Chapter 8 was about technetium, neptunium, and phosphate while also focusing on competition and mistakes. There have been many large mistakes in the scientific community throughout the ages. Scientists, Linus Pauling and Emilio Segre have some of the largest mistakes for their time. Kean gives some examples of mistakes, like element 43 being discovered many times but that wasn't really the point of the story so I found it boring. But here are the mistakes and problems caused by Pauling and Segre. A scientist at Berkeley named Ernest Lawrence was working when Segrè was fired. Segrè had been working under Enrico Fermi, who discovered element 93 by shooting uranium samples with neutrons. Edwin McMillan believed that element 93 would act like technetium, and asked Segrè to help him identify the element and its location on the table. After lots of studying McMillan and Serge found the element to be neptunium and was a cousin of rare earths. That means it branches off of the main periodic table. The other mistake man, Pauling, thought he was the one able to crack the code of DNA. Building from innacurate data of other scientists, Pauling made many wrong assumptions about DNA. Some of the inaccuracies stemed from the fact that he was using dead DNA instead of live DNA, which acts differently. He then wrote a paper about his discoveries, and the paper sound its way to Watson and Crick. These two were flabergasted becuase they had created a similiar model before but realized they were wrong and threw it out before sharing with the rest of the scientific community.
Chapter nine talked about toxins. (Oh look! A connection to our class and unit) Biology is more delicate than chemistry because living organisms count on strong amino acid chains. There is a section of the table that has all of the very toxic substances together. One example is Cadmium. This was dumped into the rivers of Japan purposfully, until it was discovered how harmful this substance is. Cadmium made the farmers weak with a disease that kind of reminded me of osteoporosis. It made the people have very weak bones from moving calcium out of the bone and replaacing it with zinc. But the most deadliest element is Thallium. This element because it unravels the amino acid chains in protein and doesn't bond to anything. Graham Fredrick Young experimented with thallium on his family. For obvious reasons he was sent to a mental hospital. But somehow he managed to poison seven other people. These elements are related because they are around for a long time. Then it talks about Bismuth which is the heaviest element and emits yellow fumes. It expands when frozen and is commonly used in paints and dyes. Bismuth helped scientists study the structure of radioactive matter. Scientists think because of the half life they estimated at twenty billion billion years, Bismuth will live long enough to be the last element to go extinct. After bismuth is polonium, an element that makes people’s hair fall out. Then is radon, which is colorless and odorless and reacts with nothing. It seems like it would be a bogus, unharmful element then right? Wrong. It displaces air, which then sinks into the lungs and discharges radioactive particles that cause lung cancer. Not so harmless after all. The last part of the chapter talks about a teenage boy from Detroit who made a nuclear reactor in his back yard. In a rage after being informed of her son's arrest for stealing car parts his mother throws everything out of the shed where he was working. All of this was covered in radioactive material. Later after joing the Navy this boy is arrested for stealing smoke alarms. It turns out smoke alarms contain radioactive particles to help find smoke. The boy was trying to enhance his smoke dector in his back yard all those years ago. Personally this book is starting to terrify me about the world we live in. Smoke dectors have radioactive particles,what's next? Food?
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