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.