From Physics to Biology

     Glenn Seaborg and Al Ghiorso, from my previous blog post, "brought the hunt for unknown elements to a new level of sophistication," but they were not the only scientists discovering new elements. One man, one of the fifteen U.S. scientists named "Men of the Year," was named Emilio Segre. He discovered the most slippery and elusive element on the table. He, along with Linus Pauling, were the scientists who made two of the biggest mistakes in science history.
     Speaking of mistakes, one element, number 43, was said to be discovered more times than any other element. One time, it was just impure iridium the German chemist was looking at. Another German thought he had it but it was really just niobium- a mistake another chemist made the next year. Eventually, "davyium" was placed in box 43, but it ended up being a mix of three elements. In 1896, "lucium" was discovered, but it was discarded as yttrium. In 1909, Masataka Ogawa found "nipponium," which was a new element, just not number 43. Instead, it ended up being  element 75, but this wasn't known until 2004. In 1925, three German scientists named Otto Berg, and Walter and Ida Noddack, discovered element 75 and named it after the Rhine River. They also claimed to have found element 43, but that work was "sketchy" so scientists declared it invalid.
     In 1937, it was finally isolated by Emilio Segre and Carlo Perrier by using nuclear physics. It turns out virtually every atom of 43 disintegrated radioactively into molybdenum millions of years ago. So the Italians had American Ernest Lawrence, a colleague, make some unknowingly.
     A few years earlier, Lawrence invented the cyclotron (an atom smasher) that was used to mass-produce radioactive elements. He used it to create isotopes of existing elements. This device contained replaceable molybdenum parts. When Segre heard of this when he visited Lawrence's lab, he requested some discarded scraps. Weeks later, they arrived and his hunch was proved correct. Segre and Perrier found traces of element 43. So finally, the most frustrating gap in the periodic table had been filled.
     Segre had also been a top assistant to an Italian physicist Enrico Fermi in 1934. At this time Fermi reported that bombarding uranium samples with neutrons, he had created element 93 and other transuranic elements. What he had actually induced was uranium fission, but he hadn't realized it. Two German scientists contradicted his report in 1939 after he had already won a Nobel Prize. The whole lag was stunned, and Segre ended up talking about the incident in two books. However, Segre made a similar mistake around 1940 when he misidentified transuranic neptunium as a fission product. So, Fermi was rewarded for discovering the transuranic  element while McMillan was rewarded for investigating the chemistry of transuranium elements. Another one of chemistry's geniuses, named Linus Pauling, was from California. He studied quantum mechanics and figured out how it governed the chemical bonds between atoms. He also figured out that snowflakes are six-sided because of the hexagonal structure of ice. One of his projects (where he worked with sickle-cell anemia) stood out as the first time anyone had traced a disease to a malfunctioning molecule. In 1948 he showed "how proteins can form long cylinders called alpha-helices" and how the bits in proteins know what their shape is. He even came up with his own version of DNA, but this version was triple-stranded because he was using sketchy secondhand data of desiccated, dead DNA that coils up differently than live DNA. He quickly published a paper on it, which was brought to the lab of James Watson and Francis Crick by Linus Pauling's son, Peter. This paper surprised Watson and Crick since they built the same model the year before, but a colleague, Rosalind Franklin criticized it. Franklin worked in x-ray crystallography which showed that DNA was double-stranded. Watson and Crick eagerly took this data and found all their previous errors mirrored in Pauling's Paper. They want to their adviser, William Bragg, who had banned the two from working on DNA after the triple-stranded embarrassment. After they shared their new information with Bragg, they were put back on DNA. Crick wrote a letter inquiring about the phosphorous core, which distracted Pauling while Watson and Crick produced the correct model of DNA. Clever huh?
    After 1953, Segre teamed up with Berkeley scientist Owen Chamberlain and 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." Antimatter and the antielectron was soon discovered. As for Pauling, he branched into new fields, became the world's leading anti-nuclear weapons activist, and won two unshared Nobel Prizes.