How Science Got Us to 2020 | Compilation

[Music] the year 2020 will no doubt be a big year for science it's a new decade and at times like these we often take the opportunity to look back and see how far we've come scientists who came before us made sure our food and drugs are free from poison and built the devices that make our modern lives possible so as we forge ahead into the new year let's take some time to thank the intrepid researchers volunteers and even the occasional dog who got us to this point first up imagine volunteering to be poisoned in the name of making food safer for everyone that really happened in the early 20th century these experiments weren't terribly safe or ethical or rigorous but they are the reason you can be confident your food doesn't have washing powder in it let's go to Stefan for more I think we can all agree that food is pretty great so participating in an experiment where almost all you have to do is eat three delicious meals every day for up to a year sounds kind of like the dream but imagine knowing that hidden in one of the foods maybe the butter maybe the freshly picked peas is a substance that's probably toxic sounds unthinkable today but that was the set up of some of the strangest and most infamous human experiments in American history known as the poison squads they ran for five years starting in 1902 and even though they wouldn't pass any scientific ethics committee today they were revolutionary at the time because people started to realize that maybe they should make sure the things are safe to eat before eating them the trials were the brainchild of Harvey Washington Wiley the head chemist with the US Department of Agriculture back then food additives didn't have to be tested or even put on labels and he wasn't really okay with the idea that no one in America had any way of knowing what they were actually eating unless they had grown or raised at themselves formaldehyde for example regularly popped up in milk to keep it from sour yeah the known carcinogen that we used to preserve dead bodies he'd also often find borax a mineral that contains sodium and boron in meat made the meat firmer which made it seem fresher especially when combined with an extra pinch of salt and red food color these days borax is a common ingredient in things like detergent and pesticides and we're not talking tiny insignificant amounts of this stuff either no one had bothered to investigate whether these additives were actually safe to eat so with 5,000 bucks from the government Wylie hired a chef promised a bunch of otherwise great free food and recruited a dozen healthy young men as volunteers he took their weight in vitals made them collect their urine and feces and gave them weekly physicals then they started with a low dose of a specific chemical and went up stopping only when the men were too sick to continue the first poison Squad tackled borax and it's derivative boric acid because they were so common at first the chef hid the chemicals in butter or milk but the volunteers could taste the metallic flavor and instinctively avoided it because no one wants to eat butter that tastes like their silverware Riley still needed the men to get the right dosage so he just put the borax and pills for them to pop about halfway through their meals Bon Appetit the guys on the poison squad reported stomach pains and feeling less hungry when were fed two to three grams of borax a day had four grams they became very tired developed headaches and couldn't work normally which sounds like an average Monday to me but apparently in their case it was caused by the borax through other trials Wiley also found that if they took a lower dose of half a gram a day for long enough they'd get similar symptoms today we know that eating borax can cause tissue damage which can eventually lead to fund things like vomiting and convulsions so thanks for saving us from that one poison Squad thankfully though almost no one walked away from these experiments with any obvious long-term problems Riley also tested copper sulfate which was added to things like canned peas to make them bright green as well as formaldehyde sodium benzoate and salicylic acid and while the effects on the men varied Wiley concluded that none of the additives were safe today any scientists looking back at these trials would be horrified by not only the ethical problems because giving people potentially deadly substances even if they know about them is never okay but also the poor experimental design for one thing the participants knew they were eating a potential poison which could have easily skewed the symptoms they reported and made them feel more sick than they actually were not to mention that for the most part the experiment had no real control group in between testing each substance the squads were given a break for several weeks but they weren't asked to continue reporting symptoms or to keep collecting their urine or fecal samples you also can't really conclude much from a small and specific group of people Wylie thought that if healthy young men got sick the same chemical would also be unsafe for women and children it's not really how biology works though and a few dozen white guys didn't exactly represent all of America but even though there were a lot of flaws with this experiment it was the first time somebody thought to test food additives and study them one at a time later research that was actually reliable led to almost all of these additives being banned from food except for sodium benzoate which is a common preservative in acidic foods like orange juice and soda but we only use it because we've tested it and it's considered safe journalists loved covering the happenings in the DC lab kitchen so people across the country started thinking seriously about the things that might be used to preserve their food in 1906 partly because of the public's new awareness Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act a precursor to today's more rigorous regulations those concerns also led to the creation of the FDA which is the organization that make sure the ingredients in your food aren't gonna kill you for the most part anyway if you decide to crack open ten thousand cans of baked beans there's not much they can do to help that one's on you since Wylie was so instrumental in protecting America's food he's often called the father of the agency so the poison squads were a really horrible idea and full of sketchy science but because of the progress we've made since then going to the supermarket today is a whole lot safer I don't know I hear formaldehyde laced beans are pretty tasty a lot of our historical episodes have looked at medicine and health maybe that's because saving a lot of lives is a pretty good way to be remembered but it's not just drugs that have changed our lives for the better like all the work that went into bringing you the phone that's probably in your pocket right now or at least somewhere within arm's reach for phones the ubiquitous pocket electronic device was the calculator less glamorous sure but there's a lot going on with that little four function piece of plastic your teachers passed around in elementary school here's Hank with more we don't think of pocket calculators as being all that special these days they're cheap easy to use and your phone can do all that stuff anyway right but the development of the pocket calculator mirrors the electronics revolution that brought us smartphones and modern computers in fact some technologies we now take for granted found their first widespread use in electronic calculators in the 1960s and 70s and the first sort of compact electronic calculators couldn't fit in your pocket they were the size of a typewriter and demanded so much power that they needed a wall outlet for example the Anita mark 8 was available in the early 1960s and cost as much as a car at the time it performed basic arithmetic functions by using vacuum tubes basically airtight chambers with filaments inside which could shuttle electrons in precise ways to generate currents and act as switches the name was short for either a new inspiration to arithmetic or a new inspiration to accounting which gives you a clue as to who bought these expensive machines but soon there were a couple major technological leaps that revolutionized calculators and also the rest of electronics and the whole world first for calculators to become cheaper more portable and less fragile vacuum tubes were replaced with transistors and integrated circuits a transistor functions like a gate for electrons basically by applying electrical power it can either be opened or closed these binary states are still the basic idea behind all electronics and typically transistors are made from a material called a semiconductor which sometimes conducts electricity and sometimes doesn't early transistor electronics like the super popular transistor radio for consumers would string individual transistors together in series transistors were way smaller and sturdier than vacuum tubes but more complex devices like computers were still fairly big in the late 1950s though engineers invented the integrated circuit a single semiconductor chip that had all parts of a circuit on it including many transistors one of those engineers worked at Texas Instruments the company knew it had something good on its hands but struggled to find a good consumer outlet for these compact chips that is until 1965 with the design of the first prototype electronic pocket calculator it was codenamed Caltech measured about 10 by 15 centimeters and could perform the four basic arithmetic functions addition subtraction multiplication and division it's chip required the equivalent of thousands of transistors they even built a version for testing without integrated circuits which according to one designer took up an entire two-tiered 2 meter tall desk so integrated circuits really packed a punch these days we call the microchips and we put them in the everything Caltech also printed out results on a roll of tape using a thermal printer this was also pretty new at the time and worked by basically melting text into a special type of paper like the receipts you get at the grocery store see I team actually wanted an electronic display but that technology wasn't great yet LEDs at the time had poor visibility LEDs work based on passing an electric current or field through a semiconductor which causes electrons to shift around and emit light the color of the light can be altered by introducing different elements which is easier said than done it's taken decades to make LEDs in every color of the rainbow early on gallium and arsenic based LEDs were only capable of emitting infrared light and very dim red light because of the way electrons move through those particular elements lots of pocket calculators after the Caltech did feature red LED displays but they demanded a ton of battery power because those early systems weren't very energy-efficient the next revolution in calculators was the liquid crystal display or LCD liquid crystals have molecules that are free to move like a liquid but can settle into an ordered state like a crystalline solid dual identity means they can block or transmit light and switch between states rapidly when there's an input like electricity that's why we use them in electronic displays the first LCDs were fragile and only worked at high temperatures but a breakthrough came in perfecting a mix of chemicals that behave as liquid crystals at room temperature other developments made them quicker and more durable as well LCDs used less power than LEDs so calculators could run off a watch battery instead of large battery packs alongside digital watches pocket calculators were the first widespread consumer use of the LCD display nowadays you'll hear about LED and LCD technologies when you're researching what kind of TV you might want to buy over the next few decades calculators became slimmer cheaper and more powerful they evolved from specialized tools for business to a status symbol to a basic tool that you're probably gonna get for free as a promo at an event at certainly where I got mine but all this development eventually slowed to a crawl so you wouldn't carry a separate calculator either unless you're still in school and eat it for the SAT or something they've stayed basic machines to help with learning not flashy internet-enabled devices and that is how the Golden Age fizzled but calculators played a huge part in the consumer electronics revolution popularizing display technology and the computer chip itself nothing to sneeze at funny you should mention sneezing yes were headed back to the world of medicine specifically the flu there's a bacterium out there in the world called Haemophilus influenzae which has nothing to do with influenza but for a while scientists thought it did so they gave it that name how could they make such a huge mistake stefan explains if you're coughing sneezing or starting to feel under the weather you might blame a virus or possibly a bacteria which is not something humans have known to do for very long around 400 BCE doctors might have blamed an imbalance of the for vital humors for your illness and around the 1700s they might have pointed to an invisible disease carrying fog instead but today we know pathogens viruses bacteria and certain other microbes are responsible for many diseases but linking specific diseases to the microbes that caused them has been surprisingly tricky in 1882 a scientist named Robert Koch demonstrated that the bacterium Mycobacterium tuberculosis causes tuberculosis and in 1890 he also published a framework for future scientists to make similar discoveries created a checklist for researchers to reference anytime they're trying to link a pathogen to a disease the steps are as follows first researchers had to be able to find the pathogen in sick organisms but not in healthy one second it could be grown in pure culture which means that a sample of the microbe could be taken from a sick organism and then the microbe could grow independently in a 19th century version of a petri dish third if they exposed a healthy organism to the stuff that they grew in step two that organism would get sick with the same disease and finally although this step is sometimes considered optional the same microbe that was isolated in step one must be found again in the organism made sick in step three these steps are now known as Koch's postulates the idea is that if the microbe meets all of the postulates then you know it's the cause of the disease unfortunately his postulates had a few problems take postulate one tuberculosis can actually be found in healthy individuals that's called latent tuberculosis so it doesn't meet cokes first postulate this situation just didn't show up in his experiments which were done in guinea pigs postulate three isn't perfect either assuming that any healthy organism exposed to a pathogen will get sick ignores differences in immune systems a healthy organism might be able to fight off the infection or might already be immune to the disease but it was the second postulate that caused the most confusion something grown in pure culture has to be the only living thing in the dish and many pathogens just can't grow independently like that viruses for example reproduced by hijacking molecular machinery in the cells of the organism they're infecting meaning you can't grow them in a dish by themselves but bacteria often grown a dish just fine because postulate 2 required the thing to grow in culture researchers at the turn of the 20th century would almost exclusively blame bacteria for the diseases they were studying which resulted in some false accusations malaria which is actually caused by blood infecting parasites was blamed on a bacterium from Italian marshes in the 1880s which they named bacillus malaria canine distemper sometimes deadly disease in dogs that causes symptoms like fever and vomiting was linked to a series of different bacteria before it was finally proven to be a virus in the 1920s and the familiar influenza or the flu was misidentified as a bacterium in 1892 by a colleague of coax the bacterium came to be known as Haemophilus influenzae to study the flu researchers needed samples of spit and snot from people with obvious symptoms but one thing that made influenza hard to study was that even though the flu usually reaches a peak in winter the only time that scientists could reliably find large numbers of flu ridden folks at the same time was during a pandemic and those could be decades apart so the first chance scientists had to check the results from 1892 was during the next influenza pandemic in 1918 and the researchers were unable to replicate those initial results but it wasn't clear at the time if it was because of poorly controlled studies in the chaos of one of the worst pandemics in recent history and the end of World War one or if they were just wrong a vaccine was developed in New York based on hema Phyllis just in case there was at least one study around that time that managed to find evidence of the right answer influenza is a virus but it took until 1933 and another influenza pandemic for scientists to prove without a doubt that the flu is caused by a virus thanks to the introduction of ferrets as a model organism ferrets were the only small mammals they could find that could actually get the flu and show symptoms similar to ours so it seemed like Koch's postulates especially the second really hindered research into any disease that didn't have a bacterium behind it but does that mean they're useless not at all since the 1880s scientists have tweaked Koch's postulates over time to match modern understandings of pathogens today the focus isn't just on microbes but on their genes using genetic sequencing scientists can gather information about all of the nucleic acids in a sample whether DNA or RNA and then use a modified version of Koch's postulates to figure out which genes are most associated with disease symptoms for example in 1996 scientists at Stanford came up with a new set of postulates with seven gene-centric points by using gene sequencing scientists can find pathogens that haven't been isolated and identified before and there's no need to culture that Koch's postulates provided a solid foundation for researchers to begin linking diseases to their sources and sure there were a few mistakes but they provided a rigorous testable basis for understanding disease even if we had to come along and make some changes later and even if some ferrets had to get the sniffles incremental progress is the name of the game in science being wrong is often not a bad thing at least not with the right attitude but sometimes it's more about quiet persistence even when your colleagues think you're wrong some scientists are never recognized in their lifetimes despite saving tons of lives and practically defining their field like Jon Snow not that Jon Snow here's Hank to tell us more these days most people are like me they hear the name John snow and they think of Game of Thrones or they think of that British news anchor but before there was John snow the news anchor and before there was John snow the fan beloved brother of the Nights Watch there was Jon Snow with an H the 19th century medical doctor from England but dr. Jon Snow has a few claims to fame including developing early anesthetics and administering anesthesia for the Queen while she delivered two of her kids but mostly he is remembered for the way he fought cholera in the 1850s his timely action and clever thinking stopped an outbreak and even though he was never recognized during his lifetime he's now considered one of the founders of Epidemiology our story begins in mid nineteenth century London which was in a word gross in two words similar gross like many cities in the eighteen hundred's London saw a huge increase in population and with that came a huge increase in poop which nobody knew quite how to deal with sewer systems hadn't quite spread to the entire city so in places like the Soho district people sloshed their waste into the streets dumped it into overflowing cesspools or trucked it over to the Thames river the river that notably also served as the city's primary water supply during this period maybe unsurprisingly London and the rest of Europe were also being plagued with persistent outbreaks of Cholera a highly infectious sometimes deadly diarrhea illness and there was considerable disagreement over why we didn't know that bacteria and viruses were at the root of most infectious diseases so the prevailing idea was miasma theory which said that they were passed around by bad air this is where Jon Snow came in he had encountered cholera before in mining populations and had come to believe the disease was not spread by air but by ingesting stuff contaminated with human waste after all the miners brought their meals to work didn't have a bathroom down there and probably didn't wash their hands before eating gross when snow observed the situation in London he therefore concluded that cholera was being spread by tiny fecal particles in the water and in 1854 he got a to prove it the year before a new collar outbreak reached a London borough near snows home and it killed more than 500 people in a matter of weeks based on the area snow was suspicious of one water pump on Broad Street specifically after his sample of the water turned up visible white flecks of organic material so he obtained a list of some people who had been killed by the outbreak and began talking to their families and ultimately he found the common factor was where those victims had gotten their water that pump on Broad Street snow then took his evidence to the local officials who agreed to take the handle off the pump to prevent people from using it but even then nobody really believed snow about why including Britain's general Board of Health it's possible that his sample size wasn't enough to convince them or maybe it was the fact that he couldn't prove what in the water was causing the illness in any case snow was confident enough in his findings that when other cholera outbreaks appeared he continued trying to find the contaminated water behind them and ultimately that led him to a more citywide discovery at some point snow realized all the districts in London affected by the outbreaks had their water piped in from one of two suppliers one that got their water from upstream of London and one that got it from downstream he suspected the downstream water as you might also suspect had a bunch of sewage in it so cholera should have been more common in the neighbourhoods that drink it to prove this he began rifling through hundreds of parliamentary death Records and he found that areas with downstream water had 14 times more deaths from cholera during the outbreak now to you and to me that might seem like pretty conclusive evidence that sewage equals cholera but for various reasons the idea still didn't catch on and that was the end of that or at least it was snows last published attempt at convincing the medical community that sewage caused cholera he did continue to investigate it privately and do other kinds of research but unfortunately he died prematurely only a few years after these events the thing is though snow was very right is typically a waterborne illness spread by sewage contaminated water it just took a few more decades of work and proof that microbes can cause diseases for scientists to finally prove and accept that thankfully for all of us though snow's methods didn't fade into obscurity even if his work was rejected in the 1850s his outbreak management strategies are still in use today his idea to map the origin of cases is a technique that is currently saving lives and it was so unique that it was a foundation of modern epidemiology looking back dr. John snow may not have had a sword he may not have had an army at his command but he did wield mass health information and helped shape a major field of science so even though snow wasn't celebrated during his lifetime there's a lot to celebrate about him today because in the end there's no doubting that his contributions have helped save millions of lives next let's look at two serious tragedies that ultimately made our drugs safer there was a time in the United States that you had to label what was in your medication but no one regulated what counted as medication meaning you could sell poison to people as long as you were upfront about it weirdly enough and as you might predict that resulted in a few deaths but also stronger rules here's Stefan to explain what happened the history of medicine is full of some huge triumphs but also some pretty terrible mistakes like in the 1930s a company out to make a quick buck took a safe effective drug and managed to make it a killer surrounding that tragedy are some pretty fascinating stories Howard I became a wonder drug how the US FDA became what it is today and how one scientist walked home with a Nobel Prize the drug in question is called elixir sulfanilamide and it was briefly manufactured and sold by the SE massingill Company of Tennessee in 1937 but before this deadly elixir was concocted sulfanilamide had a good rep as an effective drug all on its own sulfanilamide is an antibiotic so it's used to fight bacterial infections it works by interfering with bacteria's ability to make folic acid which they need to reproduce it was derived from an earlier drug called pronto cell which had a vivid red color and was actually developed by the dye industry in 1932 chemist gerhard omok found that this molecule wasn't just pretty it could cure bacterial infections in mice and once pronto still hit the market in 1935 it quickly gained popularity and saved a lot of lives in fact pronto sill and related compounds were some of the earliest widespread antibiotics penicillin had already been discovered but it wasn't easily available yet further research showed that there were two parts to the Pronto cell molecule one part was the dye and the other was the antibiotic the antibiotic half was sulfanilamide which researchers found could be used on its own mostly in powder or pill form well it had potential side effects it was generally safe we actually still use sulfanilamide to treat vaginal infections though not very often because there are other anti microbials out there nowadays the problem was that sulfanilamide had already been synthesized by chemists and the patent had expired so anybody could make in cell variants of it enter the massingill company who found that their customers liked their drugs in syrup form they set out to make a liquid version of sulfanilamide and their researchers eventually found that the powder would dissolve in diethylene glycol at the time diethylene glycol was known as a solvent it had a sweet taste and smell and once the lab added some caramel and raspberry flavoring they figured they had a nice medicine and released it as an antibiotic elixir frankly it sounds tastier than some of the cough syrups I've had for one thing diethylene glycol is super poisonous back then there were one or two scientific studies about it stucks city but they weren't widely known these days it's used as antifreeze among other things and we know it's not a sweet treat inside your body diethylene glycol takes time to do its dirty work at first the symptoms resemble drunkenness but after several hours the poisoning gets worse while scientists aren't exactly sure how it kills we do know it gets broken down by your liver into a nastier form from there it shuts down the kidneys and can affect the nervous system to the instructions that shipped with the deadly elixir sulfanilamide said to keep giving it to patients until they got better which means that some people were poisoned by well-meaning loved ones who fed them antifreeze for days or weeks until they succumbed usually from kidney failure in total at least a hundred and five people died and if massingill had just fed it to a handful of mice before shipping a bunch of it out this tragedy might have been prevented before 1938 the US FDA only had the power to prevent adulteration and mislabel who couldn't for example sell tablets of flour and say it was medicine that was against the law but you could sell something that was poisoned with zero safety testing before hand as long as it was what you said on the label massingill company's elixir contained exactly what they said it did sulfanilamide and diethylene glycol with some water and flavoring but they did technically break the law they called the stuff in elixir but that word was only supposed to be used for products that contained ethyl alcohol and massingill syrup had none the FDA seized on this technicality they used it to track down the tainted medicine and slapped massingill with an unprecedented fine if not for the fine print they would have been helpless and many more people could have died but a new law was rushed through Congress in 1938 giving the FDA increased power over drug safety that law is credited with preventing the infamous drug thalidomide which was found to cause severe birth defects from hitting the US shelves many years later in the aftermath of this tragedy and new legislation the chemist responsible for the antifreeze elixir committed suicide and the senator who sponsored the 1938 drug law died shortly after it passed reportedly of exhaustion powder in pill forms of sulfanilamide were still being made in labs and widely used as antibiotics by American soldiers in World War two as for gerhard omec developer of pronto sill he won the 1939 Nobel Prize in Physiology or medicine for helping to usher in the antibiotic era because really pronto sill sulfanilamide and related compounds were used a lot at the time can be safe and effective antibiotics you know as long as you don't take them with antifreeze stephane mentioned thalidomide and he's got that story too here's how incredibly subtle differences in chemistry can sometimes mean life or death first 1957 a new over-the-counter drug was introduced in West Germany that was supposed to basically cure morning sickness during pregnancy it was called thalidomide thousands of women purchased the drug and were relieved when their morning sickness disappeared and everything seemed great until later the next year when thousands of infants were born with severe birth defects like brain damage and deformed limbs doctors noticed the surge but at first they couldn't figure out what was causing then two doctors vidiq and lens from Germany and William McBride from Australia both noticed that the mothers of these babies had all taken that amazing new morning sickness drug by 1961 lens had proven the link between fluid amide and the birth defects and it was pulled from the shelves but by then thousands of infant's had been born with those birth defects and nearly 40% of them had passed away rules for drug testing weren't as strict back then and in this case that cost thousands of lives even though they were now aware that filler amide was a problem scientists still didn't know why turns out the answer lies in its chemistry or more specifically its geometry what researchers didn't know at the time was that there were actually two versions of the thalidomide molecule solute amide which is made up of three connected rings of carbon and nitrogen atoms plus some oxygen and hydrogen is what's known as a chiral molecule chiral comes from the Greek for hand or claw and chemists often think of chiral molecules as being right-handed or left-handed that's because the different versions of chiral molecules called enantiomers are made up of all the same parts but arranged differently just like your hands if you try overlaying your right hand on your left you'll see that no matter which way you turn your hands you can't make them match up even if you make your thumbs line up one hand is palm up and the other is palm down in other words both hands have the same five fingers but they're not identical and molecules like thalidomide are the same way a chiral molecule has an atom typically carbon with four different groups attached to it that's called the chiral Center a group can be anything from a single atom to a long-chain two rings in some cases two groups can even be connected these groups are kind of like your fingers in each and antium ER the groups are attached the chiral Center in the opposite order so they're mirror images of each other in thalidomide for example the chiral Center is a carbon atom attached to one of the rings it's bonded to two other carbons a nitrogen and a hydrogen if you position the version the molecule that's considered right-handed called the R enantiomer so the closest oxygen atom to the chiral Center is below it the hydrogen atom attached to the center will be facing away from you but if you position the left-handed or S enantiomer the same way the hydrogen atom will be facing toward you in other words the two enantiomers are mirror images of each other because different receptors and enzymes in your body react with molecules in very specific ways the fact that enantiomers are mirror images means that they might react to things totally differently in the case of thalidomide scientists discovered that the R enantiomer helped with morning sickness but the S enantiomer caused those severe birth defects one of the most famous or maybe infamous examples of how two enantiomers affect the human body is methamphetamine you'd probably associate that name with the street drug but the molecule can only really break bad when it's in its are formation the S enantiomer is commonly sold over-the-counter as a vasodilator and you can easily find it in vapor inhalers but the vapor inhaler you just bought at the pharmacy isn't filled with a dangerous drug because the S version will never be psychoactive after researchers discovered that only the S version of thalidomide cause birth defects they thought about isolating the R enantiomer so they could continue to use it to treat morning sickness but it turns out that the lid amides are enantiomer can actually switch to the S version while inside the human body meaning that even if they dice elated a hundred percent pure our thalidomide it still wouldn't be safe for pregnant women but in 1998 the FDA did approve the lid amide almost 40 years after rejecting it based on the birth defect problems this time though it was approved for treating complications from Hansen's disease aka leprosy and recent research is also leading some scientists to believe that in certain cases the lid amide could help with a number of debilitating diseases including some forms of breast cancer they just make sure not to prescribe it to anyone who's pregnant I hope you're all enjoying this showcase of Stefan's shirts by the way does he called dibs and all the history episodes oh wait here's one from me it's about a deadly disease a desperate race and one very very good boy even if you're not big on Alaskan history you might have heard of the Iditarod sled dog race every year since 1973 people have raced their dog teams across the 1500 kilometer stretch of Arctic tundra between Anchorage and Nome Alaska the race starts on the first Saturday in March and to win participants have to charge through some of the harshest conditions in the northern hemisphere but it's not an exercise in torture it's inspired by what sometimes called the great race of Mercy where dogsled teams raced along much of the same trail to deliver an antitoxin that would save thousands of people from a deadly diphtheria outbreak in the winter of 1925 in the early 1900's most of Alaska's remote towns were pretty much inaccessible during winter train tracks connected the largest cities but the most reliable way to travel between most places was by dogsled driven by so-called mushers and pulled by teams of dogs these sleds were used to transport people Goods and Mail during the long winters when the severe weather knocked boats and planes out of commission in January 1925 that dogsled transportation network became one town's last hope in December of 1924 curtis welch the only doctor in nome alaska was treating an outbreak of sore throats and coughs in the towns children which he initially diagnosed as tonsillitis a simple viral infection when two of his patients died he realized he was facing something much more serious diphtheria an extremely contagious disease caused by the bacterium corynebacterium diphtheria it spreads through tiny droplets of mucus coughed or sneezed at by infected patients which linger in the air and on surfaces at first the disease looks a lot like tonsillitis or even a common cold but it's way more deadly because the bacteria invade the patient's upper respiratory tract and produce a type of cell slaying protein known as an EXO toxin once it makes it into host cells the exotoxin protein keeps them from manufacturing their own proteins which rapidly kills them as dead and dying cells slough off the victims nose and throat and mix with the growing bacterial colonies they form these thick leathery grey coatings called pseudo membrane they can make it hard to swallow or even breathe and without treatment the disease kills more than half of its victims even back in 1924 it could be treated scientists would inject diphtheria into animals that were less susceptible to the disease and collect the antibodies they produced a response and used them to make an antitoxin serum when it's treated with the Thaksin the death toll from diphtheria drops to one in ten unfortunately for the residents of Nome the town's supply of antitoxin had expired and the vaccine developed in 1921 hadn't been administered widely to keep the outbreak from getting even worse Welsh put the entire town under quarantine to reduce the spread between families and keep the disease from reaching the roughly 10,000 people in the rest of the region but without the antitoxin thousands of people were at risk of infection and death a national search found a suitable supply of the antitoxin in Anchorage Alaska but no one was sure how to get it to Nome the closest trains brought it to Nenana which is still more than a thousand kilometers away planes back then were open cockpit and with the worst weather in 20 years they weren't an option and sea ice blocked the shipping route so the governor of the Alaskan territory turned to 20 of the best mail carrying dogsled teams to take the precious serum on the last leg of the journey over five days 20 mushers and 150 dogs carried the 9 kilogram package of antitoxin between relay points fighting whiteout blizzard conditions and temperatures of negative 45 degrees Celsius across a trail that normally took three to four weeks to complete four of the animals died in the process the teams averaged about 48 kilometers each although some went much farther than others Leonhard Seppala and his lead dog togo traveled a hundred and forty six kilometers over the tundra and crossed the icy surface of the frozen Norton Sound the last team led by musher Gunnar casein and his lead dog Balto made the trek to Nome in a whiteout so bad that Kayson said he couldn't see any of his dogs he relied on Balto sense of smell to guide them they reached Nome in the early morning of February seconds just five days and seven hours after the serum was picked up by the first musher thanks to the rapid delivery of the antitoxin only five of nomes 1400 residents died during the outbreak the national publicity of gnomes dire situation fueled a campaign by health officials to widely vaccinate against diphtheria in the United States and that continues today with the Tdap vaccine in the 1920s there were a hundred thousand to two hundred thousand cases and 13,000 to 15,000 deaths from diphtheria every year but the US has only recorded five cases in the last decade and the state of Alaska still runs a yearly immunization drive alongside the commemorative Iditarod sled dog race so in a way those teams saved an uncountable number of lives all dogs are good dogs but like these guys were the best finally I said before that historical episodes like these are why our food and drugs are free from poison notice I didn't say drinks is that you want to be technical alcohol is a poison but there was a time when the US government made it more poisonous once more here's Stefan to tell us why they thought that was a good idea on Christmas Eve 1926 more than 60 people ended up in a single Hospital in New York City they were violently ill and hallucinating and despite doctors best efforts within a few days about half of them died but it wasn't a virulent flu or poorly chosen mushrooms that caused their deaths it was alcohol that had been poisoned by the US government which sounds like a conspiracy theory but it's the truth in the twenties a chemical war between government regulators and illegal booze cellars resulted in tens of thousands of poisonings and hundreds maybe even thousands of deaths in the u.s. the roaring 20s were a decade filled with jazz flapper dresses speakeasies and lavish parties like the ones in The Great Gatsby even though America was supposed to be a dry country the 18th amendment which banned the production sale import and export of alcoholic beverages came into effect in 1920 and it wasn't repealed until 1933 but plenty of people still drink even though that sometimes meant risking their lives when alcohol became illegal people turned to the black market for their booze and thanks to heavy enforcement at ports of entry smugglers could only bring in so much so the bootleggers that trafficked in illegal alcohol often stole industrial alcohol instead ethanol the main kind of alcohol in alcoholic beverages is used in everything from cosmetics to pharmaceutical products to house paint but at the turn of the century import taxes made it really expensive to use pure ethanol that way because it's technically drinkable so starting in 1906 almost 15 years before prohibition the US government began adding toxic chemicals to industrial alcohol to make it cheaper a tactic already used in other places like Europe industrial formulas were spiked with well-known toxic compounds like gasoline chloroform and methanol and because that made them undrinkable when the 18th amendment went into effect they weren't covered by the ban but for the most part all one had to do to make them drinkable was distill them that's the process where alcohol is boiled and then it's vapor is collected and cooled and when done carefully it can get rid of small amounts of toxic additives if their boiling points are different from ethanol during the first several years of prohibition the US Treasury Department estimated tens of millions of gallons of industrial alcohol were stolen for human consumption so in 1926 President Calvin Coolidge used the help of chemists to make these already toxic alcohols even more dangerous particularly by adding methanol there was already some methanol in most industrial alcohol formulations but the government added more a lot more to the point where it was sometimes 10 percent of the entire product and that change is probably what caused so many poisonings and deaths no alcohol is great for you but methanol is much worse than ethanol the two chemicals only differ by a carbon and two hydrogen's but that's enough to make one drinkable and the other lethal in your liver an enzyme called alcohol dehydrogenase removes hydrogens from alcohols ethanol is converted to acetaldehyde and then eventually to acetic acid the same stuff in vinegar methanol is also processed by this enzyme but the losses of hydrogens create formaldehyde and then formic acid instead and formic acid is bad it inhibits a key enzyme that your cells need to convert sugar and oxygen into usable energy so even though they've got plenty of food your cells basically end up starved that's why the buildup of formic acid in someone's body can cause a range of horrifying effects from holes in the stomach and intestines to vomiting blood and kidney failure one of the most common symptoms though is hallucinations like the ones experienced by all those people rushed to that New York Hospital in 1926 that's because your optic nerves the nerves that transfer visual information from your eyes to your brain need a lot of energy to function so they're among the first to feel formic acid toxic effects and that damage can be permanent which is why methanol poisoning frequently causes blindness now in principle even 10% methanol can be distilled away but the bootleggers chemists didn't have the best equipment and they were pressed to work quickly and since booze was illegal no one was checking their product to make sure it was safe although the exact figures aren't known by the time prohibition ended in 1933 some estimate that over 10,000 people had died from drinking government poisoned alcohol killing people wasn't the goal but it was the result and these deaths became a hot-button political issue so as the 20s came to a close regulators slowly started switching to less toxic dyes and noxious compounds that couldn't be distilled away for example in 1930 the US government announced the discovery of alket a sulfuric compounds that smells like rotten eggs which isn't exactly an appetizing scent for a gin and tonic some industrial formulations still included methanol and some still do today but when the 18th amendment was repealed there was much less incentive to drink them so nowadays thankfully methanol poisonings in the u.s. are relatively rare thanks for watching this scishow compilation which was brought to you with the help of our patrons if you like what we do here and you want to help us bring cool stories like the ones you just saw to everyone check out patreon.com/scishow [Music] you [Music]

Channel: SciShow

Views: 1,971,901

Rating: 4.7608728 out of 5

Keywords: SciShow, science, Hank, Green, education, learn, Poison, Food Safety, formaldehyde, Pocket Calculator, Calculator, Bacteria, Flu, John Snow, Medicine, Sulfanilamide, Thalidomide, Chemistry, Sled Dog, Poisoned Alcohol

Id: cx3hgp7WKz8

Length: 41min 50sec (2510 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 01 2020