Berkeley Lab’s Heavy Element Chemistry Program is one of the few groups in the world doing basic research on the lanthanides and actinides, and postdoctoral fellow Gauthier Deblonde especially loves element 97, berkelium. Bk is one #16elements that Berkeley Lab researchers were involved in discovering or creating.

Bk was discovered in 1949 by a team including Stanley Thompson, Glenn Seaborg, Kenneth Street Jr., and Albert Ghiorso, when they bombarded a form of americium with alpha particles. They created a form of berkelium called berkelium-243. Berkelium's most stable form, berkelium-247, has a half-life of about 1,380 years. Berkelium-249, a more easily produced form of the element that has a half-life of about a year, is commonly used as a target for creating other heavy elements by bombarding it with particle beams.

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