Russians See Element 102, Call it Joliot‐curium

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but would an element? Number 102, officially known as nobelium and occasionally called rutherfordium, has been renamed joliot-curium by a Russian group that suggests that it may be the first actually to observe the element. At the International Conference on Heavy‐Ion Physics held at Dubna last October, G. N. Flerov, director of the Dubna Laboratory for Nuclear Reactions, reported that his group had produced five different isotopes of element 102. The new observations disagree with Berkeley measurements in 1958, 1959 and 1961, in which two isotopes of element 102 were reported, and experiments at the Nobel Institute in 1957, which indicated one or two isotopes of 102 had been found.