Editing Transfermium Wars (section)

== Controversy ==
By convention, naming rights for newly discovered chemical elements go to their discoverers. For elements 104, 105, and 106, there was a controversy between Soviet researchers at the [[Joint Institute for Nuclear Research]] and American researchers at [[Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory]] regarding which group had discovered them first. Both parties suggested their own names for elements 104 and 105, not recognizing the other's name.

The American name of [[seaborgium]] for element 106 was also objectionable to some, because it referred to American chemist [[Glenn T. Seaborg]] who was still alive at the time this name was proposed.<ref>Seaborg commented wryly at a talk in 1995 that "There has been some reluctance on the part of the Commission for Nomenclature of Inorganic Chemistry of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry to accept the name because I'm still alive and they can prove it, they say." (An Early History of LBNL by Dr. Glenn T. Seaborg {{cite web |url=http://dsd.lbl.gov/Seaborg.talks/65th-anniv/23.html |title=An Early History of LBNL by Dr. Glenn T. Seaborg |access-date=2007-03-28 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20041021013514/http://www.dsd.lbl.gov/Seaborg.talks/65th-anniv/23.html |archive-date=2004-10-21 }})</ref> ([[Einsteinium]] and [[fermium]] had also been proposed as names of new elements while [[Albert Einstein]] and [[Enrico Fermi]] were still living, but only made public after their deaths, due to [[Cold War]] secrecy.)