Chapter 7

Chapter 7 

Summary- Kean uses an excerpt from "The Talk of the Town" section of the New Yorker to begin the chapter. It talks about the recent spike in new elements being created and suggests that the team responsible for finding many of them at UC Berkeley name them: universitium, offium, californium, and berkelium. But the excerpt mainly focuses on the creation and naming of elements 97 and 98, californium and berkelium. Kean introduces Glenn Seaborg, an important figure whose first notable achievement was the result of "dumb luck." Seaborg's friend Edwin McMillan created neptunium and sought to move forward onto finding element 94. Due to World War II, McMillan was sent to work on a military project, leaving behind Seaborg and his equipment.
     Because Seaborg had access to his equipment and knew the approach McMillan planned on taking, Seaborg and a colleague managed to isolate element 94 and named it plutonium. Seaborg and a technician named Al Ghiorso, along with many students, would work with the US government at a branch of the Manhattan Project in Chicago. After the war, Seaborg and Ghiorso would create element 96 and then 95. They would name element 96, curium, and element 95, americium. In 1949, the Berkeley team discovered berkelium and californium. Within radioactive coral after a Pacific bomb test in 1952, the found elements 99 and 100: einsteinium and fermium.
     One night in 1955, having to quickly drive a sample from one lab to another, the Berkeley team discovered element 101. They named it mendelevium, a bold move, honoring Mendeleev, a Russian scientist, in the midst of the Cold War. The Berkeley team would find elements 102 and 103 in the early 1960's and name them nobelium and lawrencium. Stalin's rise to power in the Soviet Union dampened scientific advances in all sciences that were not deemed necessary and he was responsible for the deaths of many scientists. Despite this, a Soviet team of scientists would come into conflict with the Berkeley team over the names of new elements. The Soviet team beat them to elements 104 and 105, and both teams raced to 106. A West German team enetered the chaos, forcing the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry to quell the flames. After a reluctant compromise, elements 104 through 109 were dubbed: rutherfordium, dubnium, seaborgium, borhium, hassium, and meitnerium.
     Again, I liked how portrays the scientists in a very human manner and helps the reader understand their motivation for doing what they did. Another thing I liked was the constant providing of historical context, especially in terms of the Cold War. I also liked that Kean mentioned the massacres of scientist in the Soviet Union under Stalin's rule. This chapter didn't have anything I disliked that I haven't mentioned in a past post.
     I learned that new elements are difficult to create, taking a large group of people long periods of time just to isolate a few atoms of a new element. I also learned that the Soviet Union not only came into conflict with the United States in terms of the Space Race and the development of better weapons, but also in creating and naming new elements. If I had a bae, I would tell them that science is really just a competition among people to receive credit for something or to get something named after them. Science has frequently been obsessed with glory as opposed to practical discoveries.