The Disappearing Spoon Part 3

Beneath that skin of progress, though, a tumor had metastasized. Joseph Stalin, who a.s.sumed 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 s.h.i.+pped many scientists to a notorious nickel works and prison outside Norilsk, in Siberia, where temperatures regularly dropped to 80F. 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 a.r.s.enic, 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 b.u.ms in Norilsk, instead of begging for change, collect cups of rain, evaporate the water, and sell the sc.r.a.p metal for cash. Jokes aside, much of a generation of Soviet science was squandered extracting nickel and other metals for Soviet industry. In keeping with the macabre Russian sense of humor, a local joke says that b.u.ms in Norilsk, instead of begging for change, collect cups of rain, evaporate the water, and sell the sc.r.a.p 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 pa.s.s 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 publis.h.i.+ng 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 ac.u.men: 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 s.h.i.+fted 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 smas.h.i.+ng 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 calculations 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, Sputnik, the Dubna team announced it had created element 104 first. 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 c.o.c.ktail 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, a 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 h.e.l.l 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), ha.s.sium (108), and meitnerium (109). After their win, with a public relations foresight the New Yorker 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. 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 Rontgen; 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. 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 smas.h.i.+ng krypton (thirty-six) into lead (eighty-two) just might produce element 118. Many denounced the calculation as poppyc.o.c.k, 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 G.o.d," 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 a.n.a.lysis, 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 pa.s.sed 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, d.a.m.ningly, 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 smas.h.i.+ng 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.

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 s.p.a.ces on the periodic table. In fact, when Time 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 Segre. 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 Segre.

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 sober, 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 cla.s.s-picture feel, it was an ill.u.s.trious crew, and Time Time made the selections to crow about the sudden international dominance of American science. In the first four decades of the n.o.bel Prize, through 1940, U.S. scientists won fifteen prizes; in the next twenty years, they won forty-two. made the selections to crow about the sudden international dominance of American science. In the first four decades of the n.o.bel Prize, through 1940, U.S. scientists won fifteen prizes; in the next twenty years, they won forty-two.*

Segre-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. Segre once wrote Pauling for advice on experiments with radioactive beryllium. Pauling later asked Segre about the provisional name for element eighty-seven (francium), which Segre had codiscovered and Pauling wanted to mention in an Encyclopaedia Britannica Encyclopaedia Britannica article he was writing on the periodic table. 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 n.o.bel 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 Inst.i.tute 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.

Later, Segre would have joined Pauling there. In 1938, Segre became yet another Jewish refugee from fascist Europe when Benito Mussolini bowed to Hitler and sacked all the Jewish professors in Italy. As bad as that was, the circ.u.mstances of Segre's appointment at Berkeley proved equally humiliating. At the time of his firing, Segre was on sabbatical at the Berkeley Radiation Lab, a famed cousin of the chemistry department. Suddenly homeless and scared, Segre begged the director of the "Rad Lab" for a full-time job. The director said yes, of course, but only at a lower salary. He a.s.sumed correctly that Segre had no other options and forced him to accept a 60 percent pay cut, from a handsome $300 per month to $116. Segre bowed his head and accepted, then sent for his family in Italy, wondering how he would support them.

Segre got over the slight, and in the next few decades, he and Pauling (especially Pauling) became legends in their respective fields. They remain today two of the greatest scientists most laypeople have never heard of. But a largely forgotten link between them-Time certainly didn't bring it up-is that Pauling and Segre will forever be united in infamy for making two of the biggest mistakes in science history. certainly didn't bring it up-is that Pauling and Segre will forever be united in infamy for making two of the biggest mistakes in science history.

Now, mistakes in science don't always lead to baleful results. Vulcanized rubber, Teflon, and penicillin were all mistakes. Camillo Golgi discovered osmium staining, a technique for making the details of neurons visible, after spilling that element onto brain tissue. Even an outright falsehood-the claim of the sixteenth-century scholar and protochemist Paracelsus that mercury, salt, and sulfur were the fundamental atoms of the universe-helped turn alchemists away from a mind-warping quest for gold and usher in real chemical a.n.a.lysis. Serendipitous clumsiness and outright blunders have pushed science ahead all through history.

Pauling's and Segre's were not those kinds of mistakes. They were hide-your-eyes, don't-tell-the-provost gaffes. In their defense, both men were working on immensely complicated projects that, though grounded in the chemistry of single atoms, vaulted over that chemistry into explaining how systems of atoms should behave. Then again, both men could have avoided their mistakes by studying a little more carefully the very periodic table they helped illuminate.

Speaking of mistakes, no element has been discovered for the "first time" more times than element forty-three. It's the Loch Ness monster of the elemental world.

In 1828, a German chemist announced the discovery of the new elements "polinium" and "pluranium," one of which he presumed was element forty-three. Both turned out to be impure iridium. In 1846, another German discovered "ilmenium," which was actually niobium. The next year someone else discovered "pelopium," which was niobium, too. Element forty-three disciples at last got some good news in 1869, when Mendeleev constructed his periodic table and left a tantalizing gap between forty-two and forty-four. However, though good science itself, Mendeleev's work encouraged a lot of bad science, since it convinced people to look for something they were predisposed to find. Sure enough, eight years later one of Mendeleev's fellow Russians inked "davyium" into box forty-three on the table, even though it weighed 50 percent more than it should have and was later determined to be a mix of three elements. Finally, in 1896 "lucium" was discovered-and discarded as yttrium-just in time for the twentieth century.

The new century proved even crueler. In 1909, Masataka Ogawa discovered "nipponium," which he named for his homeland (Nippon in j.a.panese). All the previous faux forty-threes had been contaminated samples or previously discovered trace elements. Ogawa had actually discovered a new element-just not what he claimed. In his rush to seize element forty-three, he ignored other gaps in the table, and when no one could confirm his work, he retracted it, ashamed. Only in 2004 did a countryman reexamine Ogawa's data and determine he had isolated element seventy-five, rhenium, also undiscovered at the time, without knowing it. It depends whether you're a half-full or half-empty kind of person if you think Ogawa would be posthumously pleased to find out he'd discovered at least something, or even more vexed at his wrenching mistake. in j.a.panese). All the previous faux forty-threes had been contaminated samples or previously discovered trace elements. Ogawa had actually discovered a new element-just not what he claimed. In his rush to seize element forty-three, he ignored other gaps in the table, and when no one could confirm his work, he retracted it, ashamed. Only in 2004 did a countryman reexamine Ogawa's data and determine he had isolated element seventy-five, rhenium, also undiscovered at the time, without knowing it. It depends whether you're a half-full or half-empty kind of person if you think Ogawa would be posthumously pleased to find out he'd discovered at least something, or even more vexed at his wrenching mistake.

Element seventy-five was discovered unambiguously in 1925 by three more German chemists, Otto Berg and the husband and wife team of Walter and Ida Noddack. They named it rhenium after the Rhine River. Simultaneously, they announced yet another stab at element forty-three, which they called "masurium" after a region of Prussia. Given that nationalism had destroyed Europe a decade earlier, other scientists did not look kindly on those Teutonic, even jingoistic names-both the Rhine and Masuria had been sites of German victories in World War I. A continent-wide plot rose up to discredit the Germans. The rhenium data looked solid, so scientists concentrated on the sketchier "masurium" work. According to some modern scholars, the Germans might have discovered element forty-three, but the trio's paper contained sloppy mistakes, such as overestimating by many thousands of times the amount of "masurium" they had isolated. As a result, scientists already suspicious of yet another claim for element forty-three declared the finding invalid.

Only in 1937 did two Italians isolate the element. To do so, Emilio Segre and Carlo Perrier took advantage of new work in nuclear physics. Element forty-three had proved so elusive until then because virtually every atom of it in the earth's crust had disintegrated radioactively into molybdenum, element forty-two, millions of years ago. So instead of sifting through tons of ore like suckers for a few micro-ounces of it (as Berg and the Noddacks had), the Italians had an unknowing American colleague make some.

A few years earlier that American, Ernest Lawrence (who once called Berg and the Noddacks' claim for element forty-three "delusional"), had invented an atom smasher called a cyclotron to ma.s.s-produce radioactive elements. Lawrence was more interested in creating isotopes of existing elements than in creating new ones, but when Segre happened to visit Lawrence's lab on a tour of America in 1937, Segre heard that the cyclotron used replaceable molybdenum parts-at which point his internal Geiger counter went wild. He cagily asked to look at some discarded sc.r.a.ps. Weeks later, at Segre's request, Lawrence happily flew a few worn-out molybdenum strips to Italy in an envelope. Segre's hunch proved correct: on the strips, he and Perrier found traces of element forty-three. They had filled the periodic table's most frustrating gap.

Naturally, the German chemists did not abandon their claims for "masurium." Walter Noddack even visited and quarreled with Segre in the Italian's office-and did so dressed in an intimidating, quasi-military uniform covered with swastikas. This didn't endear him to the short, volatile Segre, who also faced political pressure on another matter. Officials at the University of Palermo, where Segre worked, were pus.h.i.+ng him to name his new element "panormium," after the Latin for Palermo. Perhaps wary because of the nationalistic debacle over "masurium," Segre and Perrier chose technetium, Greek for "artificial," instead. It was fitting, if dull, since technetium was the first man-made element. But the name cannot have made Segre popular, and in 1938 he arranged for a sabbatical abroad at Berkeley, under Lawrence.

There's no evidence Lawrence held a grudge against Segre for his molybdenum gambit, but it was Lawrence who lowballed Segre later that year. In fact, Lawrence blurted out, oblivious to the Italian's feelings, how happy he was to save $184 per month to spend on equipment, like his precious cyclotron. Ouch. This was further proof that Lawrence, for all his skill in securing funds and directing research, was obtuse with people. As often as Lawrence recruited one brilliant scientist, his dictatorial style drove another away. Even a booster of his, Glenn Seaborg, once said that Lawrence's world-renowned and much-envied Rad Lab-and not the Europeans who did-should have discovered artificial radioactivity and nuclear fission, the most momentous discoveries in science at the time. To miss both, Seaborg rued, was "scandalous failure."

Still, Segre might have sympathized with Lawrence on that last account. Segre had been a top a.s.sistant to the legendary Italian physicist Enrico Fermi in 1934 when Fermi reported to the world (wrongly, it turned out) that by bombarding uranium samples with neutrons, he had "discovered" element ninety-three and other transuranic elements. Fermi long had a reputation as the quickest wit in science, but in this case his snap judgment misled him. In fact, he missed a far more consequential discovery than transuranics: he had actually induced uranium fission years before anyone else and hadn't realized it. When two German scientists contradicted Fermi's results in 1939, Fermi's whole lab was stunned-he had already won a n.o.bel Prize for this. Segre felt especially chagrined. His team had been in charge of a.n.a.lyzing and identifying the new elements. Worse, he instantly remembered that he (among others) had read a paper on the possibility of fission in 1934 and had dismissed it as ill conceived and unfounded-a paper by, of all the d.a.m.ned luck, Ida Noddack.*

Segre-who later became a noted science historian (as well as, incidentally, a noted hunter of wild mushrooms)-wrote about the fission mistake in two books, saying the same terse thing both times: "Fission... escaped us, although it was called specifically to our attention by Ida Noddack, who sent us an article in which she clearly indicated the possibility.... The reason for our blindness is not clear."* (As a historical curiosity, he might also have pointed out that the two people who came closest to discovering fission, Noddack and Irene Joliot-Curie-daughter of Marie Curie-and the person who eventually did discover it, Lise Meitner, were all women.) (As a historical curiosity, he might also have pointed out that the two people who came closest to discovering fission, Noddack and Irene Joliot-Curie-daughter of Marie Curie-and the person who eventually did discover it, Lise Meitner, were all women.) Unfortunately, Segre learned his lesson about the absence of transuranic elements too literally, and he soon had his own solo scandalous failure to account for. Around 1940, scientists a.s.sumed that the elements just before and just after uranium were transition metals. According to their arithmetic, element ninety fell in column four, and the first nonnaturally occurring element, ninety-three, fell in column seven beneath technetium. But as the modern table shows, the elements near uranium are not transition metals. They sit beneath the rare earths at the bottom of the table and act like rare earths, not like technetium, in chemical reactions. The reason for chemists' blindness back then is clear. Despite their homage to the periodic table, they didn't take periodicity seriously enough. They thought the rare earths were strange exceptions whose quirky, clingy chemistry would never repeat. But it does repeat: uranium and others bury electrons in f-sh.e.l.ls just like the rare earths. They must, therefore, jump off the main periodic table at the same point and behave like them in reactions. Simple, at least in retrospect. A year after the bombsh.e.l.l discovery of fission, a colleague down the hall from Segre decided to try again to find element ninety-three, so he irradiated some uranium in the cyclotron. Believing (for the reasons above) that this new element would act like technetium, he asked Segre for help, since Segre had discovered technetium and knew its chemistry better than anyone. Segre, an eager element hunter, tested the samples. Taking after his quick-witted mentor, Fermi, he announced that they acted like rare earths, not like heavy cousins of technetium. More humdrum nuclear fission, Segre declared, and he dashed off a paper with the glum t.i.tle "An Unsuccessful Search for Transuranic Elements."

But while Segre moved on, the colleague, Edwin McMillan, felt troubled. All elements have unique radioactive signatures, and Segre's "rare earths" had different signatures than the other rare earths, which didn't make sense. After careful reasoning, McMillan realized that perhaps the samples acted like rare earths because they were chemical cousins of rare earths and diverged from the main periodic table, too. So he and a partner redid the irradiation and chemical tests, cutting Segre out, and they immediately discovered nature's first forbidden element, neptunium. The irony is too good not to point out. Under Fermi, Segre had misidentified nuclear fission products as transuranics. "Apparently not learning from that experience," Glenn Seaborg recalled, "once again Segre saw no need to follow up with careful chemistry." In the exact opposite blunder, Segre sloppily misidentified transuranic neptunium as a fission product.

Though no doubt furious with himself as a scientist, perhaps as a science historian Segre could appreciate what happened next. McMillan won the n.o.bel Prize in Chemistry in 1951 for this work. But the Swedish Academy had rewarded Fermi for discovering the transuranic elements; so rather than admit a mistake, it defiantly rewarded McMillan only for investigating "the chemistry of chemistry of the transuranium elements" (emphasis added). Then again, since careful, mistake-free chemistry had led him to the truth, maybe that wasn't a slight. the transuranium elements" (emphasis added). Then again, since careful, mistake-free chemistry had led him to the truth, maybe that wasn't a slight.

If Segre proved too c.o.c.ksure for his own good, he was nothing compared to the genius just down I-5 in southern California, Linus Pauling.

After earning his Ph.D. in 1925, Pauling had accepted an eighteen-month fellows.h.i.+p in Germany, then the center of the scientific universe. ( Just as all scientists communicate in English today, back then it was de rigueur to speak German.) But what Pauling, still in his twenties, learned about quantum mechanics in Europe soon propelled U.S. chemistry past German chemistry and himself onto the cover of Time Time magazine. magazine.

In short, Pauling figured out how quantum mechanics governs the chemical bonds between atoms: bond strength, bond length, bond angle, nearly everything. He was the Leonardo of chemistry-the one who, as Leonardo did in drawing humans, got the anatomical details right for the first time. And since chemistry is basically the study of atoms forming and breaking bonds, Pauling single-handedly modernized the sleepy field. He absolutely deserved one of the great scientific compliments ever paid, when a colleague said Pauling proved "that chemistry could be understood understood rather than being memorized" (emphasis added). rather than being memorized" (emphasis added).

After that triumph, Pauling continued to play with basic chemistry. He soon figured out why snowflakes are six-sided: because of the hexagonal structure of ice. At the same time, Pauling was clearly itching to move beyond straightforward physical chemistry. One of his projects, for instance, determined why sickle-cell anemia kills people: the misshaped hemoglobin in their red blood cells cannot hold on to oxygen. This work on hemoglobin stands out as the first time anyone had traced a disease to a malfunctioning molecule,* and it transformed how doctors thought of medicine. Pauling then, in 1948, while laid up with the flu, decided to revolutionize molecular biology by showing how proteins can form long cylinders called alpha-helixes. Protein function depends largely on protein shape, and Pauling was the first to figure out how the individual bits in proteins "know" what their proper shape is. and it transformed how doctors thought of medicine. Pauling then, in 1948, while laid up with the flu, decided to revolutionize molecular biology by showing how proteins can form long cylinders called alpha-helixes. Protein function depends largely on protein shape, and Pauling was the first to figure out how the individual bits in proteins "know" what their proper shape is.

In all these cases, Pauling's real interest (besides the obvious benefits to medicine) was in how new properties emerge, almost miraculously, when small, dumb atoms self-a.s.semble into larger structures. The really fascinating angle is that the parts often betray no hint of the whole. Just as you could never guess, unless you'd seen it, that individual carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen atoms could run together into something as useful as an amino acid, you'd have no idea that a few amino acids could fold themselves into all the proteins that run a living being. This work, the study of atomic ecosystems, was a step up in sophistication even from creating new elements. But that jump in sophistication also left more room for misinterpretation and mistakes. In the long run, Pauling's easy success with alpha-helixes proved ironic: had he not blundered with another helical molecule, DNA, he would surely be considered one of the top five scientists ever.

Like most others, Pauling was not interested in DNA until 1952, even though Swiss biologist Friedrich Miescher had discovered DNA in 1869. Miescher did so by pouring alcohol and the stomach juice of pigs onto pus-soaked bandages (which local hospitals gladly gave to him) until only a sticky, goopy, grayish substance remained. Upon testing it, Miescher immediately and self-servingly declared that deoxyribonucleic acid would prove important in biology. Unfortunately, chemical a.n.a.lysis showed high levels of phosphorus in it. Back then, proteins were considered the only interesting part of biochemistry, and since proteins contain zero phosphorus, DNA was judged a vestige, a molecular appendix.*

Only a dramatic experiment with viruses in 1952 reversed that prejudice. Viruses hijack cells by clamping onto them and then, like inverse mosquitoes, injecting rogue genetic information. But no one knew whether DNA or proteins carried that information. So two geneticists used radioactive tracers to tag both the phosphorus in viruses' phosphorus-rich DNA and the sulfur in their sulfur-rich proteins. When the scientists examined a few hijacked cells, they found that radioactive phosphorus had been injected and pa.s.sed on but the sulfurous proteins had not. Proteins couldn't be the carriers of genetic information. DNA was.*

But what was DNA? Scientists knew a little. It came in long strands, and each strand consisted of a phosphorus-sugar backbone. There were also nucleic acids, which stuck out from the backbone like k.n.o.bs on a spine. But the shape of the strands and how they linked up were mysteries-important mysteries. As Pauling showed with hemoglobin and alpha-helixes, shape relates intimately to how molecules work. Soon DNA shape became the consuming question of molecular biology.

And Pauling, like many others, a.s.sumed he was the only one smart enough to answer it. This wasn't, or at least wasn't only, arrogance: Pauling had simply never been beaten before. So in 1952, with a pencil, a slide rule, and sketchy secondhand data, Pauling sat down at his desk in California to crack DNA. He first decided, incorrectly, that the bulky nucleic acids sat on the outside of each strand. Otherwise, he couldn't see how the molecule fit together. He accordingly rotated the phosphorus-sugar backbone toward the molecule's core. Pauling also reasoned, using the bad data, that DNA was a triple helix. That's because the bad data was taken from desiccated, dead DNA, which coils up differently than wet, live DNA. The strange coiling made the molecule seem more twisted than it is, bound around itself three times. But on paper, this all seemed plausible.

Everything was humming along nicely until Pauling requested that a graduate student check his calculations. The student did and was soon tying himself in knots trying to see where he was wrong and Pauling was right. Eventually, he pointed out to Pauling that it just didn't seem like the phosphate molecules fit, for an elementary reason. Despite the emphasis in chemistry cla.s.ses on neutral atoms, sophisticated chemists don't think of elements that way. In nature, especially in biology, many elements exist only as ions, charged atoms. Indeed, according to laws Pauling had helped work out, the phosphorus atoms in DNA would always have a negative charge and would therefore repel each other. He couldn't pack three phosphate strands into DNA's core without blowing the d.a.m.n thing apart.

The graduate student explained this, and Pauling, being Pauling, politely ignored him. It's not clear why Pauling bothered to have someone check him if he wasn't going to listen, but Pauling's reason for ignoring the student is clear. He wanted scientific priority-he wanted every other DNA idea to be considered a knockoff of his. So contra his usual meticulousness, he a.s.sumed the anatomical details of the molecule would work themselves out, and he rushed his phosphorus-in, triple-stranded model into print in early 1953.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, two gawky graduate students at Cambridge University pored over advance copies of Pauling's paper. Linus Pauling's son, Peter, worked in the same lab as James Watson and Francis Crick* and had provided the paper as a courtesy. The unknown students desperately wanted to solve DNA to make their careers. And what they read in Pauling's paper flabbergasted them: they had built the same model a year before-and had dismissed it, embarra.s.sed, when a colleague had shown what a shoddy piece of work their triple helix was. and had provided the paper as a courtesy. The unknown students desperately wanted to solve DNA to make their careers. And what they read in Pauling's paper flabbergasted them: they had built the same model a year before-and had dismissed it, embarra.s.sed, when a colleague had shown what a shoddy piece of work their triple helix was.

During that dressing-down, however, the colleague, Rosalind Franklin, had betrayed a secret. Franklin specialized in X-ray crystallography, which shows the shapes of molecules. Earlier that year, she had examined wet DNA from squid sperm and calculated that DNA was double-stranded. Pauling, while studying in Germany, had studied crystallography, too, and probably would have solved DNA instantly if he'd seen Franklin's good data. (His data for dried-out DNA was also from X-ray crystallography.) However, as an outspoken liberal, Pauling had had his pa.s.sport revoked by McCarthyites in the U.S. State Department, and he couldn't travel to England in 1952 for an important conference, where he might have heard of Franklin's work. And unlike Franklin, Watson and Crick never shared data with rivals. Instead, they took Franklin's abuse, swallowed their pride, and started working with her ideas. Not long afterward, Watson and Crick saw all their earlier errors reproduced in Pauling's paper.

Shaking off their disbelief, they rushed to their adviser, William Bragg. Bragg had won a n.o.bel Prize decades before but lately had become bitter about losing out on key discoveries-such as the shape of the alpha-helix-to Pauling, his flamboyant and (as one historian had it) "acerbic and publicity-seeking" rival. Bragg had banned Watson and Crick from working on DNA after their triple-stranded embarra.s.sment. But when they showed him Pauling's b.o.n.e.rs and admitted they'd continued to work in secret, Bragg saw a chance to beat Pauling yet. He ordered them back to DNA.

First thing, Crick wrote a cagey letter to Pauling asking how that phosphorus core stayed intact-considering Pauling's theories said it was impossible and all. This distracted Pauling with futile calculations. Even while Peter Pauling alerted him that the two students were closing in, Pauling insisted his three-stranded model would prove correct, that he almost had it. Knowing that Pauling was stubborn but not stupid and would see his errors soon, Watson and Crick scrambled for ideas. They never ran experiments themselves, just brilliantly interpreted other people's data. And in 1953, they finally wrested the missing clue from another scientist.

That man told them that the four nucleic acids in DNA (abbreviated A, C, T, and G) always show up in paired proportions. That is, if a DNA sample is 36 percent A, it will always be 36 percent T as well. Always. The same with C and G. From this, Watson and Crick realized that A and T, and C and G, must pair up inside DNA. (Ironically, that scientist had told Pauling the same thing years before on a sea cruise. Pauling, annoyed at his vacation being interrupted by a loudmouth colleague, had blown him off.) What's more, miracle of miracles, those two pairs of nucleic acids fit together snugly, like puzzle pieces. This explained why DNA is packed so tightly together, a tightness that invalidated Pauling's main reason for turning the phosphorus inward. So while Pauling struggled with his model, Watson and Crick turned theirs inside out, so the negative phosphorus ions wouldn't touch. This gave them a sort of twisted ladder-the famed double helix. Everything checked out brilliantly, and before Pauling recovered,* they published this model in the April 25, 1953, issue of they published this model in the April 25, 1953, issue of Nature Nature.

So how did Pauling react to the public humiliation of triple helixes and inverted phosphorus? And to losing out-to his rival Bragg's lab, no less-on the great biological discovery of the century? With incredible dignity. The same dignity all of us should hope we could summon in a similar situation. Pauling admitted his mistakes, conceded defeat, and even promoted Watson and Crick by inviting them to a professional conference he organized in late 1953. Given his stature, Pauling could afford to be magnanimous; his early championing of the double helix proved he was.

The years after 1953 went much better for both Pauling and Segre. In 1955, Segre and yet another Berkeley scientist, Owen Chamberlain, discovered the antiproton. Antiprotons are the mirror image of regular protons: they have a negative charge, may travel backward in time, and, scarily, will annihilate any "real" matter, such as you or me, on contact. After the prediction in 1928 that antimatter exists, one type of antimatter, the antielectron (or positron) was quickly and easily discovered in 1932. Yet the antiproton proved to be the elusive technetium of the particle physics world. The fact that Segre tracked it down after years of false starts and dubious claims is a testament to his persistence. That's why, four years later, his gaffes forgotten, Segre won the n.o.bel Prize in Physics.* Fittingly, he borrowed Edwin McMillan's white vest for the ceremony. Fittingly, he borrowed Edwin McMillan's white vest for the ceremony.

After losing out on DNA, Pauling got a consolation prize: an overdue n.o.bel of his own, in Chemistry in 1954. Typically for him, Pauling then branched out into new fields. Frustrated by his chronic colds, he started experimenting on himself by taking megadoses of vitamins. For whatever reason, the doses seemed to cure him, and he excitedly told others. Eventually, his imprimatur as a n.o.bel Prize winner gave momentum to the nutritional supplement craze still going strong today, including the scientifically dubious notion (sorry!) that vitamin C can cure a cold. In addition, Pauling-who had refused to work on the Manhattan Project-became the world's leading antinuclear weapons activist, marching in protests and penning books with t.i.tles such as No More War! No More War! He even won a second, surprise n.o.bel Prize in 1962, the n.o.bel Peace Prize, becoming the only person to win two unshared n.o.bels. He did, however, share the stage in Stockholm that year with two laureates in medicine or physiology: James Watson and Francis Crick. He even won a second, surprise n.o.bel Prize in 1962, the n.o.bel Peace Prize, becoming the only person to win two unshared n.o.bels. He did, however, share the stage in Stockholm that year with two laureates in medicine or physiology: James Watson and Francis Crick.

Poisoner's Corridor: "Ouch-Ouch"

Pauling learned the hardest way that the rules of biology are much more delicate than the rules of chemistry. You can nigh well abuse amino acids chemically and end up with the same bunch of agitated but intact molecules. The fragile and more complex proteins of a living creature will wilt under the same stress, be it heat, acid, or, worst of all, rogue elements. The most delinquent elements can exploit any number of vulnerabilities in living cells, often by masking themselves as life-giving minerals and micronutrients. And the stories of how ingeniously those elements undo life-the exploits of "poisoner's corridor"-provide one of the darker subplots of the periodic table.

The lightest element in poisoner's corridor is cadmium, which traces its notoriety to an ancient mine in central j.a.pan. Miners began digging up precious metals from the Kamioka mines in AD AD 710. In the following centuries, the mountains of Kamioka yielded gold, lead, silver, and copper as various shoguns and then business magnates vied for the land. But not until twelve hundred years after striking the first lode did miners begin processing cadmium, the metal that made the mines infamous and the cry 710. In the following centuries, the mountains of Kamioka yielded gold, lead, silver, and copper as various shoguns and then business magnates vied for the land. But not until twelve hundred years after striking the first lode did miners begin processing cadmium, the metal that made the mines infamous and the cry "Itai-itai!" "Itai-itai!" a byword in j.a.pan for suffering. a byword in j.a.pan for suffering.

The Russo-j.a.panese War of 19041905 and World War I a decade later greatly increased j.a.panese demand for metals, including zinc, to use in armor, airplanes, and ammunition. Cadmium appears below zinc on the periodic table, and the two metals mix indistinguishably in the earth's crust. To purify the zinc mined in Kamioka, miners probably roasted it like coffee and percolated it with acid, removing the cadmium. Following the environmental regulations of the day, they then dumped the leftover cadmium sludge into streams or onto the ground, where it leeched into the water table.

Today no one would think of dumping cadmium like that. It's become too valuable as a coating for batteries and computer parts, to prevent corrosion. It also has a long history of use in pigments, tanning agents, and solders. In the twentieth century, people even used s.h.i.+ny cadmium plating to line trendy drinking cups. But the main reason no one would dump cadmium today is that it has rather horrifying medical connotations. Manufacturers pulled it from the trendy tankards because hundreds of people fell ill every year when acidic fruit juice, like lemonade, leached the cadmium from the vessel walls. And when rescue workers at Ground Zero after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks developed respiratory diseases, some doctors immediately suspected cadmium, among other substances, since the collapse of the World Trade Center towers had vaporized thousands of electronic devices. That a.s.sumption was incorrect, but it's telling how reflexively health officials fingered element forty-eight.

Sadly, that conclusion was a reflex because of what happened a century ago near the Kamioka mines. As early as 1912, doctors there noticed local rice farmers being felled by awful new diseases. The farmers came in doubled over with joint and deep bone pain, especially the women, who accounted for forty-nine of every fifty cases. Their kidneys often failed, too, and their bones softened and snapped from the pressure of everyday tasks. One doctor broke a girl's wrist while taking her pulse. The mystery disease exploded in the 1930s and 1940s as militarism overran j.a.pan. Demand for zinc kept the ores and sludge pouring down the mountains, and although the local prefecture (the j.a.panese equivalent of a state) was removed from actual combat, few areas suffered as much during World War II as those around the Kamioka mines. As the disease crept from village to village, it became known as itai-itai, itai-itai, or "ouch-ouch," disease, after the cries of pain that escaped victims. or "ouch-ouch," disease, after the cries of pain that escaped victims.

Only after the war, in 1946, did a local doctor, n.o.boru Hagino, begin studying itai-itai disease. He first suspected malnutrition as the cause. This theory proved untenable by itself, so he switched his focus to the mines, whose high-tech, Western excavation methods contrasted with the farmers' primitive paddies. With a public health professor's help, Hagino produced an epidemiological map plotting cases of itai-itai. He also made a hydrological map showing where the Jinzu River-which ran through the mines and irrigated the farmers' fields miles away-deposited its runoff. Laid over the top of each other, the two maps look almost identical. After testing local crops, Hagino realized that the rice was a cadmium sponge.

Painstaking work soon revealed the pathology of cadmium. Zinc is an essential mineral, and just as cadmium mixes with zinc in the ground, it interferes with zinc in the body by replacing it. Cadmium also sometimes evicts sulfur and calcium, which explains why it affected people's bones. Unfortunately, cadmium is a clumsy element and can't perform the same biological roles as the others. Even more unfortunately, once cadmium slips into the body, it cannot be flushed out. The malnutrition Hagino suspected at first also played a role. The local diet depended heavily on rice, which lacks essential nutrients, so the farmers' bodies were starved of certain minerals. Cadmium mimicked those minerals well enough that the farmers' cells, in dietary desperation, began to weave it into their organs at even higher rates than they otherwise would have.

Hagino went public with his results in 1961. Predictably and perhaps understandably, the mining company legally responsible, Mitsui Mining and Smelting, denied all wrongdoing (it had only bought the company that had done the damage). To its shame, Mitsui also campaigned to discredit Hagino. When a local medical committee formed to investigate itai-itai, Mitsui made sure that the committee excluded Hagino, the world expert on the disease. Hagino ran an end around by working on newfound cases of itai-itai in Nagasaki, which only bolstered his claims. Eventually, the conscience-stricken local committee, despite being stacked against Hagino, admitted that cadmium might cause the disease. Upon appeal of this wishy-washy ruling, a national government health committee, overwhelmed by Hagino's evidence, ruled that cadmium absolutely causes itai-itai. By 1972, the mining company began paying rest.i.tution to 178 survivors, who collectively sought more than 2.3 billion yen annually. Thirteen years later, the horror of element forty-eight still retained such a hold on j.a.pan that when filmmakers needed to kill off G.o.dzilla in the then-latest sequel, The Return of G.o.dzilla, The Return of G.o.dzilla, the j.a.panese military in the film deployed cadmium-tipped missiles. Considering that an H-bomb had given G.o.dzilla life, that's a pretty dim view of this element. the j.a.panese military in the film deployed cadmium-tipped missiles. Considering that an H-bomb had given G.o.dzilla life, that's a pretty dim view of this element.

Still, itai-itai disease was not an isolated incident in j.a.pan last century. Three other times in the 1900s (twice with mercury, once with sulfur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide), j.a.panese villagers found themselves victims of ma.s.s industrial poisonings. These cases are known as the Big Four Pollution Diseases of j.a.pan. In addition, thousands more suffered from radiation poisoning when the United States dropped a uranium and a plutonium bomb on the island in 1945. But the atomic bombs and three of the Big Four were preceded by the long-silent holocaust near Kamioka. Except it wasn't so silent for the people there. "Itai-itai."

Scarily, cadmium is not even the worst poison among the elements. It sits above mercury, a neurotoxin. And to the right of mercury sit the most horrific mug shots on the periodic table-thallium, lead, and polonium-the nucleus of poisoner's corridor.

This cl.u.s.tering is partly coincidence, but there are legitimate chemical and physical reasons for the high concentration of poisons in the southeast corner. One, paradoxically, is that none of these heavy metals is volatile. Raw sodium or pota.s.sium, if ingested, would explode upon contact with every cell inside you, since they react with water. But pota.s.sium and sodium are so reactive they never appear in their pure, dangerous form in nature. The poisoner's corridor elements are subtler and can migrate deep inside the body before going off. What's more, these elements (like many heavy metals) can give up different numbers of electrons depending on the circ.u.mstances. For example, whereas pota.s.sium always reacts as K+, thallium can be Tl+ or Tl or Tl+3. As a result, thallium can mimic many elements and wriggle into many different biochemical niches.

That's why thallium, element eighty-one, is considered the deadliest element on the table. Animal cells have special ion channels to vacuum up pota.s.sium, and thallium rides into the body via those channels, often by skin osmosis. Once inside the body, thallium drops the pretense of being pota.s.sium and starts unst.i.tching key amino acid bonds inside proteins and unraveling their elaborate folds, rendering them useless. And unlike cadmium, thallium doesn't stick in the bones or kidneys, but roams like a molecular Mongol horde. Each atom can do an outsized amount of damage.

For these reasons, thallium is known as the poisoner's poison, the element for people who derive an almost aesthetic pleasure from lacing food and drinks with toxins. In the 1960s, a notorious British lad named Graham Frederick Young, after reading sensationalized accounts of serial killers, began experimenting on his family by sprinkling thallium into their teacups and stew pots. He was soon sent to a mental inst.i.tution but was later, unaccountably, released, at which point he poisoned seventy more people, including a succession of bosses. Only three died, since Young made sure to prolong their suffering with less-than-lethal doses.

Young's victims are hardly alone in history. Thallium has a gruesome record* of killing spies, orphans, and great-aunts with large estates. But rather than relive darker scenes, maybe it's better to recall element eighty-one's single foray into (admittedly morbid) comedy. During its Cuba-obsessed years, the Central Intelligence Agency hatched a plan to powder Fidel Castro's socks with a sort of talc.u.m powder tainted with thallium. The spies were especially tickled that the poison would cause all his hair, including his famous beard, to fall out, which they hoped would emasculate Castro in front of his comrades before killing him. There's no record of why this plan was never attempted. of killing spies, orphans, and great-aunts with large estates. But rather than relive darker scenes, maybe it's better to recall element eighty-one's single foray into (admittedly morbid) comedy. During its Cuba-obsessed years, the Central Intelligence Agency hatched a plan to powder Fidel Castro's socks with a sort of talc.u.m powder tainted with thallium. The spies were especially tickled that the poison would cause all his hair, including his famous beard, to fall out, which they hoped would emasculate Castro in front of his comrades before killing him. There's no record of why this plan was never attempted.

Another reason thallium, cadmium, and other related elements work so well as poisons is that they stick around for aeons. I don't just mean they acc.u.mulate in the body, as cadmium does. Rather, like oxygen, these elements are likely to form stable, near-spherical nuclei that never go radioactive. Therefore, a fair amount of each still survives in the earth's crust. For instance, the heaviest eternally stable element, lead, sits in box eighty-two, a magic number. And the heaviest almost-stable element, bis.m.u.th, is its neighbor, in box eighty-three.

Because bis.m.u.th plays a surprising role in poisoner's corridor, this oddball element merits a closer look. Some quick bis.m.u.th facts: Though a whitish metal with a pinkish hue, bis.m.u.th burns with a blue flame and emits yellow fumes. Like cadmium and lead, bis.m.u.th has found widespread use in paints and dyes, and it often replaces "red lead" in the crackling fireworks known as dragon's eggs. Also, of the nearly infinite number of possible chemicals you can make by combining elements on the periodic table, bis.m.u.th is one of the very few that expands when it freezes. We don't appreciate how bizarre this is because of common ice, which floats on lakes while fish slide around below it. A theoretical lake of bis.m.u.th would behave the same way-but almost uniquely so on the periodic table, since solids virtually always pack themselves more tightly than liquids. What's more, that bis.m.u.th ice would probably be gorgeous. Bis.m.u.th has become a favorite desktop ornament and decorative knickknack for mineralogists and element nuts because it can form rocks known as hopper crystals, which twist themselves into elaborate rainbow staircases. Newly frozen bis.m.u.th might look like Technicolor M. C. Escher drawings come to life.

Bis.m.u.th has helped scientists probe the deeper structure of radioactive matter as well. For decades, scientists couldn't resolve conflicting calculations about whether certain elements would last until the end of time. So in 2003, physicists in France took pure bis.m.u.th, swaddled it in elaborate s.h.i.+elds to block all possible outside interference, and wired detectors around it to try to determine its half-life, the amount of time it would take 50 percent of the sample to disintegrate. Half-life is a common measurement of radioactive elements. If a bucket of one hundred pounds of radioactive element X takes 3.14159 years to drop fifty pounds, then the half-life is 3.14159 years. After another 3.14159 years, you'd have twenty-five pounds. Nuclear theory predicted bis.m.u.th should have a half-life of twenty billion billion years, much longer than the age of the universe. (You could multiply the age of the universe by itself and get close to the same figure-and still have only a fifty-fifty shot of seeing any given bis.m.u.th atom disappear.) The French experiment was more or less a real-life Waiting for G.o.dot Waiting for G.o.dot. But amazingly, it worked. The French scientists collected enough bis.m.u.th and summoned enough patience to witness a number of decays. This result proved that instead of being the heaviest stable atom, bis.m.u.th will live only long enough to be the final element to go extinct.

The wild, Technicolor swirls of a hopper crystal form when the element bis.m.u.th cools into a staircase crystalline pattern. This crystal spans the width of an adult hand. (Ken Keraiff, Krystals Unlimited) (A similarly Beckettesque experiment is running right now in j.a.pan to determine whether all all matter will eventually disintegrate. Some scientists calculate that protons, the building blocks of elements, are ever-so-slightly unstable, with a half-life of at least 100 billion trillion trillion years. Undaunted, hundreds of scientists set up a huge underground pool of ultra-pure, ultra-still water deep inside a mineshaft, and they surrounded it with rings of hair-trigger sensors, in case a proton does split on their watch. This is admittedly unlikely, but it's a far more benevolent use of the Kamioka mines than previously.) matter will eventually disintegrate. Some scientists calculate that protons, the building blocks of elements, are ever-so-slightly unstable, with a half-life of at least 100 billion trillion trillion years. Undaunted, hundreds of scientists set up a huge underground pool of ultra-pure, ultra-still water deep inside a mineshaft, and they surrounded it with rings of hair-trigger sensors, in case a proton does split on their watch. This is admittedly unlikely,