History Of The Earth

This episode is about some of the interesting connections that arise in science.We’ll start with me and my first professional job as a mineralogist analyzing kidney stones. My mineralogy professor at Indiana University, Carl Beck, died unexpectedly, and his wife asked me as his only grad student to carry on his business performing analysis of kidney stones. Beck had pioneered the idea of crystallographic examination to determine mineralogy of these compounds because traditional chemical analysis was misleading. For example, some common kidney stones are chemically calcium phosphates and calcium carbonates – but they are hardly ever calcium carbonate minerals. That makes a big difference in terms of treatment, because calcium carbonate minerals can be dissolved with acids, while calcium phosphate cannot. The carbonate is actually part of the phosphate mineral structure, partially substituting for some of the phosphate. Other subtleties of mineral crystallography can distinguish between different minerals and