Finding Element 43 Sparknotes
It was a race to finding element 43; A race that would earn honor to any scientist, in The disappearing spoon a book written about chemistry specifically the periodic table which most notified in Chapter 8 From physics to biology. In this chapter Kean opens it up by talking about the competition to finding element forty three great scientist such as Segre,Pauling,Glenn Seaborg and Al Ghiorso brought the hunt for the unknown element to a new level of sophistication.Many scientist searched for element 43 and failed;Chapter 8 also looks at the discovery of DNA. Kean starts out the chapter by describing the the competition to find missing elements on the periodic table. In 1869
…show more content…
When Mendeleev created the periodic table there was a gap where element forty-three would have been.There have been many people who have tried to discover the elusive element forty-three aka technetium but have failed.Linus Pauling and Emilio Segre were two of the scientists who worked hard to fill in more elements in the Periodic Table including element forty-three. Segre was a Jewish immigrant who was forced to flee his home country, Italy and moved in the United States. In 1909 Japanese scientist Masataka Ogawa hurried to fill in the missing gap of element forty three with his discovery of “nipponium”, which was actually element seventy-five “rhenium”,Humiliated Ogawa pulled it out and never checked to see if it were another element.Finally in 1937 two Italians Segre and Carlo Pierre uncovered element forty three. Pierre and Segre named element forty three technetium. Both Segre and Pauling made giant mistakes that have gone down in science history.Segre's mistake came about when he was working at the lab of his mentor Enrico Fermi.
Fermi had announced that he had discovered element ninety-three neptunium. However he really induced uranium fission long before anyone else realized it. But, Fermi had already won the Nobel Prize for his work. Segre felt responsible for the mistake because his job was to identify new elements. He even remembered reading a paper about the possibility of fission. Segre continued to look for element ninety-three, but Edwin McMillan beat him to it and called element ninety-three neptunium. Pauling's mistake may have been even more embarrassing. Pauling thought he could uncover the mystery of DNA. He put the nucleic acids on the outside of the sugar-phosphate backbone(like a spine), he also thought that DNA had a triple helix. This was because he looked at a dead sample of DNA, rather than a wet one Pauling wanted gis model to be the first accurate model of DNA so he printed it quickly. Another scientist named Rosalind Franklin looked at a wet sample of DNA and realized it had two strands. Watson and crick Two students from Cambridge University looked at Pauling's paper and recognized it. They had made a similar model with a triple helix and knew Pauling was wrong,Watson and Crick looked over Franklin's work and made a new model with a double helix. They were correct and by the time Pauling had
realized his mistake it was too for Watson and Crick had won the Nobel Prize and went down in history as the founders of the modern DNA model. The theme of this book is competition between scientist trying to find the missing elements.This is supported in the first paragraph as kean had started chapter 8 saying “
In chapter 8 of The disappearing spoon kean told of the stories of finding element’s in the periodic table such as element forty one that great scientist such as pauling and segre spent their whole lives trying to find.This chapter was very interesting seeing how much scientists lives can be changed from trying to find something and how difficult it was and took time;sometimes the chapter got confusing because of the sophisticated words that were used.I recommend this chapter to someone who loves science and is familiar with the fundamentals of chemistry and biology and if not it would be difficult because they use and talk a lot about the basic materials in each of this subjects.
When Mendeleev created the periodic table there was a gap where element forty-three would have been.There have been many people who have tried to discover the elusive element forty-three aka technetium but have failed.Linus Pauling and Emilio Segre were two of the scientists who worked hard to fill in more elements in the Periodic Table including element forty-three. Segre was a Jewish immigrant who was forced to flee his home country, Italy and moved in the United States. In 1909 Japanese scientist Masataka Ogawa hurried to fill in the missing gap of element forty three with his discovery of “nipponium”, which was actually element seventy-five “rhenium”,Humiliated Ogawa pulled it out and never checked to see if it were another element.Finally in 1937 two Italians Segre and Carlo Pierre uncovered element forty three. Pierre and Segre named element forty three technetium. Both Segre and Pauling made giant mistakes that have gone down in science history.Segre's mistake came about when he was working at the lab of his mentor Enrico Fermi.
Fermi had announced that he had discovered element ninety-three neptunium. However he really induced uranium fission long before anyone else realized it. But, Fermi had already won the Nobel Prize for his work. Segre felt responsible for the mistake because his job was to identify new elements. He even remembered reading a paper about the possibility of fission. Segre continued to look for element ninety-three, but Edwin McMillan beat him to it and called element ninety-three neptunium. Pauling's mistake may have been even more embarrassing. Pauling thought he could uncover the mystery of DNA. He put the nucleic acids on the outside of the sugar-phosphate backbone(like a spine), he also thought that DNA had a triple helix. This was because he looked at a dead sample of DNA, rather than a wet one Pauling wanted gis model to be the first accurate model of DNA so he printed it quickly. Another scientist named Rosalind Franklin looked at a wet sample of DNA and realized it had two strands. Watson and crick Two students from Cambridge University looked at Pauling's paper and recognized it. They had made a similar model with a triple helix and knew Pauling was wrong,Watson and Crick looked over Franklin's work and made a new model with a double helix. They were correct and by the time Pauling had
realized his mistake it was too for Watson and Crick had won the Nobel Prize and went down in history as the founders of the modern DNA model. The theme of this book is competition between scientist trying to find the missing elements.This is supported in the first paragraph as kean had started chapter 8 saying “
In chapter 8 of The disappearing spoon kean told of the stories of finding element’s in the periodic table such as element forty one that great scientist such as pauling and segre spent their whole lives trying to find.This chapter was very interesting seeing how much scientists lives can be changed from trying to find something and how difficult it was and took time;sometimes the chapter got confusing because of the sophisticated words that were used.I recommend this chapter to someone who loves science and is familiar with the fundamentals of chemistry and biology and if not it would be difficult because they use and talk a lot about the basic materials in each of this subjects.