While Kean generally writes with a tone of admiration and wonder for the periodic table, he is also clear about the fact that the elements have been put to both good and evil uses. Indeed Kean provides many examples of negative and destructive uses of science alongside positive ones. These include poisoning (both deliberate and accidental), chemical weapons, and the unimaginable devastation caused by nuclear bombs. Yet, at the same time, Kean shows all the positive and progressive uses to which the elements have been put. These include a host of advances in medical technology, chemical fertilizer which has mitigated the problem of hunger, and the use of cold fusion as a renewable, nonharmful source of energy. Ultimately, the extremes of good and evil uses to which the chemical elements have been put shows that the elements themselves cannot be considered to have any kind of inherent moral value, good or bad. Instead, they are simply tools that can be put to either good or evil uses.
In many ways, The Disappearing Spoon is a testament to the positive, productive ends to which the elements can be put. For example, Kean cites the example of the “gentleman astrologer” Tycho Brahe, whose nose was cut off in a duel in 1564. Brahe ordered “a replacement nose of silver,” which archaeologists later found out was actually made of copper when they found Brahe’s remains. Both elements (copper and silver) are antiseptic and thus they play an important role in medicine. Indeed, Kean links the story of Brahe’s prosthetic nose to a story much later in history, in 1976, when mysterious bacteria entered the air vents of a hotel in Philadelphia, making hundreds of the guests sick and killing 34 of them. (The sickness was later called Legionnaire’s Disease.) As a result of this disaster, copper started being used in air and water systems due to its antiseptic powers, which prevented similar tragedies from occurring again. This is far from the only example of the elements’ potential to mitigate harm and improve human life. Kean also points to the use of lithium as treatment for bipolar disorder, as well as Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann’s discovery of cold fusion, which can be used to create energy without generating harmful emissions. These examples suggest that there are myriad ways in which the elements can be used to the good of humanity. The more research is conducted on the elements and the more that is understood about them, the more likely it is for the elements to be put to productive, positive uses.
However, Kean also cites many examples of the elements’ harmful uses, which generally result from a lack of knowledge about the way the elements work. Robert Bunsen’s blindness and Irene Joliot-Curie’s leukemia, for example, were both caused by unexpected explosions that might have been avoided with greater knowledge of the elements with which these scientists were experimenting. Similarly, the itai-itai disease that struck Japan for centuries was caused by cadmium released into water by zinc mining. As Kean points out, it took 12 centuries for people to understand that cadmium was the cause of this disease and that it was produced by the zinc mining process. Finally, Kean also gives the example of two disasters that took place at NASA due to uncertainty about the behavior of gases inside a spacecraft that was still on Earth. In the first disaster in 1961, three technicians were burned alive, while in the second, 20 years later, two died of nitrogen poisoning. In both cases, it wasn’t until the disaster had already happened that scientists came to understand why they happened. Of course, for the unfortunate technicians who lost their lives, this knowledge came too late. These examples demonstrate how the periodic elements, like many other scientific discoveries, often cause accidental harm due to human error or ignorance.
Sadly, however, the destructive power of the elements is sometimes unleashed intentionally: Kean provides additional examples of how the elements have also been deliberately put to violent use throughout human history. Examples of this include the development of chemical weapons, the development of the atomic bomb, and the stories of people such as Graham Young, a British a British man who killed several people by poisoning them with thallium. Kean repeatedly invokes the figure of Faust, a German folkloric figure who sold his soul to the devil in exchange for unlimited knowledge and power, in order to represent the destructive power of science, particularly in relation to the problem of hubris (excessive pride in one’s own powers). For example, in telling the story of the scientist Fritz Haber—who passionately dedicated himself to developing chemical weapons used to horrific effect in World Wars I and II—Kean characterize Haber as one of the “petty Fausts who twist scientific innovations into efficient killing devices.” The book makes clear that while such “Fausts” are relatively few and far between in scientific history, they pose a very real and dangerous threat. In their hands, the elements—which can be used for good—become dangerous tools of destruction.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Science for Good vs. for Evil ThemeTracker
Science for Good vs. for Evil Quotes in The Disappearing Spoon
The periodic table is, finally, an anthropological marvel, a human artifact that reflects all of the wonderful and artful and ugly aspects of human beings and how we interact with the physical world—the history of our species written in a compact and elegant script.
With cheap industrial fertilizers now available, farmers no longer were limited to compost piles or dung to nourish their soil. Even by the time World War I broke out, Haber had likely saved millions from Malthusian starvation, and we can still thank him for feeding most of the world’s 6.7 billion people today.
What’s lost in that summary is that Haber cared little about fertilizers, despite what he sometimes said to the contrary. He actually pursued cheap ammonia to help Germany build nitrogen explosives […] It’s a sad truth that men like Haber pop up frequently throughout history—petty Fausts who twist scientific innovations into efficient killing devices.
In 1919, before the dust (or gas) of World War I had settled, Haber won the vacant 1918 Nobel Prize in chemistry (the Nobels were suspended during the war) for his process to produce ammonia from nitrogen, even though his fertilizers hadn’t protected thousands of Germans from famine during the war. A year later, he was charged with being an international war criminal for prosecuting a campaign of chemical warfare that had maimed hundreds of thousands of people and terrorized millions more—a contradictory, almost self-canceling legacy.
But notice the dates here. Just as the basic understanding of electrons, protons, and neutrons fell into place, the old-world political order was disintegrating. By the time Alvarez read about uranium fission in his barber’s smock, Europe was doomed.
Obscure elements do obscure things inside the body—often bad, but sometimes good. An element toxic in one circumstance can become a lifesaving drug in another, and elements that get metabolized in unexpected ways can provide new diagnostic tools in doctor’s clinics.
The human mind and brain are the most complex structures known to exist. They burden humans with strong, complicated, and often contradictory desires, and even something as austere and scientifically pure as the periodic table reflects those desires. Fallible human beings constructed the periodic table, after all […] The periodic table embodies our frustrations and failures in every human field: economics, psychology, the arts, and—as the legacy of Gandhi and the trials of iodine prove—politics. No less than a scientific, there’s a social history of the elements.
Like any human activity, science has always been filled with politics—with backbiting, jealousy, and petty gambits. Any look at the politics of science wouldn’t be complete without examples of those. But the twentieth century provides the best (i.e., the most appalling) historical examples of how the sweep of empires can also warp science. Politics marred the careers of probably the two greatest women scientists ever, and even purely scientific efforts to rework the periodic table opened rifts between chemists and physicists.
The committee could have rectified this in 1946 or later, of course, after the historical record made Meitner’s contributions clear. Even architects of the Manhattan Project admitted how much they owed her. But the Nobel committee, famous for that Time magazine once called its “old-maid peevishness,” is not prone to admit mistakes.
At his death in 1914, he owned Alcoa shares worth $30 million (around $650 million today). And thanks to Hall, aluminium became the utterly blasé metal we all know, the basis for pop cans and pinging Little League bats and airplane bodies. (A little anachronistically, it still sits atop the Washington Monument, too.) I suppose it depends on your taste and temperament whether you think aluminium was better of as the world’s most precious or most productive metal.
As science grew more sophisticated throughout its history, it grew correspondingly expensive, and money, big money, began to dictate if, when, and how science got done.
