Chapter 8

Chapter 8

Summary- Kean starts the chapter by describing a 1960 cover of Time magazine with its "Men of the Year." He comically describes the cover as "an attempt to look futuristic." It includes the faces of fifteen important scientists. Kean points out two of these scientists: Emilio Segrè and Linus Pauling. He explains that, though they couldn't be described as friends, they were co-operative. Kean also makes note of the interesting circumstances that caused Segrè and Pauling not to be faculty colleagues at Berkeley, due to a letter from Pauling to Berkeley being lost. Kean then reveals that the two men are united in infamy for making some of the most grave mistakes in science history despite being some of the greatest scientists.
      Segrè worked with Carlo Perrier, a fellow Italian, to isolate element 43. They used scraps from the cyclotron, an inverted atom smasher, belonging to Ernest Lawrence and found traces of element 43. They came into conflict with German scientists who claimed ownership of what they called "masurium" and the University of Palerno, which wanted to have it be called "panorium." Seeing both of those names as undesirable, and so they chose to name it technetium. The name is derived from the Greek word for "artificial" because it was the first man-made metal. Segrè would later misidentfiy new elements as "rare earths," only to be disproven by Edwin McMillan.
      Linus Pauling revolutionized chemistry by providing a better understanding of the functions of quantum mechanics including bond strength, bond length, bond angle, and "nearly everything." He figured out why snowflakes have a hexagonal structure, how sickle-cell anemia works and kills people, and how proteins "know" how to shape themselves. Later, he would theorize that DNA was in the form of a triple helix. Students at Cambridge, Watson and Crick, would soon disprove his theory, finding DNA to be in a double helix formation. So, Watson and Crick would become famous for their discovery, which used Pauling's mistake as a starting point and left him less famous than the duo.
     Also, as for phosphorus, it can be obtained from urine and is used in the red tips of matches. I liked that Kean explained the origin of technetium's name and explained the history of DNA. I didn't like the absence of a disappearing spoon, but I did appreciate the way in which Kean divided up the chapter so that it flowed smoothly. I learned that scientific genius is known to make mistakes, and that those mistakes aren't always benign. I would tell my non-existent bae that brushing aside the theories of others can sometimes allow others to make discoveries that one could have made on their own.