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.