and rolling i can't click bait 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 they 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 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 realized 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 lacks
now it wasn't a surprise that
electromagnetic radiation
could heat stuff that had been known for
a while people have actually been using
it for medical therapies for a while
different wavelengths had different
effects but percy spencer was the first
person to realize
you could cook efficiently with
wavelengths that were put out by radar
and then realized that you could sell
that and then realize
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 an 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
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 to
win world war ii or you could put a
magnetron inside a safe
radiation proof box called a faraday
cage you've tuned the wavelength so that
water absorbs the radiation easily
and you've got a microwave and you can
cook lunch
the technical term is diathermic heating
and 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 engineers company defense
contractor raytheon
they released the first commercial
microwave it was called the radar range
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
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
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 use ice
anabathopropylene 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 one degree celsius
somewhere between ten and fifty percent
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 will 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 scientists 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 electron 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 earlier 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 diathermy diathermy
dieth
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 around 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 didn't
you use dice army
potentialings of my own money i bought
a surplus raf
transmitter joined it up 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 said look here here's your diocernic
i thought this is very untidy made some
inquiries and sure enough there were 10
centimeter magnetrons
that had been invented by bhutan randall
at birmingham university during the war
to get hold of one of those is not easy
and this is where being in the
government department helped a bit
so i just made a few inquiries how do i
get hold and they said oh
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 a
you know an interesting cause why not
i've joined this up into
a with a wave guide into a metal box
it wasn't so much a box it was just a
thing made out of
um chicken wire except his finals and
chicken were a bit closer 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 um
occasionally a bit lacks by modern
standards
in the course experiments while we were
building it
the thing was running open and
the radiation was bouncing all around
the room and the light bulbs would light
up
without warning the filament just
radio had the same wavelength as the
radiation and it would absorb it and
light
light up and the power
notes were the funniest one they 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 up turned the thing up to full
power on the microwave which was
it was about a kilowatt coming out of it
and uh with as a timer
uh and after so many seconds the the
hamster woke up and started wandering
around
do anything 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 will 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 used
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
also to medicine itself
for preserving tissues for transfer
and also for blood blood transfusions
because at the moment blood is 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
well it 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'd work on rabbits if it
worked on rabbits and maybe it'd work on
primates and if it worked on primates
then maybe it would work on humans it
didn't unfortunately it doesn't scale up
you cannot freeze a human
it's not it's partly a matter
of how quickly you can get
the anti-freeze agent to diffuse into
the cells
humans 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 commercialize it
check find a way to safely send
astronauts to other planets
not this time unfortunately but the
researchers tried and
it feels like a story that shouldn't be
buried as a vague anecdote in a
newspaper from years ago
i think in in an awful lot of science
where there's a success
is not a 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 nova scene 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 i
oh that's going to be a nightmare to
watch all right well yes i don't get a
second take because
i put that on low