Nobelium's discovery was one of the most disputed in the periodic table: claims were made in the late 1950s by teams in Stockholm, at Berkeley, and at Dubna in the Soviet Union, and the priority quarrel ran for years. The name, honouring Alfred Nobel, was proposed by the Stockholm group and, although their claim was not upheld, the name was eventually retained. Nobelium is an intensely radioactive synthetic metal, studied only in trace amounts. Its longest-lived isotope survives less than an hour, and it is produced only a few atoms at a time; remarkably, study of those atoms shows it strongly prefers a stable two-plus ion, unlike the other actinides, a sign of the growing influence of relativistic effects in the heaviest elements.
The 1997 international resolution that finally settled the naming disputes across this stretch of the table formally credited the Dubna laboratory with nobelium's actual discovery, even though the name honouring Alfred Nobel, proposed by the Stockholm team whose claim did not hold up, was kept in place regardless, an unusual split in which credit for discovery and credit for naming ended up resting with two different parties. Berkeley researchers had also produced convincing evidence of the element independently, adding a third claimant to a priority dispute that took decades to fully resolve.