Jump to Introduction + Chronology
Jump back to Previous: The Periodic Table - chapter 15
April 5, 2015
p175 . . . and finally there came the customer we’d always dreamed of, who wanted us as consultants. To be a consultant is the ideal work, the sort from which you derive prestige and money without dirtying your hands, or breaking your backbone, or running the risk of ending up roasted or poisoned: all you have to do is take off your smock, put on your tie, listen in attentive silence to the problem, and then you’ll feel like the Delphic oracle. You must then weigh your reply very carefully and formulate it in convoluted, vague language so that the customer also considers you an oracle, worthy of his faith and the rates set by the Chemists’ Society.
...
[The customer is a manufacturer of lipstick with a product that is not as good as the competition and he wants to know why. Levi determines the problem is that his man is using soluble dye while the better lipstick contains a red pigment, which he is even able to identify. The client is pleased and asks if he can provide him with a few kilos of alloxan for which he would pay a good price. Levi agrees to try.]
p179 ...I hastened to refresh my memory as to the composition and structure of alloxan. Here is its portrait:
in which O is oxygen, C is carbon, H hydrogen, and N nitrogen. It is a pretty structure, isn’t it? It makes you think of something solid, stable, well linked. In fact it happens also in chemistry as in architecture that “beautiful” edifices, that is, symmetrical and simple, are also the most sturdy: in short, the same thing happens with molecules as with the cupolas of cathedrals or the arches of bridges. And it is also possible that the explanation is neither remote nor metaphysical: to say “beautiful” is to say “desirable,” and ever since man has built he has wanted to build at the smallest expense and in the most durable fashion, and the aesthetic enjoyment he experiences when contemplating his work comes afterward. Certainly, it has not always been this way: there have been centuries in which “beauty” was identified with adornment, the superimposed, the frills; but it is probable that they were deviant epochs and that the true beauty, in which every century recognizes itself, is found in upright stones, ships’ hulls, the blade of an ax, the wing of a plane.
I can think of many examples to support Levi’s position here, and as a fan of both the Bauhaus movement and Mid-century Modernism in general, I am largely sympathetic, but there are also notable exceptions. There are structural trusses that are quite counter-intuitive. The work of Santiago Calatrava is largely contrary to Levi’s assessment:
...and Zaha Hadid is either not much better or much worse:
The beauty of (especially the inside of) The Papal Basilica of St. Paul in Rome or of the mosques of Isfahan or in Antonio Gaudi’s more famous buildings, certainly deviate from this conception of beauty.
I’m not trying to pick nits, but to make the point that there are competing styles of beauty and often complexity (like a finely crafted pocket watch, flowers, nautilus shells) and asymmetry have as good a claim to “true beauty”.
...
p180 ...Alloxan was known for almost seventy years, but as a laboratory curiosity... The sole accessible preparation was the oldest: it did not seem too difficult to execute, and consisted in an oxidizing demolition of uric acid. Just that: uric acid, the stuff connected with gout, intemperate eaters, and stones in the bladder. It was a decidedly unusual raw material, but perhaps not as prohibitively expensive as the others.
In fact... uric acid, very scarce in the excreta of man and mammals, constitutes, however, 50 percent of the excrement of birds and 90 percent of the excrement of reptiles... The fact that alloxan, destined to embellish ladies’ lips, would come from the excrement of chickens or pythons was a thought which didn’t trouble me for a moment. The trade of chemist (fortified, in my case, by the experience of Auschwitz) teaches you to overcome, indeed to ignore, certain revulsions that are neither necessary or congenial: matter is matter, neither noble nor vile, infinitely transformable, and its proximate origin is of no importance whatsoever. Nitrogen is nitrogen, it passes miraculously from air into plants, from these into animals, and from animals to us; when its function in our body is exhausted, we eliminate it, but it still remains nitrogen, aseptic, innocent. We -- I mean to say we mammals -- who in general do not have problems about obtaining water, have learned to wedge it into the urea molecule, which is soluble in water, and as urea we free ourselves of it; other animals, for whom water is precious (or it was for their distant progenitors), have made the ingenious invention of packaging their nitrogen in the form of uric acid, which is insoluble in water, and of eliminating it as a solid, with no necessity of having recourse to water as a vehicle. In an analogous fashion one thinks today of eliminating urban garbage by pressing it into blocks, which can be carried to the dumps and buried inexpensively.
So do birds and reptiles contain less water than we do? Especially for birds, reducing the weight of water in the body would be valuable.
It is interesting, and novel to me, to think about our taking in atoms and then expelling them all unchanged. At most, some electrons may get shifted around or they will be de-bonded from one molecule and possibly re-bonded with another. Unless we take in something radioactive, and it releases some radiation while inside us, or some atom inside us is struck by a cosmic ray or something similar, every atom departs just as it arrived. So what is it that powers us? What is our source of energy? Presumably it has to do with those electrons shifting from place to place... that’s a neat trick. Since plants operate by collecting photons, building carbon based structures literally a quantum at a time, and we (if I have this right) run on the energy released by shifting electrons about, also a quantum at a time, resulting in the return of carbon dioxide to the air from which plants extracted it: we, both plants and animals, would seem to be quantum engines if you wish to look at it in this way.
p181 I will go further: far from scandalizing me, the idea of obtaining a cosmetic from excrement, that is, aurum de stercore (“gold from dung”), amused me and warmed my heart like a return to the origins, when alchemists extracted phosphorus from urine. It was an adventure both unprecedented and gay and noble besides, because it ennobled, restored, and reestablished. That is what nature does: it draws the fern’s grace from the putrefaction of the forest floor, the pasturage from manure, in Latin laetamen -- and does not laetari mean “to rejoice”? That’s what they taught us in liceo, that’s how it had been for Virgil, and that’s what it became for me.
Levi learns what he should have know from his experience in the camps, that everything that has value is part of a market, just as there are no loose ends in a healthy ecosystem. First the local chicken shit,
p182 ...the pollina -- that’s what the country people call it, which we didn’t know, nor did we know that, because of its nitrogen content, it is highly valued as a fertilizer for truck gardens -- the chicken shit is not given away free, indeed it is sold at a high price...
...
[...then the reptile shit,]
The director and the various workers attached to the exhibition [of snakes] received me with stupefied scorn... Who did I think I was showing up just like that, as if it were the most natural thing, asking for python shit? ... Their scanty shit is worth its weight in gold; besides, they -- and all exhibitors and owners of snakes -- have permanent and exclusive contracts with big pharmaceutical companies...
Nitrogen (N 7)
“On Earth, the element forms about 78% of Earth's atmosphere and as such is the most abundant pure element...
Many industrially important compounds, such as ammonia, nitric acid, organic nitrates (propellants and explosives), and cyanides, contain nitrogen. The extremely strong triple bond in elemental nitrogen (N≡N) dominates nitrogen chemistry, causing difficulty for both organisms and industry in converting the N2 into useful compounds, but at the same time causing release of large amounts of often useful energy when the compounds burn, explode, or decay back into nitrogen gas. Synthetically-produced ammonia and nitrates are key industrial fertilizers and fertilizer nitrates are key pollutants in causing the eutrophication of water systems.
Outside the major uses of nitrogen compounds as fertilizers and energy-stores, nitrogen is a constituent of organic compounds as diverse as Kevlar fabric and cyanoacrylate "super" glue. Nitrogen is a constituent of molecules in every major pharmacological drug class, including antibiotics. Many drugs are mimics or prodrugs of natural nitrogen-containing signal molecules: for example, the organic nitrates nitroglycerin and nitroprusside control blood pressure by being metabolized to natural nitric oxide. Plant alkaloids (often defense chemicals) contain nitrogen by definition, and thus many notable nitrogen-containing drugs, such as caffeine and morphine are either alkaloids or synthetic mimics that act (as many plant alkaloids do) upon receptors of animal neurotransmitters (for example, synthetic amphetamines).
Nitrogen occurs in all organisms, primarily in amino acids (and thus proteins) and also in the nucleic acids (DNA and RNA). The human body contains about 3% by mass of nitrogen, the fourth most abundant element in the body after oxygen, carbon, and hydrogen.”
...
“Nitrogen is formally considered to have been discovered by Scottish physician Daniel Rutherford in 1772, who called it noxious air.[3][4] Though he did not recognize it as an entirely different chemical substance, he clearly distinguished it from "fixed air".[5] The fact that there was a component of air that does not support combustion was clear to Rutherford. Nitrogen was also studied at about the same time by Carl Wilhelm Scheele, Henry Cavendish, and Joseph Priestley, who referred to it as burnt air or phlogisticated air. Nitrogen gas was inert enough that Antoine Lavoisier referred to it as "mephitic air" or azote, from the Greek word ἄζωτος azotos, "lifeless".[6] In it, animals died and flames were extinguished. This "mephitic air" consisted mostly of N2, but might also have included more than 1% argon.”
...
“For a long time sources of nitrogen compounds were limited. Natural sources originated either from biology or deposits of nitrates produced by atmospheric reactions. Nitrogen fixation by industrial processes like the Frank–Caro process (1895–1899) and Haber–Bosch process (1908–1913) eased this shortage of nitrogen compounds, to the extent that half of global food production (see applications) now relies on synthetic nitrogen fertilizers.[9] At the same time, use of the Ostwald process (1902) to produce nitrates from industrial nitrogen fixation allowed the large-scale industrial production of nitrates which fueled explosives in the World Wars of the 20th century.” -Wiki
No comments:
Post a Comment