The story of how the most successful US–Russia scientific collaboration collapsed

I only had a gun pulled on me once during my time at Chemistry World. It was on a chill October morning at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR) in Dubna, Russia, and the military guards, still at their post from the Cold War with AK-47s at the ready, hadn’t been told about our cameras. It was only after some hasty negotiation that we were permitted entry and could see the machine – and meet the team – that discovered the five heaviest elements currently known.

It was all thanks to a partnership that had begun almost 30 years earlier, between two former adversaries. ‘It was a special, perhaps unique, long-running collaboration,’ recalls Mark Stoyer, a staff scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), US, and part of the American team that united with the Russians. It was a collaboration that was ‘extremely scientifically productive and fruitful’, he adds.