Prologue: The World Seen Through Elements

Iodine_Memories of Scarlet Quarantine
Oxygen_From 'Bulmung' to ECMO, there's oxygen there.
Death of a 15-year-old boy making a mercury thermometer
Hwang_No, I'm going to hell
The irony surrounding sodium salt
Lead_The savior of intelligence who came to destroy intelligence
Argon_Lonely but not lonely
From the 'Mountain of Soaring Silver' to the Birth of Social Medicine
The real culprit who took away carbon vision
Selenium_The Three Laws of Robotics and Humanity
Lithium: The Hidden Birth of an Eco-Friendly Hero
Aluminum_Even the survivors are in pain
The foolish heart that commits hydrogen acid terrorism
Arsenic_Madame Bovary's Resolution
How did the "Morning Star" of the In-Elemental Realm become a lethal weapon?
Iron_The Chronicle of Iron and Blood Between Blood Sucking, Blood Selling, and Blood Donation
Calcium_Life and history engraved in the bones
Human Faces Seen at Nitrogen Extinction Camps

*** Highly recommended by Byun Jin-kyung, Lee Gi-byeong, and Hong Eun-jeon! ***

If Italy has Primo Levi, South Korea has Kim Myung-hee.
_Byeon Jin-kyung (Director of SisaIN)
The breadth and depth of the stories drawn from the elements are jaw-dropping.
_Lee Gi-byeong (medical anthropologist)
Mysterious, shocking, and above all, lovely.
_Hong Eun-jeon (human rights and animal rights activist)

On Primo Levi's laboratory
A new periodic table of human society, remixed by social scientist Kim Myung-hee.
Read the irony of civilization and history through 18 elements!

For many, the periodic table may be nothing more than a memory table, reminiscent of those boring chemistry classes where we recited “Helbebium carbonate…”
For social scientist Kim Myung-hee, the periodic table is remembered as a book by Primo Levi, a Jewish Holocaust survivor, chemist, and writer.
The series, which began at the recommendation of SisaIN’s Director Jin-kyung Byun, was an homage to Levi’s “Periodic Table” and a process of answering the question, “How different and similar are the elements I give meaning to from the 21 elements of life selected by Primo Levi?”

“I have never been swept up in the turbulent waves of history as Primo Levi was, nor have I ever faced such profound existential and ethical questions, but I too have had a ‘story to tell.’
“The story is not about me personally, but about the world and people I have studied, witnessed, and been in solidarity with as a science student, health researcher, and citizen with a lot of passion.”
- 〈Prologue〉

If Primo Levi, in his "Mercury" piece, showed "the madness of a closed community, the pre-modern moral sense, and the eccentricities of people who find it difficult to distinguish the symptoms of mercury poisoning," Kim Myung-hee reveals in detail how a 15-year-old boy who was making thermometers in a factory died from "the fantastic alchemy of corporations and government" that is more lethal than the toxicity of mercury.
When Primo Levi recalls his ancestors, “the respectable Jews of Piedmont,” in the inert nature of “argon,” Kim Myung-hee recalls “today’s atomized modern man.”
If "The Periodic Table" is a memoir by a Holocaust survivor, rich in literary quality, from childhood stories to reflections on humanity, "The Irony of the Periodic Table," which arrived to us exactly 50 years later, can be said to be a periodic table of human society newly mixed on Levy's experimental table.


Kim Myung-hee, who has been studying the health rights of workers and the socially disadvantaged and the social factors of disease, wanted to “illuminate how elements connect seemingly unrelated entities and events” by extracting stories from “extremely insignificant elements born from the Big Bang, without emotions or will,” and letting those stories flow to people.
Through a novel approach that analyzes the 18 elements of the periodic table using social science methodology, it keenly captures the contradictions of civilization and humanity hidden within the scientific order.
“By combining the complex interactions of elements, science and literature, myth and history, occupational diseases and infectious diseases, technological progress and inequality, discrimination and solidarity” (Hong Eun-jeon), he closely explores the traces that the foundation of all things has left on human ethics and social structures.
“Depending on the choices humans make and what they value, certain elements can become either saviors or destroyers,” the author reveals, step by step, based on data he personally researched and analyzed, as well as various domestic and international literature and research cases.


The authors who wrote the recommendations for this book, which stands out for its weighty subject matter and unique structure, surprisingly unanimously praised the “entertainment of the story.”
The researcher's writing possesses a level of popularity and readability that is far beyond the scope of a typical academic paper, thanks to a diverse range of materials, including science fiction, Netflix, home shopping, martial arts novels, and mythology, that straddle the line between solid scientific knowledge and accurate data.


What difference does the element make when it combines with humans?
Can science be free from society?

He entered medical school, but as soon as he entered, he was “picked” by his seniors in the student movement and became active as a “demonstrator,” and he began to doubt himself, thinking, “What’s the point of being a doctor when the world is like this?”
One day, while attending a Wonjin Rayon meeting, the author learned of a field called preventive medicine through the recommendation of a senior, and this determined his life path.
The author recalls that his career in social medicine, which seeks to identify the causes of individual illness in social structures, was “the smallest of the many legacies left behind by the Wonjin Rayon struggle.”


The story of 'Hwang' begins in the 'funeral struggle' of Wonjin Rayon that lasted 137 days.
Sulfur, which is not toxic in itself and is used in various fields of daily life, and is a major component of medicines such as penicillin and fertilizers, how did it become the 'god of death'?
The author points out cases of domestic and foreign companies that continued to relocate their production bases and neglect their workers despite knowing the toxicity of carbon disulfide, a compound of sulfur and carbon, and criticizes, “The pain of workers who fought alone against an unknown disease and workers who ended their lives by suicide after suffering from serious mental illness was something they should not have had to experience in the first place.”
The episode that concludes the story of Hwang is a deliberate irony that is refreshing and meaningful in itself, revealing the author's knowledge (science), taste (SF), and social consciousness.

“One day, a person who had been diligently preaching the word of God to me on the subway asked me, “Don’t you want to go to heaven?” when I refused to listen.
I answered.
“No, I want to go to hell.” He ran to the next compartment.
If it is the infinite power that mankind has dreamed of, the unquenchable fire of hell, there is no reason to refuse it.
Top scientists like Feynman, Hawking, Higgs, Schrödinger, and Einstein are likely already there, having committed the sin of not believing in God, and are likely already developing a technological civilization by utilizing perpetual motion.
There's no need to worry about getting bored, because there are many fun writers like Douglas Adams, Kurt Vonnegut, and many other science fiction writers who have already gone before me and established themselves.
Wouldn't it be wonderful if you could burn the sulfurous hellfire with its mystical blue flames with your cheerful fellow citizens, in a pleasant environment, without worrying about occupational diseases?
- 〈Hwang: No, I'm going to hell〉

Meanwhile, the protagonist of the 'lead' story is geochemist Claire Patterson.
With an obsessive effort, he creates the most perfect 'clean room' in history, and finally succeeds in estimating the age of the Earth by measuring the 'pure' lead content in meteorites that fell during the Earth's formation.
But here the story takes an unexpected turn.
He wondered where the ubiquitous lead came from, and after examining various hypotheses, he concluded that leaded gasoline, which appeared in 1923, was closely related to lead contamination.
The oil industry even employs contract scientists to sabotage his research, but Patterson analyzes the deep seas of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, the North and South Poles, snow-capped mountains, volcanic craters, and even human remains and mummies to prove his hypothesis.
The story doesn't end there, and extends to the water pipes of Flint, USA.
The Flint water crisis, a poor city of color whose water supply was supplied by contaminated lead pipes, vividly illustrates the discrimination that can arise when neutral elements combine with humans, while also raising the unavoidable question, "Can science be free from society?"

To Nitrogen, who was crying on the planet Tralfamador
We still have words of comfort left.

Shortly after the end of World War II, nitrogen, who had served involuntarily as a Nazi guard and doctor, weeps among the chemical elements gathered on the planet Tralfamador.
The "Nitrogen" chapter, which begins with a scene from Kurt Vonnegut's novel "Timequake," is the climax of the book, where the incomprehensible irony of humanity is most powerfully revealed.
As we follow the journey of how nitrogen, which has played a brilliant role in solving humanity's food problem, came to be used to massacre people, as the author says, "a sense of wonder comes before fear or sadness."

“Even when I personally visited the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany and the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland, I felt more puzzlement than fear or sadness.
"What on earth was this, this much work? What was the essence of the diligence and efficiency that went into transporting people scattered across Europe by train, connecting the railway to the camp's front yard to expedite the process even a little, meticulously classifying and labeling the numerous prisoners according to their characteristics, building separate gas chambers to kill so many people simultaneously and quickly, coating the inside of the carts carrying the bodies to prevent residue, and installing elevators to transport the bodies from the gas chambers to the crematorium entrance?"
- From “Nitrogen: The Human Face in an Extermination Camp”

But this book doesn't just talk about the dark side of humanity.
“Nitrogen was in the bodies of not only the murderers and bystanders, but also those who resisted injustice where there was no hope of success, who showed humanity even in the most dangerous and miserable moments, and who stood tall to protect their own conscience where no one was watching,” he said, comforting Nitrogen, who was weeping on the planet Tralfamador.
In Gwangju in 1980, when martial law forces took control of the city and public transportation was cut off, we are struck by the sight of people risking their lives to donate blood, “standing in a long, winding line from the entrance of the blood bank to the main gate of the hospital,” and by the small act of a scientist who “always held something in both hands when leaving the house” to avoid saluting Hitler and the Nazis. This is probably because we still have hope for humanity.


Human history is also a record of how we have treated others.
The 18 elements contained in the book are the basic elements of matter that contain interesting scientific knowledge in themselves, but they are also 'witnesses' who testify to what happens when humans objectify other humans.
As discussed in the "Iron" section, a "vampiric" society that sucks the blood of the people, a "blood-selling" society where even blood is traded as a commodity, and a donation society where people help strangers through voluntary "blood donation" without any special compensation are all destined to face different futures.
The map of the body, othering, and solidarity drawn by the author on the periodic table not only provides the intellectual pleasure of reading society as a material of natural science, but also provides an opportunity to reflect on “what meaning my actions or inactions have.”
It is up to the readers to answer how similar and different the irony contained in Primo Levi's "Periodic Table" published in 1975 is and how different the "Periodic Table Irony" of 2025 is.