The Disappearing Spoon Chp. 10

The Disappearing Spoon Chapter 10

Summary:

In chapter 9, it literally only talked about just how dangerous various elements can possibly be and just how harmful they can react towards living beings, what about them helping save living beings? That is what this chapter will mainly consist of. In the very beginning of the chapter, it questions as to whether or not these elements can actually save lives too. After so, it gives a brief history lesson tracing all the back as to when elements were first starting to be used to help increase better health. Although most of the medicines ended up just being folk remedies, our modern scientists can dig deeper and determine that many elements can indeed help improve medicine. An early case of improvement of health was the use of Copper in infrastructure to help kill and remove unwanted bacteria. Yet another element that has been found out to be helpful, for men in particular, is Vanadium, a spermicide. While early uses of Vanadium proved to be more anti-spermicide than anything helpful, as years passed and as technology improved, Vanadium soon became the best spermicide ever devised. While these two elements have proved to be very helpful towards many in the world, Gadolinium is possibly, if not, the most magical element so far, a cancer assassin. Sadly, however, even with the modern technology we have now, it may still takes dozens or hundreds of years to find a way to beat cancer, or perhaps never. All we can do now is wait and improve ourselves for years to come and eventually make use of every element in every possible, helpful way.

Don't let yourselves get fooled into thinking Gadolinium is a heavenly element though, it too has its own fair amount of harmful side effects. After it finishes describing the helpful and harmful details of Gadolinium, silver is then introduced and it begins describing that many people would rely on Silver again for help instead of their medicine with declining confidence. It is later found out that Silver can be used as a replacement for Copper since both elements have similar properties, it's a shame that many people used Silver too far and actually ate it believing it to cure their problems. Once it finished speaking about just how much people loved Silver, it changed subjects and began talking about the connections between modern drugs in our day and age and biology. It finally goes back to the original topic and goes back in time to speak about very early creations of medicine and how these modern day drugs came to become part of several people in helping them stay healthy. Finally, several stories are told about several different scientists that helped greatly contribute towards modern day medicine. In conclusion, modern medicine came a long way and it seems ridiculous to try to compare our modern medicine with that hundreds of years ago.

Reflection:

Reading this chapter wasn't exactly what I'd call the most exciting and thrilling, but is still nice to learn about the long struggle for medicine to reach this point in our day and age. It was very interesting to read what type of lengths people would go to to try to cure themselves of any ailments they had and actually believe it. My only problem with this chapter is that it consistently changed its topic and never set one single topic. Having the chapter in this form made me lose a bit of interest towards the chapter since I wanted to read as much as I could from a single chapter and not having everything mixed into one. Besides that, I don't have any other reason as why I'd dislike it and thoroughly believe that it wasn't half bad. Overall, I believe the chapter was interesting as is something I'm sure that many would like to fascinated themselves with.

Guided Questions:

1. Why is copper so important? List reasons from the text and from your research.

Copper can greatly help kill and remove harmful bacteria from making progress towards its destination, it greatly helped improve infrastructure, and help make water stay much more filtered from germs and bacteria.

 2. Explain electron spin and how this property makes gadolinium so effective at MRIs.

 It creates a type of shield to protect itself and thus help kill any incoming bacteria.

3. Take a look at the "blue man" on the Internet by typing in Argyria. 

Well if it isn't Papa Smurf himself.

4. What other common sulfa drugs are there besides sulfonamide? 

• Acetohexamide
• Carbutamide
• Chlorpropamide
• Glibenclamide (glyburide)
• Glibornuride

5. What is the chiral opposite of L-dopa called? 

D-Dopa