Iron, Rust, and Steel

I looked at the blue pill in the palm of my hand. A rectangle with rounded edges.  And for reasons both due somnolence and seemingly Kafkaesque, I challenged myself to enumerate the elements in the pill: iron, zinc, copper, manganese, chromium, molybdenum…

This exercise cleared my mind and I started to laugh: I had the aftermath of a supernova in my hand!  I swallowed the blue pill with hot coffee and sat by the window to remember my beloved chemistry professor.

… He was a Greek chemist, a prominent man in the field of organic chemistry. Looking at him, one would have thought of a basketball coach, or an uncle who brings pistachio nuts from Syria. But when he entered the auditorium, he was the story teller, the man who taught chemistry without chemistry, and who found in atoms many of the precursors to our behaviors.

“We have supernovae in our veins and stardust in our muscle” he once said. And proceeded to tell a story about how the explosion of supernovae created the original elements of the Periodic Table.

“Hydrogen to helium to lithium—we would have stayed at that level and not exist” he almost whispered philosophically. “But stars exploded, made more elements for us, they combined, heavy ones, lighter ones. Then in the deep of oceans, they played matching games till a bacterium was formed. And that bacterium exhaled oxygen. And one day that oxygen saturated the oceans, and was exhaled into the atmosphere. Billions of years later we had enough oxygen to start life!”

And he looked at us, chemistry, biology, and medicine students, then hung his head down and threw his arms in the air.

“What do we get after 5 billion years of work? YOU! Lazy students who do not care about chemistry! Your DNA is the supreme helix where hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen record the history of humanity; and you have more bacteria in your intestines than the entire population of humans on our planet. And yet, I have not seen any one of you excited during our lab experiments. It is sad to have wasted the energy of the Big Bang, supernovae, stars and anaerobic bacteria on you!”

But, when the session was over, he left the room saying “Well, oxygen makes rust out of iron, and perhaps this course will help you appreciate that we can also make steel out of iron. And build statues, buildings and cars. Maybe one day you will recognise how chemistry makes us leaders, innovators, followers and changes our mood.”

… It was still dark outside, sunrise was an hour away. In my mind I traced the path of the multivitamin pill I had just taken. Parts of it will soon get dissolved interacting with my gastric medium. Some elements will be released and absorbed to enter my blood stream. The other part of the pill will patiently wait till it is time to reach my intestinal flora. There it will find another medium, less acidic to surrender its other elements. In a few hours I will have an entire supernova flowing in me!

“I will keep an eye on the heavy elements from the stardust, though” I cautiously promised myself. "These will sink to the deeps of my inner core and affect the compass of my days."

September 17, 2013

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2013