With the use of the Berkeley Gas‐filled Separator, the &agr; decay of178Pb was identified in78Kr irradiations of102Pd. Following their separation from the incident beam particles, reaction products were implanted in a position‐sensitive silicon detector. Two events with E&agr;of 7602 and 7629 keV were observed and assigned to178Pb because they were position‐correlated with known descendants in the174Hg &agr;‐decay chain. The half‐life of178Pb was calculated with the maximum likelihood method to be122−50+290 &mgr;s. A mass excess of 3608(39) keV and a proton separation energy of 362(48) keV were deduced for178Pb based on the known masses of174Hg and177Tl. © 2003 American Institute of Physics