WEBVTT Kind: captions Language: en 1 00:00:00.870 --> 00:00:02.320 - And... rolling. 2 00:00:02.320 --> 00:00:03.930 I can't clickbait this video. 3 00:00:03.930 --> 00:00:07.380 I mean, I could, but it wouldn't really be fair to anyone involved. 4 00:00:07.380 --> 00:00:09.790 I know the title and the thumbnail aren't going to pull loads of people in, 5 00:00:09.790 --> 00:00:11.050 but I hope that you can trust me 6 00:00:11.050 --> 00:00:14.070 when I say: I promise this story is really interesting. 7 00:00:14.070 --> 00:00:15.110 Because it is. 8 00:00:15.110 --> 00:00:18.230 This is one of the best things I've found while researching in years. 9 00:00:18.230 --> 00:00:20.620 So this starts when I'm looking up old television shows 10 00:00:20.620 --> 00:00:22.800 and I'm about three research tangents deep, 11 00:00:22.800 --> 00:00:26.950 and I find this incredible line in a newspaper article from 1997: 12 00:00:26.950 --> 00:00:29.490 "The microwave was invented to meet a need 13 00:00:29.490 --> 00:00:32.713 "to heat hamsters humanely in 1950s laboratories." 14 00:00:33.570 --> 00:00:36.663 And I read that and I thought: that's ridiculous. No, it wasn't. 15 00:00:38.165 --> 00:00:38.998 Was it? 16 00:00:41.110 --> 00:00:43.440 There's a well-known story about the engineer 17 00:00:43.440 --> 00:00:45.010 who "invented the microwave". 18 00:00:45.010 --> 00:00:47.020 Percy Spencer, just after World War II, 19 00:00:47.020 --> 00:00:48.960 was working on one of the new military-grade radars 20 00:00:48.960 --> 00:00:50.990 while it was active, and he realised 21 00:00:50.990 --> 00:00:53.700 that the peanut bar in his back pocket had melted. 22 00:00:53.700 --> 00:00:57.390 Which implies that the radar also nearly cooked part of him as well? 23 00:00:57.390 --> 00:01:00.210 Unshielded radars are really dangerous, but it was the 1940s. 24 00:01:00.210 --> 00:01:02.650 The attitude to safety was a bit more lax. 25 00:01:02.650 --> 00:01:06.960 Now it wasn't a surprise that electromagnetic radiation could heat stuff. 26 00:01:06.960 --> 00:01:08.120 That had been known for a while. 27 00:01:08.120 --> 00:01:10.750 People had actually been using it for medical therapies for a while. 28 00:01:10.750 --> 00:01:13.020 Different wavelengths had different effects, 29 00:01:13.020 --> 00:01:16.570 but Percy Spencer was the first person to realise 30 00:01:16.570 --> 00:01:18.320 you could cook efficiently with the wavelengths 31 00:01:18.320 --> 00:01:21.800 that were put out by radar, and then realised 32 00:01:21.800 --> 00:01:24.880 that you could sell that, and then realised, 33 00:01:24.880 --> 00:01:26.680 well, I could turn that into a usable product. 34 00:01:26.680 --> 00:01:27.920 Because a massive radar dish 35 00:01:27.920 --> 00:01:30.750 is basically the same technology as this microwave. 36 00:01:30.750 --> 00:01:32.220 I'm not going to try and take this thing apart. 37 00:01:32.220 --> 00:01:33.140 I'm not qualified. 38 00:01:33.140 --> 00:01:35.130 And there is a high-voltage capacitor in here 39 00:01:35.130 --> 00:01:36.960 which can carry enough charge to kill. 40 00:01:36.960 --> 00:01:39.370 Don't mess about with these unless you know what you're doing. 41 00:01:39.370 --> 00:01:41.823 But inside here is... 42 00:01:45.090 --> 00:01:46.910 Inside here in the bit you can't access, 43 00:01:46.910 --> 00:01:49.500 there's a microwave generator called a magnetron. 44 00:01:49.500 --> 00:01:52.400 It moves electric current past a big magnet with a hole in it. 45 00:01:52.400 --> 00:01:56.160 And because... physics, that produces electromagnetic radiation. 46 00:01:56.160 --> 00:01:57.890 Tune the size of the hole in the magnet, 47 00:01:57.890 --> 00:01:59.690 you get different frequencies of radiation. 48 00:01:59.690 --> 00:02:03.103 The best analogy I've found is that it's like blowing air over glass bottles 49 00:02:03.103 --> 00:02:05.610 and changing the pitch by changing the amount of water inside. 50 00:02:05.610 --> 00:02:09.144 So... [glass whistling at different tones]. 51 00:02:09.144 --> 00:02:10.570 That, but with electricity. 52 00:02:10.570 --> 00:02:12.280 ...look, I don't have a physics degree. 53 00:02:12.280 --> 00:02:15.470 Long story short, a magnetron converts electricity 54 00:02:15.470 --> 00:02:17.520 into electromagnetic radiation. 55 00:02:17.520 --> 00:02:19.810 You send pulses of that radiation out into the sky 56 00:02:19.810 --> 00:02:22.120 and you listen for the echoes, you've got radar 57 00:02:22.120 --> 00:02:24.130 and you've helped win World War II. 58 00:02:24.130 --> 00:02:25.500 Or you could put a magnetron 59 00:02:25.500 --> 00:02:28.440 inside a safe radiation-proof box called a Faraday cage, 60 00:02:28.440 --> 00:02:29.450 you tune the wavelengths 61 00:02:29.450 --> 00:02:31.670 so that water absorbs the radiation easily, 62 00:02:31.670 --> 00:02:35.010 and you've got a microwave. And you can cook lunch. 63 00:02:35.010 --> 00:02:38.020 The technical term is "diathermic heating". 64 00:02:38.020 --> 00:02:40.270 In less than a year after the melting peanut bar incident, 65 00:02:40.270 --> 00:02:44.200 which could so easily have been, like, the "cooked hand incident" or worse, 66 00:02:44.200 --> 00:02:45.810 but less than a year after that 67 00:02:45.810 --> 00:02:48.760 that engineer's company, defence contractor Raytheon, 68 00:02:48.760 --> 00:02:51.600 they release the first commercial microwave. 69 00:02:51.600 --> 00:02:53.110 It was called the Radarange. 70 00:02:53.110 --> 00:02:55.120 It was the size of a fridge. It had to be actively cooled. 71 00:02:55.120 --> 00:02:57.390 It was incredibly expensive 72 00:02:57.390 --> 00:03:00.240 and it was designed for big commercial kitchens. 73 00:03:00.240 --> 00:03:02.290 That was 1947. 74 00:03:02.290 --> 00:03:03.780 The first microwave as we'd know it today, 75 00:03:03.780 --> 00:03:06.980 a cheap box that you plug in, that was from the late 1960s 76 00:03:06.980 --> 00:03:09.730 once magnetron technology had moved on a bit. 77 00:03:09.730 --> 00:03:12.960 At no point in that well-referenced, well-known story 78 00:03:12.960 --> 00:03:17.837 does anyone mention heating hamsters in laboratories in the 1950s. 79 00:03:17.837 --> 00:03:19.370 [microwave dings] 80 00:03:19.370 --> 00:03:21.510 So that should be pretty easy to disprove, right? 81 00:03:21.510 --> 00:03:22.600 It's going to be an urban legend. 82 00:03:22.600 --> 00:03:24.440 There are a lot of urban legends like that. 83 00:03:24.440 --> 00:03:26.010 So I started doing some journal searches 84 00:03:26.010 --> 00:03:28.650 and pretty quickly I found papers from the 1950s 85 00:03:28.650 --> 00:03:32.290 talking about the reanimation of frozen rats and hamsters. 86 00:03:32.290 --> 00:03:33.730 Those papers were written by scientists 87 00:03:33.730 --> 00:03:35.930 at the National Institute for Medical Research, 88 00:03:35.930 --> 00:03:37.400 a government laboratory in Mill Hill, 89 00:03:37.400 --> 00:03:40.240 in suburban North London, about half a mile that way. 90 00:03:40.240 --> 00:03:41.690 I would have filmed closer to that, 91 00:03:41.690 --> 00:03:43.610 but unfortunately, it was pulled down a few years ago 92 00:03:43.610 --> 00:03:46.070 and the whole area is now a load of new-build housing. 93 00:03:46.070 --> 00:03:48.910 Anyway, National Institute For Medical Research. 94 00:03:48.910 --> 00:03:52.270 In the 1950s, that research included cryobiology, 95 00:03:52.270 --> 00:03:54.570 the effects of extreme cold on bodies and tissue. 96 00:03:54.570 --> 00:03:59.630 Scientists at that lab froze rats and hamsters beyond the point of death. 97 00:03:59.630 --> 00:04:01.840 They used ice and a bath of propylene glycol, 98 00:04:01.840 --> 00:04:03.820 which is airplane de-icer, held at below zero, 99 00:04:03.820 --> 00:04:07.410 and at that point, the animal is dead and will not recover on its own. 100 00:04:07.410 --> 00:04:10.500 No heart rate, no breathing, core temperature around 1°C, 101 00:04:10.500 --> 00:04:14.740 somewhere between 10 and 50% of the animal's body water frozen to ice. 102 00:04:14.740 --> 00:04:17.250 And then by applying hot spatulas to the chest 103 00:04:17.250 --> 00:04:19.640 or high-intensity hot beams of light 104 00:04:19.640 --> 00:04:21.870 the researchers would try to warm the animals up 105 00:04:21.870 --> 00:04:24.650 and bring them back to life. The success rate wasn't great 106 00:04:24.650 --> 00:04:26.010 and the animals were often left with burns, 107 00:04:26.010 --> 00:04:28.820 but it did sometimes work. 108 00:04:28.820 --> 00:04:30.360 We'll get to why they were doing that later! 109 00:04:30.360 --> 00:04:34.400 But by 1955, one of the researchers has the idea to use a magnetron, 110 00:04:34.400 --> 00:04:36.324 reasoning that it'd be a lot more safe and humane 111 00:04:36.324 --> 00:04:39.070 to reheat the whole animal at once rather than risk burning it. 112 00:04:39.070 --> 00:04:40.730 Actually, I say one of the researchers, 113 00:04:40.730 --> 00:04:43.560 there's a name on that paper that might be a bit familiar. 114 00:04:43.560 --> 00:04:46.370 James Lovelock, one of the last independent scientists, 115 00:04:46.370 --> 00:04:50.049 born in 1919, back when "scientist" could be an entire job description 116 00:04:50.049 --> 00:04:52.730 rather than "botanist" or "physicist" or "computational linguist". 117 00:04:52.730 --> 00:04:54.330 Someone who worked across disciplines 118 00:04:54.330 --> 00:04:57.820 on whatever they found interesting or whatever they were hired to do. 119 00:04:57.820 --> 00:04:59.920 Lovelock is best known for inventing Gaia theory, 120 00:04:59.920 --> 00:05:02.540 the idea of earth as a self-regulating system. 121 00:05:02.540 --> 00:05:04.700 He also invented the electronic capture detector 122 00:05:04.700 --> 00:05:08.180 which found CFCs in the atmosphere and helped discover the ozone hole. 123 00:05:08.180 --> 00:05:11.110 Hardware that he helped design for NASA is sitting on Mars 124 00:05:11.110 --> 00:05:14.470 because it landed there with the Viking probes in 1976. 125 00:05:14.470 --> 00:05:17.670 And one of the early projects in his career, back in the 1950s 126 00:05:17.670 --> 00:05:21.736 was at the National Institute for Medical Research freezing rats and hamsters, 127 00:05:21.736 --> 00:05:24.483 and he had the idea to use microwave di-a-ther-my..., 128 00:05:24.483 --> 00:05:26.241 dia-tha-my? dia-tha...? 129 00:05:26.607 --> 00:05:27.815 [keyboard clicks] 130 00:05:29.596 --> 00:05:30.429 - "Diathermy." 131 00:05:30.429 --> 00:05:31.550 - To reheat them. 132 00:05:31.550 --> 00:05:33.850 But the papers and anecdotes from back then 133 00:05:33.850 --> 00:05:35.090 all seem to contradict each other. 134 00:05:35.090 --> 00:05:36.540 The timeline is difficult to piece together. 135 00:05:36.540 --> 00:05:40.630 There are reliable sources with completely different stories and claims. 136 00:05:40.630 --> 00:05:43.060 So I went to ask him about it. 137 00:05:43.060 --> 00:05:45.020 - "Do you know you're the first person to come 138 00:05:45.020 --> 00:05:47.140 "and ask me about the freezing work?" 139 00:05:47.140 --> 00:05:49.410 - Because James Lovelock, at 101 years old 140 00:05:49.410 --> 00:05:52.020 lives somewhere vaguely round here on the south coast of England, 141 00:05:52.020 --> 00:05:54.000 goes for a walk along the coast every day, 142 00:05:54.000 --> 00:05:55.690 and was happy to be interviewed. 143 00:05:55.690 --> 00:05:57.890 - One biologist, Audrey Smith, 144 00:05:57.890 --> 00:06:02.050 was able to revive a hamster that had been frozen. 145 00:06:02.050 --> 00:06:06.060 When they woke up, they got a gigantic burn all across their chest 146 00:06:06.060 --> 00:06:09.050 and that must have been pretty painful, and it was messy. 147 00:06:09.050 --> 00:06:11.510 I thought, this is a lousy way to do it. 148 00:06:11.510 --> 00:06:13.837 So I said, "Why don't you use diathermy?" 149 00:06:13.837 --> 00:06:22.220 For 10 shillings of my own money I bought a surplus RAF transmitter, 150 00:06:22.220 --> 00:06:27.292 joined it up, and sure enough, it poured out 30 watts at 30 megahertz, 151 00:06:27.292 --> 00:06:32.050 Which is just about right. And I took it into the lab the next day. 152 00:06:32.050 --> 00:06:34.887 And I said, "Look, here's your diathermy." 153 00:06:35.780 --> 00:06:38.790 I thought this is very untidy, made some inquiries 154 00:06:38.790 --> 00:06:42.040 and sure enough, there were 10-centimetre magnetrons 155 00:06:42.040 --> 00:06:47.370 that had been invented by Boot and Randall at Birmingham University during the war. 156 00:06:47.370 --> 00:06:50.370 To get hold of one of those is not easy. 157 00:06:50.370 --> 00:06:53.660 And this is where being in a government department helped a bit. 158 00:06:53.660 --> 00:06:55.127 So I just made a few inquiries. 159 00:06:55.127 --> 00:06:56.120 "How do I get hold...?" 160 00:06:56.120 --> 00:07:00.950 And they said, "Oh, well, they're working on them down at... just above Portsmouth." 161 00:07:00.950 --> 00:07:05.730 I said, "Any chance of borrowing one of your magnetrons?" 162 00:07:05.730 --> 00:07:07.060 And he said, "Oh no." 163 00:07:07.060 --> 00:07:12.340 He said, "We can give you one if you want. It's an interesting cause, why not?" 164 00:07:12.340 --> 00:07:18.890 I've joined this up with a waveguide, into a metal box. 165 00:07:18.890 --> 00:07:25.300 It wasn't so much a box. It was just a thing made out of 166 00:07:25.300 --> 00:07:28.960 chicken wire, except it's finer than chicken wire, 167 00:07:28.960 --> 00:07:30.760 a bit closer to mesh. 168 00:07:30.760 --> 00:07:34.600 And that was just like the box of a microwave oven. 169 00:07:34.600 --> 00:07:37.160 And I fed the microwaves into it. 170 00:07:37.160 --> 00:07:40.220 And I told Audrey, now, put your hamster in there! 171 00:07:40.220 --> 00:07:41.340 - That's a microwave. 172 00:07:41.340 --> 00:07:43.930 James Lovelock may not have invented THE first microwave 173 00:07:43.930 --> 00:07:45.600 but he certainly invented A microwave. 174 00:07:45.600 --> 00:07:47.830 The idea of using magnetrons to heat stuff wasn't his, 175 00:07:47.830 --> 00:07:51.270 but no one else was putting one in a Faraday cage box on a desktop. 176 00:07:51.270 --> 00:07:54.710 Big commercial microwaves for restaurant kitchens aren't the same thing, and besides, 177 00:07:54.710 --> 00:07:57.320 they weren't even on sale in the UK until a few years later. 178 00:07:57.320 --> 00:08:03.280 - I put a potato in it and baked it. And it was perfectly all right. 179 00:08:03.280 --> 00:08:07.660 - The safety procedures were occasionally a bit lax by modern standards. 180 00:08:07.660 --> 00:08:10.690 - In the course of the experiments while we were building it 181 00:08:10.690 --> 00:08:14.690 the thing was running open and the radiation 182 00:08:14.690 --> 00:08:16.660 was bouncing all round the room 183 00:08:16.660 --> 00:08:20.892 and the light bulbs would light up without warning. 184 00:08:20.892 --> 00:08:27.747 The filament just had the same wavelength as the radiation, 185 00:08:27.747 --> 00:08:31.003 and it would absorb it and light up. 186 00:08:32.300 --> 00:08:34.960 And pound notes were the funniest one. 187 00:08:34.960 --> 00:08:39.590 They'd catch fire because the metal strip inside was 188 00:08:39.590 --> 00:08:42.130 just about the wavelength of the magnetron. 189 00:08:42.130 --> 00:08:45.380 - And here's the really amazing thing, it worked. 190 00:08:45.380 --> 00:08:49.280 - We put the hamster in there, frozen solid. 191 00:08:49.280 --> 00:08:50.790 And I mean frozen solid. 192 00:08:50.790 --> 00:08:53.923 It was like a bit of wood when you dropped it on the bench. 193 00:08:55.435 --> 00:08:58.440 Turned the thing up to full power on the microwave, 194 00:08:58.440 --> 00:09:02.460 which was about a kilowatt coming out of it. 195 00:09:02.460 --> 00:09:05.700 And with a timer. 196 00:09:05.700 --> 00:09:10.370 And after so many seconds, the hamster woke up, 197 00:09:10.370 --> 00:09:12.540 started wandering around. 198 00:09:12.540 --> 00:09:14.450 - Do I need to say, don't try this at home? 199 00:09:14.450 --> 00:09:16.230 I mean there are enough people of all ages watching 200 00:09:16.230 --> 00:09:18.050 that statistically yes, I do need to say it. 201 00:09:18.050 --> 00:09:20.060 Don't try this at home. It's unnecessary cruelty. 202 00:09:20.060 --> 00:09:22.910 You won't be doing medical research, you'll be doing a crime. 203 00:09:22.910 --> 00:09:24.370 Context is really important, 204 00:09:24.370 --> 00:09:28.030 but also the research has been done! More than 50 years ago. 205 00:09:28.030 --> 00:09:30.660 There are charts of survival rate and heating, 206 00:09:30.660 --> 00:09:32.520 and it turns out that with a microwave, 207 00:09:32.520 --> 00:09:35.770 because that's what this was, with a precise calibrated microwave 208 00:09:35.770 --> 00:09:39.510 and with artificial respiration to start pumping oxygen around the body 209 00:09:39.510 --> 00:09:43.230 almost every rodent they froze was successfully reanimated. 210 00:09:43.230 --> 00:09:44.920 That's the word that the biologists use. 211 00:09:44.920 --> 00:09:47.400 Reanimation. Healthy, behaving as usual 212 00:09:47.400 --> 00:09:50.660 and given a retirement at an animal home, according to one of the papers. 213 00:09:50.660 --> 00:09:55.520 Back from being frozen to death, sometimes multiple times. 214 00:09:55.520 --> 00:09:58.420 So the last question is: why? 215 00:09:58.420 --> 00:10:03.810 - Well, this could be of immense importance to medicine. 216 00:10:03.810 --> 00:10:11.610 So for preserving tissues for transfer and also for blood transfusions 217 00:10:11.610 --> 00:10:15.730 because at the moment blood was kept at the blood bank 218 00:10:15.730 --> 00:10:18.570 for three weeks and then thrown down the sink. 219 00:10:18.570 --> 00:10:21.480 - Imagine if that had worked on bigger animals. 220 00:10:21.480 --> 00:10:23.820 Back then humanity did not know what the limits were. 221 00:10:23.820 --> 00:10:25.320 This was an open question. 222 00:10:25.320 --> 00:10:28.580 The reason that all those 1960s science fiction writers and comic book authors 223 00:10:28.580 --> 00:10:34.310 had people being frozen in time or astronauts being sent off in cryosleep 224 00:10:34.310 --> 00:10:36.510 might be because, for a little while, 225 00:10:36.510 --> 00:10:38.800 it looked like that might actually be possible. 226 00:10:38.800 --> 00:10:42.100 If freezing and diathermic reheating worked on hamsters... 227 00:10:42.100 --> 00:10:43.370 then maybe it would work on rabbits. 228 00:10:43.370 --> 00:10:45.490 If it worked on rabbits, then maybe it'd work on primates. 229 00:10:45.490 --> 00:10:49.290 And if it worked on primates... then maybe it'd work on humans. 230 00:10:49.290 --> 00:10:51.460 It didn't, unfortunately. It doesn't scale up. 231 00:10:51.460 --> 00:10:54.148 - You cannot freeze a human. 232 00:10:54.148 --> 00:11:02.770 It's partly a matter of how quickly you can get the anti-freeze agent 233 00:11:02.770 --> 00:11:04.960 to diffuse into the cells. 234 00:11:04.960 --> 00:11:06.820 A human's too big. 235 00:11:06.820 --> 00:11:12.100 It's just a matter of size. A hamster is an acceptable size. 236 00:11:12.100 --> 00:11:14.160 - Sometimes research hits a brick wall. 237 00:11:14.160 --> 00:11:16.740 Find out a neat thing about hamsters, check. 238 00:11:16.740 --> 00:11:20.033 Casually invent a microwave and then don't commercialise it. Check. 239 00:11:20.033 --> 00:11:23.860 Find a way to safely send astronauts to other planets? 240 00:11:23.860 --> 00:11:26.330 Not this time, unfortunately, but the researchers tried 241 00:11:26.330 --> 00:11:28.920 and that feels like a story that shouldn't be buried 242 00:11:28.920 --> 00:11:31.850 as a vague anecdote in a newspaper from years ago. 243 00:11:31.850 --> 00:11:34.710 - I think in an awful lot of science 244 00:11:34.710 --> 00:11:39.690 where there's a success it's not a scientific thing. 245 00:11:39.690 --> 00:11:43.450 It's an invention, which is something quite different. 246 00:11:43.450 --> 00:11:48.050 And I think personally I'm much more of an inventor than a scientist. 247 00:11:48.050 --> 00:11:49.740 - My thanks to James Lovelock for his time. 248 00:11:49.740 --> 00:11:53.000 His latest book "Novacene" is part memoir and part look to the future 249 00:11:53.000 --> 00:11:54.933 and there's a link to it in the description. 250 00:11:55.780 --> 00:11:57.580 - Oh, that was a mistake. 251 00:11:57.580 --> 00:11:58.413 That was... I... 252 00:12:00.998 --> 00:12:03.000 Oh that's going to be a nightmare to wash. 253 00:12:03.000 --> 00:12:05.280 All right, well, I guess I don't get a second take, 'cos... 254 00:12:05.280 --> 00:12:06.903 I put that on low!