text: During early 2016, science writers and bloggers speculated that one of the superheavy elements would be named oganessium or oganesson. The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) announced in November 2016 that element 118 would be named oganesson to honor Oganessian. It was first observed in 2002 at JINR, by a joint team of Russian and American scientists. Directed by Oganessian, the team included American scientists of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, California. Prior to this announcement, a dozen elements had been named after people, but of those, only seaborgium was likewise named while its namesake (Glenn T. Seaborg) was alive. As Seaborg died in 1999, Oganessian is the only currently living namesake of an element.