Primo Levi and me

For four years, I spent almost every day looking at a periodic table. As a recent chemistry graduate, there were posters of it on the walls of my lecture halls, a fold-out version of it tucked into my lab notebook, and I even had a periodic table laptop sticker on my computer. 

Yet a few months ago in quarantine, I stumbled upon a different Periodic Table – the book by Primo Levi. For those who are unfamiliar with Levi, he was a Jewish Italian chemist and writer who chronicled what it was like to live through the Holocaust. The fact that our paths had not crossed until now seemed almost purposeful: I had also studied Italian, aspired to be a writer, and attended more years of Hebrew School than I can remember.

While 16-year-old Levi decided to be a chemist after reading William Bragg’s Concerning the Nature of Things, my interest in chemistry did not start until college. Even then, chemistry was one of the last subjects I thought I would end up majoring in. Like most pre-med students, I intended to major in biology, but was still required to take a few semesters of general and organic chemistry. These difficult courses, which are prerequisites for US medical schools, are often said to be classes you just have to ‘get through’. As a result, I was terrified of the subject – I thought of chemistry as more of a gatekeeper and less of a gate.

Yet, as I sat in my biology lectures, I felt that there was an underlying element of mystery. Substrates would just fit into enzymes and spit out products, a reaction that was depicted in textbook illustrations like the slotting together of puzzle pieces. A molecule of glucose would churn through the names of different molecules to somehow produce ATP. I’m a ‘but how?’ kind of person, and these enigmas frustrated me to no end.