Inventions that shook the world - S01E09 - THE 1980'S

from fingerprints to DNA profiling it changed how we catch the crooks from a pack a day to a patch on the arm it helped to deal with cravings and from a space race to gravity free global harmony it created new world peace they were all inventions of the 1980s a decade defined by hi-tech in the office in the lab just about everywhere DNA fingerprinting the MIR space station and the Internet they were inventions that shook the world DNA profiling is now the way criminals are caught an exact method which can't be wiped away and none of it would have happened without a sharp-eyed british scientist at the University of Leicester one morning in 1983 geneticist Alec Jeffrey's was horrified by the headlines a teenage girl had been brutally raped and murdered in a nearby village a terrible tragedy but there was nothing Jefferies could do about it or so he thought because at the time he was trying to solve the mysteries of disease not murder Jefferies was the kind of guy who did not let anything go unobserved and that is the mark of somebody who is really paying attention somebody's gonna push back some boundaries that you haven't even thought of yet Jefferies must have been born with science in his genes he had his first microscope at the age of eight and was 22 when he graduated from Oxford with a first class honours degree in biochemistry by the mid-1980s he was working in DNA research the chemical coding system that makes us who we are it was still a new field at the time but Jeffries and his colleagues knew a few things one almost our entire DNA is shared with chimpanzees - only a small part of our DNA makes us human and three it's just a tiny fraction of our DNA that makes us physically different from one another the Jeffries was sure that DNA held even greater secrets and if he could unlock them it could help diagnose and cure disease then while I was studying a single gene just one tiny piece of the long twisted DNA strands that make up the human genome he noticed something odd in the gene he found a small region in one of the spots that didn't code for any protein there were bits of DNA that appeared to have no function but they did have interesting repeating patterns he had never seen before Jeffries realized this could be extremely important and was determined to find out more he's a very alert guy so he says gee you know I wonder what's I wonder where this came from is there are there other sequences in the genome that could match this that was the next answer Jeffries sort would there be the same strange repeat patterns in other genes he took blood from a colleague and her parents so as to compare their DNA at first glance the results just looked like a blurry mess come take a look at this he was still not entirely sure what to infer from the results what do you see I'm not sure yet but gradually he began to see distinct patterns in the DNA of the mother father and daughter it began to dawn on him that he had made an astonishing discovery the repeat patterns in one person's DNA were distinctly different from those in anyone elses as unique as a fingerprint he did use this word of DNA fingerprint and it is appropriate because just like a literal fingerprint these are unique to any individual so he realized that this has legal and forensic potential Jeffrey's discovery meant there's a new way to link suspects to a crime and he would soon have the chance to prove that this new science of identification would work three years after the first rape and murder the body of a second teenager was found a young man was charged with the second rape and murder after he confessed but he wouldn't admit to the first murder by now Geoffrey's DNA fingerprint discovery was well known so Jeffries is approached by the police and they say listen we have someone who's confessed to the second murder and we have his blood and we know he's done the second murder so all we want to do is find out if we can also indict him for the first murder Geoffrey's compared the suspects blood with semen found at both crimes and the results were a shock to everyone and it comes back to the guys he said well I've got good news and bad news good news is it's the same murderer in both cases the semen DNA profiles are identical but the bad news is the guy who's confessed to this murder is not the murderer the police were even more determined so all the local men were brought in for blood tests and they make a decision to go about collecting blood from every man in the community to see if they can ferret out the person who's actually committed these crimes the police gave the samples to Jeffries he tried to match the DNA results with a semen from the crime scenes but failed but it was not his science that had let him down it turned out that the real killer had found a way to avoid the DNA tests the man who committed the crime actually convinced a friend to give a blood sample for him because he didn't want to be discovered months went by and the guy who had given the blood sample for his friend was talking to somebody else at the at a pub he said oh I gave this blood sample for this other fellow you know and that person ultimately reported it and they you know arrested the man who was the the criminal and tested him and indeed it was a match DNA matching has not only put many criminals behind bars it has also helped free hundreds of innocent people a handful of these have been on death row so their lives have been saved even queen elizabeth ii recognized the value of Alec Jeffrey's service to science in 1994 he was knighted but despite all the attention the father of DNA evidence is still working happiest when he's hands-on in the lab searching for the vital clues that someone else may miss other inventions of the decade 1981 the stealth bomber the US Air Force introduced a new bomber that was invisible to enemy radar also that year the first portable computer the Osborn it weighed 11 kilograms with a whopping 12 centimeter screen high above Earth's surface orbiting the planet was a giant outpost in space where it was all global cooperation and harmony the MIR space station was launched despite decades of competition thanks to a farsighted Russian space engineer in Moscow on the 20th of July 1969 everybody was watching Neil Armstrong walk on the moon it was a giant leap for the u.s. in the space race it also had a great impact on everyone in the Soviet Union especially the space agency and Agia as a whole the country was enormously depressed because they were expecting to win it was a national funk that they're in for some time but there was one lone contrarian he was actually relieved that the US had landed on the moon first konstantin feoktistov who was the chief space engineer the moon was for him a detour a blind alley one that he was just as happy that was out of the way now and he can now do important stuff feoktistov had a much bigger dream flying to Mars over 200 million kilometres away his own desires was to bypass the moon to go farther in space letting people spend years in space and travel hundreds of millions of miles not just around the block feoktistov had contributed to the Soviet Union's effort during the space race he had helped to design a spacecraft that launched Yuri Gagarin in 1961 who was the first man ever to visit outer space in the 1970s the Octus Tov was the head designer of the world's first series of space stations nine of them called salutes they were launched just once and stayed in space orbiting the Earth smaller spacecraft docked at the rear of the station to deliver visiting cosmonauts they lived on board and did research in this unique gravity-free environment they could send crews up to them for weeks or even months so they were beginning to pioneer longer longer flights but the salutes were just 20 meter cylinders which were only usable for a short period of time a year the most the youngest ah've would need something far more substantial to use as a ship for traveling to Mars victus don't knew that you can't go directly from Earth to Mars you'd have to build space stations and use those as staging areas to assemble a ship refuel it test it out and then depart you want to build weigh stations on away somewhere else but in 1976 the political stars aligned in feoktistov favor the Soviet Union wanted a more permanent space station for long-term research four times the size of a Salyut with multiple docking ports for this project the octo stove would need his best engineers but he did nothing but alienate them I'm sent a little scrub with you kissed off was a very intelligent man who was aware of his appellate level of intelligence and often people like that rub people the wrong way so he was not a good company man but he was a good person to be in charge of projects feoktistov soon had plenty of design ideas but the challenge was how to build the much larger station it certainly could not be constructed on the ground and then launched into space first we don't have rockets that big and secondly building a station on the ground is a very complex operation you don't finish it all at once you finish it piecemeal the octave staff had an inspirational moment that solved the problem the space station could be modular built in separate pieces on the ground and assembled up in space the octo staff put his ideas down on paper he planned that the station would have a core module powered by solar panels there would be docking ports at each end for smaller research modules or visiting spaceships but adding these modules to the core end-to-end similar to a long goods train created a new set of problems the space station modules could only be latched together like the carriages of a train no bolts no welding this meant that a long string of them would have far too much flexibility ala structures - that's large really large in space 100 meters long for example there is a series of different forces there's slight aerodynamic forces that try and turn it and twist it the gravitational forces across this length are different it'll actually try to torque it and twist it the team had to think again feoktistov second design solved the twisting problem they would no longer dock the modules end-to-end instead they dock them on the side of the station however this idea created yet another problem a module docking at a 90 degree angle to the core could result in disaster imagine hitting any kind of structure from the side you're putting a force a bending force into the large structure if they hit this from the side with too big of a spacecraft too big a force you could damage the lawn section feoktistov final solution was revolutionary a robotic arm attached to each module would swing the module around and it's tall it gently on the side of the core module if it worked there would be far less risk of damage to the core they sounded by saying we don't have to dock in the side we can dock at that back end and then we can use a mechanical arm or swivel to take that module and move it off to the side it was a brilliant simple solution to look like a complicated problem it was brilliant but it would be one of the most hazardous maneuvers attempted in outer space in February 1987 350 kilometres above the earth the core module of the Soviet space station was in orbit it was called Mir which had two meanings world and peace however it was approaching a crucial moment for chief designer konstantin feoktistov the first attempt to use the crane arm he and his team had invented which they called the robot poor the idea was that the next module would dock at the rear of the core section the robot pore attached to it would reach back lift the module off turn it 90 degrees and redock it on the side of the core it was brilliant if it worked for feoktistov a lot was riding on this moment when you're building engineering systems like this novel space pas to remove modules back and forth your reputation on the line with that and so if it didn't work it might be the end of a career every one of the Soviet space agency held their breath as the first robot poor operation began the module docked at the rear of the core in its temporary position the robot 4 reached around to grab the module and maneuvered it into one of the docking ports it was the key moment in the process the project couldn't afford a disastrous collision at this point however the docking Wenders planned the Octus Tov the contrarian proved he was right once again and the relieved crew members began to celebrate designed to last only five years Mia remained up in space for an amazing 15 years and hosted visiting aerospace scientists from around the world in 1995 Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield flew up to Mir in a u.s. space shuttle I felt like I was a tapeworm going through an intestine pulling myself through this dark place where I'm squeezing through all these flexible tubes trying to get into the next particular volume of mirror so it was dark and very constrained but at the same time wondrous one of the main purposes in going to mirror from a decisional capability of the united states of the of nasa was to learn how to build space stations and how to go to space stations also to build links with the Soviet Union or Russia at that time the camera very on board amazed him here we are people from different continents different backgrounds different cultures who have come just very recently out of a pretty hostile time in human history and now being on board this multinational first great human outpost in space konstantin feoktistov smear was finally decommissioned in 2001 it grandly fell to earth in a ball of flames over the Pacific the Optus tov died in 2009 at the age of 83 leaving future space scientists with the challenge of getting to Mars Mars is a long ways away we will get there it's just a matter of when feoktistov ingenious design lives on in his own successor the International Space Station 14 nations working together in a true spirit of collaboration that all began with mere other inventions of the decade in 1986 super conducting ceramics arrived which could carry electricity without heating up I have not known a scientific development as exciting since the development of the laser and in 1988 the inter vascular stent invented by an Argentinean surgeon it's a lifesaver to millions of cardiac patients just slap on the patch to ease the cravings it was a new way to get a nicotine fix without killing yourself all because both a team of doctors from Duke University including Murray Jarvik and Jed Rose and a New Mexico professor developed an identical idea psychologist Frank at scorn was normally a patient man but was about to lose his temper it was the early 1980s and he'd been trying without luck to get his wife Sherry to stop smoking sherry was addicted to a very powerful drug nicotine and the woman even told me one night I was getting a lecture for class that she was going out to walk the dog and sort of absent mindedly I said go right ahead hon and then about 10 minutes later I realized we'd never ever owned a dog and she was going outside and smoking my wife started smoking when she was about 13 and that's very typical for Kentuckians she had tried to quit she was much like Mark Twain she quit hundreds of times she found it very easy and she worked at it for a number of years smoking is dangerous because the nicotine in tobacco addicted to a whole range of other toxic chemicals the things that go along with smoking a cigarette such as the tar and the carbon monoxide those those are the things that are really bad the the tar that's the the greasy brown stuff on the end of a filter that's probably what causes the cancer and the carbon monoxide blocks the heart's ability to gather oxygen Frank may hate nicotine but he had found it useful he'd been experimenting with liquid nicotine to see if he could stop rats from other bad habits such as sugar in other words aversion therapy he gave a lab rat some sugary water to drink Ed's corn then tried to turn the route again to the sweet snack by dosing it with nicotine which would then make it feel very very sick rats are cannot vomit under normal circumstances they don't have the sphincter control of the stomach and so therefore they evolved this mechanism to avoid poisons that's why they take small bits of novel food it makes in the least bit ill they avoid it for the rest of their lives but on one fateful night Frank had an accident that took his research into an unexpected new direction he gave his own skin a huge dose of nicotine he then did something that made the situation even worse sort of wiped it which actually increased the absorbing surface our heart rate went up to about a hundred and eighty and I got really really sick Frank was in agony but he began to make some connections could a dosage of nicotine through the skin satisfy smokers addiction would it be enough to enable them to stop craving the nicotine inhaled through cigarettes I was I was on that floor some things came together I had known about the scopolamine patch that's put behind the ear for motion sickness and I knew that the there were a lot of problems with people trying to quit his next step was to find a test subject for his idea rats don't smoke but his wife and his brother John did guys I need a guinea pig absolutely not honey canal help me I'm broke is it safe give me your on just tell me how that feels feels good like maybe you just had a cigarette yeah Frank then set about creating a nicotine patch the idea was at heavy smokers would start with 21 milligrams and then wean themselves off the drug gradually so when the person feels right they go down to a 14 milligram patch and in the same process down to seven and then hopefully you quit his timing was also perfect as in the 1980s the evidence that smoking killed was overwhelming The Hobbit was becoming socially unacceptable however none of this persuaded Frank's College to invest the money to get a patent not until he quoted one of his favorite texts to the college president it said something to the effect that someday someone is going to figure out how to get nicotine into the human's body without him smoking it dipping it or chewing it and they're gonna make a lot of money and I gave that to the president that was funded that afternoon Frank got a patent for his patch in 1986 then drug companies bought the technology and put the patch on the market and Frank's world exploded it was like a bomb going off I just couldn't believe any of this stuff there's little ol psychologist in the middle of New Mexico and suddenly all this is hit and it was a dream come true it was the lottery even better than winning the lottery sherry was finally able to stop a thirty-year addiction thanks to her husband's invention my wife quit smoking and I am so proud of her for doing that the patch worked for but I think the biggest motivator from our wife was having a brand new granddaughter and she didn't want to see her smoking an average of 15 million patch prescriptions are sold each year to smokers who want to quit they don't all succeed but there's no question the nicotine patch has helped a lot of people live longer and healthier information is now available in an instant one click and it is immediately sent to anyone on the planet global networking means the rest of the world is accessible to all all due to two curious computer nerds October 1972 was the first of Bob Kahn's new job at the Pentagon in the u.s. good morning Tampa just one second all transmitted he had no idea that he was about to change the world of communication but he was just the type of man who could he was and is a very just brilliant brilliant man and in the computer science world he was always interested in in taking everything to the next level of okay what happens then in terms of data communications Bob joined DARPA the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency known as ARPA they were not developing new weapons instead they were fighting a long term battle it was the time of the Cold War and the US was determined to beat the Russians in the space race as well as to stay ahead in every other field of science back in the early 1970s computer networking with the latest hot technology and for Bob Kahn working for the ARPA team was a dream come true being at ARPA was like being at a university actually so that you could engage in basic research without having to teach classes or fight for tenure you'd think that everything that came out of ARPA would be you know all defense related and military and and you know sort of Star Wars like stuff but actually it wasn't which was a which was very nice for the scientists who went to work at ARPA because they knew that a lot of them would be given free rein to pursue what they wanted to pursue Bob also got to use the ARPANET the first network of computers in the world it is a very primitive forerunner to the Internet in 1972 there were fewer than 30 members who sent packets of information back and forth and all were huge organizations it really was the first functioning network of computers all linked together and communicating with each other all over the country very few could afford the astronomical membership fees in order to get a connection to the ARPANET you had to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars so it was sort of an exclusive place to be soon everyone wanted to send and receive information by computer small independent networks formed all over the world which gave Bob Kahn a very big idea what if he could find a way to link all these independent networks to each other he knew just who to contact to achieve his idea computer scientist Vint Cerf from California Bob and Vint were both convinced that there was a way to connect the whole world so computers all across the planet could communicate to one another where we started it was a complex task first they had a big problem to solve each network was similar to a country that had used its own language the computers using one network were capable of communicating to one another but couldn't understand the computers in any other network Bob and Vint went to a hotel for a weekend of brainstorming it's clear what effect they already had a language that was used by the ARPANET computers to transmit information called a protocol we had first but it was only designed to work inside a network they had to develop a new protocol to act as a bridge between networks like that breathe baby one that could network all the networks around the world they worked all day and throughout each night by the end of the weekend they had succeeded they had invented a new international computer language called transmission control protocol it was this idea of taking these disparate networks and figuring it all out a way to put the data in an envelope and take it back out of the envelope and that's it's really seems like a very simple idea but there's a lot of computer work going on behind the scenes the inventors took that discovery on the road in part to impress the military that was funding them they believe this technology could be used on army maneuvers so they got a van basically a bread truck and they outfitted it with all this equipment and they drove it around and they had data travelling between networks all over the world they transmitted information between three different types of networks the ARPANET a radio network and a satellite network the question was could all the data travel around the world through the three networks and return intact I think that the data travelled like a hundred thousand miles without dropping a single bit and that was the big triumph they had proved it their protocol TCP could create a new worldwide internet work however they had to convince all the stubborn ARPANET members to use it switch January 1st 1983 they had to give people plenty of warning because they were saying to people that if you want to stay on the Internet you need to make this switch from NCP to TCP by 12:01 a.m. January 1st 1983 or you're off the network finally after fair warning and temporary shutdowns the old ARPANET protocol is turned off permanently on the 1st of January 1983 Bob Kahn and his team waited anxiously the TCP was the only network available but had they managed to persuade the ARPANET members to switch to using it TCP made it possible for every computer in the world to have a unique address networking was no longer an exclusive club universities could internet soon everyone on the planet could internet creating a giant worldwide web and the thing to remember about the evolution of this of this network is that it wasn't it was really just an experiment these guys were pure researchers they were geeks it was let's see if we can just get these machines to talk to each other this team had left quite a legacy three billion people are active on the Internet today Bob and Vince Internet Protocol is still the link that allows us to communicate with one another around the globe in an instant other inventions of the decade 1981 the scanning tunneling microscope a device so precise it can actually split molecules into atoms 1982 the Vectrex the first video game that came with its own monitor before any child could afford a home computer and 1983 the new bagless vacuum cleaner from the UK that's after performance like that's a thing you'd better go you imagine swallowing a pill sized camera that films the whole digestive tract instead of the medical test that everyone dreads Marlon harm the first giant leap that made it a reality was due to a teenager with big dreams in 1985 in New York Tarun Malik seems like a typical teenager mon-star but he was not he was actually a science prodigy with straight A's and a passion for medicine my interest in medicine began when I was younger and was trying to figure out as a teenager trying to figure out what I wanted to do in life the science the research on taking care of patients when Tarun was 13 he had a chance to spend time with a local gastroenterologist a doctor who examined the digestive system for signs of trouble Tarun was only a child but he was able to observe a procedure that made most adults squirm a colonoscopy there were some things that entered my mind this is a very amazing technology where you can actually look inside the colon to look for polyps which may be precursors to cancer to find them and remove them Tarun was intrigued but he understood the patient's nervousness who after all would want to have a to put in their bottom if they didn't have to so it's a very challenging test the endoscope is a fiber-optic tube and video camera that shows the journey through the large intestine on a monitor the doctor looks out for anything that seems abnormal such as the signs of cancer colonoscopies save lives but Tarun thought there must be an easier way most children would have left it at that but not Tarun that day at the doctor's office sent him into the world of high-tech spy gadgets 18 every James Bond movie about six times as a child and so that part of it intrigued me that ability to devise cool gadgets that ultimately could make life simpler could double-oh-seven help him come up with a solution during one lesson at school Tarun was daydreaming and the idea began to form in his head out of the blue I was probably bored in physics classes what I think what happened and not that physics is boring don't get me wrong but I kind of got it he imagined himself back in the doctor's office where a patient was given a pill to swallow a pill with a camera inside it the camera inside the capsule would do all the work taking pictures of a digestive tract as it moved through the body you swallow the capsule go to work go to the gym take a shower do whatever you want it's recording images all train that period of time inside the body the camera would transmit signals to a wireless video recorder the patient would wear on a belt at the end of the journey the pill would be flushed but all the data would be safe captured on the recorder you bring that device back after a couple of days and there you have all the information that you actually needed presto in the family basement two runes set to work gathering the pieces he would need to build his first prototype out of a plastic tennis ball container after a short while he had the camera part sorted out but he was still a long way off from anything that could be swallowed the next stage was to scale down the capsule size which his parents helped out with there was a teenager so I didn't make any money myself and so they gave me the money to buy things and put things together Tarun was soon testing a much smaller capsule in a much smaller tube after plenty of work on his own he received some crucial help from a family friend hey thanks for coming engineer Ram nyah here's a recorder thought but this meant that the capsule could be operated wirelessly and it was just the right size to swallow Zafra the patent it was a long 20 year process but finally Tarun obtained his patent he went on to graduate from John Hopkins University with degrees in medicine and biophysics and fulfilled his dream of becoming a doctor himself today the capsule is being used by doctors around the world to show images of the small intestine the middle area of the digestive system scopes are not able to reach this part from either end at the front end of the capsule is the lens in the middle a battery that powers the camera and at the rear is a miniature video transmitter that sends the image to a data recorder worn by the patient capsule endoscopy hasn't yet replaced the traditional colonoscopy this is because the capsule only gives a quick glimpse of the digestive tract with no chance to go back and take a second look Tarun and others are trying to develop ways to navigate the capsule and equip it with tools to do jobs such as removing polyps we have already developed capsules they can actually do therapeutic interventions on the GI tract right and in there such as removing polyps treating bleeding lesions its thinkers such as Tarun and ideas similar to his that continue to change the whole world of medical research you you

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Keywords: Channel, New, World, Discovery, series, 2013, inventions, season 1, s01, episode 9, e09, e9, ep9, Full, Watch, Season Episode, Episodes, that, shoohk, discovery channel, inventions that shook, the world, shook, that shook, inventions shook, the worlad, s01e09, Free

Id: KSHaewBCIAw

Length: 44min 15sec (2655 seconds)

Published: Mon May 20 2013