The story of superheavy elements - those at the very end of the periodic
table - is not well known outside the community of heavy-ion physicists
and nuclear chemists. But it is a most interesting story which deserves
to be known also to historians, philosophers, and sociologists of
science and indeed to the general public. This is what the present work
aims at. It tells the story or rather parts of the story, of how
physicists and chemists created elements heavier than uranium or
searched for them in nature. And it does so with an emphasis on the
frequent discovery and naming disputes concerning the synthesis of very
heavy elements. Moreover, it calls attention to the criteria which
scientists have adopted for what it means to have discovered a new
element. In this branch of modern science it may be more appropriate to
speak of creation instead of discovery. The work will be of interest to
scientists as well as to scholars studying modern science from a
meta-perspective.