The Disappearing Spoon: Chapter 2: New Twins and Black Sheep: The Genealogy of Elements Summary & Analysis

The longest word to ever appear in an English-language document is from a 1964 reference book called Chemical Abstracts. It is 1,185 letters long and describes a protein on the tobacco mosaic virus, which was the first virus ever discovered. The word for the protein is so long because each part of it describes a part of the protein. Proteins are made up of strings of amino acids which are themselves made from the most “versatile” element, carbon. The reason why amino acids chain together is due to the fact that they are made up of carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen. A carbon atom will share its electrons with up to four other atoms, making stable bonds. Nitrogen similarly shares electrons, and bonding between nitrogen and carbon takes place in an amino acid.

Scientists eventually became able to identify extremely long sequences of amino acids, such that the practice of naming proteins after the amino acids they contain had to be abandoned. Reading the periodic table vertically, one can see that carbon is more similar to the element below it, silicon, than the elements next to it. Whereas all the lifeforms known to humans are carbon-based, science-fiction creators have dreamed that there may be silicon-based life somewhere in the universe. There are, however, important differences between carbon and silicon: for example, while human lungs successfully process carbon dioxide, inhaling silicon dioxide (from which sand and glass are primarily comprised) is dangerous for human health. 

Some argue that silicon-based life is plausible because some earth animals, such as sea urchins, have silicon in their bodies. However, in order for silicon-based life to exist, these alien life-forms would have to be able to draw silicon in and out of their bodies in the same way carbon-based life-forms do with carbon. Yet while carbon dioxide exists as a gas at Earth temperatures, allowing life-forms to breathe it in, silicon dioxide doesn’t become a gas until 4,000ºF. Anywhere one might expect life to exist, it would be a solid. Silicon-based life thus wouldn’t be able to breathe. Furthermore, such life-forms would have no use for blood, and silicon doesn’t dissolve in water. 

Overall, no one can definitively rule out the existence of silicon-based life, but based on the available information it seems highly unlikely. Yet that doesn’t mean silicon is unimportant. The column that contains silicon and carbon also contains germanium, tin, and lead. Germanium is the “black sheep” of this group. After failed attempts to build a silicon amplifier, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain built a germanium amplifier in 1947, which they called the “transistor.” William Shockley, an electrical engineer and physicist who’d attempted to build the silicon amplifier, tried to “steal credit” for their work. (Later in life, he went on to become a eugenicist.)

Shockley managed to convince people that he did indeed play a key role in the development of the germanium amplifier. However, as electrical technology developed, engineers began to wonder if silicon would actually be a better element to use in making transistors after all. Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley all won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1956. Yet the transistor industry was at the time in need of major change. Jack Kilby, an electrical engineer from Kansas, was hired by Texas Instruments in 1958. There, the computer hardware required an enormous number of cheap and dysfunctional silicon transistors. While the other employees were on vacation, Kilby experimented with building his own invention: an integrated circuit.

Unlike with the use of multiple silicon transistors, the integrated circuit didn’t have to be soldered (and re-soldered) together. Kilby never received proper credit for his invention, which instead went to “one of Shockley’s proteges.” Yet over time his achievement gradually became acknowledged and in 2000 he finally won the Nobel. However, although the first integrated circuit was made from germanium, engineers soon switched to silicon due to its cheapness and abundance. Like many elements, germanium was left “anonymous.” Only a few have reached silicon’s level of fame.