The Disappearing Spoon Part 4

In 2007, when his mug shot was leaked to the media, David's cherubic face was pockmarked with red sores, as if he had acute acne and had picked every pimple until it bled. But thirty-one-year-old men usually don't come down with acne. The inescapable conclusion was that he'd been reliving his adolescence with more nuclear experiments. Once again, chemistry fooled David Hahn, who never realized that the periodic table is rife with deception. It was an awful reminder that even though the heavy elements along the bottom of the table aren't poisonous in the conventional way, the way that elements in poisoner's corridor are, they're devious enough to ruin a life.

Take Two Elements, Call Me in the Morning

The periodic table is a mercurial thing, and most elements are more complicated than the straightforward rogues of poisoner's corridor. Obscure elements do obscure things inside the body-often bad, but sometimes good. An element toxic in one circ.u.mstance can become a lifesaving drug in another, and elements that get metabolized in unexpected ways can provide new diagnostic tools in doctors' clinics. The interplay of elements and drugs can even illuminate how life itself emerges from the unconscious chemical slag of the periodic table.

The reputations of a few elemental medicines extend back a surprisingly long time. Roman officers supposedly enjoyed better health than their grunts because they took their meals on silver platters. And however useless hard currency was in the wild, most pioneer families in early America invested in at least one good silver coin, which spent its Conestoga wagon ride across the wilderness hidden in a milk jug-not for safekeeping, but to keep the milk from spoiling. The noted gentleman astronomer Tycho Brahe, who lost the bridge of his nose in a drunken sword duel in a dimly lit banquet hall in 1564, was even said to have ordered a replacement nose of silver. The metal was fas.h.i.+onable and, more important, curtailed infections. The only drawback was that its obviously metallic color forced Brahe to carry jars of foundation with him, which he was always smoothing over his nasal prosthesis.

Curious archaeologists later dug up Brahe's body and found a green crust on the front of his skull-meaning Brahe had probably worn not a silver but a cheaper, lighter copper nose.* (Or perhaps he switched noses, like earrings, depending on the status of his company.) Either way, copper or silver, the story makes sense. Though both were long dismissed as folk remedies, modern science confirms that those elements have antiseptic powers. Silver is too dear for everyday use, but copper ducts and tubing are standard in the guts of buildings now, as public safety measures. Copper's career in public health began just after America's bicentennial, in 1976, when a plague broke out in a hotel in Philadelphia. Never-before-seen bacteria crept into the moist ducts of the building's air-conditioning system that July, proliferated, and coasted through the vents on a bed of cool air. Within days, hundreds of people at the hotel came down with the "flu," and thirty-four died. The hotel had rented out its convention center that week to a veterans group, the American Legion, and though not every victim belonged, the bug became known as Legionnaires' disease. (Or perhaps he switched noses, like earrings, depending on the status of his company.) Either way, copper or silver, the story makes sense. Though both were long dismissed as folk remedies, modern science confirms that those elements have antiseptic powers. Silver is too dear for everyday use, but copper ducts and tubing are standard in the guts of buildings now, as public safety measures. Copper's career in public health began just after America's bicentennial, in 1976, when a plague broke out in a hotel in Philadelphia. Never-before-seen bacteria crept into the moist ducts of the building's air-conditioning system that July, proliferated, and coasted through the vents on a bed of cool air. Within days, hundreds of people at the hotel came down with the "flu," and thirty-four died. The hotel had rented out its convention center that week to a veterans group, the American Legion, and though not every victim belonged, the bug became known as Legionnaires' disease.

The laws pushed through in reaction to the outbreak mandated cleaner air and water systems, and copper has proved the simplest, cheapest way to improve infrastructure. If certain bacteria, fungi, or algae inch across something made of copper, they absorb copper atoms, which disrupt their metabolism (human cells are unaffected). The microbes choke and die after a few hours. This effect-the oliG.o.dynamic, or "self-sterilizing," effect-makes metals more sterile than wood or plastic and explains why we have bra.s.s doork.n.o.bs and metal railings in public places. It also explains why most of the well-handled coins of the U.S. realm contain close to 90 percent copper or (like pennies) are copper-coated.* Copper tubing in air-conditioning ducts cleans out the nasty bugs that fester inside there, too. Copper tubing in air-conditioning ducts cleans out the nasty bugs that fester inside there, too.

Similarly deadly to small wriggling cells, if a bit more quackish, is vanadium, element twenty-three, which also has a curious side effect in males: vanadium is the best spermicide ever devised. Most spermicides dissolve the fatty membrane that surrounds sperm cells, spilling their guts all over. Unfortunately, all cells have fatty membranes, so spermicides often irritate the lining of the v.a.g.i.n.a and make women susceptible to yeast infections. Not fun. Vanadium eschews any messy dissolving and simply cracks the crankshaft on the sperm's tails. The tails then snap off, leaving the sperm whirling like one-oared rowboats.*

Vanadium hasn't appeared on the market as a spermicide because-and this is a truism throughout medicine-knowing that an element or a drug has desirable effects in test tubes is much different from knowing how to harness those effects and create a safe medicine that humans can consume. For all its potency, vanadium is still a dubious element for the body to metabolize. Among other things, it mysteriously raises and lowers blood glucose levels. That's why, despite its mild toxicity, vanadium water from (as some sites claim) the vanadium-rich springs of Mt. Fuji is sold online as a cure for diabetes.

Other elements have made the transition into effective medicines, like the hitherto useless gadolinium, a potential cancer a.s.sa.s.sin. Gadolinium's value springs from its abundance of unpaired electrons. Despite the willingness of electrons to bond with other atoms, within their own atoms, they stay maximally far apart. Remember that electrons live in sh.e.l.ls, and sh.e.l.ls further break down into bunks called orbitals, each of which can accommodate two electrons. Curiously, electrons fill orbitals like patrons find seats on a bus: each electron sits by itself in an orbital until another electron is absolutely forced to double up.* When electrons do condescend to double up, they are picky. They always sit next to somebody with the opposite "spin," a property related to an electron's magnetic field. Linking electrons, spin, and magnets may seem weird, but all spinning charged particles have permanent magnetic fields, like tiny earths. When an electron buddies up with another electron with a contrary spin, their magnetic fields cancel out. When electrons do condescend to double up, they are picky. They always sit next to somebody with the opposite "spin," a property related to an electron's magnetic field. Linking electrons, spin, and magnets may seem weird, but all spinning charged particles have permanent magnetic fields, like tiny earths. When an electron buddies up with another electron with a contrary spin, their magnetic fields cancel out.

Gadolinium, which sits in the middle of the rare earth row, has the maximum number of electrons sitting by themselves. Having so many unpaired, noncanceling electrons allows gadolinium to be magnetized more strongly than any other element-a nice feature for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). MRI machines work by slightly magnetizing body tissue with powerful magnets and then flipping the magnets off. When the field releases, the tissue relaxes, reorients itself randomly, and becomes invisible to a magnetic field. Highly magnetic bits like gadolinium take longer to relax, and the MRI machine picks up on that difference. So by affixing gadolinium to tumor-targeting agents-chemicals that seek out and bind only to tumors-doctors can pick tumors out on an MRI scan more easily. Gadolinium basically cranks up the contrast between tumors and normal flesh, and depending on the machine, the tumor will either stand out like a white island in a sea of grayish tissue or appear as an inky cloud in a bright white sky.

Even better, gadolinium might do more than just diagnose tumors. It might also provide doctors with a way to kill those tumors with intense radiation. Gadolinium's array of unpaired electrons allows it to absorb scads of neutrons, which normal body tissue cannot absorb well. Absorbing neutrons turns gadolinium radioactive, and when it goes nuclear, it shreds the tissue around it. Normally, triggering a nano-nuke inside the body is bad, but if doctors can induce tumors to absorb gadolinium, it's sort of an enemy of an enemy thing. As a bonus, gadolinium also inhibits proteins that repair DNA, so the tumor cells cannot rebuild their tattered chromosomes. As anyone who has ever had cancer can attest, a focused gadolinium attack would be a tremendous improvement over chemotherapy and normal cancer radiation, both of which kill cancer cells by scorching everything around them, too. Whereas those techniques are more like firebombs, gadolinium could someday allow oncologists to make surgical strikes without surgery.*

This is not to say that element sixty-four is a wonder drug. Atoms have a way of drifting inside the body, and like any element the body doesn't use regularly, gadolinium has side effects. It causes kidney problems in some patients who cannot flush it out of their systems, and others report that it causes their muscles to stiffen up like early stages of rigor mortis and their skin to harden like a hide, making breathing difficult in some cases. From the looks of it, there's a healthy Internet industry of people claiming that gadolinium (usually taken for an MRI) has ruined their health.

As a matter of fact, the Internet is an interesting place to scout out general claims for obscure medicinal elements. With virtually every element that's not a toxic metal (and even occasionally with those), you can find some alternative medicine site selling it as a supplement.* Probably not coincidentally, you'll also find personal-injury firms on the Internet willing to sue somebody for exposure to nearly every element. So far, the health gurus seem to have spread their message farther and wider than the lawyers, and elemental medicines (e.g., the zinc in lozenges) continue to grow more popular, especially those that have roots as folk remedies. For a century, people gradually replaced folk remedies with prescription drugs, but declining confidence in Western medicine has led some people to self-administer "drugs" such as silver once more. Probably not coincidentally, you'll also find personal-injury firms on the Internet willing to sue somebody for exposure to nearly every element. So far, the health gurus seem to have spread their message farther and wider than the lawyers, and elemental medicines (e.g., the zinc in lozenges) continue to grow more popular, especially those that have roots as folk remedies. For a century, people gradually replaced folk remedies with prescription drugs, but declining confidence in Western medicine has led some people to self-administer "drugs" such as silver once more.*

Again, there is an ostensible scientific basis for using silver, since it has the same self-sterilizing effects as copper. The difference between silver and copper is that silver, if ingested, colors the skin blue. Permanently. And it's actually worse than that sounds. Calling silvered skin "blue" is easy shorthand. But there's the fun electric blue in people's imaginations when they hear this, and then there's the ghastly gray zombie-Smurf blue people actually turn.

Thankfully, this condition, called argyria, isn't fatal and causes no internal damage. A man in the early 1900s even made a living as "the Blue Man" in a freak show after overdosing on silver nitrate to cure his syphilis. (It didn't work.) In our own times, a survivalist and fierce Libertarian from Montana, the doughty and doughy Stan Jones, ran for the U.S. Senate in 2002 and 2006 despite being startlingly blue. To his credit, Jones had as much fun with himself as the media did. When asked what he told children and adults who pointed at him on the street, he deadpanned, "I just tell them I'm practicing my Halloween costume."

Jones also gladly explained how he contracted argyria. Having his ear to the tin can about conspiracy theories, Jones became obsessed in 1995 with the Y2K computer crash, and especially with the potential lack of antibiotics in the coming apocalypse. His immune system, he decided, had better get ready. So he began to distill a heavy-metal moons.h.i.+ne in his backyard by dipping silver wires attached to 9-volt batteries into tubs of water-a method not even hard-core silver evangelists recommend, since electric currents that strong dissolve far too many silver ions in the bath. Jones drank his stash faithfully for four and a half years, right until Y2K fizzled out in January 2000.

Despite that dud, and despite being gawked at during his serial Senate campaigns, Jones remains unrepentant. He certainly wasn't running for office to wake up the Food and Drug Administration, which in good libertarian fas.h.i.+on intervenes with elemental cures only when they cause acute harm or make promises they cannot possibly keep. A year after losing the 2002 election, Jones told a national magazine, "It's my fault that I overdosed [on silver], but I still believe it's the best antibiotic in the world.... If there were a biological attack on America or if I came down with any type of disease, I'd immediately take it again. Being alive is more important than turning purple."

Stan Jones's advice notwithstanding, the best modern medicines are not isolated elements but complex compounds. Nevertheless, in the history of modern drugs, a few unexpected elements have played an outsized role. This history largely concerns lesser-known heroic scientists such as Gerhard Domagk, but it starts with Louis Pasteur and a peculiar discovery he made about a property of biomolecules called handedness, which gets at the very essence of living matter.

Odds are you're right-handed, but really you're not. You're left-handed. Every amino acid in every protein in your body has a left-handed twist to it. In fact, virtually every protein in every life form that has ever existed is exclusively left-handed. If astrobiologists ever find a microbe on a meteor or moon of Jupiter, almost the first thing they'll test is the handedness of its proteins. If the proteins are left-handed, the microbe is possibly earthly contamination. If they're right-handed, it's certainly alien life.

Pasteur noticed this handedness because he began his career studying modest fragments of life as a chemist. In 1849, at age twenty-six, he was asked by a winery to investigate tartaric acid, a harmless waste product of wine production. Grape seeds and yeast carca.s.ses decompose into tartaric acid and collect as crystals in the dregs of wine kegs. Yeast-born tartaric acid also has a curious property. Dissolve it in water and s.h.i.+ne a vertical slit of light through the solution, and the beam will twist clockwise away from the vertical. It's like rotating a dial. Industrial, human-made tartaric acid does nothing like that. A vertical beam emerges true and upright. Pasteur wanted to figure out why.

He determined that it had nothing to do with the chemistry of the two types of tartaric acid. They behaved identically in reactions, and the elemental composition of both was the same. Only when he examined the crystals with a magnifying gla.s.s did he notice any difference. The tartaric acid crystals from yeast all twisted in one direction, like tiny, severed left-handed fists. The industrial tartaric acid twisted both ways, a mixture of left- and right-handed fists. Intrigued, Pasteur began the unimaginably tedious job of separating the salt-sized grains into a lefty pile and a righty pile with tweezers. He then dissolved each pile in water and tested more beams of light. Just as he suspected, the yeastlike crystals rotated light clockwise, while the mirror-image crystals rotated light counterclockwise, and exactly the same number of degrees.

Pasteur mentioned these results to his mentor, Jean Baptiste Biot, who had first discovered that some compounds could twist light. The old man demanded that Pasteur show him-then nearly broke down, he was so deeply moved at the elegance of the experiment. In essence, Pasteur had shown that there are two identical but mirror-image types of tartaric acid. More important, Pasteur later expanded this idea to show that life has a strong bias for molecules of only one handedness, or "chirality."*

Pasteur later admitted he'd been a little lucky with this brilliant work. Tartaric acid, unlike most molecules, is easy to see as chiral. In addition, although no one could have antic.i.p.ated a link between chirality and rotating light, Pasteur had Biot to guide him through the optical rotation experiments. Most serendipitously, the weather cooperated. When preparing the man-made tartaric acid, Pasteur had cooled it on a windowsill. The acid separates into left- and right-handed crystals only below 79F, and had it been warmer that season, he never would have discovered handedness. Still, Pasteur knew that luck explained just part of his success. As he himself declared, "Chance favors only the prepared mind."

Pasteur was skilled enough for this "luck" to persist throughout his life. Though not the first to do so, he performed an ingenious experiment on meat broth in sterile flasks and proved definitively that air contains no "vitalizing element," no spirit that can summon life from dead matter. Life is built solely, if mysteriously, from the elements on the periodic table. Pasteur also developed pasteurization, a process that heats milk to kill infectious diseases; and, most famously at the time, he saved a young boy's life with his rabies vaccine. For the latter deed, he became a national hero, and he parlayed that fame into the clout he needed to open an eponymous inst.i.tute outside Paris to further his revolutionary germ theory of disease.

Not quite coincidentally, it was at the Pasteur Inst.i.tute in the 1930s that a few vengeful, vindictive scientists figured out how the first laboratory-made pharmaceuticals worked-and in doing so hung yet another millstone around the neck of Pasteur's intellectual descendant, the great microbiologist of his era, Gerhard Domagk.

In early December 1935, Domagk's daughter Hildegard tripped down the staircase of the family home in Wuppertal, Germany, while holding a sewing needle. The needle punctured her hand, eyelet first, and snapped off inside her. A doctor extracted the shard, but days later Hildegard was languis.h.i.+ng, suffering from a high fever and a brutal streptococcal infection all up and down her arm. As she grew worse, Domagk himself languished and suffered, because death was a frighteningly common outcome for such infections. Once the bacteria began multiplying, no known drug could check their greed.

Except there was one drug-or, rather, one possible drug. It was really a red industrial dye that Domagk had been quietly testing in his lab. On December 20, 1932, he had injected a litter of mice with ten times the lethal dose of streptococcal bacteria. He had done the same with another litter. He'd also injected the second litter with that industrial dye, p.r.o.ntosil, ninety minutes later. On Christmas Eve, Domagk, until that day an insignificant chemist, stole back into his lab to peek. Every mouse in the second litter was alive. Every mouse in the first had died.

That wasn't the only fact confronting Domagk as he kept vigil over Hildegard. p.r.o.ntosil-a ringed organic molecule that, a little unusually, contains a sulfur atom-had unpredictable properties. Germans at the time believed, a little oddly, that dyes killed germs by turning the germs' vital organs the wrong color. But p.r.o.ntosil, though lethal to microbes inside mice, had no effect on bacteria in test tubes. They swam around happily in the red wash. No one knew why, and because of that ignorance, numerous European doctors had attacked German "chemotherapy," dismissing it as inferior to surgery in treating infection. Even Domagk didn't quite believe in his drug. Between the mouse experiment in 1932 and Hildegard's accident, tentative clinical trials in humans had gone well, but with occasional serious side effects (not to mention that it caused people to flush bright red, like lobsters). Although he was willing to risk the possible deaths of patients in clinical trials for the greater good, risking his daughter was another matter.

In this dilemma, Domagk found himself in the same situation that Pasteur had fifty years before, when a young mother had brought her son, so mangled by a rabid dog he could barely walk, to Pasteur in France. Pasteur treated the boy with a rabies vaccine tested only on animals, and the boy lived.* Pasteur wasn't a licensed doctor, and he administered the vaccine despite the threat of criminal prosecution if it failed. If Domagk failed, he would have the additional burden of having killed a family member. Yet as Hildegard sank further, he likely could not rid his memory of the two cages of mice that Christmas Eve, one teeming with busy rodents, the other still. When Hildegard's doctor announced he would have to amputate her arm, Domagk laid aside his caution. Violating pretty much every research protocol you could draw up, he sneaked some doses of the experimental drug from his lab and began injecting her with the blood-colored serum. Pasteur wasn't a licensed doctor, and he administered the vaccine despite the threat of criminal prosecution if it failed. If Domagk failed, he would have the additional burden of having killed a family member. Yet as Hildegard sank further, he likely could not rid his memory of the two cages of mice that Christmas Eve, one teeming with busy rodents, the other still. When Hildegard's doctor announced he would have to amputate her arm, Domagk laid aside his caution. Violating pretty much every research protocol you could draw up, he sneaked some doses of the experimental drug from his lab and began injecting her with the blood-colored serum.

At first Hildegard worsened. Her fever alternately spiked and crashed over the next couple of weeks. Suddenly, exactly three years after her father's mouse experiment, Hildegard stabilized. She would live, with both arms intact.

Though euphoric, Domagk held back mentioning his clandestine experiment to his colleagues, so as not to bias the clinical trials. But his colleagues didn't need to hear about Hildegard to know that Domagk had found a blockbuster-the first genuine antibacterial drug. It's hard to overstate what a revelation this drug was. The world in Domagk's day was modern in many ways. People had quick cross-continental transportation via trains and quick international communication via the telegraph; what they didn't have was much hope of surviving even common infections. With p.r.o.ntosil, plagues that had ravaged human beings since history began seemed conquerable and might even be eradicated. The only remaining question was how p.r.o.ntosil worked.

Not to break my authorial distance, but the following explanation must be chaperoned with an apology. After expounding on the utility of the octet rule, I hate telling you that there are exceptions and that p.r.o.ntosil succeeds as a drug largely because it violates this rule. Specifically, if surrounded by stronger-willed elements, sulfur will farm out all six of its outer-sh.e.l.l electrons and expand its octet into a dozenet. In p.r.o.ntosil's case, the sulfur shares one electron with a benzene ring of carbon atoms, one with a short nitrogen chain, and two each with two greedy oxygen atoms. That's six bonds with twelve electrons, a lot to juggle. And no element but sulfur could pull it off. Sulfur lies in the periodic table's third row, so it's large enough to take on more than eight electrons and bring all those important parts together; yet it's only in the third row and therefore small enough to let everything fit around it in the proper three-dimensional arrangement.

Domagk, primarily a bacteriologist, was ignorant of all that chemistry, and he eventually decided to publish his results so other scientists could help him figure out how p.r.o.ntosil works. But there were tricky business issues to consider. The chemical cartel Domagk worked for, I. G. Farbenindustrie (IGF, the company that later manufactured Fritz Haber's Zyklon B), already sold p.r.o.ntosil as a dye, but it filed for a patent extension on p.r.o.ntosil as a medicine immediately after Christmas in 1932. And with clinical proof that the drug worked well in humans, IGF was fervid about maintaining its intellectual property rights. When Domagk pushed to publish his results, the company forced him to hold back until the medicinal patent on p.r.o.ntosil came through, a delay that earned Domagk and IGF criticism, since people died while lawyers quibbled. Then IGF made Domagk publish in an obscure, German-only periodical, to prevent other firms from finding out about p.r.o.ntosil.

Despite the precaution, and despite p.r.o.ntosil's revolutionary promise, the drug flopped when it hit the market. Foreign doctors continued to harangue about it and many simply didn't believe it could work. Not until the drug saved the life of Franklin Delano Roosevelt Jr., who was struck by a severe strep throat in 1936, and earned a headline in the New York Times New York Times did p.r.o.ntosil and its lone sulfur atom win any respect. Suddenly, Domagk might as well have been an alchemist for all the money IGF stood to make, and any ignorance about how p.r.o.ntosil worked seemed trifling. Who cared when sales figures jumped fivefold in 1936, then fivefold more the next year. did p.r.o.ntosil and its lone sulfur atom win any respect. Suddenly, Domagk might as well have been an alchemist for all the money IGF stood to make, and any ignorance about how p.r.o.ntosil worked seemed trifling. Who cared when sales figures jumped fivefold in 1936, then fivefold more the next year.

Meanwhile, scientists at the Pasteur Inst.i.tute in France had dug up Domagk's obscure journal article. In a froth that was equal parts antiintellectual property (because they hated how patents hindered basic research) and anti-Teuton (because they hated Germans), the Frenchmen immediately set about busting the IGF patent. (Never underestimate spite as a motivator for genius.) p.r.o.ntosil worked as well as advertised on bacteria, but the Pasteur scientists noticed some odd things when they traced its course through the body. First, it wasn't p.r.o.ntosil that fought off bacteria, but a derivative of it, sulfonamide, which mammal cells produce by splitting p.r.o.ntosil in two. This explained instantly why bacteria in test tubes had not been affected: no mammal cells had biologically "activated" the p.r.o.ntosil by cleaving it. Second, sulfonamide, with its central sulfur atom and hexapus of side chains, disrupts the production of folic acid, a nutrient all cells use to replicate DNA and reproduce. Mammals get folic acid from their diets, which means sulfonamide doesn't hobble their cells. But bacteria have to manufacture their own folic acid or they can't undergo mitosis and spread. In effect, then, the Frenchmen proved that Domagk had discovered not a bacteria killer but bacteria birth control!

This breakdown of p.r.o.ntosil was stunning news, and not just medically stunning. The important bit of p.r.o.ntosil, sulfonamide, had been invented years before. It had even been patented in 1909-by I. G. Farbenindustrie*-but had languished because the company had tested it only as a dye. By the mid-1930s, the patent had expired. The Pasteur Inst.i.tute scientists published their results with undisguised glee, giving everyone in the world a license to circ.u.mvent the p.r.o.ntosil patent. Domagk and IGF of course protested that p.r.o.ntosil, not sulfonamide, was the crucial component. But as evidence acc.u.mulated against them, they dropped their claims. The company lost millions in product investment, and probably hundreds of millions in profits, as compet.i.tors swept in and synthesized other "sulfa drugs."

Despite Domagk's professional frustration, his peers understood what he'd done, and they rewarded Pasteur's heir with the 1939 n.o.bel Prize in Medicine or Physiology, just seven years after the Christmas mice experiment. But if anything, the n.o.bel made Domagk's life worse. Hitler hated the n.o.bel committee for awarding the 1935 Peace Prize to an anti-n.a.z.i journalist and pacifist, and Die Fuhrer had made it basically illegal for any German to win a n.o.bel Prize. As such, the Gestapo arrested and brutalized Domagk for his "crime." When World War II broke out, Domagk redeemed himself a little by convincing the n.a.z.is (they refused to believe at first) that his drugs could save soldiers suffering from gangrene. But the Allies had sulfa drugs by then, too, and it couldn't have increased Domagk's popularity when his drugs saved Winston Churchill in 1942, a man bent on destroying Germany.

Perhaps even worse, the drug Domagk had trusted to save his daughter's life became a dangerous fad. People demanded sulfonamide for every sore throat and sniffle and soon saw it as some sort of elixir. Their hopes became a nasty joke when quick-buck salesmen in the United States took advantage of this mania by peddling sulfas sweetened with antifreeze. Hundreds died within weeks-further proof that when it comes to panaceas the credulity of human beings is boundless.

Antibiotics were the culmination of Pasteur's discoveries about germs. But not all diseases are germ-based; many have roots in chemical or hormonal troubles. And modern medicine began to address that second cla.s.s of diseases only after embracing Pasteur's other great insight into biology, chirality. Not long after offering his opinion about chance and the prepared mind, Pasteur said something else that, if not as pithy, stirs a deeper sense of wonder, because it gets at something truly mysterious: what makes life live. After determining that life has a bias toward handedness on a deep level, Pasteur suggested that chirality was the sole "well-marked line of demarcation that at the present can be drawn between the chemistry of dead matter and the chemistry of living matter."* If you've ever wondered what defines life, chemically there's your answer. If you've ever wondered what defines life, chemically there's your answer.

Pasteur's statement guided biochemistry for a century, during which doctors made incredible progress in understanding diseases. At the same time, the insight implied that curing diseases, the real prize, would require chiral hormones and chiral biochemicals-and scientists realized that Pasteur's dictum, however perceptive and helpful, subtly highlighted their own ignorance. That is, in pointing out the gulf between the "dead" chemistry that scientists could do in the lab and the living cellular chemistry that supported life, Pasteur simultaneously pointed out there was no easy way to cross it.

That didn't stop people from trying. Some scientists obtained chiral chemicals by distilling essences and hormones from animals, but in the end that proved too arduous. (In the 1920s, two Chicago chemists had to puree several thousand pounds of bull t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es from a stockyard to get a few ounces of the first pure testosterone.) The other possible approach was to ignore Pasteur's distinction and manufacture both right-handed and left-handed versions of biochemicals. This was actually fairly easy to do because, statistically, reactions that produce handed molecules are equally likely to form righties and lefties. The problem with this approach is that mirror-image molecules have different properties inside the body. The zesty odor of lemons and oranges derives from the same basic molecules, one right-handed and one left-handed. Wrong-handed molecules can even destroy left-handed biology. A German drug company in the 1950s began marketing a remedy for morning sickness in pregnant women, but the benign, curative form of the active ingredient was mixed in with the wrong-handed form because the scientists couldn't separate them. The freakish birth defects that followed-especially children born without legs or arms, their hands and feet st.i.tched like turtle flippers to their trunks-made thalidomide the most notorious pharmaceutical of the twentieth century.*

As the thalidomide disaster unfolded, the prospects of chiral drugs seemed dimmer than ever. But at the same time people were publicly mourning thalidomide babies, a St. Louis chemist named William Knowles began playing around with an unlikely elemental hero, rhodium, in a private research lab at Monsanto, an agricultural company. Knowles quietly circ.u.mvented Pasteur and proved that "dead" matter, if you were clever about it, could indeed invigorate living matter.

Knowles had a flat, two-dimensional molecule he wanted to inflate into three dimensions, because the left-handed version of the 3D molecule had shown promising effects on brain diseases such as Parkinson's. The sticking point was getting the proper handedness. Notice that 2D objects cannot be chiral: after all, a flat cardboard cutout of your right hand can be flipped over to make a left hand. Handedness emerges only with the z-axis. But inanimate chemicals in a reaction don't know to make one hand or the other.* They make both, unless they're tricked. They make both, unless they're tricked.

Knowles's trick was a rhodium catalyst. Catalysts speed up chemical reactions to degrees that are hard to comprehend in our poky, everyday human world. Some catalysts improve reaction rates by millions, billions, or even trillions of times. Rhodium works pretty fast, and Knowles found that one rhodium atom could inflate innumerably many of his 2D molecules. So he affixed the rhodium to the center of an already chiral compound, creating a chiral catalyst.

The clever part was that both the chiral catalyst with the rhodium atom and the target 2D molecule were sprawling and bulky. So when they approached each other to react, they did so like two obese animals trying to have s.e.x. That is, the chiral compound could poke its rhodium atom into the 2D molecule only from one position. And from that position, with arms and belly flab in the way, the 2D molecule could unfold into a 3D molecule in only one dimension.

That limited maneuverability during coitus, coupled with rhodium's catalytic ability to fast-forward reactions, meant that Knowles could get away with doing only a bit of the hard work-making a chiral rhodium catalyst-and still reap bushels of correctly handed molecules.

The year was 1968, and modern drug synthesis began at that moment-a moment later honored with a n.o.bel Prize in Chemistry for Knowles in 2001.

Incidentally, the drug that rhodium churned out for Knowles is levo-dihydroxyphenylalanine, or L-dopa, a compound since made famous in Oliver Sacks's book Awakenings Awakenings. The book doc.u.ments how L-dopa shook awake eighty patients who'd developed extreme Parkinson's disease after contracting sleeping sickness (Encephalitis lethargica) in the 1920s. All eighty were inst.i.tutionalized, and many had spent four decades in a neurological haze, a few in continuous catatonia. Sacks describes them as "totally lacking energy, impetus, initiative, motive, appet.i.te, affect, or desire... as insubstantial as ghosts, and as pa.s.sive as zombies... extinct volcanoes."

In 1967, a doctor had had great success in treating Parkinson's patients with L-dopa, a precursor of the brain chemical dopamine. (Like Domagk's p.r.o.ntosil, L-dopa must be biologically activated in the body.) But the right- and left-handed forms of the molecule were knotty to separate, and the drug cost upwards of $5,000 per pound. Miraculously-though without being aware why-Sacks notes that "towards the end of 1968 the cost of L-dopa started a sharp decline." Freed by Knowles's breakthrough, Sacks began treating his catatonic patients in New York not long after, and "in the spring of 1969, in a way... which no one could have imagined or foreseen, these 'extinct volcanoes' erupted into life."

The volcano metaphor is accurate, as the effects of the drug weren't wholly benign. Some people became hyperkinetic, with racing thoughts, and others began to hallucinate or gnaw on things like animals. But these forgotten people almost uniformly preferred the mania of L-dopa to their former listlessness. Sacks recalls that their families and the hospital staff had long considered them "effectively dead," and even some of the victims considered themselves so. Only the left-handed version of Knowles's drug revived them. Once again, Pasteur's dictum about the life-giving properties of proper-handed chemicals proved true.

How Elements Deceive

No one could have guessed that an anonymous gray metal like rhodium could produce anything as wondrous as L-dopa. But even after hundreds of years of chemistry, elements continually surprise us, in ways both benign and not. Elements can muddle up our unconscious, automatic breathing; confound our conscious senses; even, as with iodine, betray our highest human faculties. True, chemists have a good grasp of many features of elements, such as their melting points or abundance in the earth's crust, and the eight-pound, 2,804-page Handbook of Chemistry and Physics Handbook of Chemistry and Physics-the chemists' Koran-lists every physical property of every element to far more decimal places than you'd ever need. On an atomic level, elements behave predictably. Yet when they encounter all the chaos of biology, they continue to baffle us. Even blase, everyday elements, if encountered in unnatural circ.u.mstances, can spring a few mean surprises.

On March 19, 1981, five technicians undid a panel on a simulation s.p.a.cecraft at NASA's Cape Canaveral headquarters and entered a cramped rear chamber above the engine. A thirty-three-hour "day" had just ended with a perfectly simulated liftoff, and with the s.p.a.ce shuttle Columbia Columbia-the most advanced s.p.a.ce shuttle ever designed-set to launch on its first mission in April, the agency had understandable confidence. The hard part of their day over, the technicians, satisfied and tired, crawled into the compartment for a routine systems check. Seconds later, eerily peacefully, they slumped over.

Until that moment, NASA had lost no lives on the ground or in s.p.a.ce since 1967, when three astronauts had burned to death during training for Apollo 1. Apollo 1. At the time, NASA, always concerned about cutting payload, allowed only pure oxygen to circulate in s.p.a.cecrafts, not air, which contains 80 percent nitrogen (i.e., 80 percent deadweight). Unfortunately, as NASA recognized in a 1966 technical report, "in pure oxygen [flames] will burn faster and hotter without the dilution of atmospheric nitrogen to absorb some of the heat or otherwise interfere." As soon as the atoms in oxygen molecules (O At the time, NASA, always concerned about cutting payload, allowed only pure oxygen to circulate in s.p.a.cecrafts, not air, which contains 80 percent nitrogen (i.e., 80 percent deadweight). Unfortunately, as NASA recognized in a 1966 technical report, "in pure oxygen [flames] will burn faster and hotter without the dilution of atmospheric nitrogen to absorb some of the heat or otherwise interfere." As soon as the atoms in oxygen molecules (O2) absorb heat, they dissociate and raise h.e.l.l by stealing electrons from nearby atoms, a spree that makes fires burn hotter. Oxygen doesn't need much provocation either. Some engineers worried that even static electricity from the Velcro on astronauts' suits might ignite pure, vigorous oxygen. Nevertheless, the report concluded that although "inert gas has been considered as a means of suppressing flammability... inert additives are not only unnecessary but also increasingly complicated."

Now, that conclusion might be true in s.p.a.ce, where atmospheric pressure is nonexistent and just a little interior gas will keep a s.p.a.cecraft from collapsing inward. But when training on the ground, in earth's heavy air, NASA technicians had to pump the simulators with far more oxygen to keep the walls from crumpling-which meant far more danger, since even small fires combust wildly in pure oxygen. When an unexplained spark went off one day during training in 1967, fire engulfed the module and cremated the three astronauts inside.

A disaster has a way of clarifying things, and NASA decided inert gases were necessary, complicated or not, in all shuttles and simulators thereafter. By the 1981 Columbia Columbia mission, they filled any compartment p.r.o.ne to produce sparks with inert nitrogen (N mission, they filled any compartment p.r.o.ne to produce sparks with inert nitrogen (N2). Electronics and motors work just as well in nitrogen, and if sparks do shoot up, nitrogen-which is locked into molecular form more tightly than oxygen-will smother them. Workers who enter an inert compartment simply have to wear gas masks or wait until the nitrogen is pumped out and breathable air seeps back in-a precaution not taken on March 19. Someone gave the all clear too soon, the technicians crawled into the chamber unaware, and they collapsed as if ch.o.r.eographed. The nitrogen not only prevented their neurons and heart cells from absorbing new oxygen; it pickpocketed the little oxygen cells store up for hard times, accelerating the technicians' demise. Rescue workers dragged all five men out but could revive only three. John Bjornstad was dead, and Forrest Cole died in a coma on April Fools' Day.

In fairness to NASA, in the past few decades nitrogen has asphyxiated miners in caves and people working in underground particle accelerators,* too, and always under the same horror-movie circ.u.mstances. The first person to walk in collapses within seconds for no apparent reason. A second and sometimes third person dash in and succ.u.mb as well. The scariest part is that no one struggles before dying. Panic never kicks in, despite the lack of oxygen. That might seem incredible if you've ever been trapped underwater. The instinct not to suffocate will buck you to the surface. But our hearts, lungs, and brains actually have no gauge for detecting oxygen. Those organs judge only two things: whether we're inhaling some gas, any gas, and whether we're exhaling carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide dissolves in blood to form carbonic acid, so as long as we purge CO too, and always under the same horror-movie circ.u.mstances. The first person to walk in collapses within seconds for no apparent reason. A second and sometimes third person dash in and succ.u.mb as well. The scariest part is that no one struggles before dying. Panic never kicks in, despite the lack of oxygen. That might seem incredible if you've ever been trapped underwater. The instinct not to suffocate will buck you to the surface. But our hearts, lungs, and brains actually have no gauge for detecting oxygen. Those organs judge only two things: whether we're inhaling some gas, any gas, and whether we're exhaling carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide dissolves in blood to form carbonic acid, so as long as we purge CO2 with each breath and tamp down the acid, our brains will relax. It's an evolutionary kludge, really. It would make more sense to monitor oxygen levels, since that's what we crave. It's easier-and usually good enough-for cells to check that carbonic acid is close to zero, so they do the minimum. with each breath and tamp down the acid, our brains will relax. It's an evolutionary kludge, really. It would make more sense to monitor oxygen levels, since that's what we crave. It's easier-and usually good enough-for cells to check that carbonic acid is close to zero, so they do the minimum.

Nitrogen thwarts that system. It's odorless and colorless and causes no acid buildup in our veins. We breathe it in and out easily, so our lungs feel relaxed, and it snags no mental trip wires. It "kills with kindness," strolling through the body's security system with a familiar nod. (It's ironic that the traditional group name for the elements in nitrogen's column, the "pnictogens," comes from a Greek word for "choking" or "strangling.") The NASA workers-the first casualties of the doomed s.p.a.ce shuttle Columbia Columbia, which would disintegrate over Texas twenty-two years later-likely felt light-headed and sluggish in their nitrogen haze. But anyone might feel that way after thirty-three hours of work, and because they could exhale carbon dioxide just fine, little more happened mentally before they blacked out and nitrogen shut down their brains.

Because it has to combat microbes and other living creatures, the body's immune system is more biologically sophisticated than its respiratory system. That doesn't mean it's savvier about avoiding deception. At least, though, with some of the chemical ruses against the immune system, the periodic table deceives the body for its own good.

In 1952, Swedish doctor Per-Ingvar Brnemark was studying how bone marrow produces new blood cells. Having a strong stomach, Brnemark wanted to watch this directly, so he chiseled out holes in the femurs of rabbits and covered the holes with an eggsh.e.l.l-thin t.i.tanium "window," which was transparent to strong light. The observation went satisfactorily, and Brnemark decided to snap off the expensive t.i.tanium screens for more experiments. To his annoyance, they wouldn't budge. He gave up on those windows (and the poor rabbits), but when the same thing happened in later experiments-the t.i.tanium always locked like a vise onto the femur-he examined the situation a little closer. What he saw made watching juvenile blood cells suddenly seem vastly less interesting and revolutionized the sleepy field of prosthetics.

Since ancient times, doctors had replaced missing limbs with clumsy wooden appendages and peg legs. During and after the industrial revolution, metal prostheses became common, and disfigured soldiers after World War I sometimes even got detachable tin faces-masks that allowed the soldiers to pa.s.s through crowds without drawing stares. But no one was able to integrate metal or wood into the body, the ideal solution. The immune system rejected all such attempts, whether made of gold, zinc, magnesium, or chromium-coated pig bladders. As a blood guy, Brnemark knew why. Normally, posses of blood cells surround foreign matter and wrap it in a straitjacket of slick, fibrous collagen. This mechanism-sealing the hunk off and preventing it from leaking-works great with, say, buckshot from a hunting accident. But cells aren't smart enough to distinguish between invasive foreign matter and useful foreign matter, and a few months after implantation, any new appendages would be covered in collagen and start to slip or snap free.

Since this happened even with metals the body metabolizes, such as iron, and since the body doesn't need t.i.tanium even in trace amounts, t.i.tanium seemed an unlikely candidate for being accepted by the immune system. Yet Brnemark found that for some reason, t.i.tanium hypnotizes blood cells: it triggers zero immune response and even cons the body's osteoblasts, its bone-forming cells, into attaching themselves to it as if there was no difference between element twenty-two and actual bone. t.i.tanium can fully integrate itself into the body, deceiving it for its own good. Since 1952, it's been the standard for implanted teeth, screw-on fingers, and replaceable sockets, like the hip socket my mother received in the early 1990s.

Due to cosmically bad luck, arthritis had cleaned out the cartilage in my mother's hip at a young age, leaving bone grinding on bone like a jagged mortar and pestle. She got a full hip replacement at age thirty-five, which meant having a t.i.tanium spike with a ball on the end hammered like a railroad tie into her sawed-off femur and the socket screwed into her pelvis. A few months later, she was walking pain-free for the first time in years, and I happily told people she'd had the same surgery as Bo Jackson.

Unfortunately, partly because of her unwillingness to take it easy around her kindergartners, my mother's first hip failed within nine years. The pain and inflammation returned, and another team of surgeons had to cut her open again. It turned out that the plastic component inside the fake hip socket had begun to flake, and her body had dutifully attacked the plastic shards and the tissue around them, covering them with collagen. But the t.i.tanium socket anch.o.r.ed to her pelvis hadn't failed and in fact had to be snapped off to fit the new t.i.tanium piece. As a memento of her being their youngest two-time hip replacement patient ever, the surgeons at the Mayo Clinic presented my mother with the original socket. She still has it at home, in a manila envelope. It's the size of a tennis ball cut in half, and even today, a decade later, bits of white bone coral are unshakably cemented to the dark gray t.i.tanium surface.

Still yet more advanced than our unconscious immune system is our sensory equipment-our touch and taste and smell-the bridges between our physical bodies and our incorporate minds. But it should be obvious by now that new levels of sophistication introduce new and unexpected vulnerabilities into any living system. And it turns out that the heroic deception of t.i.tanium is an exception. We trust our senses for true information about the world and for protection from danger, and learning how gullible our senses really are is humbling and a little frightening.

Alarm receptors inside your mouth will tell you to drop a spoonful of soup before it burns your tongue, but, oddly, chili peppers in salsa contain a chemical, capsaicin, that irritates those receptors, too. Peppermint cools your mouth because minty methanol seizes up cold receptors, leaving you s.h.i.+vering as if an arctic blast just blew through. Elements pull similar tricks with smell and taste. If someone spills the tiniest bit of tellurium on himself, he will reek like pungent garlic for weeks, and people will know he's been in a room for hours afterward. Even more baffling, beryllium, element four, tastes like sugar. More than any other nutrient, humans need quick energy from sugar to live, and after millennia of hunting for sustenance in the wild, you'd think we'd have pretty sophisticated equipment to detect sugar. Yet beryllium-a pale, hard-to-melt, insoluble metal with small atoms that look nothing like ringed sugar molecules-lights up taste buds just the same.

This disguise might be merely amusing, except that beryllium, though sweet in minute doses, scales up very quickly to toxic.* By some estimates, up to one-tenth of the human population is hypersusceptible to something called acute beryllium disease, the periodic table equivalent of a peanut allergy. Even for the rest of us, exposure to beryllium powder can scar the lungs with the same chemical pneumonitis that inhaling fine silica causes, as one of the great scientists of all time, Enrico Fermi, found out. When young, the c.o.c.ksure Fermi used beryllium powder in experiments on radioactive uranium. Beryllium was excellent for those experiments because, when mixed with radioactive matter, it slows emitted particles down. And instead of letting particles escape uselessly into the air, beryllium spikes them back into the uranium lattice to knock more particles loose. In his later years, after moving from Italy to the United States, Fermi grew so bold with these reactions that he started the first-ever nuclear chain reaction, in a University of Chicago squash court. (Thankfully, he was adept enough to stop it, too.) But while Fermi tamed nuclear power, simple beryllium was doing him in. He'd inadvertently inhaled too much of this chemists' confectioner's powder as a young man, and he succ.u.mbed to pneumonitis at age fifty-three, tethered to an oxygen tank, his lungs shredded. By some estimates, up to one-tenth of the human population is hypersusceptible to something called acute beryllium disease, the periodic table equivalent of a peanut allergy. Even for the rest of us, exposure to beryllium powder can scar the lungs with the same chemical pneumonitis that inhaling fine silica causes, as one of the great scientists of all time, Enrico Fermi, found out. When young, the c.o.c.ksure Fermi used beryllium powder in experiments on radioactive uranium. Beryllium was excellent for those experiments because, when mixed with radioactive matter, it slows emitted particles down. And instead of letting particles escape uselessly into the air, beryllium spikes them back into the uranium lattice to knock more particles loose. In his later years, after moving from Italy to the United States, Fermi grew so bold with these reactions that he started the first-ever nuclear chain reaction, in a University of Chicago squash court. (Thankfully, he was adept enough to stop it, too.) But while Fermi tamed nuclear power, simple beryllium was doing him in. He'd inadvertently inhaled too much of this chemists' confectioner's powder as a young man, and he succ.u.mbed to pneumonitis at age fifty-three, tethered to an oxygen tank, his lungs shredded.

Beryllium can lull people who should know better in part because humans have such a screwy sense of taste. Now, some of the five types of taste buds are admittedly reliable. The taste buds for bitter scour food, especially plants, for poisonous nitrogen chemicals, like the cyanide in apple seeds. The taste buds for savory, or umami, lock onto glutamate, the G G in MSG. As an amino acid, glutamate helps build proteins, so these taste buds alert you to protein-rich foods. But the taste buds for sweet and sour are easy to fleece. Beryllium tricks them, as does a special protein in the berries of some species of plants. Aptly named miraculin, this protein strips out the unpleasant sourness in foods without altering the overtones of their taste, so that apple cider vinegar tastes like apple cider, or Tabasco sauce like marinara. Miraculin does this both by muting the taste buds for sour and by bonding to the taste buds for sweet and putting them on hair-trigger alert for the stray hydrogen ions (H in MSG. As an amino acid, glutamate helps build proteins, so these taste buds alert you to protein-rich foods. But the taste buds for sweet and sour are easy to fleece. Beryllium tricks them, as does a special protein in the berries of some species of plants. Aptly named miraculin, this protein strips out the unpleasant sourness in foods without altering the overtones of their taste, so that apple cider vinegar tastes like apple cider, or Tabasco sauce like marinara. Miraculin does this both by muting the taste buds for sour and by bonding to the taste buds for sweet and putting them on hair-trigger alert for the stray hydrogen ions (H+) that acids produce. Along those same lines, people who accidentally inhale hydrochloric or sulfuric acid often recall their teeth aching as if they'd been force-fed raw, extremely sour lemon slices. But as Gilbert Lewis proved, acids are intimately bound up with electrons and other charges. On a molecular level, then, "sour" is simply what we taste when our taste buds open up and hydrogen ions rush in. Our tongues conflate electricity, the flow of charged particles, with sour acids. Alessandro Volta, an Italian count and the inspiration for the eponym "volt," demonstrated this back around 1800 with a clever experiment. Volta had a number of volunteers form a chain and each pinch the tongue of one neighbor. The two end people then put their fingers on battery leads. Instantly, up and down the line, people tasted each other's fingers as sour.

The taste buds for salty also are affected by the flow of charges, but only the charges on certain elements. Sodium triggers the salty reflex on our tongues most strongly, but pota.s.sium, sodium's chemical cousin, free rides on top and tastes salty, too. Both elements exist as charged ions in nature, and it's mostly that charge, not the sodium or pota.s.sium per se, that the tongue detects. We evolved this taste because pota.s.sium and sodium ions help nerve cells send signals and muscles contract, so we'd literally be brain-dead and our hearts would stop without the charge they supply. Our tongues taste other physiologically important ions such as magnesium and calcium* as vaguely salty, too. as vaguely salty, too.

Of course, taste being so complicated, saltiness isn't as tidy as that last paragraph implies. We also taste physiologically useless ions that mimic sodium and pota.s.sium as salty (e.g., lithium and ammonium). And depending on what sodium and pota.s.sium are paired with, even they can taste sweet or sour. Sometimes, as with pota.s.sium chloride, the same molecules taste bitter at low concentrations but metamorphose, Wonka-like, into salt licks at high concentrations. Pota.s.sium can also shut the tongue down. Chewing raw pota.s.sium gymnemate, a chemical in the leaves of the plant Gymnema sylvestre, Gymnema sylvestre, will neuter miraculin, the miracle protein that turns sour into sweet. In fact, after chewing pota.s.sium gymnemate, the cocaine-like rush the tongue and heart usually get from glucose or sucrose or fructose reportedly fizzles out: piles of raw sugar heaped on the tongue taste like so much sand. will neuter miraculin, the miracle protein that turns sour into sweet. In fact, after chewing pota.s.sium gymnemate, the cocaine-like rush the tongue and heart usually get from glucose or sucrose or fructose reportedly fizzles out: piles of raw sugar heaped on the tongue taste like so much sand.*

All of this suggests that taste is a frighteningly bad guide to surveying the elements. Why common pota.s.sium deceives us is strange, but perhaps being overeager and over-rewarding our brain's pleasure centers are good strategies for nutrients. As for beryllium, it deceives us probably because no human being ever encountered pure beryllium until a chemist isolated it in Paris after the French Revolution, so we didn't have time to evolve a healthy distaste for it. The point is that, at least partially, we're products of our environment, and however good our brains are at parsing chemical information in a lab or designing chemistry experiments, our senses will draw their own conclusions and find garlic in tellurium and powdered sugar in beryllium.

Taste remains one of our primal pleasures, and we should marvel at its complexity. The primary component of taste, smell, is the only sense that bypa.s.ses our logical neural processing and connects directly to the brain's emotional centers. And as a combination of senses, touch and smell, taste digs deeper into our emotional reservoirs than our other senses do alone. We kiss with our tongues for a reason. It's just that when it comes to the periodic table, it's best to keep our mouths shut.

A live body is so complicated, so b.u.t.terfly-flaps-its-wings-in-Brazil chaotic, that if you inject a random element into your bloodstream or liver or pancreas, there's almost no telling what will happen. Not even the mind or brain is immune. The highest faculties of human beings-our logic, wisdom, and judgment-are just as vulnerable to deception with elements such as iodine.

Perhaps this shouldn't be a surprise, since iodine has deception built into its chemical structure. Elements tend to get increasingly heavy across rows from left to right, and Dmitri Mendeleev decreed in the 1860s that increasing atomic weight drives the table's periodicity, making increasing atomic weight a universal law of matter. The problem is that universal laws of nature cannot have exceptions, and Mendeleev's craw knew of a particularly intractable exception in the bottom right-hand corner of the table. For tellurium and iodine to line up beneath similar elements, tellurium, element fifty-two, must fall to the left of iodine, element fifty-three. But tellurium outweighs iodine, and it kept stubbornly outweighing it no matter how many times Mendeleev fumed at chemists that their weighing equipment must be deceiving them. Facts is facts.

Nowadays this reversal seems a harmless chemical ruse, a humbling joke on Mendeleev. Scientists know of four pair reversals among the ninety-two natural elements today-argon-pota.s.sium, cobalt-nickel, iodine-tellurium, and thorium-protactinium-as well as a few among the ultraheavy, man-made elements. But a century after Mendeleev, iodine got caught up in a larger, more insidious deception, like a three-card monte hustler mixed up in a Mafia hit. You see, a rumor persists to this day among the billion people in India that Mahatma Gandhi, that sage of peace, absolutely hated iodine. Gandhi probably detested uranium and plutonium, too, for the bombs they enabled, but according to modern disciples of Gandhi who want to appropriate his powerful legend, he reserved a special locus of hatred in his heart for element fifty-three.

In 1930, Gandhi led the Indian people in the famous Salt March to Dandi, to protest the oppressive British salt tax. Salt was one of the few commodities an endemically poor country such as India could produce on its own. People just gathered seawater, let it evaporate, and sold the dry salt on the street from burlap sacks. The British government's taxing of salt production at 8.2 percent was tantamount in greed and ridiculousness to charging bedouins for scooping sand or Eskimos for making ice. To protest this, Gandhi and seventy-eight followers left for a 240-mile march on March 12. They picked up more and more people at each village, and by the time the swelling ranks arrived in the coastal town of Dandi on April 6, they formed a train two miles long. Gandhi gathered the throng around him for a rally, and at its climax he scooped up a handful of saline-rich mud and cried, "With this salt I am shaking the foundation of the [British] Empire!" It was the subcontinent's Boston Tea Party. Gandhi encouraged everyone to make illegal, untaxed salt, and by the time India gained independence seventeen years later, so-called common salt was indeed common in India.

The only problem was that common salt contains little iodine, an ingredient crucial to health. By the early 1900s, Western countries had figured out that adding iodine to the diet is the cheapest and most effective health measure a government can take to prevent birth defects and mental r.e.t.a.r.dation. Starting with Switzerland in 1922, many countries made iodized salt mandatory, since salt is a cheap, easy way to deliver the element, and Indian doctors realized that, with India's iodine-depleted soil and catastrophically high birthrate, they could save millions of children from crippling deformities by iodizing their salt, too.

But even decades after Gandhi's march to Dandi, salt production was an industry by the people, for the people, and iodized salt, which the West pushed on India, retained a whiff of colonialism. As the health benefits became clearer and India modernized, bans on non-iodized salt did spread among Indian state governments between the 1950s and 1990s, but not without dissent. In 1998, when the Indian federal government forced three holdout states to ban common salt, there was a backlash. Mom-and-pop salt makers protested the added processing costs. Hindu nationalists and Gandhians fulminated against encroaching Western science. Some hypochondriacs even worried, without any foundation, that iodized salt would spread cancer, diabetes, tuberculosis, and, weirdly, "peevishness." These opponents worked frantically, and just two years later-with the United Nations and every doctor in India gaping in horror-the prime minister repealed the federal ban on common salt. This technically made common salt legal in only three states, but the move was interpreted as de facto approval. Iodized salt consumption plummeted 13 percent nationwide. Birth defects climbed in tandem.

Luckily, the repeal lasted only until 2005, when a new prime minister again banned common salt. But this hardly solves India's iodine problem. Resentment in Gandhi's