Sam Kean
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“only one handedness, or ‘chirality’ ”: It’s a bit of a stretcher to claim that people are exclusively left-handed on a molecular level. Even though all of our proteins are indeed left-handed, all of our carbohydrates, as well as our DNA, have a right-handed twist. Regardless, Pasteur’s main point remains: in different contexts, our bodies expect and can only process molecules of a specific handedness. Our cells would not be able to translate left-handed DNA, and if we were fed left-handed sugars, our bodies would starve.
“the boy lived”: Joseph Meister, the little boy Pasteur saved from rabies, ended up becoming the groundskeeper for the Pasteur Institute. Tragically, poignantly, he was still groundskeeper in 1940 when German soldiers overran France. When one officer demanded that Meister, the man with the keys, open up Pasteur’s crypt so that he, the officer, could view Pasteur’s bones, Meister committed suicide rather than be complicit in this act.
“by I. G. Farbenindustrie”: The company Domagk worked for, I. G. Farbenindustrie (IGF), would later become notorious around the world for manufacturing the insecticide Zyklon B, which the Nazis used to gas concentration camp prisoners (see chapter 5). The company was broken up shortly after World War II, and many of its directors faced war crimes charges at Nuremberg (United States v. Carl Krauch, et al.) for enabling the Nazi government in its aggressive war and mistreating prisoners and captured soldiers. IGF’s descendants today include Bayer and BASF.
“ ‘the chemistry of dead matter and the chemistry of living matter’ ”: Nevertheless, the universe seems to be chiral on other levels, too, from the subatomic to the supergalactic. The radioactive beta decay of cobalt-60 is an asymmetric process, and cosmologists have seen preliminary evidence that galaxies tend to rotate in counterclockwise spiral arms above our northern galactic pole and in clockwise spirals beneath Antarctica.
“the most notorious pharmaceutical of the twentieth century”: A few scientists recently reconstructed why thalidomide’s devastating effects slipped through clinical trials. For nitty-gritty molecular reasons, thalidomide doesn’t cause birth defects in litters of mice, and the German company that produced thalidomide, Grünenthal, did not follow up mouse trials with careful human trials. The drug was never approved for pregnant women in the United States because the head of the Food and Drug Administration, Frances Oldham Kelsey, refused to bow to lobbying pressure to push it through. In one of those curious twists of history, thalidomide is now making a comeback to treat diseases such as leprosy, where it’s remarkably effective. It’s also a good anticancer agent because it limits the growth of tumors by preventing new blood vessels from forming—which is also why it caused such awful birth defects, since embryos’ limbs couldn’t get the nutrients they needed to grow. Thalidomide still has a long road back to respectability. Most governments have strict protocols in place to make sure doctors do not give the drug to women of childbearing age, on the off chance that they might become pregnant.
“don’t know to make one hand or the other”: William Knowles unfolded the molecule by breaking a double bond. When carbon forms double bonds, it has only three “arms” coming out of it: two single bonds and a double. (There are still eight electrons, but they are shared over three bonds.) Carbon atoms with double bonds usually form triangular molecules, since a tricornered arrangement keeps its electrons as far apart as possible (120 degrees). When the double bond breaks, carbon’s three arms become four. In that case, the way to keep electrons as far apart as possible is not with a planar square but with a three-dimensional tetrahedron. (The vertices in a square are 90 degrees apart. In a tetrahedron, they’re 109.5 degrees apart.) But the extra arm can sprout above or below the molecule, which will in turn give the molecule either left- or right-handedness.
11. How Elements Deceive
“in underground particle accelerators”: A professor of mine from college once held me captive with a story about how a few people died from nitrogen asphyxiation in a particle accelerator at Los Alamos in the 1960s, under circumstances very similar to the NASA accident. After the deaths at Los Alamos, my professor added 5 percent carbon dioxide to the gaseous mixtures in the accelerators he worked on, as a safety measure. He later wrote to me, “Incidentally I did put it to the test about a year later, when one of our graduate student operators did exactly the same thing [i.e., forgot to pump the inert air out and let oxygenated air back in]. I entered the pressure vessel with it full of inert gas…. But not really, [because] by the time I got my shoulders through the hole I was already in desperation, panting due to ‘breathe more!’ commands from my breathing center.” Air is normally 0.03 percent CO2, so one breath of the doped air was about 167 times more potent.
“scales up very quickly to toxic”: To its shame and embarrassment, the U.S. government admitted in 1999 that it had knowingly exposed up to twenty-six thousand scientists and technicians to high levels of powdered beryllium, to the extent that hundreds of them developed chronic beryllium disease and related ailments. Most of the people poisoned worked in aerospace, defense, or atomic energy—industries the government decided were too important to arrest or impede, so it neither improved safety standards nor developed an alternative to beryllium. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette ran a long and damning front-page exposé on Tuesday, March 30, 1999. It was titled “Decades of Risk,” but one of the subtitles captures the pith of the story better: “Deadly Alliance: How Industry and Government Chose Weapons over Workers.”
“and calcium”: However, scientists at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia believe that in addition to sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and savory (umami), humans have a separate, unique taste for calcium, too. They’ve definitely found it in mice, and some humans respond to calcium-enriched water as well. So what does calcium taste like? From an announcement about the findings: “ ‘Calcium tastes calciumy,’ [lead scientist Michael] Tordoff said. ‘There isn’t a better word for it. It is bitter, perhaps even a little sour. But it’s much more because there are actual receptors for calcium.’ ”
“like so much sand”: Sour taste buds can also go flat. These taste buds respond mostly to the hydrogen ion, H+, but in 2009 scientists discovered that they can taste carbon dioxide as well. (CO2 combines with H2O to make a weak acid, H2CO3, so perhaps that’s why these taste buds perk up.) Doctors discovered this because some prescription drugs, as a side effect, suppress the ability to taste carbon dioxide. The resulting medical condition is known as the “champagne blues,” since all carbonated beverages taste flat.
12. Political Elements
“killed Pierre”: Pierre might not have lived long anyway. In a poignant memory, Rutherford once recalled watching Pierre Curie do an astounding glow-in-the-dark experiment with radium. But in the feeble green glow, the alert Rutherford noticed scars covering Pierre’s swollen, inflamed fingers and saw how difficult it was for him to grasp and manipulate a test tube.
“her rocky personal life”: For more details about the Curies especially, see Sheilla Jones’s wonderful book The Quantum Ten, an account of the surprisingly contentious and fractious early days of quantum mechanics, circa 1925.
“pre-seeped bottles of radium and thorium water”: The most famous casualty of the radium craze was the steel tycoon Eben Byers, who drank a bottle of Radithor’s radium water every day for four years, convinced it would provide him with something like immortality. He ended up wasting away and dying from cancer. Byers wasn’t any more fanatical about radioactivity than a lot of people; he simply had the means to drink as much of the water as he wished. The Wall Street Journal commemorated his death with the headline, “The Radium Water Worked Fine Until His Jaw Came Off.”
“its spot on the table”: For the true story of hafnium’s discovery, see Eric Scerri’s The Periodic Table, a thorough and superbly documented account of the rise of the periodic system, including the often strange philosophies and worldviews of the people who founded it.
“special ‘heavy’ water”: Hevesy performed heavy-water experim
ents on goldfish as well as himself, and he ended up killing a number of them.
Gilbert Lewis also used heavy water in a last-ditch effort to win the Nobel Prize in the early 1930s. Lewis knew that Harold Urey’s discovery of deuterium—heavy hydrogen with an extra neutron—would win the Nobel Prize, as did every other scientist in the world, including Urey. (After a mostly lackluster career that included ridicule from his in-laws, he came home right after discovering deuterium and told his wife, “Honey, our troubles are over.”)
Lewis decided to hitch himself to this no-miss prize by investigating the biological effects of water made with heavy hydrogen. Others had the same idea, but Berkeley’s physics department, headed by Ernest O. Lawrence, happened to have the world’s largest supply of heavy water, quite by accident. The team had a tank of water it had been using for years in radioactivity experiments, and the tank had a relatively high concentration of heavy water (a few ounces). Lewis begged Lawrence to let him purify the heavy water, and Lawrence agreed—on the condition that Lewis give it back after his experiments, since it might prove important in Lawrence’s research, too.
Lewis broke his promise. After isolating the heavy water, he decided to give it to a mouse and see what happened. One queer effect of heavy water is that, like ocean water, the more you drink, the more throat-scratchingly thirsty you feel, since the body cannot metabolize it. Hevesy ingested heavy water in trace amounts, so his body really didn’t notice, but Lewis’s mouse gulped all the heavy water in a few hours and ended up dead. Killing a mouse was hardly a Nobel Prize–worthy exercise, and Lawrence went apoplectic when he learned a lousy rodent had peed away all his precious heavy water.
“blocked him for personal reasons”: Kazimierz Fajans’s son Stefan Fajans, now a professor emeritus of internal medicine at the University of Michigan’s medical school, kindly supplied information to me in an e-mail:
In 1924 I was six years old, but either then and certainly in the years to follow I did hear from my father of some aspects of the Nobel Prize story. That a Stockholm newspaper published a headline “K. Fajans to Receive Nobel Prize” (I do not know whether it was in chemistry or physics) is not rumor but fact. I remember seeing a copy of that newspaper. I also remember seeing in that newspaper a photo of my father walking in front of a building in Stockholm (probably taken earlier) in somewhat formal dress but not [formal] for that time…. What I did hear was that an influential member of the committee blocked the award to my father for personal reasons. Whether that was rumor or fact is impossible to know unless someone could look at the minutes of these meetings. I believe they are secret. I do know as a fact that my father expected to receive the Nobel Prize as intimated to him by some people in the know. He expected to receive it in the years to follow…. but it never happened, as you know.
“ ‘protactinium’ stuck”: Meitner and Hahn actually named their element “protoactinium,” and only in 1949 did scientists shorten it by removing the extra o.
“ ‘disciplinary bias, political obtuseness, ignorance, and haste’ ”: There’s a wonderful dissection of Meitner, Hahn, and the awarding of the Nobel Prize in the September 1997 issue of Physics Today (“A Nobel Tale of Postwar Injustice” by Elisabeth Crawford, Ruth Lewin Sime, and Mark Walker). The article is the source of the quote about Meitner losing the prize because of “disciplinary bias, political obtuseness, ignorance and haste.”
“the peculiar rules for naming elements”: Once a name has been proposed for an element, the name gets only one shot at appearing on the periodic table. If the evidence for the element falls apart, or if the international governing body of chemistry (IUPAC) rules against an element’s name, it is blacklisted. This might feel satisfying in the case of Otto Hahn, but it also means that no one can ever name an element “joliotium” after Irène or Frédéric Joliot-Curie, since “joliotium” was once an official candidate name for element 105. It’s unclear whether “ghiorsium” has another shot. Perhaps “alghiorsium” would work, although IUPAC frowns on using first and last names, and in fact once rejected “nielsbohrium” in favor of plain “bohrium” for element 107—a decision that didn’t please the West German team that discovered 107, since “bohrium” sounds too much like boron and barium.
13. Elements as Money
“in Colorado in the 1860s”: The fact that gold-tellurium compounds were discovered in the mountains of Colorado is reflected in the name of a local mining town, Telluride, Colorado.
“It’s called fluorescence”: To clarify some easily (and often) confused terms, “luminescence” is the umbrella term for a substance absorbing and emitting light. “Fluorescence” is the instantaneous process described in this chapter. “Phosphorescence” is similar to fluorescence—it consists of molecules absorbing high-frequency light and emitting low-frequency light—but phosphorescing molecules absorb light like a battery and continue to glow long after the light shuts off. Obviously, both fluorescence and phosphorescence derive from elements on the periodic table, fluorine and phosphorus, the two most prominent elements in the molecules that first exhibited these traits to chemists.
“the silicon semiconductor revolution eighty years later”: Moore’s law says that the number of silicon transistors on a microchip will double every eighteen months—amazingly, it has held true since the 1960s. Had the law held for aluminium, Alcoa would have been producing 400,000 pounds of aluminium per day within two decades of starting up, not just 88,000. So aluminium did well, but not quite well enough to beat its neighbor on the periodic table.
“Alcoa shares worth $30 million”: There’s some discrepancy about the magnitude of Charles Hall’s wealth at his death. Thirty million dollars is the high end of the range. The confusion may be because Hall died in 1914 but his estate was not settled until fourteen years later. One-third of his estate went to Oberlin College.
“spelling disagreement”: Aside from differences between languages, other spelling discrepancies within a language occur with cesium, which the British tend to spell “caesium,” and sulfur, which many people still spell “sulphur.” You could make a case that element 110 should be spelled mendeleevium, not mendelevium, and that element 111 should be spelled röntgenium, not roentgenium.
14. Artistic Elements
“Sybille Bedford could write”: The Sybille Bedford quote comes from her novel A Legacy.
“a hobby”: Speaking of strange hobbies, I can’t not share this in a book full of quirky stories about elements. This anagram won the Special Category prize for May 1999 at the Web site Anagrammy.com, and as far as I’m concerned, this “doubly-true anagram” is the word puzzle of the millennium. The first half equates thirty elements on the periodic table with thirty other elements:
hydrogen + zirconium + tin + oxygen + rhenium + platinum + tellurium + terbium + nobelium + chromium + iron + cobalt + carbon + aluminum + ruthenium + silicon + ytterbium + hafnium + sodium + selenium + cerium + manganese + osmium + uranium + nickel + praseodymium + erbium + vanadium + thallium + plutonium = nitrogen + zinc + rhodium + helium + argon + neptunium + beryllium + bromine + lutetium + boron + calcium + thorium + niobium + lanthanum + mercury + fluorine + bismuth + actinium + silver + cesium + neodymium + magnesium + xenon + samarium + scandium + europium + berkelium + palladium + antimony + thulium
That’s pretty amazing, even if the number of ium endings mitigated the difficulty a little. The kicker is that if you replace each element with its atomic number, the anagram still balances.
1 + 40 + 50 + 8 + 75 + 78 + 52 + 65 + 102 + 24 + 26 + 27 + 6 + 13 + 44 + 14 + 70 + 72 + 11 + 34 + 58 + 25 + 76 + 92 + 28 + 59 + 68 + 23 + 81 + 94 = 7 + 30 + 45 + 2 + 18 + 93 + 4 + 35 + 71 + 5 + 20 + 90 + 41 + 57 + 80 + 9 + 83 + 89 + 47 + 55 + 60 + 12 + 54 + 62 + 21 + 63 + 97 + 46 + 51 + 69 = 1416
As the anagram’s author, Mike Keith, said, “This is the longest doubly-true anagram ever constructed (using the chemical elements—or any other set of this type, as far as I know).”
Along these lines, there’s also Tom Lehrer’
s incomparable song “The Elements.” He adapted the tune from Gilbert and Sullivan’s “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General,” and in it he names every element on the periodic table in a brisk eighty-six seconds. Check it out on YouTube: “There’s antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium…”
“ ‘Plutonists’ ”: Plutonists were sometimes called Vulcanists, too, after the fire god Vulcan. This moniker emphasized the role of volcanoes in the formation of rocks.
“Döbereiner’s pillars”: Döbereiner called his groupings of elements not triads but affinities, part of his larger theory of chemical affinities—a term that gave Goethe (who frequently attended Döbereiner’s lectures at Jena) the inspiration for the title Elective Affinities.
“inches close to majesty”: Another majestic design inspired by elements is the wooden Periodic Table Table, a coffee table built by Theodore Gray. The table has more than one hundred slots on top, in which Gray has stored samples of every extant element, including many exclusively man-made ones. Of course, he has only minute quantities of some. His samples of francium and astatine, the two rarest natural elements, are actually hunks of uranium. Gray’s argument is that somewhere buried deep inside those hunks are at least a few atoms of each one, which is true and honestly about as good as anyone has ever done. Besides, since most of the elements on the table are gray metals, it’s hard to tell them apart anyway.
“ruthenium began capping every Parker 51 in 1944”: For the details about the metallurgy of the Parker 51, see “Who Was That Man?” by Daniel A. Zazove and L. Michael Fultz, which appeared in the fall 2000 issue of Pennant, the house publication of the Pen Collectors of America. The article is a wonderful instance of dedicated amateur history—of keeping alive an obscure but charming bit of Americana. Other resources for Parker pen information include Parker51.com and Vintagepens.com.