77 Mass Ave.

Continued from page 3

Chemist by Day, Poet by Night
Her research is also her muse

when chemistry grad student Mala L. Radhakrishnan isn't busy figuring out how to design drug molecules that are specific to their targets, she's using her work as inspiration for poetry. Radhakrishnan is working on assembling her comic, chemistry-themed poems into a book. Although Radhakrishnan didn't start writing poetry about chemistry until she came to MIT, she says she first got the idea from her experience teaching high-school chemistry. "I would teach through analogy," she says. "For example, a valence electron is just like a person in the last row of a crowded movie theater. He can't really see that well and he doesn't feel part of the action, and if he could get closer seats elsewhere, he'd go somewhere else." Radhakrishnan hopes that nonscientists who read her poems enjoy her sense of humor and "maybe even learn something," while the scientific-minded can appreciate "the more subtle inside jokes" in her work. She says the poem "Amalgam in the Middle" was inspired by the "somewhat arbitrary dividing line between metals and nonmetals."

Amalgam in the Middle By Mala L. Radhakrishnan

Silicon was faithfully teased each day
In school when atoms would line up to play:
Metals in one line, nons in the next,
But which line should it join? All were perplexed.

Like a metal, it was shiny,
But its conductivity was tiny.
Its band gap was too far from little,
And unlike metals 'twas rather brittle.

It clutched electrons way too tightly,
So metals teased it daily and nightly.
Yet nons would also jeer and nettle,
"You dress and look just like a metal!"

What pain since it did not conform!
No box for it to check on forms.
Few atoms could know the lonely void
That it knew as a "metalloid."

But sili did not yet know 'twas able
To be popular with the rest of the table.
Its half-filled shell did place it where
It had some four electrons to share.

While greedy nonmetals weren't willing to spare
And metals were willing to give anywhere,
Sili's electrons were things to be earned,
But they bonded with skill that couldn't be learned.

Once other elements saw this fact,
Moles of them came 'round to react.
O2 was the first to ask it on dates,
And others joined in to make silicates.

The former outcast whose hopes had been bust
Now was key in forming Earth's crust!
The pariah that had been given the hand
Was now in every grain of sand.

Soon, silicon was lionized;
Its band gap was of perfect size
To dope with nearby brothers and sisters
And make computers from transistors.

As if its utility has not yet impressed us,
It's also in quartz and glass and asbestos!
And silicon's used in chemical plants
To make lubricants and breast implants.

Sili, its fourteen electrons so strong,
Proved all of its doubtful peers to be wrong
When it managed to move all the way out to Cali
And founded its very own aptly named valley.

The ugly duckling of the table,
Silicon simply couldn't be labeled.
So if you feel you don't fit in,
Think of silicon and don't give in.