The lesson at Border Star Montessori School in Kansas City, Missouri, was as routine as teaching chemistry is. Kenneth Boehr gave his fifth graders the ball-and-stick modeling kits, the colored spheres and connecting rods that every science class has, and had them build simple molecules: water, carbon dioxide, the standards. Ten-year-old Clara Lazen did not build a standard. He assembled a dense, symmetrical clump of black carbon, red oxygen, and blue nitrogen, took it to Boehr’s desk, and asked the question that started it all: Was this a real molecule or not? Boehr looked at him and realized he had no idea. Call a friend What Boehr did next is the whole story, because a normal move, how nice, Clara, back to your seat, would have ended it. Instead, he took a photo of the model with his cell phone and sent it to an old college friend, Robert Zoellner, a professor of computational chemistry at Humboldt State University in California, whose specialty is using software to model whether molecules can exist and how they would behave. Zoellner later said that in most of these images you can tell at a glance whether the structure is real, known, or nonsense. Clara made him stop. He compared it to chemical databases that catalog all published compounds and found that the formula matched exactly a known substance, but with the atoms arranged differently and an arrangement that no one had ever described. The girl had assembled a genuinely novel structure: a central carbon containing four nitrate-based groups in a symmetrical cage, a compact, plausible molecule unimaginable until then. Then his calculations yielded the detail that guaranteed the headlines. The structure contains carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen in the same proportions as nitroglycerin, and Zoellner’s model suggested that the thing, if ever synthesized, could store important energy—useful, he noted, for energy storage, or for a big explosion, or something in between. The molecule was called tetranitratoxycarbon, and Clara, when asked by journalists what her creation could be used for, responded with fifth-grade candor that she could sell it to the military for money. Author, ten years old Zoellner did the unusual well. He wrote up the analysis, a computational study predicting the geometry, stability, and possible high-energy behavior of the molecule, and submitted it to the peer-reviewed journal Computational and Theoretical Chemistry, where it appeared in the January 2012 issue under three names: Zoellner, who did the math; Boehr, who made the connection; and Clara Lazen, the ten-year-old girl who conceived the structure. Zoellner deadpanned to a reporter that he had never partnered with a high school student before and placed the paper at the top of his list of sample publications. Honest asterisks are from the record and are slight. Tetranitratoxycarbon is, to this day, a hypothetical molecule; It exists in silicon, not in any flask, and synthesizing a cage of nitrate groups that are predicted to eagerly decay from nitroglycerin is a project that few labs are eager to attempt. Later computational work by other chemists has investigated its stability and decay pathways, and some of it suggests that the molecule would behave worse than the first paper expected. And accounts differ as to whether Clara gathered her group randomly or deliberately; He said he chose an arrangement in which the pieces fit together and the structure seemed complete, which, for what it’s worth, is not a terrible description of how chemists think about stable geometry. None of the asterisks touch on the central fact: a structure that no chemist had described entered the scientific literature because a child built it with classroom toys and asked if it was real. The question that made the work The story circulated around the world, and Boehr reported the most predictable consequence: a surge of interest in chemistry at Border Star, where thereafter every kit-building lesson had a lottery-ticket shine. Clara, for her part, took fame lightly and strayed, as ten-year-olds have the right to do, into new interests, telling later interviewers that she was most drawn to biology and medicine. What endures is the anatomy of the discovery, which required no genius at any step, only the absence of rejection at each step. A child built something and asked a real question instead of assuming toys don’t matter. One teacher admitted he didn’t know and escalated instead of guessing. A teacher took a cell phone photo from a fifth-grade classroom seriously enough to run it through the machinery of professional chemistry. Each link cost almost nothing and the chain ended up in permanent literature. There is a version of this story in which Clara’s molecule someday synthesizes and does something remarkable, and a version in which she remains forever a hypothetical curiosity with an eleven-syllable name. Chemistry will decide that as it pleases. The part that is already resolved is the quote, which will read the same in all databases, in each future year: Zoellner, Lazen, Boehr, 2012, about a molecule assembled for the first time, in plastic, by the youngest author, who wanted to know if it was real. Was. About this articleThis article is for general information and reflection. It is not professional advice. For your specific situation, consult a qualified professional.
