Element 43, technetium, has a strange distinction: It has been “discovered” more times than any other element (138). Technetium, very little of which lies in the Earth’s crust, is unstable and decays into element 42, molybdenum. Technetium means “artificial,” as most quantities are made in the lab.

Italian Emilio Segrè visited Berkeley in 1937. While touring Ernest Lawrence’s new atom-smashing cyclotron, he requested that scraps of leftover molybdenum from the machine be sent to his lab in Italy—and then discovered technetium scattered in those scraps. Months later, Segrè was exiled from Italy for being Jewish, and Lawrence agreed to give him a job at Berkeley. However, perhaps harboring a grudge for the technetium discovery, Lawrence saddled Segrè with a significant pay cut.

Segrè, along with his mentor, Enrico Fermi, went on to misread the clues that led others to discover fission in 1939. Segrè also airily dismissed an associate’s lab results on a strange material, thinking it a mere transition metal The associate, Edwin McMillan, dug deeper and proved he found the first of the transuranium elements, number 93, neptunium. McMillan won the Nobel Prize for his discovery. Segrè later redeemed himself with the discovery of the hard-to-find antiproton; he also won the Nobel Prize.

Kean turns next to Linus Pauling, another famous and cocksure scientist who eventually earned a blemish on his résumé. Pauling, a chemist at Caltech, “figured out how quantum mechanics governs the chemical bonds between atoms: bond strength, bond length, bond angle, nearly everything” (144). Pauling also figured out why snowflakes have six sides, why sickle-cell anemia is so deadly, and “how the individual bits in proteins ‘know’ what their proper shape is” (145). Pauling won not one but two Nobels, the first for chemistry and the second for peace, for his antiwar activism. In his work, he was primarily interested “in how new properties emerge, almost miraculously, when small, dumb atoms self-assemble into larger structures” (145). His blunder came in 1952, when he sought to crack the mysteries of a new frontier. He assumed, mistakenly, that DNA is a triple helix but that the phosphorus atoms within it would repel each other and snap the helix apart. Pauling published his triple-helix theory only to have it corrected by James Watson and Francis Crick, English scientists who had already made and corrected Pauling’s mistake and concluded that DNA is double-stranded. Watson and Crick figured out that DNA’s four nucleic acids always come in pairs, and each of the “two pairs of nucleic acids fit together snugly, like puzzle pieces” inside the helix, with the phosphorus atoms safely on the outside (149).

Chapter 9 asserts that some elements “can exploit any number of vulnerabilities in living cells, often by masking themselves as life-giving minerals and micronutrients” but instead killing them; these occupy the “poisoner’s corridor” of the periodic table (152).

Cadmium, element 48 and one of these poisoners, “has a long history of use in pigments, tanning agents, and solders,” as an anticorrosive in computers and batteries, and as a shiny decorative coating (153). Early 20th-century Japanese miners, searching instead for zinc to support war efforts, found it embedded in cadmium deposits; they leached out the cadmium and tossed it aside, where it washed into a local river. Nearby rice farmers and their families developed a painful illness that damaged kidneys and weakened bones. Soon the ailment “became known as itai-itai, or ‘ouch-ouch,’ disease” (154). Researchers discovered that “rice was a cadmium sponge” (154), and that cadmium replaces zinc, sulfur, and calcium but can’t usefully perform those elements’ tasks in the body. The mining company denied responsibility but was nevertheless forced to pay restitution to the farmers beginning in 1972.

Worse than cadmium are mercury, thallium, lead, and polonium, grouped together on the periodic table. Of these, “thallium, element eighty-one, is considered the deadliest element on the table” (156) and known as “the poisoner’s poison (157). Thallium mimics potassium. “Once inside the body,” Kean explains, “thallium drops the pretense of being potassium and starts unstitching key amino acid bonds inside proteins and unraveling their elaborate folds, rendering them useless” (156). It thus can inflict damage throughout the body.

Bismuth, element 83, “crouches among the worst heavy-metal poisons” but is benign (160). Almost perfectly stable, bismuth does eventually decay, but it has a half-life—the amount of time it takes for half of the atoms to break down—of 20 billion years. Bismuth crystals shine in rainbow colors; it’s used in paints, dyes, and fireworks; doctors prescribe it for ulcers; and “it’s the ‘bis’ in hot-pink Pepto-Bismol” (160).

Next on the periodic table are the radioactive poisons, such as polonium (famous as a poison of spies) and radon (which, inhaled, causes lung cancer). In fact, “almost everything useful about heavy elements derives from how, and how quickly, they go radioactive” (161). Kean recounts this cautionary tale: A teenager named David Hahn tried to build a miniature nuclear power breeder reactor “as part of a clandestine Eagle Scout project gone berserk in the mid-1990s” (161). By using uranium isotopes to irradiate thorium, you get proactinium, which then mutates into uranium. In other words, Kean explains, “Almost magically, you get more fuel just by combining elements that go radioactive in the right way” (163). But Hahn’s attempt failed; his project contained “a billion billion times too little fissionable material” (165). (He had melted together thorium lamp filaments and lithium from batteries, and then tried to bombard the result with a neutron gun (164)). Years later, Hahn was caught for stealing smoke detectors for their radioactive americium. His mug shot shows a face “pockmarked with red sores” from radiation poisoning. 

Chapter 10 reviews the health benefits of certain elements. While some elements look poisonous, they actually aid health. Silver and copper, “long dismissed as folk remedies” (168), have antiseptic properties. Copper pipes help prevent bacterial illnesses such as Legionnaire’s Disease; the copper kills the bugs but doesn’t hurt humans. According to Kean, this also “explains why we have brass doorknobs and metal railings in public places” (169).

Vanadium, element 23—used by some creatures instead of iron in their blood—has odd influences on human blood sugar: “vanadium water from […] the vanadium-rich springs of Mt. Fuji is sold online as a cure for diabetes” (169). It also acts as an excellent spermicide, but side effects prevent wide use. Gold can be heat-treated to kill cancer cells. Gadolinium, element 64, the most easily magnetized element, helps MRI machines detect cancer tumors; gadolinium’s radioactive version can kill the cells. Unfortunately, gadolinium also can stiffen body tissues.

Silver has antibiotic effects, but an overdose turns skin gray-blue. In Montana, Stan Jones, fearing that a computer glitch on January 1, 2000, would cause chaos and a lack of antibiotics, dosed himself with the metal. Jones “ran for the U.S. Senate in 2002 and 2006 despite being startlingly blue” (172). He has no regrets: “I still believe it’s the best antibiotic in the world…. Being alive is more important than turning purple” (173).

Kean continues his examination by turning to Louis Pasteur, who studied tartaric acid in wine, which causes light to bend oddly in water, and discovered that this was because “[t]he tartaric acid crystals from yeast all twisted in one direction” (174). Kean adds, “Pasteur later expanded this idea to show that life has a strong bias for molecules of only one handedness, or ‘chirality’” (175). Pasteur also believed that germs cause illnesses, which prompted him to invent pasteurization, “a process that heats milk to kill infectious diseases” (175).

In the late 1800s, Pasteur also saved a boy bitten by a rabid dog with the first rabies vaccine for humans. In 1932, German chemist Gerhard Domagk dared a similar test on his daughter, who suffered a sewing needle puncture that festered dangerously, by injecting her with a red dye, prontosil, that kills bacteria in mice. The test worked; Domagk had found “the first genuine antibacterial drug” (177). His company, IGF, hoarded the patents and controlled the market. Prontosil works because it contains sulfur; when ingested, the body splits prontosil into sulfonamide, which prevents bacteria from multiplying. French scientists showed that it’s the sulfonamide that cures infections. Kean notes the swiftness of the chemical’s production: “competitors swept in and synthesized other ‘sulfa drugs’” (180). Because of this, IGF’s sales plummeted. Domagk won the 1939 Nobel Prize, but Hitler punished him for winning an award outlawed in Nazi Germany. Still, the Germans used sulfa drugs during World War II.

Pasteur’s discovery of chirality became important when German pharmaceutical companies sold a morning-sickness drug, thalidomide, to pregnant women in the 1950s. The drug serves up both left- and right-handed versions of the chemical, but only one version is safe; the unsafe version causes babies to be born without hands or feet. Science needed to master chirality. It happened in 1968, when Monsanto researcher William Knowles added a rhodium atom to a compound and created a chemical that catalyzes left-handed versions of L-dopa, a therapeutic drug for Parkinson’s disease; this made wide use affordable. A Nobel Prize in Chemistry headed Knowles’s way in 2001.

Some elements act in the opposite way from what we’d expect. This chapter runs through some of those elements, and Kean first looks at nitrogen. Eighty percent of the air is nitrogen; 20% is oxygen. To prevent fires, certain rooms in spacecraft and particle accelerators are filled with nitrogen. Now and then, technicians forget to re-oxygenate those rooms, enter them, and promptly faint; some have died. The body struggles to breathe not from lack of oxygen but when it suffers from a buildup of CO2, and pure nitrogen masks that effect.

Because the human immune system surrounds foreign objects with “a straitjacket of slick, fibrous collagen” (190), implants often fail—“whether made of gold, zinc, magnesium, or chromium-coated pig bladders” (190). The one exception is titanium: “Since 1952, it’s been the standard for implanted teeth, screw-on fingers, and replaceable sockets” (191).

Other elements fool in other ways. Tellurium on skin reeks of garlic for weeks; beryllium tastes like sugar. The US government admitted in 1999 that it has 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” (192 fn). Beryllium disease causes “the same chemical pneumonitis that inhaling fine silica causes” (192). Enrico Fermi worked with beryllium and died at age 53 of pneumonitis.

Taste buds can also be fooled by these deceptive elements. The ones for sour react to hydrogen ions in acids; a small electric charge on the tongue will taste sour. Taste buds for salt react both to sodium and potassium as salty but also do so for lithium and ammonium, both useless.

These sneaky elements can also have widespread consequences. Iodine was misunderstood by a political movement. In 1930, India’s Mahatma Gandhi led a march to the sea to distill free salt from seawater in defiance of a British colonial tax on salt. After independence, the Indian government tried to mandate adding iodine to salt “to prevent birth defects and mental retardation” (197). This caused a backlash: “Mom-and-pop salt makers protested the added processing costs. Hindu nationalists and Gandhians fulminated against encroaching Western science” (198). Today, a half-billion Indians still don’t get enough iodine.

Iodine’s effect on mental faculties inspired philosopher Bertrand Russell to conclude “that the rich mental life of human beings, the source of all their glory and much of their woe, is chemistry through and through” (199).