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Lithium, a time stabilizer*

Lithium, a time stabilizer*

 

Pierre Teissier, Nantes University

Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University

 

Materials have long been considered as markers of time. Archaeologists have traditionally used materials to divide prehistory into distinct eras, such as the Stone Age, the Bronze Age. And some historians talk about the Iron age, Plastic age, Silicon age… If materials define our collective experience of time, could they also affect our individual experience of time? Based on the case study of lithium, this paper argues that materials may shape our individual experience of time in response to societal and economic pressures.

Lithium, an element of the periodic table, refers to two different materials whose uses nevertheless have a common impact on our perception of time. As a psychotropic drug used against bipolar disorders, lithium helps create a uniform psychological mood, avoiding the ups and downs that typify the condition so that time appears to sufferers as a regular and smooth stream without turbulences. As a component of batteries to store energy, it enables industrialists to provide steady electricity from intermittent sources such as windmills and photovoltaic panels. It affords the comfort of electricity for users independently from both the circadian and the seasonal cycles.

Our argumentation is built on four interconnected questions. By which process did an abundant mineral become a chemical element characterized by its electrochemical properties? How did it provide two materials in two different technological sectors? How do these materials provide a uniform and smooth flow of time fitting in the prevailing social framework? What are the benefits and risks of the regulating power of lithium-based materials?

Mineral and elemental profiles

Lithium is a ubiquitous substance. The Latin term “lithium” derives from the Ancient Greek, lithos, meaning stone, because it is found in a wide variety of minerals on the earth, in combination with other substances. As a chemical element lithium was discovered in 1810 in a period when chemists isolated and characterized dozens of simple bodies. This soft and light metal – the least dense metal- was isolated while analysing silicate compounds from the iron mine of Utö near Stockholm. As an “alkali metal” it is highly reactive with water and moist air, albeit with less energy than sodium. It has good electrical conductivity and is the most electronegative metal.

All these properties remained unnoticed until the 19th century when Jacob Berzelius characterized it. This soft silvery metal was known to combine with halogens, oxides, or sulphurs to give various solid salts with a high fusibility. Therefore, Berzelius arranged it among the “electro-positive metals” in his electro-chemical classification, by opposition to “metalloids” and “electro-negative metals”.

More recently the cosmological origin of lithium has been traced. It belongs to the short list of elements synthesized during the first three minutes of the universe. According to Big Bang models, the “gradual cooling of matter led to [… a] well-known mixture of primordial gas with a mass proportion of hydrogen to helium (H:He) of approximately 0.75:0.25 and a tiny admixture of lithium and an even tinier of heavier elements [beryllium]”.1 One hundred million years later, lithiumwas produced by stellar nucleosyntheses, scattered throughout galaxies, and incorporated into planetary bodies. On Earth, it participated in the evolutionary process of life by bridging gaps between inorganic and organic domains through “multiple physiological manifestations”: ionic transport, modulation of immune systems, stimulation of tissue growth, effects on metabolism, including defence against viruses and dermatological disorders.2

Thus, the ubiquitous and mundane substance viewed as a simple “stone” has been turned into a chemical element with remarkable properties and a long history dating back to the origins of  the universe. However, in science textbooks, this abstract and universal category tends to be divorced from the geological origin of the substance in the deposits -minerals and brines- where it can be extracted.  

One chemical with two distinct social lives

Thanks to its electrical properties, the chemical element was transmuted into two quite dissimilar active materials: a psychotropic drug for medicine, and battery component for energy storage in industry. Its material life, so far based on measurement and purification practices, was reconfigured as an agency performing actions of social interest on nervous and electric systems. A similar socialization process has been at work in the two applications of lithium.

In energy and psychiatry, the mundane chemical element raised to th social status of advanced material thanks to the joint efforts of industrial complexes, research laboratories and state policies. It became a strategic tool for psychiatric treatments in the 1970s and for energy storage in the 1990s. The genius of lithium materials—their highly valued performance—lies in lithium’s capacity to release its outer electron and to form the positive and small ion Li+. The same ionic form works as an electric carrier in both pills and batteries.

Battery devices operate through a reversible cycle of electrochemical charge and discharge. The discharge generates electrical current by releasing electrons flowing through the circuit. It is due to a chemical process of oxidation-reduction and ion transfer between two electrodes inside the cell. Usually, in lead-acid batteries for example, the oxidation of the metallic electrode (acting as an anode) produces protons (H+) moving in an aqueous electrolyte toward the negative solid electrode (acting as a cathode) where they are reduced. Lithium-ion battery is specific since the conduction is due to Li+ (instead of H+), the electrolyte is non-aqueous (LiPF6 in propylene carbonate), and the electrodes welcome ions within atomic layers (instead of outside surface). Thanks to their fast mobility, lithium ions have made highly conductive devices possible. As a consequence, in the early 1990s, the available energy density was increased fourfold, up to 160Wh/kg.3

In psychiatry, the mechanism of lithium action was much less well controlled because of the greater complexity of physiological compared to industrial processes. Nevertheless, neural circuits were known to transmit signals by the migration of chemicals, or neurotransmitters, from neuron to neuron through synapses. During the 20th century, pharmaceutical agents—artificial or natural chemicals—were clinically tested for their psychotropic effects on human brains. Among them, lithium ions were empirically found to “provide effective control” of the fluctuating moods of bipolar patients.4 Their electrochemical interactions with synapses tend to decrease neural excitability in the brain.

However, turning chemical structures into industrial materials and mass-market products is a long process with obstacles. Both lithium materials were the outcomes of research campaigns that required interdisciplinary teams and heavy investments. In energy, lithium-ion battery research gathered researchers from materials science and engineering, solid-state chemistry, electrochemistry and physics. Lithium batteries thus contributed to the emergence of “intercalation chemistry” and “solid state ionics”. In psychiatry, “pharmacologists, biochemists, physiologists, psychiatrists, psychologists, and many others, joined forces in the search of the century – the search for the key to mental illness”.5 In both cases, the research leading to commercial materials came from the convergence of instrumental tools (statistics, devices) and theoretical knowledge (models, theories) to stabilize results and provide efficient products.6

What historical circumstances and social pressures drove these intensive research efforts? The development and production of chemical drugs like lithium to regulate the nervous system of sufferers and reduce their pains were driven by the market for psychotropic drugs, which was worth US$ billions in the 1970s. chlorpromazine, synthesized by Rhône-Poulenc in the early 1950s and known as Thorazine, was the first anti-psychotic medication: it was used by European and North American psychiatrists to “calm many schizophrenic patients without sedating them […] Increasingly during the 1960s and 1970s, hospital psychiatrists were using a number of phenothiazine derivatives to treat schizophrenia, lithium carbonate to stabilize manic patients, and imipramine to relieve psychotic depression”.7 In the 1980s, around “one person in about two thousand” in the United Kingdom regularly took lithium for bipolar disorders.8 Many psychiatric practitioners were also interested in lithium ion for epistemic reasons. They thought that its structural simplicity as a neurotransmitter (compared to the more usual large organic molecules) and its chemical similarity to ubiquitous alkaline ions such as sodium and potassium in biological tissues made lithium ion suitable for investigating the psychotropic mechanisms of neurotransmitters and promised to provide “the key to mental illness”.9 The assumption of simplicity proved to be wrong. However, after decades of intensive pharmaceutical R&D to find other classes of drugs as anticonvulsants and atypical antipsychotics, lithium ion remains a specific regulator of “abnormal mood swings” in the 21st century.10

Research and development on the lithium-ion battery emerged in the late 1960s in the Western world, at the crossroad of academic, military, and industrial forces.11 From 1967 onward, new advanced electrodes and electrolytes for batteries were developed in universities (Archie Hickling at Leicester, John Goodenough at Oxford, Robert Huggins and Michel Armand at Stanford) and industrial research centers (Joseph Kummer at Ford Motor Company and Stanley Whittingham at Exxon). A NATO conference held in 1972 in Belgirate (Italy) spurred academic and industrial interactions. Soon after, the enthusiasm for electric vehicles was boosted by the oil crises and environmental critics against petroleum. The production of lithium-ion was boosted by the boom of telecommunication technology in the 1980s: working prototypes for electronic devices made by Sony in Japan (Akira Yoshino) led to the commercialization of lithium-cobalt-oxide batteries for laptops by Sony and AT&T in the early 1990s. Over the past decades Li-ion batteries have become even more attractive for the electrification of transports that promises the reduction of CO2 emissions. The advantages of Li-ion batteries for the energy transition have been frequently? advertised and were celebrated by the 2019 Nobel prize in chemistry awarded to John Goodenough, Stanley Whittingham and Akira Yoshino: “Lithium-ion batteries have brought the greatest benefit to humankind, as they have enabled the development of laptop computers, mobile phones, electric vehicles and the storage of energy generated by solar and wind power”.12 Lithium thus fuels the dream of a green future of economic growth through the transition from fossil energy to renewable energy despite the historical studies demonstrating that the so-called energy transition is in fact an accumulation rather than a substitution of sources of energy – coal, water, oil, gas, and atoms – which resulted in an increase of overall consumption of fossil fuels from 1950s to 2020s.13 The myth of a profitable economic growth through Li-ion batteries is also vulnerable to anthropological studies. In the context of an ERC research project “Worlds of lithium” the colonial dimension of this myth can be emphasized through the contrast between the bucolic future of green cities in the North with the actual present of the Southern countries confronted with the ecological and social impacts of the extraction of lithium from  minerals or brines. The capitalist project of a profitable renewable energy market allowing the economic growth of the North comes at the cost of the real conditions of the Southern countries such as Australia and Chile providing the sources of lithium.

Smoothing time in a bipolar world

In an elegant paper entitled “Lithium: Towards a theory of a bipolar transition”, Marina Weinberg and Cristóbal Bonelli use the bipolar category as a metaphor to convey the colonial pattern enabling the inequal distribution of wealth.14 In referring to the ancient Greek medical theory of humours, of bodily water-fluids that need to be balanced to secure health, they argue that the “manic mood of the capitalist North” is connected to “the depressive state of mind of the South”. And they link this world balance of humours to the Western notions of space and time as universal containers of geological and historical events. “By separating the world into continents, discrete and distinct, and imposing a single and universal linear time, these transitions, designed from the Global North, operate without considering the ecological relevance of the sustainability of interdependent ecological processes”.15

Although the bipolar metaphor is presumably inspired by the pharmaceutical use of lithium as a drug against bipolar disorders, the authors did not compare the real agency of lithium as a stabilizer of time in its medical and energy applications. However, the comparison goes beyond the metaphorical use of the psychiatric notion.

Lithium psychotropics have been used for about 70 years for preventing the dramatic episodes of depression that often lead to suicides of people with psychic disorders.16 Lithium is essential for what physicians eloquently call a “therapy of maintenance”. Patients with bipolar diseases treated by lithium for many years, no longer go through alternating episodes of mania and depression. They no longer experience the mixed condition known as “rapid cycling”: a mix of depressive, manic, hypomaniac moods in a 12-month period. As lithium prevents relapses and mood instability, it smooths out the ups and downs and affords an experience of time as a continuous flow of inert texture. This mood stabilizer improves the quality of life and social adaptation of patients suffering from bipolar disorders, mania, and depression.

In a quite different way the lithium-ion battery is one of the storing devices that is supposed to smooth the curves of production and consumption of energy in the transition from fossil energy to the renewable energy provided by intermittent solar or wind forces. The storage capacity of lithium batteries creates a more or less permanent present, where electricity never ceases to be within reach to power our electronic devices and electric vehicles. As they store energy, they create the illusion that we can afford to prioritize our personal timetable, a time regulated by social conventions and emancipated from the circadian cycles, from seasons, as well as from the cycles of carbon that regulate the climate of the Earth. Li-ion batteries thus sustain the modern ideal of emancipation from nature through technology.

Stabilizing a culture of ignorance

However, the promises of lithium as time stabilizer in both health and energy technologies are based on a socially constructed ignorance.17 The limitations and the impacts of both technologies are obfuscated, or treated as simple externalities, thus preventing the exploration of alternatives. In psychiatry, lithium ions are used to control symptoms without curing illnesses. In energy, lithium-ion batteries are highly inflammable due to the ether-based liquid electrolyte used by Sony. A safer technology based on solid-state electrolytes developed by Michel Armand, and providing less power per hour has not been investigated because it did not fit the profitable mass market of electric vehicles.18

Most importantly the side-effects of both uses of lithium as time stabilizer are systematically neglected or downplayed. Lithium drugs have been massively used to regulate and control the social behaviors of individuals for more than half a century despite their undesirable side effects on patients. Since the 1950s they have generated “crises” among patients such as thyroid disturbances, kidney damage, cardiac deficiency, and cardiac malformations of the fetus in  pregnant patients.19 Psychotropic drugs can also generate nauseous states and sickness in sufferers. Indeed the side effect issue is characteristic of the pharmakon: any drug has both poisonous and therapeutic actions. This old question is usually addressed through statistical models and clinical trials.  Yet, in the case of lithium, the negative side-effects have been generally minimized and considered as a lesser evil for a greater good, or a minor disadvantage for a greater benefit. Lithium psychotropics nevertheless generate a real loss in individual lives that generate ethical issues.20 Patients engaged in long-term lithium treatments are well adapted to the standard time and the rhythms of social constraints, but they lose part of their selves and their connections to the world. They can no longer enjoy what Virginia Woolf so nicely described as “moments of being”.21 These rare interludes emerge from the “cotton wool” of everyday life interrupting the ordinary time that flows silently by revealing a dense world, where things are linked together, entangled. They give the impression that, hidden within everyday life, there may be something else to discover. “Our self”, endlessly swinging between the need to “scrape” the surface of others and a call for the “gloom, cold, deep, inscrutable” of an inner-scape without clock, nor map, is buried under a stable chemical sociable self.22 Thus lithium is part of a medical culture that sacrifices the existential intensity and emotional identity of individuals to the standardization of time and discipline of the population.

Similarly the social-political upheavals and environmental disturbances generated by the mass production of Li-ion batteries are concealed by the promise of a green future of carbon-free energy. As mentioned above, the mass-market production of Li-ion batteries is organized around a tacit worldwide division of labor between North and South. South America, where the “lithium triangle” formed by Bolivia, Chile and Argentina gathers above 60% of the globe’ known lithium deposits, sells off cheaply its raw materials. Asia –China, Japan and South Korea – gathers the added value of industrial production. Finally, Europe and North America take the lion’s share of the storage battery market for electronic devices and electric vehicles. The well-being of European and North American populations is based on the social construction of ignorance of the environmental and social problems generated by extraction in South America for the economic benefit of Asian transnational companies,23 and for China’s geopolitical hegemonic ambitions.

Lithium batteries and lithium drugs are at once embedded in the modern vision of time as an empty and passive container of events and reinforce it. The smooth universal timeline of chronological time is so deeply entrenched in western culture that it prevails over alternative individual or collective experiences of time. And it will presumably persist in the 21st century with the help of lithium psychotropics although the lost individuality due to lithium treatment raises serious ethical concerns of personal care, and the massive extraction of critical materials for the manufacture of lithium batteries raises serious ethical concerns of social justice and geopolitical concerns worldwide.

*This paper is based on Pierre Teissier’s biographical essay on lithium  published in Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent ed. Biographies of Materials, World Scientific Publisher, London, Singapore : World Scientific, 2022, p. 223-238.

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