The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements by Sam KeanMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
A book on the periodic table is a highly improbable selection – for me, at least. But, truly it has colored and brightened the topic so pleasantly that I cannot recommend The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean too much. After designing a chemistry curriculum for my fourth and final home educated kiddo, I thought this book would serve as a nice compliment to the more tedious tasks of balancing chemical equations and fiddling with bunsen burners. We read it together.
We were so entertained by some of the sidekick info offered by Mr. Kean, that even though it was sometimes hard to parse the content, we looked forward it cheerfully. Never did I think that acquiring literacy in the fundamentals of chemistry would be something to put a spring in my step. The 15 year old found my wonderment, as Kean worked his magic with artful anecdotes, a little….inconvenient, shall we say? (Generational divergences, I guess.)
This book is great. For example, did you know that every amino acid in every protein in your body has a left-handed twist to it? We have Pasteur to thank for this piece of knowledge, which is expanded upon to reveal how some compounds twist light and how life as we know it has a strong bias for only one “handedness” and how if we find microbes on another planet to be right-handed, we know it is from an alien. How cool is that?
On the poisoner’s dark arts, Kean notes: “Scarily, cadmium is not even the worst poison among the elements. It sits above mercury, a neurotoxin. And to the right of mercury sit the most horrific mug shots on the periodic table—thallium, lead, and polonium—the nucleus of poisoner’s corridor.”
On why and how lithium works in the brains of manic-depressives, Kean explains: “Lithium regulates the proteins that control the body’s inner clock. This clock runs, oddly, on DNA, inside special neurons deep in the brain. Special proteins attach to people’s DNA each morning, and after a fixed time they degrade and fall off. Sunlight resets the proteins over and over, so they hold on much longer. In fact, the proteins fall off only after darkness falls—at which point the brain should “notice” the bare DNA and stop producing stimulants. This process goes awry in manic-depressives because the proteins, despite the lack of sunlight, remain bound fast to their DNA. Their brains don’t realize they should stop revving.”
And some of the fun-to-know stuff Kean reveals: “Einstein came to distrust quantum mechanics. Its statistical and deeply probabilistic nature sounded too much like gambling to him, and it prompted him to object that ‘God does not play dice with the universe.’ He was wrong, and it’s too bad that most people have never heard the rejoinder by Niels Bohr: "Einstein! Stop telling God what to do.”
Visiting Kean’s website, I discovered that he has other books like this one and we will start The Violinist’s Thumb in a few weeks!
Kean takes topics that mere mortals (like me) find dull and dusty and somehow makes them bright and shiny. Oh, bless this man.
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