Clarice Phelps was sitting in church in 2019 when a friend texted her that she was trending on Twitter. “I was like, ‘What?’ I don’t even have Twitter,” she recalls. “I don’t know how to tweet.”
There had been much excitement when the scientific breakthrough in which she had played a key role – the discovery of a new superheavy element – was announced in 2010. It was later named tennessine, after the state of Tennessee, where three of the five research institutes involved in the research were based (and where Clarice was raised).
Finding tennessine – element number 117 – helped a resurgence in elemental discovery that was once thought to have ended in the 20th century.
Phelps had no idea that her own involvement was historic. Now she does.
“Through my story, I want to encourage young people to build their own path and make their own discovery about the potential that lies within them. I grew up poor, I only had a bachelor’s degree in chemistry with a GPA of 2.98 and yet there I was in the middle of all these engineers and scientists with their masters and PhDs. And I took my seat at the periodic table with them.”
The superheavy hunt
Phelps, along with the researchers working in her field, believes superheavy elements are a key to unlocking transformative new forms of energy.
“It’s really about finding the beginnings of the Universe, like the Big Bang, what happened and what kind of things existed when that happened,” she told The Brilliant.
As of now, superheavy elements can only be created synthetically, using massive high-energy machines, then decay within fractions of a second.
Scientists are seeking the “island of stability” where the lifespan of synthetic superheavy elements can be extended from fractions of a second to decades or longer. This could transform the creation of energy sources, and form the basis of the nuclear fuel for fission-propelled space missions.
Seventy years ago, there were 101 elements and the scientific consensus was that the periodic table was complete. Today, thanks to emergence of research into superheavy elements, there are 118 elements. It is widely expected that at least 70 more elements will be discovered.
The element that the team Phelps was part of and helped discover, tennessine, is the second heaviest known element and was discovered through a collaborative effort between the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia (JINR); the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee; Vanderbilt University in Tennessee; University of Tennessee at Knoxville; Research Institute of Atomic Reactors; and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.
Phelps’ role on the team was critical. “We spent months pouring over calculations, preparing reagents, putting items in the glove box, going over everything over and over and over again, so that we could purify berkelium-249 which was to be used as the target to make seven atoms of element 117.” she says.
Because its half-life was only 327 days, it needed to be quickly transported to Russia so that the project could be completed before the berkelium-249 decayed. But the shipment was rejected twice by Russian customs officials and had to travel across the Atlantic five times. It did finally arrive at the JINR in time and a few years later, in 2015, the discovery was officially recognised.
A Wiki controversy
It was science journalist Kit Chapman, author of Superheavy: Making and Breaking the Periodic Table – the first in-depth look at how synthetic elements are discovered – who realised something remarkable about Phelps’ involvement in the discovery of tennessine. She was the first African American woman to be involved in the discovery of an element on the periodic table.
Chapman notified Jess Wade, a physicist at Imperial College London who has written more than 1,000 Wikipedia entries on scientists who are women or from under-represented minority groups. Wade wrote an entry for Phelps in 2018 but Wikipedia editors then deleted it the following year, arguing that Phelps did not meet the site’s notability criteria. She had not been named in the official announcement, nor had her contribution been covered by the mainstream press; both of which are seen as critical to Wikipedia’s notability criteria. It shone a light on the double standards applied to female scientists and people of colour compared to their white male counterparts, in how often their Wikipedia entries are challenged. After much public debate, Phelps’ entry was finally restored in January 2020. And suddenly she was well-known for so much more than just her contribution to a momentous breakthrough.
Making negative spin positive
Phelps never expected to make history, but she is now determined to use her public profile to help bring greater diversity to the research sector.
I often find myself the only black woman or the only woman in a room all the time. I mean, all the time,” she says. “For some people that is not their reality, they’re not able to understand what it feels like to always walk into the room and get certain kind of looks or certain types of questions because you’re different.”
“You find yourself always having to work hard to not come off as threatening, as a woman in a male-dominated sector, as well as a minority in that same setting. Being part of a historical discovery gives me the opportunity to help people of colour – especially women – to feel comfortable in these spaces; be respected in the spaces and also to be present and recognised in these spaces where others have been for years – centuries in fact.”
That in itself is not an easy task but Phelps also wants to tackle student recruitment and outreach so that more women of colour study and enter the STEM sector. “Science shows on television predominantly show older white guys with glasses on and a ton of books behind them. I want young people to know that minorities, particularly women of colour, belong in these spaces and contribute a lot to the extraordinary advances in knowledge like I have.”
It’s not just media representation that’s important. Phelps says that university and corporate employers need to ensure their minority employees, particularly women of colour, also represent the companies at science career fairs. “Too often we get lost in a sea of white or male faces,” Phelps observes. “You need to listen to your employees who happen to be people of colour and women about what they think would draw more people like them to your organisation.”
Phelps explains further that future employees aren’t just looking at jobs at these fairs. Who is there on the day gives them insight into how comfortable they will be on a day-to-day basis. “You want someone who looks like you to bring the reality of a work life into view for you.” Phelps says. “And that is important for people of colour because they want to work at organisations where they know they are welcome.”
Phelps also spends time working in local communities to show minority groups and people from lower socio-economic backgrounds that they belong in science.
There are a lot of kids who grow up poor like I did and may go to a school that doesn’t have all the resources they need or a lab or connection to scientists in their family,” Phelps says. “I want to encourage them to take their own path and that they could be the first person in their family to go to college or be a scientist.”
Her own story is certainly inspirational. “We grew up pretty poor,” she says. “My mom would go to garage sales and one day when I was around six or seven, she picked up a microscope set. I was so fascinated with how much was in something so tiny – like a strand of hair. It made me want to find out more. I had a set of books that had a ton of science experiments – I did every one of them. I fell in love with science and the scientific process, where you were challenged to figure out a problem.“
It was Phelps’ 10th grade chemistry teacher, Mr Woodberry, who inspired her to pursue chemistry. “He had a huge jar full of balls sitting on the top of his desk. And he was talking about how this represented high entropy. And then he pulled the jar up and all of the balls fell out all over the classroom floor,” Phelps recounts. “He said, ‘Now that’s low entropy.’ I immediately understood it. He made chemistry fun.”
After graduating with a chemistry degree from Tennessee State University, Phelps joined the US Navy, where she helped maintain the chemistry and radiological controls of the two reactor plants onboard the aircraft carrier, the USS Ronald Reagan (CVN 76). Phelps then went to work at ORNL as a nuclear operations technician at the Radiochemical Engineering Development Center, processing and purifying mainline radio isotopes. Today she is a researcher and project manager for industrial use isotopes.
It may come as a surprise that someone so instrumental in the momentous discovery of tennessine had only a humble undergraduate degree in the way of formal qualifications. In her TedX Nashville Talk, Phelps challenges the perception that discovery can only be done by someone with an expensive swag of advanced degrees.
We fail to recognise the people behind the scenes that helped bring scientific ideas to fruition and these people come from all sorts of backgrounds,” she says. “Some of the smartest people I’ve actually worked with either didn’t have a degree or just have their associate degree.”
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Article by Kylie Ahern
Image credit: Carlos Jones, Oak Ridge National Lab