The Disappearing Spoon: Chapter 8: From Physics to Biology Summary & Analysis

In 1960, Time magazine listed 15 scientists as part of its “Men of the Year.” One of these men was Emilio Segrè, a Jewish immigrant who escaped World War II. Another was Linus Pauling, who had tried to go to Berkeley for graduate school, but—after his letter to Gilbert Lewis enquiring about admission as lost—ended up at Cal Tech instead. Meanwhile, Segrè was given a job at Berkeley, but on humiliatingly low pay. Pauling and Segrè are “two of the greatest scientists most lay people have never heard of,” who are united by making enormous, career-defining mistakes. While accidents and mistakes have often played an important role in scientific progress, “Pauling’s and Segrè’s were not those kinds of mistakes.”

People have claimed to have discovered element 43 many times; it is as elusive as the Loch Ness monster. In 1828, 1846, 1847, and 1869, people claimed that they had found it, only to be proven wrong. In 1909, a Japanese scientists once again claimed to have found it when actually he had found another new element, 75, although this wasn’t actually revealed until 2004, after his death. The same German scientists who consciously found 75 in 1925 also claimed to find 43 in 1925, but they were also wrong. In 1937, however, Emilio Segrè and another Italian, Carlo Perrier, finally made a plausible claim to have found 43.

A few years before, an American scientist named Ernest Lawrence devised an “atom smasher” that could be used to produce a large number of radioactive elements at once. He called it a cyclotron. On hearing that it was made from molybdenum, Segrè asked Lawrence to send some sample strips from one of the machines; when he did, Segrè found traces of element 43 on them. This was the first man-made element, a fact Segrè and Perrier honored by calling it technetium, from the Ancient Greek word for “artificial.” Later in life, Segrè—who became a historian of science—reflected on how he and Perrier had the chance to discover nuclear fission during this time, an opportunity which for some reason they let pass them by.

In 1940, scientists widely assumed that the elements surrounding uranium on the periodic table were transition metals, when in fact they behave more like rare earths. This misstep was due to the fact that these scientists “didn’t take periodicity seriously enough” and assumed there were more anomalies in the table than is actually the case—something that is easy to see in hindsight but was difficult at the time. After an attempt to find element 93 with a colleague, Edwin McMillan, Segrè concluded their endeavor to be unsuccessful, which he announced in a published paper. However, McMillian himself soon realized that the problem was that they had assumed the samples they’d been examining behaved like rare earths, but were actually “cousins” of this group of elements.

McMillan returned to the experiment with another colleague, leaving Segrè out. He realized that he and Segrè had misidentified the original result in what was, ironically, the exact opposite of another major mistake Segrè had made before. McMillan ended up winning the 1957 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for this work.

Linus Pauling, meanwhile, revolutionized the field of chemistry by showing how quantum mechanics determines the chemical bonds that form between atoms. This led to other major discoveries, such as the fact that sickle-cell anemia is triggered by faulty molecules, a realization that radically transformed the field of medicine. Pauling was essentially concerned with how something like protein shape was determined by the behavior of molecules that made up a protein. This meant that what he was interested in was DNA—however, he did not become aware of this fact until 1952. DNA had actually been discovered by Friedrich Miescher in 1869, but for a long time scientists misunderstood it and misjudged its significance.

Everything changed in 1952, when two geneticists realized that it was DNA, not proteins, that pass on genetic information. At this point, no one knew the shape of DNA strands or how they linked together, information that Pauling was determined to discover. He made some speculative sketches and calculations, then asked a graduate student to check his work. When the student explained the flaw in Pauling’s speculation, Pauling ignored him, seemingly too excited by the prospect of being the scientist to solve DNA. He published his model, which his son, Peter, showed to two other students in his lab at the University of Cambridge: James Watson and Francis Crick. 

Watson and Crick were shocked to find that Pauling’s idea was a recapitulation of a model they themselves had built the year before but it was discarded when a colleague, Rosalind Franklin, had proven it wrong. Watson and Crick immediately told their adviser, Nobel Prize-winning William Bragg, that Pauling had published a paper that repeated their mistakes. Bragg considered Pauling a rival and was excited by the prospect of one-upping him. Peter Pauling warned Linus that Watson and Crick were at work trying to prove his model wrong, but Linus remained foolishly confident in it. Watson and Crick, meanwhile, made a breakthrough, finally figuring out how the two strands of DNA fit together so perfectly, like “puzzle pieces.” They concluded that DNA was shaped like a double helix and in 1953 published this model in Nature.

Pauling reacted to the whole situation with “dignity,” immediately owning up to his mistake and supporting Watson and Crick’s work. Things improved for both Segrè and Pauling after 1953. As research began to be conducted on the subject of antimatter, the scientific world acknowledged that Segrè had laid the groundwork for this research to take place; as a result, he was awarded the Nobel Prize. Pauling also got an “overdue” Nobel in 1954. Following this, he began experimenting with taking vitamin supplements, forming the beginning of the entire supplement industry. Meanwhile, sticking to the same principles that led him to refuse to participate in the Manhattan Project, he became an activist against nuclear weapons. Pauling won a second Nobel in 1962—this time the Peace Prize—the same year Watson and Crick were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.