Summary:
In this chapter Sam Kean discusses all the poisonous elements, "prisoner's corridor". Kean starts off by talking about how cadmium is one of the lightest elements in the "prisoner's corridor". Cadmium made the mines that the Japanese mined infamous and was the cause of the word "itai-itai!", known in Japan for suffering. The Japanese used it to help create armor for their soldiers and dumped what was left into the stream, poisoning rice plants and eventually people. It was a long time before they began to study the effects of cadmium poisoning. Cadmium is not even one of the scariest elements says kean before continuing on.
Thallium is known as one of the deadliest of all the elements. "The poisoner's poison" is how Kean describes it. A serial in the 1960's used this element to lace his family's food and drink for an experiment. His name was Graham Fredrick Young. Thallium and cadmium work so well as poisons because they both stick around in your body like oxygen and become stable, the nuclei formed never goes radioactive. Kean also talks about the element called Bismuth. Bismuth has many scientist probe into radioactive matter. A physicists in France took pure bismuth and discovered its half-life of 20 billion years. Bismuth was used as an antidote when people fell ill from cadmium tainted lemonade. Kean mentions a man named David Hahn who was arrested for having for having possession of radioactive materials in his Pontiac.
Reflection:
I think I found this chapter to be pretty depressing. Though it did a good job of giving the examples of just how harmful these elements can be. This chapter is involved with a lot f death and it is quite disheartening, yet very interesting to know how long it took to help people with cadmium poisoning and how bismuth is found in pepto bismol.
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