Cobalt, Goblins And Globins

Cobalt's mysterious name apparently traces back to Greek and Latin roots meaning evil spirit. read more. Though known to Paracelsus (1493-1541) as salts and oxides, cobalt was not considered an element until Antoine Lavoisier redefined the very term "element."
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Chemists have a little mnemonic teaching rhyme which goes:

 If it's blue, it's cobalt (II).

Cobalt (II) salts give the gorgeous deep blue color which contrasts the stark white tin glaze used in Delftware pottery:

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Like iron, our bodies need cobalt -- just less of it. Vitamin B₁₂, also called cobalamin, contains cobalt. Vitamin B₁₂ fascinates me because it was present at several very important 20^th century chemical mileposts. I could write a blog post about each and every of the following:

• How the discovery of liver juice and liver extracts cured pernicious anemia, leading to a Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1934.
• How after the curative factor was isolated and named Vitamin B₁₂, British chemist Dorothy Hodgkin determined its structure using X-ray crystallography. Vitamin B₁₂ was then the most complex natural molecule known.* Hodgkin received the 1964 Nobel Chemistry Prize for her work.
• How Hodgkin's structure inspired Robert Burns Woodward, American chemist extraordinaire, to synthesize B₁₂ de novo. This work, his crowning oeuvre, in collaboration with Albert Eschenmoser in Switzerland, spanned a dozen years and spawned much new chemistry and also a set of rules which led to another Nobel Prize in 1981 (which Woodward would have shared had he lived).
• How the isolation of Vitamin B₁₂ sparked a legal battle in the patent world beginning in the late 1950's: the legal question was whether something found in nature was patentable subject matter or not. Ironically, SCOTUS may be revisiting parts of a 1958 case this fall when they decide to hear arguments or not regarding the patentability of genes.

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*While the contemporaneous discovery of DNA (the double helix) was perhaps more important, B₁₂ was intellectually more interesting, involving as it did a novel cobalt-carbon bond.