Born in Toronto in 1913, he was a remarkably talented musician-easily switching between the violin and viola-and graduated from high school early. US National Archives Public Domain Archive
If you want to understand anything related to biology, you start with carbon.” Undeniable Chemistry
It’s part of the process of photosynthesis-carbon dioxide is used by plants to make oxygen. “All life is made of carbon,” atmospheric chemist Mark Thiemens of the University of California, San Diego, tells Popular Mechanics. After he was released, Kamen went home for a brief nap, returned to the lab, and then made one of the most important discoveries of the 20th Century: the carbon-14 isotope. They accused him of committing a string of murders that took place the previous evening.īut the police couldn’t pin the crimes on Kamen because the scientist had been locked away in his lab for the past three days, lobbing deuteron particles at a tiny sample of graphite with his colleague, the chemist Samuel Ruben. Police officers apprehended the disheveled scientist, too tired to protest, outside of his laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley and hauled him to the station for questioning. In the early morning hours of February 27, 1940, chemist Martin Kamen sat in a cold, dark police station.
