Radiolab - HEAVY METAL

Today we have a story about the sometimes obvious but sometimes sneaky effects of the way that we humans rearrange the elemental stuff around us. Reporter Avir Mitra and science journalist Lydia Denworth bring us a story about how one man’s relentless pursuit of a deep truth about the Earth led to an obsession that really changed the very air we breathe. This episode was reported by Avir Mitra, and produced by Matt Kielty, Becca Bressler, Rachael Cusick, and Maria Paz Gutiérrez. Special thanks to Cliff Davidson, Paul M. Sutter, Denton Ebel, and Sam Kean. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab today. Radiolab is on YouTube! Catch up with new episodes and hear classics from our archive. Plus, find other cool things we did in the past — like miniseries, music videos, short films and animations, behind-the-scenes features, Radiolab live shows, and more. Take a look, explore and subscribe!

Duration: 45m
Broadcast on: 24 Sep 2021
Audio Format: other

This episode was reported by Avir Mitra, and produced by Matt Kielty, Becca Bressler, Rachael Cusick, and Maria Paz Gutiérrez.

Special thanks to Cliff Davidson, Paul M. Sutter, Denton Ebel, and Sam Kean.

Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab today.

Radiolab is on YouTube! Catch up with new episodes and hear classics from our archive. Plus, find other cool things we did in the past — like miniseries, music videos, short films and animations, behind-the-scenes features, Radiolab live shows, and more. Take a look, explore and subscribe!

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

"Wait, you're listening to RadioLab from WNYC." I'm Latif Nasir. This is RadioLab. Today, a story about how we humans rearranged the elemental stuff all around us, and how one man's pursuit of a basic truth about the Earth revealed in an extraterrestrial explosion, a 2,000-year-old Peruvian skeleton, even a strand of his lab assistant's hair changed the very air we breathe. So I guess we'll start it with this guy, Claire Patterson; he goes by the name Pat. That's from an oral history in 1995. And so Pat's tribe did all the things you do growing up in the country. Learn how to swim and fish, and we saw crops being planted, we knew about farm animals. But he was... he was... This is science journalist Lydia Denmore. He was in some ways a farm boy, but... I knew I was different than most people. He was the kind of kid who asked his mother all kinds of questions about the world. Why is a drop of water around? He set up a chemistry lab in his basement when he was 12. In high school, he was always like... Science teacher would say something about electricity being a fluid. Correcting his teachers. I had to explain to him about electrons. He was just always, always fascinated by how the world worked, and he had the ability to see beyond what others saw. He made leaps. So like for example, this is a kid from a small town, goes to a small high school, small college, and graduates in his first job out of college, he's working for the Manhattan Project. Now to back up a little bit at the beginning of World War II, around 1940, there were these European scientists. Like Einstein and others. We're immigrating to the US and telling anyone who would listen, the Germans were making a bomb, an atomic bomb. And they were pushing the Americans to make sure that they didn't get behind the Germans. And so when Pat graduated, some of his professors pushed him to join the army and help the American effort to create a nuclear bomb. So Patton listed, got shipped down to Oak Ridge, Tennessee. With his wife, Lori. Lori Patterson. She was also a scientist, brilliant chemist in fact, and also worked on the Manhattan Project. So anyway, Oak Ridge was one of those places that they made a city overnight. 75,000 people in the end were working and living there. And we had a little dog and we went back and forth on a bus to work every day. To these top secret state of the art laboratories, buried in the mail and I don't think he knew what he would be doing when he got there. But he ends up dead smack in the middle of the whole thing. Like dead, dead smack in the middle of the bomb? Yeah, his job at Oak Ridge was to make the actual stuff in the bomb that goes boom. Which was Uranium and Uranium is an interesting character and element, really. It's the heaviest element that occurs naturally, at least. So like, you know, every element is made up of three things, protons, neutrons and electrons.

Transcription truncated.