Sam Kean Quotes

#1. Radium, discovered by Marie and Pierre Curie in 1898, was especially popular: the 'it' element of its day. Radium glows an eerie blue-green in the dark, giving off light for years without any apparent power source. People had never seen anything like it.

Sam Kean

#2. In a vague way, I always knew neurosurgery was different - more delicate, more difficult, more demanding. After all, we say things like, 'I'm no brain surgeon,' for a reason.

Sam Kean

#3. One theme I ran into over and over while writing about the periodic table was the future of energy and the question of which element or elements will replace carbon as king.

Sam Kean

#4. Even fictional characters sometimes receive unwarranted medical opinions. Doctors have diagnosed Ebenezer Scrooge with OCD, Sherlock Holmes with autism, and Darth Vader with borderline personality disorder.

Sam Kean

#5. Even if we never cure a single disease, the Human Genome Project and other ventures will have been worth it.

Sam Kean

#6. Negative experiences can wire neurons together, too.

Sam Kean

#7. It's often meaningless to talk about a genetic trait without also discussing the environment in which that trait appears. Sometimes, genes don't work at all until the environment awakens them.

Sam Kean

#8. In a touch Buckland would have appreciated, this multipronged dispersal from Africa is sometimes called the Weak Garden of Eden theory. But this tale is actually better than the biblical version; we didn't lose Eden but learned to make other Edens across the world.

Sam Kean

#9. Geneticists in the early 1900s believed that nature - in an effort to avoid wasting precious space within chromosomes - would pack as many genes into each chromosome as possible.

Sam Kean

#10. Despite its obscurity, probably no element on the periodic table has as colorful a history as antimony. Money, madness, poison, linguistics, charlatanism, sex - pretty much every theme that runs through the periodic table can be found in Element 51.

Sam Kean

#11. Biologists summarize these hypothalamic duties as the "four F's" of animal behavior - feeding, fleeing, fighting, and, well, sexual congress.

Sam Kean

#12. I didn't mind staying home from school and medicating myself with vanilla ice cream and chocolate sauce. Being sick always gave me another chance to break an old-fashioned mercury thermometer, too.

Sam Kean

#13. Despite what you might guess, when monitoring your breathing, your body doesn't care whether you're inhaling enough oxygen. It cares only whether you're expelling enough carbon dioxide - that's the gas that sets off the panic button when you're suffocating.

Sam Kean

#14. Germans at the time believed, a little oddly, that dyes killed germs by turning the germs' vital organs the wrong color.

Sam Kean

#15. DNA is a 'thing' - a chemical that sticks to your fingers.

Sam Kean

#16. Microchimeric sharing means that, even if the mother loses a child, she'll have a small memento of him or her secreted away inside her. Similarly, a bit of our mothers live on in all of us no matter how long ago Mom died.

Sam Kean

#17. Guinea pigs are practically synonymous with experiments. Lab rats have become the workhorses of modern medicine. Genetics owes a huge debt to the humble fruit fly. There's almost no branch of the life sciences, in fact, that hasn't leaned heavily on one animal or another.

Sam Kean

#18. Since before even the ancient Egyptians and Babylonians, human beings used the stars and seasons to track time and record their most important moments. Cesium severed that link with the heavens, effaced it just as surely as urban streetlamps blot out constellations.

Sam Kean

#19. Except for certain moments - when cells are dividing, for instance - chromosomes don't form compact, countable bodies inside cells. Instead, they unravel and flop about, which makes counting chromosomes a bit like counting strands of ramen in a bowl.

Sam Kean

#20. Junk DNA - or, as scientists call it nowadays, noncoding DNA - remains a mystery: No one knows how much of it is essential for life.

Sam Kean

#21. The amygdala plays a crucial role in processing fear, and minus her two amygdalae, S.M. became unflappable. Studies of her are actually a hoot to read, since they basically consist of scientists concocting ever-more-elaborate ways of trying to scare her.

Sam Kean

#22. Although it's the hub of the nervous system and the ultimate terminus of every nerve, the brain itself lacks enervation and therefore cannot feel pain.

Sam Kean

#23. Every glass thermometer has subtle variations in the size and shape of the bulb at the bottom and the capillary tube inside, as well as variations in the width of gradations on the side. The compounded effect of these uncertainties is that each thermometer reads temperature slightly differently.

Sam Kean

#24. Medieval alchemists, despite their lust for gold, considered mercury the most potent and poetic substance in the universe. As a child, I would have agreed with them.

Sam Kean

#25. (In the 1920s, two Chicago chemists had to puree several thousand pounds of bull testicles from a stockyard to get a few ounces of the first pure testosterone.)

Sam Kean

#26. Scientists have continued to tinker with different elements and have learned new ways to store and deliver energy.

Sam Kean

#27. Today, just two generations on, the Monte Carlo method (in various forms) so dominates some fields that many young scientists don't realize how thoroughly they've departed from traditional theoretical or experimental science.

Sam Kean

#28. Acid strength is measured by the pH scale, with lower numbers being stronger, and in 2005 a chemist from New Zealand invented a boron-based acid called a carborane, with a pH of -18

Sam Kean

#29. After about 1940, scientists generally stopped looking for elements in nature. Instead, they had to create them by smashing smaller atoms together.

Sam Kean

#30. The brain, which is plastic when young, must be exposed to certain sights early in life, or it will remain blind to those sights forever.

Sam Kean

#31. B2FH traces these various fusion reactions and explains the recipe for producing everything up to iron: it's nothing less than evolution for elements.

Sam Kean

#32. Scientists didn't discover the noble gas helium - the second most common element in the universe - on Earth until 1895. And they thought it existed in minute quantities only, until miners found a huge underground cache in Kansas in 1903.

Sam Kean

#33. Genes work with probabilities; they don't work with certainties. So most things that you're looking at with these genetic tests, it's not like you're condemned to automatically get the disease or the syndrome. There's a lot of factors in play there.

Sam Kean

#34. Everywhere in the universe, the periodic table has the same basic structure. Even if an alien civilization's table weren't plotted out in the castle-with-turrets shape we humans favor, their spiral or pyramidal or whatever-shaped periodic table would naturally pause after 118 elements.

Sam Kean

#35. The inability to trace DNA to actual diseases has serious consequences. As does the opposite problem - not being able to trace diseases back to DNA.

Sam Kean

#36. Most stars just fuse hydrogen into helium, but larger stars can fuse helium into other elements. Still larger stars, in turn, fuse those elements into slightly bigger ones, and so on.

Sam Kean

#37. Your body thinks radium is a great thing to pack into bone - where it kills some cells outright and scrambles the DNA of others, causing problems like cancer.

Sam Kean

#38. If certain bacteria, fungi, or algae inch across something made of copper, they absorb copper atoms, which disrupt their metabolism (human cells are unaffected). The microbes choke and die after a few hours.

Sam Kean

#39. Most people who have encountered mercury have done so after breaking a mercury thermometer. And many of us who saw the liquid balls of mercury scatter across a floor or countertop considered the element the most beautiful on the periodic table.

Sam Kean

#40. If anything runs deeper than a mathematician's love of variables, it's a scientist's love of constants.

Sam Kean

#41. Boron is carbon's neighbor on the periodic table, which means it can do a passable carbon impression and wriggle its way into the matrix of a diamond. But it has one fewer electron, so it can't quite form the same four perfect bonds.

Sam Kean

#42. Ancestor. In fact, this clock tells us that all seven billion people alive today can trace their maternal lineage to one woman who lived in Africa 170,000 years ago, dubbed Mitochondrial Eve.

Sam Kean

#43. Because our lungs regularly deal with carbon dioxide, they see nothing wrong with absorbing its cousin, SiO2, which can be fatal. Many dinosaurs might have died this way when a metropolis-sized asteroid or comet struck the earth 65 million years ago.

Sam Kean

#44. The amygdala is indeed crucial for monitoring our environment and deciding what's worth getting worked up over. Once the amygdala determines this, however, it merely trips another circuit to actually produce the panic.

Sam Kean

#45. I think it's a natural human tendency, when you read something, you tend to read a lot of your prejudices into it. And neuroscience is like a lot of disciplines - it has fashions; things change.

Sam Kean

#46. The noble gases, which reside on the East Coast of the periodic table, are its aristocrats - detached and aloof, never bothering to interact with the rabble of common elements that make up the vast majority of the world.

Sam Kean

#47. Among physicists and chemists, cold fusion - nuclear fusion at close to room temperature - enjoys a reputation about on par with creationism.

Sam Kean

#48. So while Pauling struggled with his model, Watson and Crick turned theirs inside out, so the negative phosphorus ions wouldn't touch. This gave them a sort of twisted ladder - the famed double helix.

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#49. The humped bladderwort has yellow, snapdragon-like flowers, and it's actually carnivorous, capable of trapping and eating not just insects but even tadpoles and tiny fish.

Sam Kean

#50. As a child in the early 1980s, I tended to talk with things in my mouth - food, dentist's tubes, balloons that would fly away, whatever - and if no one else was around, I'd talk anyway.

Sam Kean

#51. No one knows quite the reason, but surgically severing the corpus callosum can reduce the rate and intensity of seizures. So in the early 1960s, a few patients with severe epilepsy had their corpus callosums cut, turning them into split-brain people.

Sam Kean

#52. All human beings are, in fact, born with dozens of mutations their parents lacked, and a few of those mutations could well be lethal if we didn't have two copies of every gene, so one can pick up the slack if the other malfunctions.

Sam Kean

#53. Atoms consist of a positive nucleus and negative electrons flying around outside it. Electrons closest to the nucleus feel a strong negative-on-positive tug, and the bigger atoms get, the bigger the tug. In really big atoms, electrons whip around at speeds close to the speed of light.

Sam Kean

#54. Mendeleev, unlike the squeamish Meyer, had balls enough to predict that new elements would be dug up. Look harder, you chemists and geologists, he seemed to taunt, and you'll find them.

Sam Kean

#55. Many different elements can form isomers, but only a few elements on the periodic table, like hafnium, can form isomers that last more than fractions of a second - and might therefore be turned into weapons.

Sam Kean

#56. The more that I looked at DNA, the more I realized it was nature and nurture. It's how genes and your environment work together to produce the person you are.

Sam Kean

#57. Aluminium's sixty-year reign as the world's most precious substance was glorious, but soon an American chemist ruined everything.

Sam Kean

#58. We really should be grateful to the people who participate in research and allow certain details to be published about themselves. Because if they didn't, we wouldn't have nearly the understanding of the brain that we do.

Sam Kean

#59. While our amplified knowledge of genetics - and the increasing precision of the field - does make it tempting to take on celebrity cases, retro-genetics can't always provide clear answers.

Sam Kean

#60. Our evolution could have gone in different directions a lot of times. We could have gone extinct at some points. We might not have gotten our big brains, or Neanderthals might have made it while we did not.

Sam Kean

#61. Most people, even most doctors, learn that the placenta is a nice, tight seal that prevents anything in the mother's body from invading the fetus, and vice-versa. That's mostly true. But the placenta doesn't seal off the baby perfectly, and every so often, something slips across.

Sam Kean

#62. Scarily, cadmium is not even the worst poison among the elements. It sits above mercury, a neurotoxin. And to the right of mercury sit the most horrific mug shots on the periodic table - thallium, lead, and polonium - the nucleus of poisoner's corridor.

Sam Kean

#63. Before the Human Genome Project, most scientists assumed, based on our complex brains and behaviors, that humans must have around 100,000 genes; some estimates went as high as 150,000.

Sam Kean

#64. I'm kind of a sucker for the retro-diagnoses.

Sam Kean

#65. What I find fascinating is the idea that we all have a physical brain, but we also have this mental part, and we have to figure out how they work together.

Sam Kean

#66. Thirteen aluminum atoms grouped together in the right way do a killer bromine, the two entities indistinguishable in chemical reactions.

Sam Kean

#67. The amygdala is one of those brain structures that a lot of people know a little bit about, and there's a definite tendency to conflate the amygdala and the fear response itself - as if the amygdala, and the amygdala alone, 'causes' fear.

Sam Kean

#68. Entrepreneurs in the United States and Europe finally figured out how to separate aluminum from minerals cheaply and also how to produce it on an industrial scale.

Sam Kean

#69. Animal vision - including human vision - is so biased toward movement that we don't technically see stationary objects at all.

Sam Kean

#70. A fully plastic brain learns everything and remembers nothing.

Sam Kean

#71. For a long time, I kept an eye out for element eighty at school and in books, as you might watch for a childhood friend's name

Sam Kean

#72. America was probably Europe's equal scientifically by the end of World War I and certainly surpassed it after the chaos of World War II.

Sam Kean

#73. The body tends to treat elements in the same column of the periodic table as equivalents.

Sam Kean

#74. People adored Element 13's color and luster, which reminded them of the sparkle of gold and silver - a brand-new precious metal. In fact, aluminum became more precious than gold and silver in the 19th century because it was harder to obtain.

Sam Kean

#75. I was reading this story about these people who suffered from brain injuries, and then their behavior changed kind of drastically afterward, and I just said to myself, 'There's no way that that can possibly be true.'

Sam Kean

#76. The most profound change that genetics brings about might not be scientific at all. It might be mental and even spiritual enrichment: a more expansive sense of who we humans are, existentially, and where we came from, and how we fit with other life on earth.

Sam Kean

#77. (Rutherford himself was fond of saying, "In science, there is only physics; all the rest is stamp collecting" - words

Sam Kean

#78. We human beings are humane in part because we can look beyond our biology.

Sam Kean

#79. Yet they enjoy the high. In the surest sign that selenium actually makes them go mad, cattle grow addicted to locoweed despite its awful side effects and eat it to the exclusion of anything else. It's animal meth.

Sam Kean

#80. For more details about the Curies especially, see Sheilla Jones's wonderful book The Quantum Ten, an account of the surprisingly contentious and fractious early days of quantum mechanics, circa 1925.

Sam Kean

#81. If stem cells divide equally, so both daughter cells look more or less the same, each one becomes another stem cell. If the split is unequal, neurons form prematurely.

Sam Kean

#82. Whereas recessive traits require two bad copies of a gene to become noticeable, a dominant trait expresses itself no matter what the other copy does. A benign example of dominance: If you inherit one gene for sticky wet earwax and one gene for dry earwax, the sticky earwax gene wins out every time.

Sam Kean

#83. One popular trick, since gallium molds easily and looks like aluminum, is to fashion gallium spoons, serve them with tea, and watch as your guests recoil when their Earl Grey "eats" their utensils.

Sam Kean

#84. The mutated Marfan gene creates a defective version of fibrillin, a protein that provides structural support for soft tissues like blood vessels. Marfan victims often die young, in fact, after their aortas grow threadbare and rupture.

Sam Kean

#85. Despite the disreputable company it keeps, bismuth is harmless. In fact, it's medicinal: Doctors prescribe it to soothe ulcers, and it's the 'bis' in hot-pink Pepto-Bismol. Overall, it seems like the most out-of-place element on the periodic table, a gentleman among scoundrels.

Sam Kean

#86. If studying the periodic table taught me nothing else, it's that the credulity of human beings for periodic table panaceas is pretty much boundless.

Sam Kean

#87. Cancer is really a DNA disease ... We have these certain genes that prevent our cells from growing out of control at the expense of the body. And it's a pretty good, robust system. But if a couple of these genes fail, then that's when cancer starts, and cells start growing out of control.

Sam Kean

#88. Brain surgery couldn't happen without the patient's own active voice to guide the work. The patient is part of the surgical team here, perhaps the most important part, and above all, that's what makes neurosurgery different.

Sam Kean

#89. Mutations can arise anywhere in the genome, in gene DNA and noncoding DNA alike. But mutations to genes have bigger consequences: They can disable proteins and kill a creature.

Sam Kean

#90. Genes are like the story, and DNA is the language that the story is written in.

Sam Kean

#91. We know that genes shape human cultures and human societies: The DNA we inherited from our ancestors makes certain foods taste better, affects the way we care for children, influences what colors we find vibrant, and contributes to our love of socializing, among other examples.

Sam Kean

#92. When it comes to the periodic table, the United States really blew its chance to make a name for itself. If you look over a map of all the elements named for cities, states, countries, and continents, it's not surprising that European locales dominate the map.

Sam Kean

#93. Never underestimate spite as a motivator for genius.

Sam Kean

#94. Hat manufacturers once used a bright orange mercury wash to separate fur from pelts, and the common hatters who dredged around in the steamy vats, like the mad one in Alice in Wonderland, gradually lost their hair and wits.

Sam Kean

#95. You're not supposed to interject feelings into science, but part of the reason it's so fascinating that we're 8 percent (or more) fossilized virus is that it's so creepy that we're 8 percent (or more) fossilized virus.

Sam Kean

#96. The price of diamonds can vary greatly depending on size, cut, color, and other factors, including whether they have a history. But because of the rarity of blue boron diamonds, they often fetch more money than gems of similar quality.

Sam Kean

#97. In 'The Violinist's Thumb,' I talk about the poignancy of cells leaking across the placenta into both the mother and the child.

Sam Kean

#98. Lithium makes a fine battery because it's a scarily reactive metal. Pure lithium ignites on contact if it touches water - a flake of it would sizzle and fry on the water-rich cells of your skin.

Sam Kean

#99. X-rays revealed that some people were born without a corpus callosum, and they seemed just fine.

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#100. Some scientists claim - although these claims are contentious - that they can form deadly isomers with simple X-rays and that hafnium can multiply the power of these X-rays to an astounding degree, converting them into gamma rays up to 250 times more potent than the X-rays.

Sam Kean