Chapter 1

Roots: The Making of a Teenage Scientist

You-Scientist!
-The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments, 1960

David Hahn's earliest memory seems appropriate in light of later events; it is of conducting an experiment in the bathroom when he was perhaps four years old. With his father at work and his unmindful mother listening to music in the living room of the family's small apartment in suburban Detroit, he rummaged through the medicine chest and undersink cabinet and gathered toothpaste, soap, medicines, cold cream, nail polish remover, and rubbing alcohol. He mixed everything in a metal bowl and stirred in the contents of an ashtray used by his mother, a chain-smoker. "I was trying to get a magical reaction, to create something new," he remembered later. "I thought that the more things I threw in, the stronger the reaction I'd get."

After he finished blending the ingredients together, young David was disappointed to see that all he had in the bowl was a lifeless, grayish glob. Hence, he went back to the cabinet beneath the sink and pulled out a bright-blue bottle, which years later he realized was probably a drain-cleaning product. He uncapped the bottle and poured a healthy amount into the bowl; soon, the mixture began to bubble and threatened to boil over. In a panic, David flushed the contents of the bowl down the toilet. His parents never knew what happened, and David promised himself that he would never again try something so foolish. It was the first of many similar vows made over the years, all broken in short order. It also established a pattern: experiment, trouble, cover-up.

If David was a slightly odd child, his parents, lost in their own preoccupations, hardly noticed. His father, Ken Hahn, grew up in the Detroit area along with his four brothers and sisters. Ken's father was a skilled tradesman, a tool-and-die maker who worked for General Electric and Pratt & Whitney. At night, Ken would sit with his dad and pore over blueprints of the tools his dad made during his workday. By the time he reached Henry Ford High School, Ken had decided to pursue a similar career, though he was fascinated by the idea of drawing the blueprints, not building the tools. He enrolled in a college-prep program for mechanical engineering and after graduating attended Lawrence Technological University, a local school.

Ken was so wrapped up with his engineering studies that he had little time for dating or romance. But while a sophomore at Lawrence Tech, he and a friend were cruising Woodward Avenue just outside of Detroit when they spotted two pretty girls driving alongside his Chevy Chevelle. After signaling for them to pull into a Big Boy hamburger drive-in, Ken zeroed in on nineteen-year-old Patty Spaulding and came away with her phone number. For Ken, it was love at first sight. "She was cute as a bug," he remembered later, proudly showing off a picture of a beautiful young woman with a bouncy smi