🧪The Greats

When Paul-Émile Lecoq de Boisbaudran discovered gallium in 1875, he measured its density as 4.7 — but Mendeleev's published prediction for the missing element demanded roughly 5.9, and the Russian wrote to say the Frenchman was measuring an impure sample of Mendeleev's element. Boisbaudran purified his gallium, remeasured, and got 5.9: the theorist had corrected the discoverer about a metal the theorist had never seen.

To prove radium existed, Curie spent 1898 to 1902 processing tonnes of pitchblende residue in a leaky shed at a Paris industrial school, stirring boiling ore with an iron rod nearly her own height, to isolate about a decigram of radium chloride. Wilhelm Ostwald, visiting, called the shed a cross between a stable and a potato cellar. Her notebooks from those years are still radioactive; the Bibliothèque nationale stores them in lead and asks readers to sign a waiver.

The corpus under Jabir's name grew so vast — some three thousand titles by traditional count — that scholars long doubted one lifetime could hold it. The philologist Paul Kraus showed in 1943 that the writings span generations and were likely produced by a school writing under the master's name, while a later Latin author, "pseudo-Geber," borrowed the brand for Europe's most important medieval chemistry textbook. The most influential chemist of the Middle Ages may be a thousand-year-old collective pen name.

At the 1890 "Benzolfest" in Berlin celebrating 25 years of the benzene ring, Kekulé told the story everyone now knows: dozing before a fire, he dreamed of atoms forming snakes, until one seized its own tail — and he awoke to the ring. Historians still argue whether the dream happened in Ghent in 1865 or was invented as after-dinner theater 25 years later; either way, the structure it decorates has never needed revision.

In 1934 Robert Robinson handed Hodgkin a few milligrams of crystalline insulin, and she photographed its diffraction pattern within the year — then spent the next three and a half decades building, method by method and computer by computer, the tools the problem demanded. Her group finally solved insulin's structure in 1969, thirty-four years after that first photograph. She then spent years touring the world's labs, sharing the structure with diabetes researchers.

In 1935 Julian, an underfunded instructor at DePauw, was completing physostigmine's synthesis just as Oxford's Robert Robinson — the most powerful organic chemist alive — published his own route. Julian declared in print that Robinson's intermediate was wrong, staking his career on the melting point of the final compounds: his matched the natural alkaloid, Robinson's did not. DePauw still would not give him a faculty post, so he took his chemistry to industry — and later, when his Chicago-area home was firebombed, his neighbors stood guard.

After hundreds of herbal extracts failed, Tu re-read the fourth-century physician Ge Hong's Emergency Formulas Kept Up One's Sleeve, which said to soak qinghao in cold water and wring out the juice — no boiling. Suspecting heat destroyed the active compound, she switched to low-temperature ether extraction; on 4 October 1971, extract number 191 inhibited malaria parasites in mice completely. To move quickly to patients, Tu and two colleagues volunteered as the first human subjects in 1972.