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There are no stable isotopes of astatine; all decay with half-lives in the order of hours at the most, seconds to minutes for the most part.

In 1943, three years after astatine was first synthesized artificially in a nuclear reactor, it was discovered that the element occurs naturally in miniscule amounts in the earth’s crust.

This element, the second-heaviest ever created, is a homologue of astatine, meaning that it sits right below astatine on the periodic table and likely shares similar properties.

Americans were generally absent from the race until well into the twentieth century, and it was not until 1940 that the first American-discovered element, astatine, was announced by a team at Berkeley.

In the early 1950s, he belonged to a team of physicists credited with discovering the radioactive element astatine.