The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements

by Sam Kean

  That revolution succeeded partly because Lenin promised to turn backward Russia around, and the Soviet Politburo insisted that scientists would be first among equals in the new workers’ paradise. Those claims held true for a few years, as scientists under Lenin went about their business with little state interference, and some world-class scientists emerged, amply supported by the state. In addition to making scientists happy, money turned out to be powerful propaganda as well. Noting how well-funded even mediocre Soviet colleagues were, scientists outside the Soviet Union hoped (and their hope led them to believe) that at last a powerful government recognized their importance. Even in America, where McCarthyism flourished in the early 1950s, scientists often looked fondly at the Soviet bloc for its material support of scientific progress.

  In fact, groups like the ultra-right-wing John Birch Society, founded in 1958, thought the Soviets might even be a little too clever with their science. The society fulminated against the addition of fluoride (ions of fluorine) to tap water to prevent cavities. Aside from iodized salt, fluorinated water is among the cheapest and most effective public health measures ever enacted, enabling most people who drank it to die with their own teeth for the first time in history. To the Birchers, though, fluoridation was linked with sex education and other “filthy Communist plots” to control Americans’ minds, a mirrored fun house that led straight from local water officials and health teachers to the Kremlin. Most U.S. scientists watched the antiscience fearmongering of the John Birch Society with horror, and compared to that, the pro-science rhetoric of the Soviet Union must have seemed blissful.

  Beneath that skin of progress, though, a tumor had metastasized. Joseph Stalin, who assumed despotic control over the Soviet Union in 1929, had peculiar ideas about science. He divided it—nonsensically, arbitrarily, and poisonously—into “bourgeois” and “proletarian” and punished anyone who practiced the former. For decades, the Soviet agricultural research program was run by a proletarian peasant, the “barefoot scientist” Trofim Lysenko. Stalin practically fell in love with him because Lysenko denounced the regressive idea that living things, including crops, inherit traits and genes from their parents. A proper Marxist, he preached that only the proper social environment mattered (even for plants) and that the Soviet environment would prove superior to the capitalist pig environment. As far as it was possible, he also made biology based on genes “illegal” and arrested or executed dissidents. Somehow Lysenkoism failed to boost crop yields, and the millions of collectivized farmers forced to adopt the doctrine starved. During those famines, an eminent British geneticist gloomily described Lysenko as “completely ignorant of the elementary principles of genetics and plant physiology…. To talk to Lysenko was like trying to explain the differential calculus to a man who did not know his twelve times table.”

  Moreover, Stalin had no compunction about arresting scientists and forcing them to work for the state in slave labor camps. He shipped many scientists to a notorious nickel works and prison outside Norilsk, in Siberia, where temperatures regularly dropped to −80°F. Though primarily a nickel mine, Norilsk smelled permanently of sulfur, from diesel fumes, and scientists there slaved to extract a good portion of the toxic metals on the periodic table, including arsenic, lead, and cadmium. Pollution was rife, staining the sky, and depending on which heavy metal was in demand, it snowed pink or blue. When all the metals were in demand, it snowed black (and still does sometimes today). Perhaps most creepily, to this day reportedly not one tree grows within thirty miles of the poisonous nickel smelters.* In keeping with the macabre Russian sense of humor, a local joke says that bums in Norilsk, instead of begging for change, collect cups of rain, evaporate the water, and sell the scrap metal for cash. Jokes aside, much of a generation of Soviet science was squandered extracting nickel and other metals for Soviet industry.

  An absolute realist, Stalin also distrusted spooky, counterintuitive branches of science such as quantum mechanics and relativity. As late as 1949, he considered liquidating the bourgeois physicists who would not conform to Communist ideology by dropping those theories. He drew back only when a brave adviser pointed out that this might harm the Soviet nuclear weapons program just a bit. Plus, unlike in other areas of science, Stalin’s “heart” was never really into purging physicists. Because physics overlaps with weapons research, Stalin’s pet, and remains agnostic in response to questions about human nature, Marxism’s pet, physicists under Stalin escaped the worst abuses leveled at biologists, psychologists, and economists. “Leave [physicists] in peace,” Stalin graciously allowed. “We can always shoot them later.”

  Still, there’s another dimension to the pass that Stalin gave the physical sciences. Stalin demanded loyalty, and the Soviet nuclear weapons program had roots in one loyal subject, nuclear scientist Georgy Flyorov. In the most famous picture of him, Flyorov looks like someone in a vaudeville act: smirking, bald front to crown, a little overweight, with caterpillar eyebrows and an ugly striped tie—like someone who’d wear a squirting carnation in his lapel.

  That “Uncky Georgy” look concealed shrewdness. In 1942, Flyorov noticed that despite the great progress German and American scientists had made in uranium fission research in recent years, scientific journals had stopped publishing on the topic. Flyorov deduced that the fission work had become state secrets—which could mean only one thing. In a letter that mirrored Einstein’s famous letter to Franklin Roosevelt about starting the Manhattan Project, Flyorov alerted Stalin about his suspicions. Stalin, roused and paranoid, rounded up physicists by the dozens and started them on the Soviet Union’s own atomic bomb project. But “Papa Joe” spared Flyorov and never forgot his loyalty.

  Nowadays, knowing what a horror Stalin was, it’s easy to malign Flyorov, to label him Lysenko, part two. Had Flyorov kept quiet, Stalin might never have known about the nuclear bomb until August 1945. Flyorov’s case also evokes another possible explanation for Russia’s lack of scientific acumen: a culture of toadyism, which is anathema to science. (During Mendeleev’s time, in 1878, a Russian geologist named a mineral that contained samarium, element sixty-two, after his boss, one Colonel Samarski, a forgettable bureaucrat and mining official, and easily the least worthy eponym on the periodic table.)

  But Flyorov’s case is ambiguous. He had seen many colleagues’ lives wasted—including 650 scientists rounded up in one unforgettable purge of the elite Academy of Sciences, many of whom were shot for traitorously “opposing progress.” In 1942, Flyorov, age twenty-nine, had deep scientific ambitions and the talent to realize them. Trapped as he was in his homeland, he knew that playing politics was his only hope of advancement. And Flyorov’s letter did work. Stalin and his successors were so pleased when the Soviet Union unleashed its own nuclear bomb in 1949 that, eight years later, officials entrusted Comrade Flyorov with his own research lab. It was an isolated facility eighty miles outside Moscow, in the city of Dubna, free from state interference. Aligning himself with Stalin was an understandable, if morally flawed, decision for the young man.

  In Dubna, Flyorov smartly focused on “blackboard science”—prestigious but esoteric topics too hard to explain to laypeople and unlikely to ruffle narrow-minded ideologues. And by the 1960s, thanks to the Berkeley lab, finding new elements had shifted from what it had been for centuries—an operation where you got your hands dirty digging through obscure rocks—to a rarefied pursuit in which elements “existed” only as printouts on radiation detectors run by computers (or as fire alarm bells). Even smashing alpha particles into heavy elements was no longer practical, since heavy elements don’t sit still long enough to be targets.

  Scientists instead reached deeper into the periodic table and tried to fuse lighter elements together. On the surface, these projects were all arithmetic. For element 102, you could theoretically smash magnesium (twelve) into thorium (ninety) or vanadium (twenty-three) into gold (seventy-nine). Few combinations stuck together, however, so scientists had to invest a lot of time in calculatio
ns to determine which pairs of elements were worth their money and effort. Flyorov and his colleagues studied hard and copied the techniques of the Berkeley lab. And thanks in large part to him, the Soviet Union had shrugged off its reputation as a backwater in physical science by the late 1950s. Seaborg, Ghiorso, and Berkeley beat the Russians to elements 101, 102, and 103. But in 1964, seven years after the original Sputnik, the Dubna team announced it had created element 104 first.

  Back in berkelium, californium, anger followed shock. Its pride wounded, the Berkeley team checked the Soviet results and, not surprisingly, dismissed them as premature and sketchy. Meanwhile, Berkeley set out to create element 104 itself—which a Ghiorso team, advised by Seaborg, did in 1969. By that point, however, Dubna had bagged 105, too. Again Berkeley scrambled to catch up, all the while contesting that the Soviets were misreading their own data—a Molotov cocktail of an insult. Both teams produced element 106 in 1974, just months apart, and by that time all the international unity of mendelevium had evaporated.

  To cement their claims, both teams began naming “their” elements. The lists are tedious to get into, but it’s interesting that the Dubna team, à la berkelium, coined one element dubnium. For its part, Berkeley named element 105 after Otto Hahn and then, at Ghiorso’s insistence, named 106 after Glenn Seaborg—a living person—which wasn’t “illegal” but was considered gauche in an irritatingly American way. Across the world, dueling element names began appearing in academic journals, and printers of the periodic table had no idea how to sort through the mess.

  Amazingly, this dispute stretched all the way to the 1990s, by which point, to add confusion, a team from West Germany had sprinted past the bickering Americans and Soviets to claim contested elements of their own. Eventually, the body that governs chemistry, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC), had to step in and arbitrate.

  IUPAC sent nine scientists to each lab for weeks to sort through innuendos and accusations and to look at primary data. The nine men met for weeks on their own, too, in a tribunal. In the end, they announced that the cold war adversaries would have to hold hands and share credit for each element. That Solomonic solution pleased no one: an element can have only one name, and the box on the table was the real prize.

  Finally, in 1995, the nine wise men announced tentatively official names for elements 104 to 109. The compromise pleased Dubna and Darmstadt (home of the West German group), but when the Berkeley team saw seaborgium deleted from the list, they went apoplectic. They called a press conference to basically say, “To hell with you; we’re using it in the U.S. of A.” A powerful American chemistry body, which publishes prestigious journals that chemists around the world very much like getting published in, backed Berkeley up. This changed the diplomatic situation, and the nine men buckled. When the really final, like-it-or-not list came out in 1996, it included seaborgium at 106, as well as the official names on the table today: rutherfordium (104), dubnium (105), borhium (107), hassium (108), and meitnerium (109). After their win, with a public relations foresight the New Yorker had once found lacking, the Berkeley team positioned an age-spotted Seaborg next to a huge periodic table, his gnarled finger pointing only sort of toward seaborgium, and snapped a photo. His sweet smile betrays nothing of the dispute whose first salvo had come thirty-two years earlier and whose bitterness had outlasted even the cold war. Seaborg died three years later.

  After decades of bickering with Soviet and West German scientists, a satisfied but frail Glenn Seaborg points toward his namesake element, number 106, seaborgium, the only element ever named for a living person. (Photo courtesy Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory)

  But a story like this cannot end tidily. By the 1990s, Berkeley chemistry was spent, limping behind its Russian and especially German peers. In remarkably quick succession, between just 1994 and 1996, the Germans stamped out element 110, now named darmstadtium (Ds), after their home base; element 111, roentgenium (Rg), after the great German scientist Wilhelm Röntgen; and element 112, the latest element added to the periodic table, in June 2009, copernicium (Cn).* The German success no doubt explained why Berkeley defended its claims for past glory so tenaciously: it had no prospect of future joy. Nevertheless, refusing to be eclipsed, Berkeley pulled a coup in 1996 by hiring a young Bulgarian named Victor Ninov—who had been instrumental in discovering elements 110 and 112—away from the Germans, to renew the storied Berkeley program. Ninov even lured Al Ghiorso out of semiretirement (“Ninov is as good as a young Al Ghiorso,” Ghiorso liked to say), and the Berkeley lab was soon surfing on optimism again.

  For their big comeback, in 1999 the Ninov team pursued a controversial experiment proposed by a Polish theoretical physicist who had calculated that smashing krypton (thirty-six) into lead (eighty-two) just might produce element 118. Many denounced the calculation as poppycock, but Ninov, determined to conquer America as he had Germany, pushed for the experiment. Creating elements had grown into a multiyear, multimillion-dollar production by then, not something to undertake on a gamble, but the krypton experiment worked miraculously. “Victor must speak directly to God,” scientists joked. Best of all, element 118 decayed immediately, spitting out an alpha particle and becoming element 116, which had never been seen either. With one stroke, Berkeley had scored two elements! Rumors spread on the Berkeley campus that the team would reward old Al Ghiorso with his own element, 118, “ghiorsium.”

  Except… when the Russians and Germans tried to confirm the results by rerunning the experiments, they couldn’t find element 118, just krypton and lead. This null result might have been spite, so part of the Berkeley team reran the experiment themselves. It found nothing, even after months of checking. Puzzled, the Berkeley administration stepped in. When they looked back at the original data files for element 118, they noticed something sickening: there was no data. No proof of element 118 existed until a late round of data analysis, when “hits” suddenly materialized from chaotic 1s and 0s. All signs indicated that Victor Ninov—who had controlled the all-important radiation detectors and the computer software that ran them—had inserted false positives into his data files and passed them off as real. It was an unforeseen danger of the esoteric approach to extending the periodic table: when elements exist only on computers, one person can fool the world by hijacking the computers.

  Mortified, Berkeley retracted the claim for 118. Ninov was fired, and the Berkeley lab suffered major budget cuts, decimating it. To this day, Ninov denies that he faked any data—although, damningly, after his old German lab double-checked his experiments there by looking into old data files, it also retracted some (though not all) of Ninov’s findings. Perhaps worse, American scientists were reduced to traveling to Dubna to work on heavy elements. And there, in 2006, an international team announced that after smashing ten billion billion calcium atoms into a (gulp) californium target, they had produced three atoms of element 118. Fittingly, the claim for element 118 is contested, but if it holds up—and there’s no reason to think it won’t—the discovery would erase any chance of “ghiorsium” appearing on the periodic table. The Russians are in control, since it happened at their lab, and they’re said to be partial to “flyorium.”

  Part III

  PERIODIC CONFUSION: THE EMERGENCE OF COMPLEXITY

  8

  From Physics to Biology

  Glenn Seaborg and Al Ghiorso brought the hunt for unknown elements to a new level of sophistication, but they were hardly the only scientists inking in new spaces on the periodic table. In fact, when Time magazine named fifteen U.S. scientists its “Men of the Year” for 1960, it selected as one of the honorees not Seaborg or Ghiorso but the greatest element craftsman of an earlier era, a man who’d nabbed the most slippery and elusive element on the entire table while Seaborg was still in graduate school, Emilio Segrè.

  In an attempt to look futuristic, the cover for the issue shows a tiny, throbbing red nucleus. Instead of electrons, it is surrounded by fifteen head shots, all in the same so
ber, stilted poses familiar to anyone who’s ever snickered over the teachers’ spread in a yearbook. The lineup included geneticists, astronomers, laser pioneers, and cancer researchers, as well as a mug shot of William Shockley, the jealous transistor scientist and future eugenicist. (Even in this issue, Shockley couldn’t help but expound on his theories of race.) Despite the class-picture feel, it was an illustrious crew, and Time made the selections to crow about the sudden international dominance of American science. In the first four decades of the Nobel Prize, through 1940, U.S. scientists won fifteen prizes; in the next twenty years, they won forty-two.*

  Segrè—who as an immigrant and a Jew also reflected the importance of World War II refugees to America’s sudden scientific dominance—was among the older of the fifteen, at fifty-five. His picture appears in the top left quadrant, above and to the left of an even older man—Linus Pauling, age fifty-nine, pictured in the lower middle. The two men helped transform periodic table chemistry and, though not intimate friends, conversed about and exchanged letters on topics of mutual interest. Segrè once wrote Pauling for advice on experiments with radioactive beryllium. Pauling later asked Segrè about the provisional name for element eighty-seven (francium), which Segrè had codiscovered and Pauling wanted to mention in an Encyclopædia Britannica article he was writing on the periodic table.

  What’s more, they could have easily been—in fact, should have been—faculty colleagues. In 1922, Pauling was a hot chemistry recruit out of Oregon, and he wrote a letter to Gilbert Lewis (the chemist who kept losing the Nobel Prize) at the University of California at Berkeley, inquiring about graduate school there. Strangely, Lewis didn’t bother answering, so Pauling enrolled at the California Institute of Technology, where he starred as a student and faculty member until 1981. Only later did Berkeley realize it had lost Pauling’s letter. Had Lewis seen it, he certainly would have admitted Pauling and then—given Lewis’s policy of keeping top graduate students as faculty members—would have bound Pauling to Berkeley for life.