva in 1997. The names met with widespread approval. Elements 105 and 106 were named dubnium (symbol Db) and seaborgium (Sg), respectively, and element 104, 28 years after its discovery, was finally named rutherfordium (Rf).

London-based C&EN Senior Correspondent Michael Freemantle reports primarily on developments in European chemistry and science policy. He was IUPAC information officer from 1985 to 1994.

RUTHERFORDIUM AT A GLANCE

Name: Named after New Zealand physicist Ernest Rutherford.

Atomic mass: (261).

History: Production first reported by a team at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia, in 1964. Albert Ghiorso and his team at the University of California, Berkeley, produced a different isotope in 1969. IUPAC recommended that the discovery be shared.

Occurrence: Artificially produced.

Appearance: Metal of unknown color.

Behavior: Intensely radioactive.

Uses: No commercial uses.

VANADIUM

ALISON BUTLER, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SANTA BARBARA

My intrigue with vanadium began in college when I discovered the brilliant colors characteristic of vanadium complexes. The multiple oxidation states stable in aqueous solution captured my interest, and I kept a careful eye out for reports on the biological role of vanadium. Since the turn of the past century, vanadium has been known to be accumulated to very high levels by ascidians (also known as tunicates or sea squirts), yet even today, the biological function of the sequestered vanadium remains a mystery. In the 1970s, a vanadium nitrogenase had been reported, then retracted, and finally rediscovered through genetic manipulations in the late 1980s as the alternative nitrogenase.

When I started out as an assistant professor in 1986 and wanted to work on a new metalloprotein in biology, I was delighted by the initial report of a vanadium haloperoxidase enzyme that is found in marine algae. Vanadium bromoperoxidase (V-BrPO) is abundant in marine algae and catalyzes the oxidation of halides (Cl², Br², or I²) by hydrogen peroxide, which results in the halogenation of certain organic substrates or the formation of singlet oxygen in the absence of appropriate organic substrates.

RAINBOW Vanadium forms various bright colors in solution depending on oxidation state. From left to right, V(II), V(III), V(IV), and V(V). Solutions were prepared by Jens Uwe Kuhn.