Far from being sunshine in a pill, then, lithium acts as “anti-sunlight.” Neurologically, it undoes sunlight and thereby compresses the circadian clock back to twenty-four hours-preventing both the mania bubble from forming and the Black Tuesday crash into depression.
Notice that sunlight still trumps lithium during the day and resets the proteins it’s only when the sunlight goes away at night that lithium helps DNA shake free. Lithium helps cleave the proteins from DNA so people can wind down. Their brains don’t realize they should stop revving. This process goes awry in manic-depressives because the proteins, despite the lack of sunlight, remain bound fast to their DNA.
In fact, the proteins fall off only after darkness falls-at which point the brain should “notice” the bare DNA and stop producing stimulants. Sunlight resets the proteins over and over, so they hold on much longer. Special proteins attach to people’s DNA each morning, and after a fixed time they degrade and fall off. This clock runs, oddly, on DNA, inside special neurons deep in the brain. Better living through chemistry is often accompanied by better killing.“Lithium regulates the proteins that control the body’s inner clock. For every humanity-serving development an element brings, there is a harmful, I-am-become-God aspect, never more evident than in the case of Fritz Haber, who saved millions from famine with artificial fertilization and then caused nearly as many deaths by inventing mustard gas.
His keen sense of humor is a particular pleasure, such as when he compares the reaction between a large rhodium-based catalyst and an equally bulky molecule to ”two obese animals trying to have sex.” The humor also helps illuminate history’s grimmer ironies.
With the anecdotal flourishes of Oliver Sacks and the populist accessibility of Malcolm Gladwell, but without the latter’s occasional facileness, he makes even the most abstract concepts graspable for armchair scientists. Kean’s traipse among the elements leads him through a warren of subjects, as he examines how these basic building blocks have factored prominently in astronomy, biology, literature, history, politics, and even cryptozoology.
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