Dubnium was named after the Russian city of Dubna just outside of Moscow. The city is remarkable in that it was founded basically around a campus dedicated to nuclear research at the height of the cold war. The Soviets invested heavily and brought in the scientific elite to work on transuranic science for benefits scientific and political alike. In recent years the city has become much more open and collaborative with its western counterparts.

The discovery of this element is mired in some controversy as rival teams from the U.S. and Germany poked doubt into Russia's reports from the experiments they claimed yielded the as-yet unnamed element. The argument would continue for several decades all the meanwhile all three teams continued to provide conclusive proof of the existence of these fleeting atomic creations. In the end, years after the Soviet Union ceased to exist, the Russians would at long last get the satisfaction of seeing their former colleagues honored when IUPAC - the supreme court in these sorts of matters - granted them the coveted recognition.