The Disappearing Spoon: Chapter 10: Take Two Elements, Call Me in the Morning Summary & Analysis

Elements often behave in surprising, contradictory ways when they interact with the human body. Humans have been using elements for medicinal purposes for a long time. Silver, for example, has been used to improve health since ancient times. In the 16th century, a “gentleman astronomer” named Tycho Brahe had his nose cut off during a drunken duel. He supposedly commissioned a silver prosthetic nose to wear afterward. When archaeologists found the nose they discovered it was actually copper—yet both elements work well for the purpose of prosthesis, as they have antiseptic qualities.

Copper began being used in a public health context in the 1970s, after a group of hotel guests in Philadelphia became ill due to bacteria in the hotel air conditioning vents. Thirty-four people died from the illness, which was named Legionnaire’s disease. In the aftermath, copper was used in air and water systems in order to prevent the spread of bacteria in the future. Vanadium has a similar capacity to kill “small wriggling cells” and can be used as an effective spermicide. However, it has negative side effects, as is often the case when using an element for a particular purpose. Gadolinium, meanwhile, is used in MRI machines due to its ability to illuminate tumors, distinguishing them from healthy tissue.

Furthermore, scientists hope to be able to use gadolinium to treat cancer because of its capacity to inhibit proteins that repair DNA, which could stop tumor cells healing and growing. Unfortunately, gadolinium also has negative side effects, such as causing kidney problems and muscle stiffness. Experimenting with the health benefits of elements is highly common; almost every nontoxic element is being used by someone, somewhere as a supplement. However, this can have unintended consequences. People who ingest copper and silver, for example, might find that their skin turns blue as a result. This happened to Stan Jones, a Montana libertarian who ran as a candidate for the U.S. Senate in 2002.

Jones began taking silver due to panic over what he believed was the apocalyptic threat of the supposedly imminent Y2K computer crash, which he worried would make it impossible to access antibiotics. He lost the election, but expressed no regret over taking silver, despite its colorful effect on his body. In any case, “complex,” carefully designed compounds tend to make better medicines than pure elements. Despite this, a few elements do play an important role in medicine. Two scientists, Gerhard Domagk and Louis Pasteur, discovered a quality of biomolecules called “handedness,” meaning that molecules such as proteins can be either right- or left-handed.

Pasteur is also significant for developing the process of pasteurization, a way of heating milk that kills disease-causing bacteria. In 1935, Domagk’s daughter Hildegard accidentally impaled her hand with a sewing needle, which snapped off inside her. She became ill with a terrible infection thanks to bacteria inside her wound. Domagk had been conducting experiments on a red industrial dye in his lab, which he’d come to realize had the potential to fight lethal bacteria. Yet Domagk was (understandably) hesitant to use the dye to treat Hildegard, when he’d previously only used it on mice in his lab.

Years earlier, Pasteur had gone rogue and treated a young boy with a rabies vaccine that had thus far only been tested on animals. This was a criminal offense, yet it succeeded in saving the boy’s life. In desperation—and in violation of “pretty much every research protocol you could draw up”—Domagk decided to steal some of the drug he’d been developing from his lab and inject Hildegard with it. Miraculously, it worked, and Hildegard recovered. This was prontosil, the “first genuine antibacterial drug,” which revolutionized the world to an unimaginable degree. Yet Domagk was a bacteriologist with limited understanding of the chemistry behind his successful experiment. 

Prontosil didn’t gain popularity as a drug until it was used to save the life of Franklin Delano Roosevelt Jr. from a bad case of strep throat in 1936. At this point, scientists from the Pasteur Institute in France located the paper Domagk originally published on prontosil and, looking at his findings, concluded that it was not prontosil itself that killed bacteria, but rather a compound called sulfonamide which was produced when mammal cells split prontosil in half. Prontosil stopped bacteria from spreading. It wasn’t a “bacteria killer”—it was “bacteria birth control.” For this discovery, Domagk was awarded the 1939 Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology. This, in turn, provoked the ire of Hitler, who hated the Nobel committee due to their having awarded an anti-Nazi journalist the Peace Prize in 1935.

Alongside Domagk’s personal difficulties, he also had to face the reality that sulfonamide became a “dangerous fad” that people took too often and bought on the black market, where it was mixed with lethal antifreeze. Meanwhile, Pasteur’s research led to the development of antibiotics. For a long time, Pasteur’s claim that “handedness” was what separated dead cells and living cells was taken as gospel within the scientific community. Yet experiments that followed this principle often went terribly wrong, such as when a German company sold thalidomide as a cure for morning-sickness, not realizing that the “wrong-handed” form of this chemical caused drastic birth deformities.

Yet while this was taking place, an American chemist named William Knowles was experimenting with an element called rhodium and coming to realize that inanimate (dead) chemicals can be “tricked” into only making one hand. This was the origin of modern drug synthesis. In Knowles’ case, the drug rhodium produced was levo-dihydroxyphenylalanine, known as “L-dopa.” Similar to the neurotransmitter dopamine, it had revolutionary potential for treating Parkinson’s disease.