The writer is a science commentator The chill of geopolitical winds can be felt in unexpected places. One such realm is the hunt for new chemical elements, which various countries have undertaken in a spirit of mutually supportive rivalry since the end of the cold war.

Those alliances are now cooling thanks to Russia’s war in Ukraine, with one renowned institution, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, striking out alone. The Berkeley laboratory, along with other American labs plus facilities in Germany and Japan, had previously worked alongside Russia’s Joint Institute of Nuclear Research, checking each other’s work and sharing credit for discoveries. Now, according to Chemistry World, sanctions have torpedoed the arrangement.

Yuri Oganessian, a leading JINR scientist and the only person currently alive to have an element named after him, confirmed this. Sanctions, he told me by email, “completely exclude scientific co-operation with Russia” and, since the institute is on Russian territory — in Dubna, near Moscow — it has now been isolated.