Word: chemist
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Creating new heavy elements is a scientific tour de force that gets harder and harder as the easier possibilities are knocked off the list. When Chemist Paul R. Fields of the Argonne National Laboratory got into the game last year, all the elements above uranium (No. 92 and nature's heaviest) through element No. 101 (mendelevium) had already been synthesized.*He knew that the next candidate, element No. 102, would be the toughest yet. Last week, in a joint release of Argonne, Britain's Harwell laboratory and Sweden's Nobel Institute for Physics, a U.S.-British-Swedish...
Fields and Friedman interested British Chemist John Milsted, who wangled some time on the Stockholm cyclotron, the only one in operation capable of projecting a sufficiently intense beam of carbon ions. Milsted also undertook the tricky job of making curium into a thin film, and sandwiching it between aluminum foil to form a suitable target. The apparatus was arranged so that any atoms of element 102 formed would be knocked out of the target and would stick to a "catcher foil," a bit of plastic film...
...cyclotron. As the concrete shield opened, a group of scientists, wearing gloves and dust masks against radioactivity, dashed into the cyclotron chamber. One snatched the target from the machine, another took it apart and passed it to a third, who extracted the catcher foil. The fastest runner, generally Swedish Chemist Lennart Holm, then dashed 100 yards to a waiting elevator...
They did not create much of it-only about 50 atoms or one billion-trillionth of an ounce. "Hardly a commercial quantity," said Chemist Fields. Asked why he and his friends went to such trouble, he said with a happy smile: "Well, discovery of a new element is considered a big thing in some circles...
Robert Burns Woodward, Harvard chemist who synthesized quinine, cholesterol, cortisone, strychnine and lysergic acid Sc.D...