The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table

The alkalis form a column on the left side of the periodic table. Among them are hydrogen, sodium, and potassium. Each of the alkali elements has a single electron in its outer shell, which combines readily with other elements, especially the halogens on the other side of the table. 

The University of California at Berkeley was for decades a hotbed of scientific breakthroughs, especially during the reign of Glenn Seaborg at the university’s Lawrence Radiation Lab between 1946 and 1961 and again in the 1970s; more than a dozen new elements were discovered there. 

Berkeley’s Cold War counterpart, the Dubna lab in Russia was founded by Gyorgy Flyorov in the 1950s, Dubna’s atomic research lab discovered a number of new atoms. This pitted it in a contest with Berkeley’s American researchers.