Chapter 12 Summary and Reflection

     In chapter 12, Kean starts by talking about how the elements go hand in hand with politics. Kean mentions that if you were to look for Poland on any map from the past five centuries, odds were that you wouldn't find it. Poland didn't even technically exist when Marie Sklodowska was born in 1867 or better known as Marie Curie. Marie was tutored by her father as it was frowned upon to teach women back then, and then moved as an adult to Paris to pursue her science career. After receiving her PhD, she decided to stay as she had fallen in love with and married Pierre Curie. In the 1890s, the Curie's began on their most famous collaboration to find radioactive elements. When Marie found that the secret to finding radioactive elements separated the chemistry from the physics, so all scientists had to do was look only to the elements of the periodic table. This earned Marie and Pierre Curie a shared Nobel Prize in physics in 1903. The Curie's had their daughter named Irene in 1897, and shortly after their Nobel Prize, Marie and Pierre found two new radioactive elements, polonium and radium, after boiling down pitchblende. This would have resulted in another shared Nobel Prize, but Pierre was ran over by a street carriage and killed so only Marie received the Nobel Prize since only living people can receive it.

     Kean then moves on to the daughter of Marie and Pierre Curie, Irene Joliot-Curie, and the work she did with her husband, Frederic Joliot-Curie. Irene found a method to convert tame elements into artificially radioactive elements by bombarding them with subatomic particles. This earned her a Nobel Prize in 1935. Then tragedy struck, as Irene relied on polonium for her atomic bombardier, in 1946 a capsule of polonium exploded in her lab so when Irene inhaled it, it later caused her to die of leukemia like her mother. Quantum mechanics hadn't had such a warm reception when it came out as it was described as ugly by many scientists. Even though it didn't have much support, quantum mechanics helped prove element 72, hafnium, by Bohr and Hevesy. The author also mentions the injustice done to Lise Meitner and her tremendous work done with Otto Hahn. Together, they found element 91 previously known as brevium, but it was later renamed as protactinium. This should have earned Meitner a Nobel Prize, but since she was a woman and because of World War II, she wasn't awarded one then or later after Otto Hahn received one and could have mentioned her.

     This chapter shows that even though chemistry brings people of many countries together with their discoveries, politics can separate them as well. I liked reading about the work and discoveries of Marie and Pierre Curie, especially from their daughter Irene. They really brought a tremendous needed amount of girl power to the science community. Reading about their work really fascinated me and I wish to learn more about them. I really didn't like reading about the way Lise Meitner was never awarded a Nobel Prize even though she clearly deserved it. I was really angry at Otto Hahn when he received his Nobel Prize and he never mentioned her and all of the work she did.