Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood by Oliver Sacks,
Alfred A. Knopf, $25, 329 pages.

The News & Observer


December 10, 2001


Memories of a chemical boyhood

By Phillip Manning

In September 1939, war broke out and turned the predictable and pleasant world of Oliver Sacks upside down. Sacks, who was six years old at the time, was evacuated from his comfortable home in London and sent out of town to boarding school to protect him from the expected Nazi bombings. Thousands of other children were also sent away and had agreeable experiences in the country. But Sacks spent his time with a sadistic schoolmaster, who beat the children unmercifully, stole food parcels sent from home, and fed them almost entirely on turnips. The harsh treatment nearly unhinged the sensitive and lonely boy, and his parents brought him home in 1943 when they realized he "was close to the edge." In this superb, beautifully crafted memoir, Sacks recounts his search for stability while coming of age in a difficult time -- in a world that the war had proved was entirely unstable.

To find the certainties he longed for, Sacks turned to mathematics and science. If you add A to B, you always get answer C. And if you perform a scientific experiment properly, you always get the same result. These absolutes he found enormously reassuring. Fortunately, Sacks was in the ideal household to study those subjects. Both of his parents were physicians, and many of his uncles and aunts and cousins -- all of whom came and went regularly through his parents "rambling house, sometimes staying for extended periods -- were scientists or engineers.

At first, he was crazy about numbers and spent thousands of hours looking for patterns in them. "Numbers," a favorite aunt liked to say, "are the way God thinks." Over time, his interests shifted, and he became fascinated with chemistry. He was soon asking questions that stumped his parents. They referred him to Uncle Dave, who manufactured light bulbs using fine tungsten wire filaments. Uncle Dave loved metals, especially tungsten, and his hobby was chemistry. He had a flair for dramatic experiments and demonstrated the process of oxidation to Sacks, not by showing him the slow rusting of iron, but by removing the coating on a bar of aluminum, exposing the metal to the oxygen in the air. "It was like some terrible disease," Sacks writes, "the surface broke down and a white substance like a fungus rapidly grew out of it." Uncle Dave explained that the "fungus" was actually harmless aluminum oxide. These demonstrations enthralled Sacks, and Uncle Dave became his mentor in chemistry, the beloved Uncle Tungsten.

Soon the budding young chemist set up a laboratory in his own house. He performed the usual experiments that all young wannabe chemists try -- the active, explosive, stinky ones. He watched highly reactive sodium skitter around on the surface of water and made nitrogen tri-iodide, a chemical that explodes violently when touched with anything, even a feather (a fact confirmed by my own youthful experiments). As so many chemists have before and after him, Sacks took a deep breath of pure hydrogen and got the predictable effect: "My voice would go high and squeaky for a few seconds, a Mickey Mouse voice I could no longer recognize as my own." He emptied the house when he generated hydrogen sulfide, a chemical that smells like rotting eggs.

But Sacks dug deeper than any young chemist I've ever known. He studied the history of chemistry, sometimes repeating the ground-breaking experiments of Lavoisier, Robert Boyle, Humphrey Davy, and Marie Curie. At age 12, he literally fell in love with Mendeleef's periodic table. It was, he writes, "incredibly beautiful, the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. . . . a representation of truths that could never be overturned."

In chemistry, the young Sacks found the stability he so desperately sought. His love affair -- and there is no other way to describe his passion for the subject -- creates the central tension of this memoir. The Oliver Sacks who is writing the book is not a chemist. As readers of his earlier books know, he is a practicing neurologist and the author of many books on the subject, such as "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat," "Seeing Colors," and "Awakenings," which was made into a movie starring Robin Williams and Robert De Niro. Why did the chemistry-addled adolescent abandon his true love?

Sacks's disengagement from chemistry was caused, in part, by the work of two of his heroes, Pierre and Marie Curie. In an epic project, Madame Curie and her husband isolated 1 gram of radium from 8 tons of pitchblende, a naturally occurring ore, for which they won the 1903 Nobel prize in physics. Later research showed that radioactive elements, such as radium, decay into more stable elements. Each radioactive element has a "half life," which is the time it takes for half of it to decay.

Radium, for example, has a half life of 1,602 years. Thus, what would be left after 1,602 years of the gram of radium that the Curies isolated, would be a half gram of radium and half gram of transformed elements (its decay products). Although the half lives of radioactive elements are known precisely, no one can predict the fate of any given atom. Some decay immediately, others will last for millennia. "I found this profoundly mystifying and disconcerting," writes Sacks. "The feeling of the elements" stability and invariance was crucial to me psychologically."

As Sacks's understanding of radioactivity grew, he began to see chemistry more as a matter of probabilities rather than certainties. His love affair waned. By the age of 14, he was no longer spending time with Uncle Tungsten; his home lab gathered dust. Buffeted by adolescent longings, he turned to philosophy and literature and -- following in his parents' footsteps -- to the life sciences, medicine, and eventually neurology.

But old flames never die completely, and writing this memoir rekindled the affair for Sacks. He began reading his old books and dreaming about Uncle Tungsten. "The passion for chemistry, which I had thought dead at fourteen, has clearly survived, deep inside me." As a chemist who has been away from the subject for many years, I know how he feels. And after reading this book, I want to try some of the experiments I did as a youngster -- to watch sodium dance on water one more time.
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