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

  “ ‘The reason for our blindness is not clear’ ”: The quote from Segrè about Noddack and fission comes from his biography Enrico Fermi: Physicist.

  “a malfunctioning molecule”: Pauling (with colleagues Harvey Itano, S. Jonathan Singer, and Ibert Wells) determined that defective hemoglobin causes sickle-cell anemia by running defective cells through a gel in an electric field. Cells with healthy hemoglobin traveled one way in the electric field, while sickle cells moved in the opposite direction. This meant that the two types of molecules had opposite electric charges, a difference that could arise only on a molecular, atom-by-atom level.

  Funnily enough, Francis Crick later cited the paper in which Pauling laid out his theory about the molecular basis of sickle-cell anemia as a major influence on him, since it was exactly the sort of nitty-gritty molecular biology that interested Crick.

  “a molecular appendix”: Interestingly, biologists are slowly coming back around to their original view from Miescher’s day that proteins are the be-all and end-all of genetic biology. Genes occupied scientists for decades, and they’ll never really go away. But scientists now realize that genes cannot account for the amazing complexity of living beings and that far more is going on. Genomics was important fundamental work, but proteomics is where there’s real money to be made.

  “DNA was”: To be scrupulous, the 1952 virus experiments with sulfur and phosphorus, conducted by Alfred Hershey and Martha Chase, were not the first to prove that DNA carries genetic information. That honor goes to work with bacteria done by Oswald Avery, published in 1944. Although Avery illuminated the true role of DNA, his work was not widely believed at first. People were beginning to accept it by 1952, but only after the Hershey-Chase experiments did people such as Linus Pauling really get involved in DNA work.

  People often cite Avery—and Rosalind Franklin, who unwittingly told Watson and Crick that DNA was a double helix—as prime examples of people who got locked out of Nobel Prizes. That’s not quite accurate. Those two scientists never won, but both had died by 1958, and no one won a Nobel Prize for DNA until 1962. Had they still been alive, at least one of them might have shared in the spoils.

  “James Watson and Francis Crick”: For primary documents related to Pauling and his competition with Watson and Crick, see the wonderful site set up by Oregon State University, which has archived and posted the contents of hundreds of personal papers and letters by Pauling and also produced a documentary history called “Linus Pauling and the Race for DNA” at http://osulibrary.oregonstate.edu/specialcollections/coll/pauling/dna/index.html.

  “before Pauling recovered”: After the DNA debacle, Ava Pauling, Linus’s wife, famously scolded him. Assuming that he would decipher DNA, Pauling had not broken much of a sweat on his calculations at first, and Ava lit into him: “If [DNA] was such an important problem, why didn’t you work harder at it?” Even so, Linus loved her deeply, and perhaps one reason he stayed at Cal Tech so long and never transferred his allegiance to Berkeley, even though the latter was a much stronger school at the time, was that one of the more prominent members of the Berkeley faculty, Robert Oppenheimer, later head of the Manhattan Project, had tried to seduce Ava, which made Linus furious.

  “the Nobel Prize in Physics”: As one last punch in the gut, even Segrè’s Nobel Prize was later tainted by accusations (possibly unfounded) that he stole ideas while designing the experiments to discover the antiproton. Segrè and his colleague, Owen Chamberlain, acknowledged working with the combative physicist Oreste Piccioni on methods to focus and guide particle beams with magnets, but they denied that Piccioni’s ideas were of much use, and they didn’t list him as an author on a crucial paper. Piccioni later helped discover the antineutron. After Segrè and Chamberlain won the prize in 1959, Piccioni remained bitter about the slight for years and finally filed a $125,000 lawsuit against them in 1972—which a judge threw out not for lack of scientific standing but because it had been filed more than a decade after the fact.

  From the New York Times obituary of Piccioni on April 27, 2002: “ ‘He’d break down your front door and tell you he’s got the best idea in the world,’ said Dr. William A. Wenzel, a senior scientist emeritus at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who also worked on the antineutron experiment. ‘Knowing Oreste, he has a lot of ideas; he throws them out a dozen a minute. Some of them are good, some of them aren’t. Nevertheless, I felt he was a good physicist and he contributed to our experiment.’ ”

  9. Poisoner’s Corridor

  “a gruesome record”: People still die of thallium poisoning today. In 1994, Russian soldiers working at an old cold war weapons depot found a canister of white powder laced with this element. Despite not knowing what it was, they powdered their feet with it and blended it with their tobacco. A few soldiers reportedly even snorted it. All of them came down with a mysterious, entirely unforeseeable illness, and a few died. On a sadder note, two children of Iraqi fighter pilots died in early 2008 after eating a birthday cake laced with thallium. The motive for the poisoning was unclear, although Saddam Hussein had used thallium during his dictatorship.

  “in his mother’s backyard”: Various newspapers in Detroit have tracked David Hahn over the years, but for the most detailed account of Hahn’s story, see Ken Silverstein’s article in Harper’s magazine, “The Radioactive Boy Scout” (November 1998). Silverstein later expanded the article into a book of the same name.

  10. Take Two Elements, Call Me in the Morning

  “a cheaper, lighter copper nose”: In addition to studying the crust around Brahe’s fake nose, the archaeologists who dug him up also found signs of mercury poisoning in his mustache—probably a result of his active research into alchemy. The usual story of Brahe’s demise is that he died of a ruptured bladder. One night at a dinner party with some minor royalty, Brahe drank too much, but he refused to get up and go to the bathroom because he thought leaving the table before his social superiors did would be rude. By the time he got home, hours later, he couldn’t pee anymore, and he died eleven excruciating days later. The story has become a legend, but it’s possible that mercury poisoning contributed as much or more to the astronomer’s death.

  “are copper-coated”: The elemental compositions of U.S. coins: New pennies (since 1982) are 97.5 percent zinc but have a thin copper coating, to sterilize the part you touch. (Old pennies were 95 percent copper.) Nickels are 75 percent copper, the balance nickel. Dimes, quarters, and half-dollars are 91.67 percent copper, the balance nickel. Dollar coins (besides special-issue gold coins) are 88.5 percent copper, 6 percent zinc, 3.5 percent manganese, and 2 percent nickel.

  “one-oared rowboats”: Some further facts about vanadium: Some creatures (no one knows why) use vanadium in their blood instead of iron, which turns their blood red, apple green, or blue, depending on the creature. When sprinkled into steel, vanadium greatly strengthens the alloy without adding much weight (much like molybdenum and tungsten; see chapter 5). In fact, Henry Ford once boomed: “Why, without vanadium there would be no automobiles!”

  “forced to double up”: The bus metaphor for how electrons fill their shells one at a time until “someone” is absolutely forced to double up is one of the best in chemistry, both folksy and accurate. It originated with Wolfgang Pauli, who discovered the Pauli “exclusion principle” in 1925.

  “surgical strikes without surgery”: Besides gadolinium, gold is often cited as the best hope for treating cancer. Gold absorbs infrared light that otherwise passes through the body, and grows extremely warm as it does so. Delivering gold-coated particles into tumor cells could allow doctors to fry the tumors without damaging the surrounding tissue. This method was invented by John Kanzius, a businessman and radio technician who underwent thirty-six rounds of chemotherapy for leukemia beginning in 2003. He felt so nauseated and beaten up by the chemo—and was so filled with despair at the sight of the children with cancer he encountered in his hospital—that he decided there had to be a better way. In the middle of th
e night, he came up with the idea of heating metal particles, and he built a prototype machine using his wife’s baking pans. He tested it by injecting half of a hot dog with a solution of dissolved metals and placing it in a chamber of intense radio waves. The tampered-with side of the hot dog fried, while the other half remained cold.

  “selling it as a supplement”: In the May 2009 issue of Smithsonian, the article “Honorable Mentions: Near Misses in the Genius Department” describes one Stan Lindberg, a daringly experimental chemist who took it upon himself “to consume every single element of the periodic table.” The article notes, “In addition to holding the North American record for mercury poisoning, his gonzo account of a three-week ytterbium bender… (‘Fear and Loathing in the Lanthanides’) has become a minor classic.”

  I spent a half hour hungrily trying to track down “Fear and Loathing in the Lanthanides” before realizing I’d been had. The piece is pure fiction. (Although who knows? Elements are strange creatures, and ytterbium might very well get you high.)

  “self-administer ‘drugs’ such as silver once more”: Wired magazine ran a short news story in 2003 about the online reemergence of “silver health scams.” The money quote: “Meanwhile, doctors across the country have seen a surge in argyria cases. ‘In the last year and a half, I’ve seen six cases of silver poisoning from these so-called health supplements,’ said Bill Robertson, the medical director of the Seattle Poison Center. ‘They were the first cases I’d seen in fifty years of medical practice.’ ”

  “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 beve
rages 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 experiments on goldfish as well as himself, and he ended up killing a number of them.