Chapter 12 DS summary

Science has always been inextricably tied to politics. Poland is one example - a political pawn across the centuries and often swallowed up by other countries. It was during one of these periods, when Poland wasn't even technically a country, the Marie Curie was born. Curie was one of the first people to begin to make the distinction between chemistry in physics, although she ended up winning Nobel prizes in both. The Nobel she won in chemistry was was for two new elements she had discovered. She named polonium after the latin word for Poland and hoped that it would cause a scandal, but the element itself was a dud as well as its interest to the media. She also discovered radium which did cause a big fuss because it was radioactive and it glowed. Ironically, her daughter, Irene Juliot-Curie, later died because of exposure to it during her experimenting with making artificially radioactive substances. Hevesy was another well known chemist during this time that after having first gone to work under the supervision of Rutherford and being given the impossible assignment of separating the radioactive tracers from the non-radioactive particles, went to work with Bohr. Bohr had determined that the at-the-time undiscovered element 72 was not a lutetium-like rare earth metal and Hevesy and his partner Coster found it on their first try. These new discoveries made chemistry seem quaint compared to quantum mechanics. Another successful pair was Meitner and Hahn that maintained their partnership even through threats from the Nazis. Fermi had just discovered what he claimed was a transuranic element, and even Irene remarked that it was a lot like lanthanum, but only Meitner was bold enough to suggest the possibility of fission. Despite their long relationship, though, the Nobel prize for discovering fission wen exclusively to Hahn although in an ironic twist of justice only Meitner had an element named after her.

Chapter 11 DS summary

Even with the massive compilation of information about elements that we have, they continue to surprise us. Pure nitrogen gas, for instance, is a silent and peaceful killer and took the lives of two technicians working on the spacecraft the Columbia. Another surprising element is titanium - despite the fact that it is metal, our bodies seem to not reject it, making it ideal for implants of every kind. Elements can not only deceive our immune systems, but also our sensory systems. Beryllium tastes like sugar to our taste buds even though the molecules share no similarities in their shape. Potassium triggers our salt-sensing taste buds because, interestingly enough, they detect the charges on ions rather than an element or nutrient specifically. Iodine is another element that scientists have discovered has medical merit, to the point where most governments made iodized salt mandatory as it was the easiest way to prevent birth defects and mental disabilities among the masses although, ironically, Gandhi's peaceful Salt March led to a decline in this and a sharp decline in birth defects in India.

Chapter 10 DS Summary

Just as often as elements are toxic they can also be life-giving. Copper, for instance, has proved to be the simplest, cheapest way to improve infrastructure by killing fungi, bacteria, and other microbes in water and air systems. Another element that kills "small, wriggling cells" is vanadium which is an incredibly effective spermicide although it is not prescribed for human use because it is difficult for the body to metabolize and seriously raises and lowers glucose levels. Gadolinium has the maximum number of unpaired electrons and is therefore incredibly useful by being easily magnetized and used in MRI scans. Silver is another element that many use for its supposed medicinal properties. It is fabled to be an antibiotic and several people have developed a condition called "agyria" which turns the skin a silver-blue after ingesting large quantities of it to cure ailments. But the most effective medical cures are not single elements but complex compounds. Louis Pasteur discovered a property about biomolecules called handedness or chirality. Every molecules in every living organism is left-handed.

Chapter 9 Disappearing Spoon Summary

The rules that govern biological structures are much more delicate than those of chemistry. Often times, elements on the periodic table mimic minerals that living cells need for life and quietly and ingeniously kill them. These elements are found in the "poisoner's corridor" of the table. The lightest of this grouping is cadmium which first gained its infamy after being dumped into streams where it leached into the water table in Japan after it was separated from other metals being mined. As early as 1912 this caused horrific diseases dubbed "itai-itai" or "ouch-ouch" disease. A doctor studying this in 1946 discovered that cadmium often replaces zinc and occasionally calcium and sulfur in the body, yet it can't perform the same functions. The next element in poisoner's corridor is thallium - considered one of the deadliest elements. It enters through the channels that the body uses for potassium but once inside cells it unstitches essential amino acid bonds inside proteins. Interestingly enough the next element, bismuth, which sits between some of the deadliest elements on the table, is actually quite benign and will probably be the very last element to decay even though it is mildly radioactive. In fact radioactivity plays a large role in the danger of many elements including thorium and americium, two elements the Eagle Scout David Hahn used when building a nuclear reactor in the shed in his backyard in the 90's.

Chp. 8 Disappearing Spoon

When TIME published their 15 candidates for Men of the Year in 1960, it was not Seaborg or Ghiorso on the cover, but William Shockley, a scientist from a slightly previous generation that was included. Serge and Pauling were two of the most influential chemists during the first part of the 20th century and should have been on the same faculty, but as fate would have it, were not. Interestingly enough, these two men both made huge mistakes. Segre had Lawrence unwittingly create number 93 for his by requesting a strip of molybdenum that had been smashed with other elements although years later his lab published a report about a transuranic element that was disproven and Serge himself had dismissed a paper about fission that he himself had actually induced. His colleague McMillan ended up discovering that several of the elements Serge had discovered were actually rare earth metal rather than transition metal and Serge brushed this aside as well. His fellow Californian chemist Pauling also made a huge gaff. After building a reputation for his meticulous science and essentially singlehandedly discovering many of atoms and molecules' properties incorrectly predicted the shape of DNA and was disproven by a team working a Cambridge that his own son was a part of.

Chapter 7 D.S. summary

Leading into the 1950's the discovery and naming of new elements was so frequent that even the New Yorker was making quips about it. Two scientists, Seaborg and Ghiorso, were, for many years, ahead of the rest of the world in discovery and creating new elements at UC Berkeley, and had the honor of naming them with nationalistic names like americium and californium. This mad dash across the globe of scientists wanting to be the discoverers and namers of elements led to much debate across the scientific community - someone would claim to have found an element, someone else reviewed it and found it faulty, the name is retracted, it it discovered years later that it may have actually been a different and still-undiscovered element, etc. In this same race Russian scientists, Flyorov, gained a name for himself in Stalin's eyes after predicting the US' plans for developing a nuclear bomb and with his team bagged 105 and 105. The team at Berkeley hotly contested all of these and desperately tried to regain their lead. After both teams produced 106 just months apart the issue over naming came to a T - both teams were naming the elements they were discovering (the same elements) their own names and it grew to the point where IUPAC had to step in although Berkeley ended up getting most of the names it wanted through stubbornness. This contest went back and forth, with much hasty and faulty evidence, as the Soviet Union and the U.S. tried to out-chemistry each other.