- And... rolling. I can't clickbait this video. I mean, I could, but it wouldn't
really be fair to anyone involved. I know the title and the thumbnail
aren't going to pull loads of people in, but I hope that you can trust me when I say: I promise this
story is really interesting. Because it is. This is one of the best things I've found
while researching in years. So this starts when I'm
looking up old television shows and I'm about three
research tangents deep, and I find this incredible line
in a newspaper article from 1997: "The microwave was invented to meet a need "to heat hamsters humanely
in 1950s laboratories." And I read that and I thought:
that's ridiculous. No, it wasn't. Was it? There's a well-known story
about the engineer who "invented the microwave". Percy Spencer, just after World War II, was working on one of the
new military-grade radars while it was active,
and he realised that the peanut bar in his
back pocket had melted. Which implies that the radar also
nearly cooked part of him as well? Unshielded radars are really dangerous,
but it was the 1940s. The attitude to safety was a bit more lax. Now it wasn't a surprise that
electromagnetic radiation could heat stuff. That had been known for a while. People had actually been using it
for medical therapies for a while. Different wavelengths
had different effects, but Percy Spencer was the
first person to realise you could cook efficiently
with the wavelengths that were put out by
radar, and then realised that you could sell that,
and then realised, well, I could turn that
into a usable product. Because a massive radar dish is basically the same
technology as this microwave. I'm not going to try and
take this thing apart. I'm not qualified. And there is a high-voltage
capacitor in here which can carry enough charge to kill. Don't mess about with these
unless you know what you're doing. But inside here is... Inside here in the bit you can't access, there's a microwave generator
called a magnetron. It moves electric current past
a big magnet with a hole in it. And because... physics, that
produces electromagnetic radiation. Tune the size of the hole in the magnet, you get different
frequencies of radiation. The best analogy I've found is that
it's like blowing air over glass bottles and changing the pitch by
changing the amount of water inside. So...
[glass whistling at different tones]. That, but with electricity. ...look, I don't have a physics degree. Long story short, a magnetron
converts electricity into electromagnetic radiation. You send pulses of that
radiation out into the sky and you listen for the
echoes, you've got radar and you've helped win World War II. Or you could put a magnetron inside a safe radiation-proof box
called a Faraday cage, you tune the wavelengths so that water absorbs
the radiation easily, and you've got a microwave.
And you can cook lunch. The technical term is
"diathermic heating". In less than a year after the
melting peanut bar incident, which could so easily have been, like,
the "cooked hand incident" or worse, but less than a year after that that engineer's company,
defence contractor Raytheon, they release the first
commercial microwave. It was called the Radarange. It was the size of a fridge.
It had to be actively cooled. It was incredibly expensive and it was designed for
big commercial kitchens. That was 1947. The first microwave as we'd know it today, a cheap box that you plug in,
that was from the late 1960s once magnetron technology
had moved on a bit. At no point in that
well-referenced, well-known story does anyone mention heating hamsters
in laboratories in the 1950s. [microwave dings] So that should be pretty
easy to disprove, right? It's going to be an urban legend. There are a lot of
urban legends like that. So I started doing some journal searches and pretty quickly I found
papers from the 1950s talking about the reanimation
of frozen rats and hamsters. Those papers were written by scientists at the National Institute
for Medical Research, a government laboratory in Mill Hill, in suburban North London,
about half a mile that way. I would have filmed closer to that, but unfortunately, it was
pulled down a few years ago and the whole area is now a
load of new-build housing. Anyway, National Institute
For Medical Research. In the 1950s, that research
included cryobiology, the effects of extreme
cold on bodies and tissue. Scientists at that lab froze rats and
hamsters beyond the point of death. They used ice and a bath
of propylene glycol, which is airplane de-icer,
held at below zero, and at that point, the animal is dead
and will not recover on its own. No heart rate, no breathing,
core temperature around 1°C, somewhere between 10 and 50%
of the animal's body water frozen to ice. And then by applying hot spatulas
to the chest or high-intensity hot beams of light the researchers would try
to warm the animals up and bring them back to life.
The success rate wasn't great and the animals were
often left with burns, but it did sometimes work. We'll get to why they
were doing that later! But by 1955, one of the researchers
has the idea to use a magnetron, reasoning that it'd be a lot more safe
and humane to reheat the whole animal at once
rather than risk burning it. Actually, I say one of the researchers, there's a name on that paper
that might be a bit familiar. James Lovelock, one of the
last independent scientists, born in 1919, back when "scientist"
could be an entire job description rather than "botanist" or "physicist"
or "computational linguist". Someone who worked across disciplines on whatever they found interesting
or whatever they were hired to do. Lovelock is best known
for inventing Gaia theory, the idea of earth as a
self-regulating system. He also invented the
electronic capture detector which found CFCs in the atmosphere
and helped discover the ozone hole. Hardware that he helped design
for NASA is sitting on Mars because it landed there with
the Viking probes in 1976. And one of the early projects
in his career, back in the 1950s was at the National Institute for Medical Research
freezing rats and hamsters, and he had the idea to use
microwave di-a-ther-my..., dia-tha-my? dia-tha...? [keyboard clicks] - "Diathermy." - To reheat them. But the papers and
anecdotes from back then all seem to contradict each other. The timeline is difficult
to piece together. There are reliable sources with
completely different stories and claims. So I went to ask him about it. - "Do you know you're
the first person to come "and ask me about the freezing work?" - Because James Lovelock, at 101 years old lives somewhere vaguely round here
on the south coast of England, goes for a walk along the coast every day, and was happy to be interviewed. - One biologist, Audrey Smith, was able to revive a hamster
that had been frozen. When they woke up, they got a
gigantic burn all across their chest and that must have been pretty
painful, and it was messy. I thought, this is a lousy way to do it. So I said, "Why don't you use diathermy?" For 10 shillings of my own money
I bought a surplus RAF transmitter, joined it up, and sure enough,
it poured out 30 watts at 30 megahertz, Which is just about right.
And I took it into the lab the next day. And I said, "Look, here's your diathermy." I thought this is very untidy,
made some inquiries and sure enough, there were
10-centimetre magnetrons that had been invented by Boot and Randall
at Birmingham University during the war. To get hold of one of those is not easy. And this is where being in a
government department helped a bit. So I just made a few inquiries. "How do I get hold...?" And they said, "Oh, well, they're working on
them down at... just above Portsmouth." I said, "Any chance of borrowing
one of your magnetrons?" And he said, "Oh no." He said, "We can give you one if you want.
It's an interesting cause, why not?" I've joined this up with a
waveguide, into a metal box. It wasn't so much a box. It was
just a thing made out of chicken wire, except it's
finer than chicken wire, a bit closer to mesh. And that was just like the
box of a microwave oven. And I fed the microwaves into it. And I told Audrey, now,
put your hamster in there! - That's a microwave. James Lovelock may not have
invented THE first microwave but he certainly invented A microwave. The idea of using magnetrons
to heat stuff wasn't his, but no one else was putting one
in a Faraday cage box on a desktop. Big commercial microwaves for restaurant
kitchens aren't the same thing, and besides, they weren't even on sale in
the UK until a few years later. - I put a potato in it and baked it.
And it was perfectly all right. - The safety procedures were occasionally
a bit lax by modern standards. - In the course of the experiments
while we were building it the thing was running open
and the radiation was bouncing all round the room and the light bulbs would
light up without warning. The filament just had the same wavelength
as the radiation, and it would absorb it
and light up. And pound notes were the funniest one. They'd catch fire because the
metal strip inside was just about the wavelength of the magnetron. - And here's the really
amazing thing, it worked. - We put the hamster
in there, frozen solid. And I mean frozen solid. It was like a bit of wood
when you dropped it on the bench. Turned the thing up to full power
on the microwave, which was about a
kilowatt coming out of it. And with a timer. And after so many seconds,
the hamster woke up, started wandering around. - Do I need to say,
don't try this at home? I mean there are enough
people of all ages watching that statistically yes,
I do need to say it. Don't try this at home.
It's unnecessary cruelty. You won't be doing medical research,
you'll be doing a crime. Context is really important, but also the research has been done!
More than 50 years ago. There are charts of
survival rate and heating, and it turns out that with a microwave, because that's what this was,
with a precise calibrated microwave and with artificial respiration
to start pumping oxygen around the body almost every rodent they froze
was successfully reanimated. That's the word that the biologists use. Reanimation. Healthy, behaving as usual and given a retirement at an animal home,
according to one of the papers. Back from being frozen to death,
sometimes multiple times. So the last question is: why? - Well, this could be of immense
importance to medicine. So for preserving tissues for transfer
and also for blood transfusions because at the moment blood
was kept at the blood bank for three weeks and then
thrown down the sink. - Imagine if that had worked
on bigger animals. Back then humanity did not
know what the limits were. This was an open question. The reason that all those 1960s science fiction writers
and comic book authors had people being frozen in time or
astronauts being sent off in cryosleep might be because, for a little while, it looked like that might
actually be possible. If freezing and diathermic reheating
worked on hamsters... then maybe it would work on rabbits. If it worked on rabbits, then
maybe it'd work on primates. And if it worked on primates...
then maybe it'd work on humans. It didn't, unfortunately.
It doesn't scale up. - You cannot freeze a human. It's partly a matter of how quickly you
can get the anti-freeze agent to diffuse into the cells. A human's too big. It's just a matter of size.
A hamster is an acceptable size. - Sometimes research hits a brick wall. Find out a neat thing
about hamsters, check. Casually invent a microwave and
then don't commercialise it. Check. Find a way to safely send
astronauts to other planets? Not this time, unfortunately,
but the researchers tried and that feels like a story
that shouldn't be buried as a vague anecdote in a
newspaper from years ago. - I think in an awful lot of science where there's a success
it's not a scientific thing. It's an invention, which
is something quite different. And I think personally I'm much more
of an inventor than a scientist. - My thanks to James Lovelock for his time. His latest book "Novacene" is part memoir
and part look to the future and there's a link to
it in the description. - Oh, that was a mistake. That was... I... Oh that's going to be a nightmare to wash. All right, well, I guess I don't
get a second take, 'cos... I put that on low!
Damn, he did not overpromise on the title. That was incredibly interesting.
Also, again: Damn. I want to look this good and healthy and clear minded at 101 years old.
Well, it was worth it for the name, Lovelock, now to go find that book. It was interesting, mostly because I hadn't known any mammal had been frozen and reanimated. I knew humans had been resuscitated, despite being brought into hospital apparently frozen, but not literately solid. It's now a thing in medical circles, "You're not dead till you're warm and dead" I understand the proffered method is stuff them in a tube, and blow hot (very warm?) air through it.
I watched him put that snack bar in there and thought, "Yeah, about 10 seconds, maybe 5" then watched how long it was running, and thought, "god, that's going to be a mess" I was a teenager when my family got our first microwave, I remember turning a meal or two into inedible leather before getting the timing right.
I had previously read that one of the early clues to the potential for microwaves was finding dead seagulls in front of coastal radar antennae.
There's actually a puzzle in Day of the Tentacle where you defrost a hamster in a microwave.
I wonder if the creators knew about this when making the game?
It's wild that reanimating deeply frozen hamsters actually works, sounds completely scifi. Like, the concept of cryosleep actually does work to some extent already.
I know Lovelock said that the same wouldn't work with humans due to our size, but if it's only down to the anti-freeze agent and how quickly it diffuses into cells, then maybe there's a chance someone finds a way in future?
So, hamsters can be frozen and reanimated because they're small enough for the antifreeze to diffuse through their tiny bodies quickly enough, but humans are too big for that procedure to work.
So in other words, if we want to conquer the stars, we must first figure out how to make astronauts the size of hamsters.
I can't believe he's 101. Wow
Genuinely interesting, title did not disappoint.
Holy shit. At 101 that guy was sharp as a tack.
It's fairly modest in comparison to some of his others, but I think this has to be one of the best videos Tom Scott has ever made honestly. It was encapsulating throughout, and having James Lovelock on it, the primary source of this whole thing, was incredible.