Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood

by Oliver Sacks

Beyond iron no energy could be released by further fusion, so this accumulated as an end point in nucleosynthesis. Hence its remarkable abundance in the universe, an abundance reflected in metallic meteorites and in the iron core of the earth.

(The heavier elements, those beyond iron, remained a puzzle for longer; they only originate, apparently, with supernova explosions.)

I no longer seemed to get these sudden illuminations, these epiphanies, those excitements which Flaubert (whom I was now reading) called “erections of the mind.”

had dreamed of becoming a chemist, but the chemistry that really stirred me was the lovingly detailed, naturalistic, descriptive chemistry of the nineteenth century, not the new chemistry of the quantum age.

Primo Levi’s wonderful book The Periodic Table,

George Gamow, a scientist-writer of great versatility and charm whose Birth and Death of the Sun

It contained a large poster of the periodic table with photographs of each element;

Gray's poster that I have?

The passion for chemistry, which I had thought dead at fourteen, has clearly survived, deep inside me, throughout the intervening years.

do not occur anywhere else in the universe,

Haven't they found one in some star?

If (as is now speculated) such bacteria were the first organisms on earth, then tungsten may have been crucial for the origin of life.