NEWS OF THE WEEK RESEARCH
ELEMENTS 118 AND 116 RETRACTED Failures to reproduce experiments lead Berkeley lab to withdraw paper
T RETRACTION Victor Ninov (left) and Gregorich during 1999 experiments at the Berkeley gasfilled separator.
WO YEARS AFTER ANNOUNC-
ing their discovery of two new superheavy elements, researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) have retracted their claim. The retraction was posted on July 27 on LBNLs website and will appear in a forthcoming issue of Physical Review Letters.
Injune 1999, LBNL scientists issued a press release claiming that, during nuclear reaction experiments in which a 2 0 8 Pb target was bombarded with an intense beam of energetic 86 Kr ions, they had detected three series of correlated events that signaled creation and subsequent decay of element 118 with 175 neutrons (C&ENJune, 14,1999, page 6). One of the members of the new element's decay chain was identified as 289116, a second new element. The results were published two months later [Phys. Rev. Lett., 83,1104 (1999)}. The 2 0 8 Pb + 86 Kr experiment was repeated at LBNL in 2 0 0 0 and 2001, yet element 118's signature was not observed, says
E N V I R O N M E N T
LAWMAKERS TAKE ON ARSENIC STANDARD House passes bill with 10-ppb ceiling for drinking water rule
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C&EN
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tives waded into the debate over the amount of arsenic that should be allowed in drinking water and came out siding with the Clinton Administration's 10-ppb standard. The Republican-controlled House late last month attached an amendment to a fiscal-year 2002 spending bill that would forbid EPA from setting an arsenic standard higher than 10 ppb. The Bush Administration in March suspended the 10-ppb standard for arsenic set in Janu-
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ary by the previous administration. EPA is now reassessing the rule and plans to issue a new arsenic standard of between 3 and 20 ppb by February 2002. Meanwhile, the nation's drinking water standard for arsenic remains at 50 ppb, a level set in 1942. Sponsored by Democratic Whip David E. Bonior (D-Mich.), the amendment was approved 218 to 189. In the vote, 19 Republicans, mainly from the Northeast, sided with 198 Democrats and one independent in favor of
Kenneth E. Gregorich, team leader of Lawrence Berkeley's heavy-element group. Likewise, experiments conducted at heavyion research facilities in Germany and Japan failed to confirm the 1999 results. "We went back to the 1999 data and reexamined the files," Gregorich explains. "The chains of events that we interpreted as originating from element 118 are not in that data set. We just don't understand it, but we felt that it was important to get the word out quickly because there is a lot of theoretical and experimental work being done because of our 1999 publication." Sigurd Hofmann, a leading nuclear scientist at the Institute for Heavy-Ion Research, Darmstadt, Germany says "the Berkeley team has behaved very fairly," adding that the retraction "doesn't touch the possibility of synthesizing element 118 in the future. For now, though, the retraction clears the way for further investigation and the possibility of unambiguous discovery"-M ITCH JAC0BY
it. H.R. 2620, the bill the provision was attached to, passed the House on a vote of 336 to 89. Opposing Bonior's amendment were legislators from western states with naturally occurring high concentrations of arsenic in groundwater. It remains to be seen whether the Democrat-controlled Senate will include the provision in its version of the EPA spending bill. The amendment would cut off funding for any EPA effort to raise the drinking water standard above 10 ppb. Bonior says the bill would not prevent EPA from setting a standard below 10 ppb. Erik D. Olson, senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, says the vote "sends a clear, bipartisan message to President Bush: The American public doesn't want people messing around with their drinking water."-CHERYL H0GUE HTTP://PUBS.ACS.ORG/CEN
