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By 1925 all of the naturally occurring stable elements had been discovered, most of them by chemists mining ores. Elements 43, 61, 85 and 87 were "missing" because, as physicists were beginning to realize, all forms would be radioactive and would have decayed away long ago. The advent of the cyclotron introduced a new breed of alchemist-the "element makers." They were physicists and chemists who would take irradiated targets and "mine" them for new elements and isotopes as if they were ores. In 1928 Enrico Fermi awarded his first PhD to a young Italian physicist named Emilio Segre (1905-1989). Segre taught at the University of Rome (1932-1936) and in 1936 headed the Physics Laboratory at Palermo, Sicily. Despite the repressive government, Segre made Palermo a center for physics research. In 1936 he spent a few weeks in Berkeley with Ernest Lawrence and his new cyclotron. Those were exciting times; new...