Latest / Boring Science / Boring Science For Sleep _ STRANGE Origins of Common Medicines and more

Transcript

Boring Science For Sleep _ STRANGE Origins of Common Medicines and more · Boring Science

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: The heavy weight of the blanket settles over you, sealing
• 0:04
  Speaker 1: you away from the noise of the day. It feels
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: safe here, quiet. But do not let the silence fool you.
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: Inside the fragile vessel of your body, a trillion microscopic
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: machines are humming. They are fighting wars you will never
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: see and repairing damage you never felt. We often think
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: of medicine as clean, precise, and sterile, but the truth
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: is much messier. The cures that keep us alive were
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: born from rotting hay, forgotten mold, and deadly poisons. Tonight,
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: as the sleepless scientist guides you through the strange history
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: of healing, you can close your eyes. The hard work
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: has already been done. so you do not have to.
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: Let us begin by acknowledging the vessel you are currently inhabiting.
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: You are lying horizontal. Your heart rate is slowing down
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: to a rhythmic thump, a drum beat that has been
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: playing since before you were born. It is easy to
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: feel permanent. It is easy to feel like the master
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: of your domain. But biologically speaking, You are a softly
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: glowing ember in a very dark, very cold room. For
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: 99% of human history, the state of being alive was
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: a temporary and terrifying condition. If you scratched your leg
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: on a thorn, you died. If you drank water from
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: the wrong stream, you died. If you breathed the air
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: near someone who was coughing, you died. The human body
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: is a miracle of engineering, but it is also laughably fragile.
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: We have no hard shell like a crab. We have
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: no fur to keep out the frost. We are soft,
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: wet bags of protein, walking around in a universe that
• 2:12
  Speaker 1: is aggressively trying to dismantle us. Think about the immune
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: system for a moment, right now, as you drift towards sleep.
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: Your white blood cells are patrolling the highways of your
• 2:26
  Speaker 1: veins like bored security guards. Most of the time, it
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: is quiet. But occasionally, a bacteria breaches the wall. It
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: enters the warm, nutrient-rich paradise of your bloodstream. To a bacteria,
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: you are not a person. You are an endless buffet.
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: You are warm. You are full of sugar and oxygen,
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: and you are unprotected. In the past, this invasion would
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: have been the end of the story. The bacteria would multiply,
• 3:05
  Speaker 1: doubling every 20 minutes. One becomes two, two become four,
• 3:12
  Speaker 1: four become eight. By the time the sun rose, Millions
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: of invaders would be consuming your resources, turning your own
• 3:21
  Speaker 1: body against you. Your temperature would rise as your body
• 3:26
  Speaker 1: tried to cook them out. You would shiver under animal skins,
• 3:30
  Speaker 1: praying to gods who could not see, microscopic organisms, hoping
• 3:36
  Speaker 1: your own defenses were strong enough to hold the line. Usually,
• 3:41
  Speaker 1: they were not. But you? You lucky, spoiled modern human.
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: You do not have to worry about this. You have
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: a shield. You have a weapon. When the invasion happens,
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: you swallow a small white pill. And within hours, the
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: invaders are dead. The war is over. You survive to
• 4:09
  Speaker 1: complain about the traffic or the weather. We call this
• 4:12
  Speaker 1: weapon antibiotics. And like most things that save our lives,
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: we discovered it entirely by mistake because someone was too
• 4:22
  Speaker 1: lazy to clean up their room. Let us travel back
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: in time, not to a gleaming futuristic laboratory, but to
• 4:32
  Speaker 1: a cluttered dusty room in London. The year is 1928.
• 4:38
  Speaker 1: The month is September. The air outside is thick with
• 4:43
  Speaker 1: the coal smoke of the city, but inside the laboratory
• 4:47
  Speaker 1: at St. Mary's Hospital, the air smells of agar and
• 4:51
  Speaker 1: stale coffee. This is the workspace of a man named
• 4:56
  Speaker 1: Alexander Fleming. History remembers him as a genius, a hero,
• 5:02
  Speaker 1: a titan of science. But If you were to walk
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: into his lab on that morning in September, you would
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: not see a titan. You would see a man who
• 5:14
  Speaker 1: was very bad at washing the dishes. Fleming was a bacteriologist.
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: His job was to study Staphylococcus, a nasty little bacteria
• 5:27
  Speaker 1: that causes boils, sore throats, and fatal infections. To study them,
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: he had to grow them. Imagine small, round glass plates,
• 5:41
  Speaker 1: like coasters. Inside each plate is a layer of nutrient jelly, agar.
• 5:49
  Speaker 1: It is the perfect food for bacteria. Fleming would smear
• 5:54
  Speaker 1: the bacteria onto the jelly, stack the plates in the corner,
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: and let them grow. A meticulous scientist would cover the
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: plates perfectly. A meticulous scientist would scrub the bench down
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: with bleach every night. Fleming was not meticulous. He was,
• 6:14
  Speaker 1: to put it politely, a bit chaotic. He decided to
• 6:18
  Speaker 1: go on a holiday, a vacation. For two weeks, the
• 6:23
  Speaker 1: lab sat empty. The lights were off. The equipment was silent.
• 6:30
  Speaker 1: But Fleming had made a mistake. He had left a
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: window open, just a crack. But a crack is all
• 6:39
  Speaker 1: the universe needs. Outside that window, the world was teeming
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: with life. Dust motes floated on the breeze. Pollen drifted
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: from the trees. And riding on one of those invisible
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: currents of air was a microscopic spore. It was a spore.
• 7:01
  Speaker 1: of penicillium mold, bread mold, the same fuzzy blue-green stuff
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: that grows on an orange when you leave it in
• 7:11
  Speaker 1: the fruit bowl for too long. The spore drifted through
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: the London air, avoiding the rain, avoiding the soot, and
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: floated through the open window of the laboratory. It drifted down,
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: dancing on a draft, and landed on one of Fleming's
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: glass plates. Specifically, a plate teeming with the deadly Staphylococcus bacteria. Now,
• 7:38
  Speaker 1: imagine this from the perspective of the mold. It has
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: landed in a hostile territory. It is surrounded by millions
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: of hungry bacteria. The bacteria are aggressive. They are fast.
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: They want to consume the jelly, and they will happily
• 7:58
  Speaker 1: consume the mold to get to it. The mold is
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: outnumbered a million to one, but the mold has a
• 8:04
  Speaker 1: secret weapon. It is not strong, but it is chemically brilliant.
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: As it begins to grow, sending out its tiny, thread-like
• 8:15
  Speaker 1: roots into the jelly, it realizes it is under attack. So...
• 8:22
  Speaker 1: It begins to sweat. It excretes a chemical juice, a poison.
• 8:28
  Speaker 1: This chemical is not designed to kill a human. It
• 8:32
  Speaker 1: is designed to blow up the cell walls of bacteria.
• 8:35
  Speaker 1: It is a siege weapon. As the mold releases this juice,
• 8:41
  Speaker 1: the chemical spreads through the jelly. When Fleming returned from
• 8:46
  Speaker 1: his holiday, he walked into the silent lab. He began
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: sorting through the stacks of glass plates. Most of them
• 8:54
  Speaker 1: were covered in the cloudy yellow slime of bacteria colonies.
• 8:59
  Speaker 1: He sighed, tossing them into a tray to be cleaned.
• 9:02
  Speaker 1: But then he picked up one plate. He stopped. He squinted.
• 9:08
  Speaker 1: That's funny, he muttered. On this one plate, there was
• 9:13
  Speaker 1: a blob of blue-green mold. But that wasn't the strange part.
• 9:19
  Speaker 1: The strange part was the ring of death around it.
• 9:24
  Speaker 1: Everywhere else on the plate, the bacteria grew thick and yellow.
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: But around the mold, there was a clear, perfect circle.
• 9:35
  Speaker 1: A halo of emptiness. The bacteria couldn't get close. Any
• 9:40
  Speaker 1: bacteria that tried to cross that invisible line simply dissolved.
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: They popped like water balloons. Fleming didn't scream, Eureka. He
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: didn't run into the street. He just looked at the
• 9:54
  Speaker 1: dirty dish and realized that the mold was fighting a war.
• 10:00
  Speaker 1: And it was winning. He called the juice mold juice
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: at first because he wasn't very poetic. Later, he named
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: it penicillin. Think about the absurdity of this. For thousands
• 10:16
  Speaker 1: of years, Humans had tried everything to cure infection. We
• 10:20
  Speaker 1: put leeches on our skin to suck out the bad blood.
• 10:24
  Speaker 1: We poured boiling oil into wounds. We chanted spells. We
• 10:29
  Speaker 1: drank mercury. We tortured ourselves, hoping to drive out the
• 10:34
  Speaker 1: demons of sickness. And the answer was floating in the
• 10:38
  Speaker 1: wind the whole time. The answer was a defensive weapon
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: used by a fungus to protect its lunch. The drug
• 10:48
  Speaker 1: that saved your life, the drug that allowed humanity to
• 10:51
  Speaker 1: double its population, is literally just a chemical weapon used
• 10:56
  Speaker 1: in a microscopic turf war between a fungus and a germ.
• 11:01
  Speaker 1: We are just the bystanders who figured out how to
• 11:04
  Speaker 1: bottle the ammunition. It feels strange, doesn't it, to realize
• 11:10
  Speaker 1: that your safety depends on such small, mindless things. But
• 11:17
  Speaker 1: that is the nature of biology. It is not elegant.
• 11:22
  Speaker 1: It is effective. Fleming couldn't isolate the chemical properly. He
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: was a messy gardener, not a chemist. It would take
• 11:33
  Speaker 1: another decade and a world war for other scientists to
• 11:37
  Speaker 1: figure out how to mass produce the mold juice. They
• 11:40
  Speaker 1: had to grow it in bathtubs, in milk churns, on bedpans.
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: They eventually found that the best mold for making the
• 11:50
  Speaker 1: medicine didn't come from a lab at all. It came
• 11:54
  Speaker 1: from a moldy cantaloupe found in a market in Peoria, Illinois. So,
• 12:01
  Speaker 1: the next time you feel safe, remember the moldy cantaloupe.
• 12:05
  Speaker 1: Remember the open window. Remember that chaos is sometimes your friend.
• 12:13
  Speaker 1: Let the image of the mold fade now. Let the
• 12:17
  Speaker 1: dusty lab in London dissolve into the grey fog. We
• 12:22
  Speaker 1: are going to move further back in time. Before microscopes.
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: Before glass. Before we even knew what a bacteria was.
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: You are walking through a damp forest. The ground is
• 12:38
  Speaker 1: soft with mud. The air smells of wet earth and
• 12:42
  Speaker 1: river water. It is cold here. A sharp, biting wind
• 12:47
  Speaker 1: cuts through your clothes. You are an ancient human, and
• 12:53
  Speaker 1: you are in pain. Perhaps you have a toothache, a throbbing,
• 13:00
  Speaker 1: rhythmic pulse of agony in your jaw, or perhaps your
• 13:05
  Speaker 1: joints are swollen from the damp cold. Pain is a
• 13:09
  Speaker 1: constant companion in the ancient world. It is the alarm
• 13:13
  Speaker 1: bell that never stops ringing. You stop by the edge
• 13:17
  Speaker 1: of a river. Leaning over the water is a tree.
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: It has long, slender branches that droop down like swaying curtains.
• 13:30
  Speaker 1: The leaves are thin and silver green. It is a
• 13:34
  Speaker 1: white willow tree. You do not know chemistry. You do
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: not know biology. But you know tradition. You know that
• 13:44
  Speaker 1: the elders say this tree has a spirit that soothes pain.
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: You take a stone knife and scrape a strip of
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: bark from the tree. It is rough, gray. You put
• 13:56
  Speaker 1: the strip of bark into your mouth and chew. The
• 14:00
  Speaker 1: taste is immediate, and it is awful. It is intensely bitter,
• 14:07
  Speaker 1: a sharp, astringent taste that makes your mouth pucker. It
• 14:12
  Speaker 1: tastes like poison. And in a way, it is. Plants
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: cannot run away. If a deer wants to eat a tree,
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: the tree cannot sprint to safety. If an insect wants
• 14:25
  Speaker 1: to burrow into the bark, the tree cannot swat it away. So,
• 14:30
  Speaker 1: plants fight with chemistry. They fill their leaves and bark
• 14:34
  Speaker 1: with nasty compounds to make themselves taste terrible. Or to
• 14:39
  Speaker 1: make the predators sick. The white willow tree produces a
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: chemical called salicylic acid. It is a chemical weapon designed
• 14:48
  Speaker 1: to stop bugs from eating it. But when you, the
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: ancient human, chew on that bitter bark, something strange happens.
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: The chemical enters your bloodstream. It blocks the production of prostaglandins,
• 15:03
  Speaker 1: the little messengers in your body that tell your brain, hey,
• 15:08
  Speaker 1: we are in pain. Slowly, the throbbing in your jaw fades.
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: The ache in your joints dulls. The alarm bell quiets down.
• 15:20
  Speaker 1: For thousands of years, this was the only way. The
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: Sumerians wrote about it on clay tablets 4,000 years ago.
• 15:30
  Speaker 1: The Egyptians wrote about it on papyrus. Hippocrates... The father
• 15:35
  Speaker 1: of medicine told women to chew on willow leaves to
• 15:39
  Speaker 1: ease the pain of childbirth. Imagine the scene. A world
• 15:44
  Speaker 1: of stone and bronze. A world of constant physical struggle.
• 15:49
  Speaker 1: And the only relief comes from chewing on the bitter
• 15:52
  Speaker 1: skin of a tree that grows in the mud. But
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: there was a problem. A big problem. Salicylic acid is
• 16:02
  Speaker 1: an acid. It is caustic. It burns. If you chewed
• 16:07
  Speaker 1: enough willow bark to cure your headache, you would burn
• 16:11
  Speaker 1: a hole in your stomach. It was a cruel trade-off.
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: You could trade the pain in your head for a
• 16:18
  Speaker 1: pain in your gut. You could cure your fever, but
• 16:23
  Speaker 1: you might vomit blood. For centuries, this was the choice.
• 16:29
  Speaker 1: Pain or different pain. Flash forward to the year 1897.
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: We are in Germany now, in a brick factory building
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: owned by a dye company called Bayer. A young chemist
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: named Felix Hoffman is working late. He is worried about
• 16:51
  Speaker 1: his father. His father has crippling arthritis. Every step is agony.
• 16:58
  Speaker 1: He needs the salicylic acid to move, to walk, to
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: live but the acid is destroying his stomach. He cannot
• 17:07
  Speaker 1: take it anymore. He is caught in the trap. Hoffman
• 17:12
  Speaker 1: is looking for a way to modify the chemical. He
• 17:15
  Speaker 1: wants to keep the pain-killing part but remove the stomach-burning part.
• 17:20
  Speaker 1: He wants to put a safety cap on the molecule.
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: He decides to perform a simple chemical reaction. He takes
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: the salicylic acid from the willow tree and he mixes
• 17:31
  Speaker 1: it with something you have in your kitchen right now, vinegar,
• 17:36
  Speaker 1: or chemically speaking, acetic acid. He performs a process called acetylation. Essentially,
• 17:46
  Speaker 1: he is gluing a little group of atoms onto the
• 17:49
  Speaker 1: side of the willow molecule. He is masking the sharp
• 17:53
  Speaker 1: edge of the acid. The result is a white powder,
• 17:58
  Speaker 1: acetylsalicylic acid. He tests it. It works. It kills the
• 18:04
  Speaker 1: pain just as well as the raw bark, but it
• 18:08
  Speaker 1: doesn't burn the throat. It is gentle on the stomach.
• 18:11
  Speaker 1: It is a miracle. The company Bayer needs a name
• 18:16
  Speaker 1: for this new powder. They take the A from acetyl
• 18:21
  Speaker 1: and spire from spirea, another plant that contains the chemical.
• 18:28
  Speaker 1: They call it aspirin. It becomes the first true blockbuster
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: drug in history. It is the first time we took
• 18:37
  Speaker 1: a natural defense mechanism, a chemical weapon from a tree,
• 18:42
  Speaker 1: and tamed it. Think about that the next time you
• 18:46
  Speaker 1: have a headache. You go to the cabinet. You open
• 18:50
  Speaker 1: a plastic bottle. You take two small round white tablets.
• 18:56
  Speaker 1: You swallow them with water. You don't taste the bitterness.
• 19:00
  Speaker 1: You don't have to chew on bark. You don't have
• 19:03
  Speaker 1: to sit by a muddy river in the rain. But
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: the chemistry is the same. You are consuming the distilled
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: essence of a willow tree's desire not to be eaten.
• 19:14
  Speaker 1: You are borrowing the tree's armor to protect yourself from
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: your own nervous system. The tree fights the insect. You
• 19:24
  Speaker 1: fight the headache. The chemical bridge connects you both across
• 19:29
  Speaker 1: millions of years of evolution. The blanket feels heavier now,
• 19:34
  Speaker 1: doesn't it? The thought of these ancient connections is soothing.
• 19:40
  Speaker 1: It reminds us that we are part of a system.
• 19:44
  Speaker 1: We are not separate from the trees or the mold.
• 19:47
  Speaker 1: We are just borrowing their traces. Let us leave the
• 19:52
  Speaker 1: riverbank now. Let the taste of the bitter bark fade
• 19:56
  Speaker 1: from your memory. We are moving to the American Midwest.
• 20:01
  Speaker 1: The landscape is flat and wide. Endless fields of grass
• 20:06
  Speaker 1: and grain stretching out to the horizons. The sky is
• 20:12
  Speaker 1: a pale, washed-out blue. The year is 1920. The winter
• 20:19
  Speaker 1: has been wet, terribly wet. Farmers in Wisconsin and Alberta
• 20:26
  Speaker 1: are noticing something disturbing. Their cattle are dying. But they
• 20:33
  Speaker 1: aren't getting sick in the normal way. They aren't coughing.
• 20:38
  Speaker 1: They don't have fevers. A farmer walks out to his
• 20:43
  Speaker 1: barn in the morning light. The air smells of damp
• 20:46
  Speaker 1: straw and manure. He finds his prize bull lying on
• 20:52
  Speaker 1: the ground. The bull is weak, breathing shallowly. The farmer
• 21:00
  Speaker 1: notices a small scratch on the bull's leg. Maybe from
• 21:04
  Speaker 1: a barbed wire fence. Maybe from a thorny bush. A
• 21:09
  Speaker 1: scratch that should have healed in a day. But it
• 21:13
  Speaker 1: isn't healing. It is bleeding. And it won't stop. The
• 21:18
  Speaker 1: blood is thin. Watery. It seeps out of the animal relentlessly.
• 21:26
  Speaker 1: The bull bleeds to death from a scratch that wouldn't
• 21:29
  Speaker 1: hurt a child. It is happening now. everywhere. Cows are
• 21:36
  Speaker 1: undergoing routine procedures, like dehorning or castration, and they simply
• 21:42
  Speaker 1: bleed until they die. It is a massacre. The farmers
• 21:48
  Speaker 1: are panicked. They call it Sweet Clover Disease. They notice
• 21:55
  Speaker 1: that it only happens when the cattle eat hay made
• 21:59
  Speaker 1: from sweet clover, a plant with yellow flowers that was
• 22:04
  Speaker 1: brought over from Europe. But the cows had eaten sweet
• 22:08
  Speaker 1: clover for years with no problems. Why now? The answer
• 22:13
  Speaker 1: lay in the weather. It was the dampness. The wet
• 22:19
  Speaker 1: summer had caused the hay to rot. Mold had grown
• 22:23
  Speaker 1: on the clover. Here is the twist. Sweet clover contains
• 22:28
  Speaker 1: a harmless chemical called coumarin. It smells nice. It's actually
• 22:34
  Speaker 1: what gives fresh cut grass that lovely sweet scent. It
• 22:39
  Speaker 1: is used in perfumes. It is totally safe. But when
• 22:44
  Speaker 1: the mold attacked the clover, it performed a chemical reaction.
• 22:49
  Speaker 1: It ate the coumarin and twisted it. It changed the
• 22:53
  Speaker 1: molecular structure into something new, something toxic. The mold turned
• 23:00
  Speaker 1: the sweet smell weapon that destroys vitamin K. Vitamin K
• 23:08
  Speaker 1: is the instruction manual your body uses to clot blood.
• 23:12
  Speaker 1: Without it, your blood forgets how to become solid. You
• 23:17
  Speaker 1: become a leaky vessel. The farmers were feeding their cattle poison.
• 23:23
  Speaker 1: Not on purpose, but because the hay was a little
• 23:27
  Speaker 1: bit spoiled. For years, This substance was identified and extracted.
• 23:35
  Speaker 1: It was named Warfarin, and it was sold as the
• 23:39
  Speaker 1: world's most effective rat poison. It was perfect. The rats
• 23:46
  Speaker 1: would eat it, feel fine, go back to their nests,
• 23:50
  Speaker 1: and days later, they would simply go to sleep and
• 23:54
  Speaker 1: never wake up. It was clean. It was efficient. It
• 24:00
  Speaker 1: was death in a powder, but biology is a game
• 24:05
  Speaker 1: of balance. One man's poison is another man's cure. In 1951,
• 24:13
  Speaker 1: an army recruit tried to commit suicide. He wanted to
• 24:19
  Speaker 1: end it all. He found a box of warfarin rat
• 24:22
  Speaker 1: poison and swallowed the whole thing. A massive dose. He
• 24:27
  Speaker 1: was rushed to the hospital. The doctors prepared for the worst.
• 24:32
  Speaker 1: They expected him to die, but they gave him vitamin K.
• 24:39
  Speaker 1: They gave him blood transfusions, and to everyone's shock, he survived.
• 24:46
  Speaker 1: He recovered completely. This failed suicide attempt changed everything. Doctors
• 24:52
  Speaker 1: realized that if a human could survive a massive dose
• 24:56
  Speaker 1: of rat poison, maybe... Just maybe a tiny dose could
• 25:04
  Speaker 1: be useful. Think about the number one killer of humans
• 25:08
  Speaker 1: in the modern world. Heart attacks, strokes, blood clots. A
• 25:15
  Speaker 1: clot is just blood that has become solid when it shouldn't.
• 25:19
  Speaker 1: It blocks a vein or an artery. It stops the
• 25:23
  Speaker 1: flow of oxygen. It stops the machine. Doctors realized that
• 25:28
  Speaker 1: if they gave a patient a tiny, microscopic amount of
• 25:32
  Speaker 1: the rat poison, it would thin their blood just enough.
• 25:37
  Speaker 1: It would prevent the clots from forming. It would keep
• 25:40
  Speaker 1: the river flowing. They rebranded it. They called it Coumadin.
• 25:46
  Speaker 1: But it is the same molecule. Today, millions of people
• 25:52
  Speaker 1: take this blood thinner every day. Perhaps your grandmother takes it.
• 25:59
  Speaker 1: Perhaps you take it. It is one of the most
• 26:03
  Speaker 1: common medicines in the world. But trace the line back.
• 26:09
  Speaker 1: It started as a mysterious plague killing cows in a
• 26:13
  Speaker 1: Wisconsin winter. It became a way to kill rats in
• 26:17
  Speaker 1: the sewers of New York. And now It sits in
• 26:22
  Speaker 1: a plastic pill organizer next to the bed, keeping hearts
• 26:26
  Speaker 1: beating by making sure the blood doesn't get too thick.
• 26:29
  Speaker 1: It is a delicate dance on the edge of a knife.
• 26:33
  Speaker 1: Too much and you bleed like the cattle. Too little
• 26:37
  Speaker 1: and you clot. Medicine is not about finding safe things.
• 26:43
  Speaker 1: It is about finding dangerous things and using them with
• 26:47
  Speaker 1: extreme precision. It is strange to think that we are
• 26:51
  Speaker 1: kept alive by small doses of death. But that is
• 26:56
  Speaker 1: the way of the universe. The difference between a medicine
• 27:01
  Speaker 1: and a poison is often just the dose. We are
• 27:05
  Speaker 1: walking a tightrope, suspended over the void, balanced by the
• 27:11
  Speaker 1: chemical ghosts of moldy clover. But blood is just one fluid.
• 27:18
  Speaker 1: Consciousness is another. There is perhaps nothing more terrifying than
• 27:24
  Speaker 1: the idea of surgery before the mid-19th century. Close your
• 27:29
  Speaker 1: eyes and picture a hospital in the year 1840. It
• 27:34
  Speaker 1: does not smell like antiseptic. It smells of sweat, sawdust,
• 27:40
  Speaker 1: and fear. There are no beeping machines. There are no
• 27:48
  Speaker 1: sterile drapes. The operating table is made of wood. It
• 27:53
  Speaker 1: has leather straps, heavy ones. If you needed a leg
• 27:58
  Speaker 1: amputated or a tumor removed, you were awake, fully awake.
• 28:04
  Speaker 1: Surgeons were not judged by their delicacy. They were judged
• 28:09
  Speaker 1: by their speed. The best surgeon was the fastest surgeon.
• 28:15
  Speaker 1: A good surgeon could remove a leg in under 30 seconds.
• 28:20
  Speaker 1: It was not medicine. It was butchery performed at a sprint.
• 28:25
  Speaker 1: They would give you whiskey, or perhaps a stick to
• 28:28
  Speaker 1: bite on, hence the phrase, bite the bullet. But alcohol
• 28:34
  Speaker 1: barely takes the edge off when a knife cuts through muscle.
• 28:37
  Speaker 1: Patients would scream. They would struggle. Four strong men were
• 28:43
  Speaker 1: often employed just to hold the patient down. The psychological
• 28:48
  Speaker 1: trauma was so bad that many people chose to die
• 28:51
  Speaker 1: of their illness rather than face the knife. The concept
• 28:55
  Speaker 1: of anesthesia, the artificial sleep, seemed like magic. To turn
• 29:01
  Speaker 1: off the brain? To disconnect the mind from the body's pain?
• 29:06
  Speaker 1: It was considered impossible. But the discovery of the void,
• 29:12
  Speaker 1: the beautiful black void of anesthesia did not come from
• 29:17
  Speaker 1: a serious medical study. It came from parties. In the
• 29:21
  Speaker 1: early 1800s, young people in America and Britain were bored.
• 29:29
  Speaker 1: There was no television, no internet. So they went to
• 29:35
  Speaker 1: ether frolics. Ether is a chemical liquid that turns into
• 29:39
  Speaker 1: a gas very easily. It smells sweet, sickly sweet, and chemical,
• 29:46
  Speaker 1: like a marker pen mixed with sugar. At these parties,
• 29:51
  Speaker 1: people would soak a handkerchief in ether and inhale the fumes.
• 29:56
  Speaker 1: It made them feel light, drunk, dizzy, They would laugh uncontrollably.
• 30:03
  Speaker 1: They would fall over. They would run into walls. It
• 30:07
  Speaker 1: was hilarious. It was a parlor trick. One night, at
• 30:13
  Speaker 1: one of these parties, a young dentist named Horace Wells
• 30:18
  Speaker 1: was watching the festivities. He watched a man inhale a
• 30:22
  Speaker 1: huge lungful of ether. The man began to dance around,
• 30:27
  Speaker 1: stumbling and laughing. In his drunken stupor, the man smashed
• 30:33
  Speaker 1: his leg hard against a wooden bench. It was a
• 30:36
  Speaker 1: brutal hit, the kind of hit that should have caused
• 30:40
  Speaker 1: him to howl in agony. But the man didn't even flinch.
• 30:45
  Speaker 1: He kept laughing. He kept dancing. He didn't feel a thing.
• 30:53
  Speaker 1: Wells watched this. The gears in his mind began to turn.
• 30:59
  Speaker 1: He wasn't looking at a party trick. He was looking
• 31:04
  Speaker 1: at the end of pain. The next day, Wells decided
• 31:08
  Speaker 1: to test it on himself. He had a colleague extract
• 31:12
  Speaker 1: one of his own wisdom teeth while he was high
• 31:15
  Speaker 1: on laughing gas. He woke up a few minutes later.
• 31:18
  Speaker 1: He looked at the bloody tooth in the tray. He
• 31:22
  Speaker 1: looked at his colleague. I didn't feel it, he whispered.
• 31:26
  Speaker 1: It was as the prick of a pin. The era
• 31:30
  Speaker 1: of agony was over, but it wasn't a smooth transition.
• 31:36
  Speaker 1: People were terrified of this artificial sleep. The church argued
• 31:42
  Speaker 1: that pain was God's will. They argued that women should
• 31:46
  Speaker 1: suffer during childbirth because it was written in the Bible.
• 31:51
  Speaker 1: It took a queen to change the world. Queen Victoria,
• 31:57
  Speaker 1: the ruler of the British Empire, was pregnant with her
• 32:01
  Speaker 1: eighth child. She was tired of the pain. She was
• 32:06
  Speaker 1: the most powerful woman on Earth, and she decided she
• 32:11
  Speaker 1: did not want to suffer anymore. She asked for chloroform,
• 32:16
  Speaker 1: a newer, sweet-smelling gas similar to ether. Her doctors were hesitant.
• 32:23
  Speaker 1: The priests were scandalized. But you do not say no
• 32:27
  Speaker 1: to Queen Victoria. She inhaled the gas from a handkerchief.
• 32:33
  Speaker 1: The room spun. The voices faded. The pain dissolved into
• 32:39
  Speaker 1: a gray mist. She delivered Prince Leopold while floating in
• 32:44
  Speaker 1: a cloud of disconnected bliss. When she woke up, she
• 32:49
  Speaker 1: called it that blessed chloroform. Suddenly, because the queen did it,
• 32:54
  Speaker 1: it was fashionable. It became the standard. The scream was
• 33:00
  Speaker 1: replaced by the silence. Today, when you go into surgery,
• 33:06
  Speaker 1: an anesthesiologist injects a cocktail of white milk-like fluid into
• 33:11
  Speaker 1: your IV. They ask you to count backward from 10. 10.
• 33:14
  Speaker 1: You feel cold. 9. The lights look fuzzy. 8. Your
• 33:25
  Speaker 1: limbs feel heavy, like lead, seven, and then nothing. You
• 33:32
  Speaker 1: skip time. You time travel. One second it is morning.
• 33:38
  Speaker 1: The next second you are waking up in a recovery room,
• 33:41
  Speaker 1: thirsty and groggy, with the surgery already done. It is
• 33:47
  Speaker 1: the closest We chemically disconnect the soul from the machine.
• 33:55
  Speaker 1: We turn off the lights in the house so the
• 33:58
  Speaker 1: workmen can fix the pipes. And it all started because
• 34:03
  Speaker 1: bored teenagers wanted to get high at parties and fall
• 34:07
  Speaker 1: down without hurting themselves. The blanket around you is warm.
• 34:13
  Speaker 1: You are not in a cold operating theater. You are
• 34:17
  Speaker 1: not chewing bark by a river. You are safe. But
• 34:22
  Speaker 1: let us drift from the operating room to the barnyard.
• 34:27
  Speaker 1: We need to talk about cows again. Cows seem to
• 34:30
  Speaker 1: be a recurring theme in human survival. First, they gave
• 34:35
  Speaker 1: us the blood thinner. Now, they give us the shield
• 34:40
  Speaker 1: against the plague. Smallpox. The word itself sounds small, but
• 34:48
  Speaker 1: the reality was a monster. Smallpox was the greatest killer
• 34:54
  Speaker 1: in human history. It killed hundreds of millions of people. Kings, queens, peasants.
• 35:04
  Speaker 1: It did not care. If you caught it, your body
• 35:08
  Speaker 1: would be covered in painful, fluid-filled blisters. If you survived,
• 35:15
  Speaker 1: you were often left blind or horribly scarred. It was...
• 35:21
  Speaker 1: The Red Death. The terror of the world. But in
• 35:28
  Speaker 1: the English countryside, there was a rumor, a whisper among
• 35:34
  Speaker 1: the milkmaids. Milkmaids were young women who spent their days
• 35:39
  Speaker 1: milking cows. They had smooth skin. They were famous for
• 35:44
  Speaker 1: their beauty. Why? Because they never got smallpox. they would
• 35:50
  Speaker 1: get something else. Cows get a disease called cowpox. It
• 35:56
  Speaker 1: causes blisters on the cow's udders. The milkmaids, touching the
• 36:01
  Speaker 1: udders every day, would catch it, they would get a
• 36:04
  Speaker 1: few blisters on their hands, they would feel a little
• 36:08
  Speaker 1: sick for a few days, and then they would recover.
• 36:14
  Speaker 1: But after that, they were invincible. Smallpox could sweep through
• 36:22
  Speaker 1: the village, killing everyone in its path, but the milkmaid
• 36:26
  Speaker 1: would walk through the house of the dead and never
• 36:29
  Speaker 1: catch a fever. A country doctor named Edward Jenner heard
• 36:33
  Speaker 1: these whispers. He looked at the hands of the milkmaids.
• 36:38
  Speaker 1: He looked at the blisters. He had a theory, a dangerous,
• 36:43
  Speaker 1: radical theory. He believed that the mild disease from the
• 36:47
  Speaker 1: cow was teaching the human body how to fight the
• 36:51
  Speaker 1: deadly disease. In 1796, Jenner decided to test this. Now,
• 36:58
  Speaker 1: in modern science, we have ethics committees, we have safety protocols,
• 37:04
  Speaker 1: we have volunteers. Jenner had a gardener, and the gardener
• 37:11
  Speaker 1: had an eight-year-old son named James Phipps. Jenner took some pus, Yes,
• 37:20
  Speaker 1: fluid from a blister from the hand of a milkmaid
• 37:24
  Speaker 1: named Sarah Nelmas. She had caught cowpox from a cow
• 37:30
  Speaker 1: named Blossom. Jenner took a sharp knife. He made a
• 37:34
  Speaker 1: small cut on the arm of the eight-year-old boy. He
• 37:39
  Speaker 1: rubbed the cow pus into the cut. The boy got
• 37:42
  Speaker 1: a little sick. He had a fever for a few days.
• 37:47
  Speaker 1: Then he got better. Then came the terrifying part. The
• 37:51
  Speaker 1: part that would put Jenner in prison today. Six weeks later,
• 37:57
  Speaker 1: Jenner took pus from a smallpox victim. The deadly virus.
• 38:03
  Speaker 1: The killer of millions. And he injected it into the boy.
• 38:08
  Speaker 1: He waited. The parents waited. Nothing happened. The boy did
• 38:14
  Speaker 1: not get sick. Not even a single drop. blister, the
• 38:20
  Speaker 1: mild ghost of the cow disease had whispered the secret
• 38:24
  Speaker 1: password to the boy's immune system. His white blood cells
• 38:30
  Speaker 1: knew the enemy. They were ready. Jenner called his invention vaccination.
• 38:38
  Speaker 1: It comes from the Latin word vacca, which means cow.
• 38:43
  Speaker 1: Every time you get a vaccine, You are paying tribute
• 38:47
  Speaker 1: to a cow named Blossom. You are using a trick
• 38:51
  Speaker 1: learned in a barn to teach your body to fight monsters.
• 38:56
  Speaker 1: It is a strange thought. We are apex predators. We
• 39:02
  Speaker 1: build skyscrapers. We fly to the moon. Yet our survival
• 39:08
  Speaker 1: depends on the biology of our livestock. We are chemically tethered.
• 39:14
  Speaker 1: to the animals we domesticated. The immune system is a library.
• 39:20
  Speaker 1: A vaccine is just a book we add to the
• 39:22
  Speaker 1: shelf so the body can read it before the test.
• 39:26
  Speaker 1: And the first book was written in the fluid of
• 39:28
  Speaker 1: a blister on a milkmaid's hand. Take a slow breath.
• 39:33
  Speaker 1: Feel the air filling your lungs. That air is full
• 39:38
  Speaker 1: of history, full of invisible things. But your body knows
• 39:43
  Speaker 1: what to do. The library is full. From the barnyard,
• 39:49
  Speaker 1: Let us walk into the garden, a beautiful English cottage garden.
• 39:57
  Speaker 1: It is summer. The bees are humming. The flowers are
• 40:02
  Speaker 1: in bloom. Tall purple spikes of flowers rise up from
• 40:07
  Speaker 1: the green leaves. They look like little bells or perhaps
• 40:14
  Speaker 1: little fingers of gloves. They are foxgloves. Digitalis purpurea. They
• 40:22
  Speaker 1: are stunningly beautiful. And they are incredibly deadly. If you
• 40:28
  Speaker 1: eat the leaves of the foxglove, your heart will go chaotic.
• 40:33
  Speaker 1: It will beat irregularly. You will vomit. You hallucinate. And
• 40:40
  Speaker 1: then your heart will stop. It is a witch's flower
• 40:46
  Speaker 1: a plant of folklore and poison. But in the 18th century,
• 40:52
  Speaker 1: a man named William Withering heard a story. He was
• 40:56
  Speaker 1: a doctor, a man of science, but he was stuck.
• 41:02
  Speaker 1: He had a patient with dropsy. Dropsy is an old
• 41:07
  Speaker 1: word for heart failure. The heart becomes too weak to
• 41:11
  Speaker 1: pump blood. Fluid builds up in the legs The Luns.
• 41:18
  Speaker 1: The patient slowly drowns in their own fluids. It is
• 41:23
  Speaker 1: a slow, miserable way to die. Withering could do nothing,
• 41:28
  Speaker 1: but the locals told him to go see the wise
• 41:31
  Speaker 1: woman of Shropshire, an herbalist, a witch, some might say.
• 41:37
  Speaker 1: She had a secret recipe, a tea that could cure
• 41:41
  Speaker 1: the dropsy. It was a mixture of 20 different herbs,
• 41:47
  Speaker 1: Withering was desperate. He bought the recipe. He took it
• 41:51
  Speaker 1: back to his lab and analyzed it. He threw out
• 41:55
  Speaker 1: the herbs one by one, testing them. Most of them
• 42:00
  Speaker 1: were useless. Mint, strawberries, just flavor. But one herb was
• 42:09
  Speaker 1: the key. The foxglove. He realized that the witch wasn't
• 42:16
  Speaker 1: using magic. She was using a precise dose of poison.
• 42:20
  Speaker 1: The chemical in foxglove, digitalis, does something contradictory. It slows
• 42:28
  Speaker 1: the heart rate down, but it makes each beat squeeze harder.
• 42:33
  Speaker 1: Imagine a tired horse trying to pull a heavy cart uphill.
• 42:39
  Speaker 1: If you whip it to run faster, it will collapse.
• 42:43
  Speaker 1: But if you slow it down, and make it take deep,
• 42:47
  Speaker 1: powerful steps. It can make it to the top. Digitalis
• 42:51
  Speaker 1: forces the heart to take powerful steps. It clears the fluid.
• 42:56
  Speaker 1: It saves the life. But the line is razor thin.
• 43:01
  Speaker 1: One cup of tea saves you. Two cups kill you.
• 43:06
  Speaker 1: Withering spent 10 years studying the flower. He learned to
• 43:12
  Speaker 1: look for the signs of toxicity. A yellow halo in
• 43:16
  Speaker 1: the vision. Nausea. He turned a folk remedy into a science. Today,
• 43:24
  Speaker 1: millions of people with heart failure take digoxin. It is
• 43:28
  Speaker 1: a pill. It is white. It looks boring. But it
• 43:34
  Speaker 1: is not boring. It is the crushed essence of a
• 43:38
  Speaker 1: beautiful purple flower. that grows in the shade of the
• 43:43
  Speaker 1: English woods. It is a poison that we have tamed
• 43:46
  Speaker 1: just enough to keep the rhythm of the heart steady.
• 43:50
  Speaker 1: The garden is full of secrets. Every petal hides a
• 43:55
  Speaker 1: chemical factory. And sometimes the cure does not come from
• 44:01
  Speaker 1: a flower or a mold. Sometimes it comes from a monster.
• 44:07
  Speaker 1: Let us travel to the desert. The Sonoran Desert in
• 44:12
  Speaker 1: the American Southwest. It is hot, dry. The sun beats
• 44:19
  Speaker 1: down on the red rocks. Crawling slowly across the sand
• 44:24
  Speaker 1: is a lizard. It is heavy, lumpy. Its skin is
• 44:29
  Speaker 1: a pattern of black and pink beads. It looks like
• 44:33
  Speaker 1: it is made of rocks. This is the Gila Monster.
• 44:38
  Speaker 1: It is one of the only venomous lizards in the world.
• 44:42
  Speaker 1: It doesn't have fangs like a snake. It has grooves
• 44:45
  Speaker 1: in its teeth. When it bites you, it chews. It
• 44:50
  Speaker 1: grinds the venom into the wound. The bite is excruciating.
• 44:56
  Speaker 1: It feels like your blood is on fire. But the
• 44:59
  Speaker 1: Gila monster has a superpower. It only eats three or
• 45:04
  Speaker 1: four times a year. It eats a nest of bird eggs.
• 45:08
  Speaker 1: and then it goes to sleep for months. How does
• 45:12
  Speaker 1: it survive the spikes in blood sugar? How does it
• 45:16
  Speaker 1: handle the starvation? Its saliva contains a hormone, a chemical
• 45:23
  Speaker 1: that regulates sugar with incredible efficiency. Scientists looked at this venom.
• 45:30
  Speaker 1: They saw how it controlled the lizard's metabolism, and they
• 45:36
  Speaker 1: thought of Type 2 diabetes is a disease of sugar regulation.
• 45:44
  Speaker 1: The body loses control. By studying the spit of this
• 45:49
  Speaker 1: desert monster, scientists created a synthetic version of the hormone, exonatide.
• 45:56
  Speaker 1: It helps people control their insulin. It helps them lose weight.
• 46:01
  Speaker 1: The latest generation of weight loss drugs, the ones you
• 46:05
  Speaker 1: hear about in the news, trace their lineage back to
• 46:09
  Speaker 1: the venom of a sluggish lizard in the Arizona desert.
• 46:13
  Speaker 1: We look for salvation in the strangest places, in the rot,
• 46:19
  Speaker 1: in the poison, in the jaws of monsters. And speaking
• 46:25
  Speaker 1: of poison, let us talk about the deadliest substance known
• 46:29
  Speaker 1: to man. If you were to take a single gram
• 46:32
  Speaker 1: of this substance, the weight of a paperclip, and disperse
• 46:36
  Speaker 1: it evenly, it could kill a million people. It is
• 46:41
  Speaker 1: a bacteria called Clostridium botulinum. It grows in airless places.
• 46:47
  Speaker 1: It loves cans of food that haven't been sealed properly.
• 46:52
  Speaker 1: It loves sausages that have been cured badly. In the 1800s,
• 46:58
  Speaker 1: it was known as sausage poisoning. The Latin word for
• 47:02
  Speaker 1: sausage is botulus. Hence, botulism. If you eat a sausage
• 47:11
  Speaker 1: tainted with this bacteria, the toxin attacks your nerves. It
• 47:17
  Speaker 1: blocks the signal from the brain to the muscle. You
• 47:21
  Speaker 1: want to move your arm, but the muscle never gets
• 47:25
  Speaker 1: the memo. You become paralyzed. Your eyelids droop. Your breathing stops.
• 47:32
  Speaker 1: You go limp. It is a terrifying way to die.
• 47:37
  Speaker 1: A total shutdown of the body's electrical grid. So, naturally,
• 47:44
  Speaker 1: we decided to inject it into our faces. In the 1980s,
• 47:49
  Speaker 1: an ophthalmologist was treating patients with uncontrollable eye spasms. Their
• 47:55
  Speaker 1: eyelids would twitch and shut tight. It was blinding them.
• 47:59
  Speaker 1: The doctor had an idea. If the sausage poison causes paralysis,
• 48:05
  Speaker 1: maybe a tiny, microscopic dose could paralyze just the twitching muscle?
• 48:13
  Speaker 1: He injected the toxin. It worked. The spasms stopped. The
• 48:19
  Speaker 1: eye opened. But the patients noticed something else. Doctor, they said,
• 48:26
  Speaker 1: the wrinkles around my eyes are gone. The paralysis had
• 48:30
  Speaker 1: relaxed the skin. It had smoothed out the crow's feet.
• 48:35
  Speaker 1: The deadly sausage poison became Botox. People pay hundreds of
• 48:40
  Speaker 1: dollars to have the most toxic substance on earth injected
• 48:44
  Speaker 1: into their foreheads just to look a little bit younger,
• 48:48
  Speaker 1: to look a little bit more rested. It works by
• 48:51
  Speaker 1: freezing the muscles. It forces them to relax. It is
• 48:56
  Speaker 1: a chemical enforced nap for your face. It is the
• 49:00
  Speaker 1: ultimate irony of medicine. We take the things that kill
• 49:04
  Speaker 1: us and we dilute them until they serve us. We
• 49:08
  Speaker 1: turn monsters into pets. The blanket is still there. The
• 49:15
  Speaker 1: room is still quiet. You have traveled from the dusty
• 49:19
  Speaker 1: lab of Fleming to the muddy riverbank of the Willow,
• 49:24
  Speaker 1: to the cow sheds, to the desert, and to the clinic.
• 49:29
  Speaker 1: You have seen that the history of medicine is not
• 49:32
  Speaker 1: a straight line of brilliance. It is a winding path
• 49:36
  Speaker 1: of accidents, desperation, and bravery. We are not separate from
• 49:42
  Speaker 1: the world. We are made of the same stuff, the
• 49:46
  Speaker 1: same atoms, the same carbon. The war inside your body continues.
• 49:54
  Speaker 1: The white blood cells are still patrolling. But now you
• 49:58
  Speaker 1: know you have backup. You have the mold, the bark,
• 50:04
  Speaker 1: the lizard, the flower. You are not fighting alone. We
• 50:11
  Speaker 1: have one last stop on this journey. It is not
• 50:15
  Speaker 1: a place on a map. It is a place in
• 50:19
  Speaker 1: the mind. We have talked about chemical cures, drugs, molecules.
• 50:27
  Speaker 1: But there is a cure that is purely psychological. A
• 50:31
  Speaker 1: cure that proves that the brain is the most powerful
• 50:35
  Speaker 1: pharmacy of all. We are in World War II the
• 50:39
  Speaker 1: beaches of Anzio in Italy. The fighting is fierce. The
• 50:44
  Speaker 1: shelling is constant. An American anesthesiologist named Henry Beecher is
• 50:51
  Speaker 1: treating wounded soldiers. The injuries are horrific, but he is
• 50:56
  Speaker 1: running out of morphine. The soldiers are screaming. They are
• 51:01
  Speaker 1: in shock. Beecher is desperate. He tells a nurse to
• 51:07
  Speaker 1: fill a syringe with salt water Just saline. Nothing else.
• 51:13
  Speaker 1: He walks up to a wounded soldier. He looks him
• 51:17
  Speaker 1: in the eye. He says, I am going to give
• 51:21
  Speaker 1: you a potent painkiller. You will feel better in a moment.
• 51:26
  Speaker 1: He injects the salt water. He watches. The soldier's breathing
• 51:31
  Speaker 1: slows down. His face relaxes. The grimace of agony fades.
• 51:38
  Speaker 1: He whispers, Thank you, doc. The soldier goes into shock,
• 51:43
  Speaker 1: but not from pain. He relaxes. His blood pressure stabilizes.
• 51:50
  Speaker 1: The salt water did nothing chemically, but the belief did everything.
• 51:57
  Speaker 1: This is the placebo effect. The sugar pill paradox? Your
• 52:03
  Speaker 1: brain expects relief, so it produces its own relief. It
• 52:10
  Speaker 1: releases endorphins, the body's natural morphine. It turns down the
• 52:16
  Speaker 1: volume on the pain signals. It is the strangest realization
• 52:21
  Speaker 1: of all. Your body has the ability to heal itself,
• 52:26
  Speaker 1: to soothe itself, but sometimes it waits for permission. It
• 52:32
  Speaker 1: waits for a man in a white coat or a
• 52:35
  Speaker 1: pill or a ritual to tell it that it is
• 52:39
  Speaker 1: okay to stop hurting. Tonight, you do not need a pill.
• 52:45
  Speaker 1: You do not need salt water. You have the permission.
• 52:53
  Speaker 1: The day is done. The wars are being fought by
• 52:57
  Speaker 1: the silent machines within you. The history of the world
• 53:01
  Speaker 1: has led to this moment where you can lie in
• 53:04
  Speaker 1: a soft bed, In a temperature-controlled room, safe from the wolves,
• 53:10
  Speaker 1: safe from the cold, safe from the smallpox, you are
• 53:14
  Speaker 1: the result of four billion years of survival. You are
• 53:18
  Speaker 1: the descendant of the ones who chewed the bark, who
• 53:22
  Speaker 1: survived the plague, who noticed the mold. You have earned
• 53:27
  Speaker 1: this rest. The darkness of the room is not empty.
• 53:33
  Speaker 1: It is a blanket of its own. Your breathing is slow. In, out.
• 53:39
  Speaker 1: The rhythm of the biology. The hum of the vessel.
• 53:45
  Speaker 1: Everything is working as it should. Nature is chaotic, yes.
• 53:52
  Speaker 1: But it is also resilient. And so are you. The
• 53:57
  Speaker 1: universe will keep spinning while you sleep. The mold will grow.
• 54:02
  Speaker 1: The flowers will bloom. The lizards will sleep in the desert.
• 54:08
  Speaker 1: You can let go now. The science is done. The
• 54:12
  Speaker 1: experiment is a success. But science, true science, is never
• 54:19
  Speaker 1: really finished. It is a book that writes itself endlessly.
• 54:24
  Speaker 1: And while the pill bottle on your nightstand is closed,
• 54:27
  Speaker 1: the history behind it is vast. We have spoken of
• 54:31
  Speaker 1: mold and flowers, but... We have not yet spoken of
• 54:36
  Speaker 1: the jungle, or the trenches, or the strange glowing lights
• 54:43
  Speaker 1: that people once thought were magic. So, do not drift
• 54:48
  Speaker 1: away just yet. Let us open the cabinet again. Let
• 54:53
  Speaker 1: us reach toward the back where the dusty bottles are kept,
• 54:57
  Speaker 1: the ones with the faded labels, the ones that tell
• 55:01
  Speaker 1: stories of fever and war and the beautiful, deadly mistakes
• 55:07
  Speaker 1: we made along the way. Let us transport ourselves from
• 55:11
  Speaker 1: the safety of your bedroom to a place where safety
• 55:14
  Speaker 1: does not exist. Imagine a tropical jungle in the 17th century.
• 55:20
  Speaker 1: The air is heavy. It sits on your skin like
• 55:24
  Speaker 1: a wet blanket. It smells of rotting vegetation. Sweet orchids
• 55:31
  Speaker 1: and stagnant water. You are sweating. But you are freezing.
• 55:37
  Speaker 1: You are shivering so violently that your teeth chatter. This
• 55:42
  Speaker 1: is the ague. The shaking fever. The malaria. For centuries,
• 55:49
  Speaker 1: malaria was the dragon that guarded the tropics. It killed explorers.
• 55:54
  Speaker 1: It killed soldiers. It killed popes in Rome. It was
• 55:59
  Speaker 1: an invisible predator that lived in the bad air. Or
• 56:04
  Speaker 1: so we thought. The word itself, malaria, means bad air
• 56:09
  Speaker 1: in Italian. We thought it came from the smell of
• 56:13
  Speaker 1: the swamps. We did not know it came from the mosquito.
• 56:19
  Speaker 1: But deep in the forests of Peru, the indigenous people
• 56:23
  Speaker 1: knew a secret. They knew of a tree. The cinchona tree.
• 56:29
  Speaker 1: It was a tall tree with pink flowers, and like
• 56:33
  Speaker 1: the willow, it had a bitter bark. Legend tells of
• 56:38
  Speaker 1: a Spanish countess, the Countess of Chinchon. She was dying
• 56:44
  Speaker 1: of the fever in Peru. Her doctors were helpless, but
• 56:48
  Speaker 1: a local healer offered her the bark. She drank the
• 56:53
  Speaker 1: bitter tea. She survived. She brought the bark back to Europe,
• 56:59
  Speaker 1: and for the first time, the Western world had a
• 57:03
  Speaker 1: weapon against the fever. We called it quinine. It was
• 57:09
  Speaker 1: a white, crystalline powder extracted from the bark, and it
• 57:14
  Speaker 1: was miraculously effective. It killed the malaria parasite in the blood,
• 57:20
  Speaker 1: but it had a flaw. It was bitter, unspeakably bitter,
• 57:26
  Speaker 1: It made the willow bark taste like candy in comparison.
• 57:30
  Speaker 1: British soldiers stationed in India had to take their quinine
• 57:34
  Speaker 1: every day to survive. But the taste was so foul
• 57:38
  Speaker 1: they could barely stomach it. They tried to mask it.
• 57:42
  Speaker 1: They mixed the bitter powder with sugar. They mixed it
• 57:46
  Speaker 1: with water. They added lime. And because they were British soldiers,
• 57:55
  Speaker 1: they added gin. The gin and tonic was born. Think
• 58:02
  Speaker 1: about that the next time you hear the clink of
• 58:04
  Speaker 1: ice in a glass at a bar. That is not
• 58:08
  Speaker 1: just a cocktail. It is a medical delivery system. It
• 58:12
  Speaker 1: is a pharmacological solution to a logistical problem. The tonic
• 58:17
  Speaker 1: water you buy today still contains quinine. If you hold
• 58:21
  Speaker 1: it under a black light, it will glow a ghostly
• 58:26
  Speaker 1: That glow is the ghost of the fever tree, the
• 58:29
  Speaker 1: legacy of a struggle against the swamp. We turned a
• 58:33
  Speaker 1: life-saving medicine into a recreational beverage. It is a very
• 58:38
  Speaker 1: human thing to do. We take the bitter survival mechanism
• 58:42
  Speaker 1: of a tree and we turn it into a social ritual.
• 58:47
  Speaker 1: But sometimes the origin of a cure is not found
• 58:53
  Speaker 1: in a forest. but on a battlefield. And the substance
• 58:58
  Speaker 1: is not a tree bark, but a weapon of mass destruction.
• 59:03
  Speaker 1: Let us move the timeline forward. We are in the
• 59:08
  Speaker 1: trenches of world war one. War I. The year is 1917.
• 59:14
  Speaker 1: The landscape is gray. The mud is deep. The sky
• 59:19
  Speaker 1: is choked with smoke. There is a sound, a low hiss.
• 59:26
  Speaker 1: A cloud of yellow gas drifts across the battlefield It
• 59:30
  Speaker 1: is heavier than air. It sinks into the trenches. It
• 59:36
  Speaker 1: smells like garlic. It smells like mustard. This is mustard gas.
• 59:43
  Speaker 1: It is a chemical weapon designed to kill. It burns
• 59:47
  Speaker 1: the skin. It blinds the eyes. It destroys the lungs.
• 59:53
  Speaker 1: It is one of the most horrific inventions of warfare.
• 59:57
  Speaker 1: But doctors... noticed something strange about the soldiers who were
• 1:00:02
  Speaker 1: exposed to this gas. When they examined the survivors, they
• 1:00:07
  Speaker 1: found that their white blood cell counts were incredibly low.
• 1:00:13
  Speaker 1: The gas had destroyed their bone marrow. It had stopped
• 1:00:17
  Speaker 1: their body from making new cells. At the time, this
• 1:00:21
  Speaker 1: was just another tragedy, another horror of war. But Fast
• 1:00:29
  Speaker 1: forward to the 1940s. Scientists were looking for a way
• 1:00:36
  Speaker 1: to fight cancer, specifically lymphoma. Lymphoma is a cancer of
• 1:00:43
  Speaker 1: the white blood cells. It is a disease where the
• 1:00:46
  Speaker 1: cells multiply uncontrollably. They divide and divide until they choke
• 1:00:53
  Speaker 1: the body. The doctors remembered the mustard gas. They remembered
• 1:01:00
  Speaker 1: that it stopped cells from dividing. They thought, what if
• 1:01:05
  Speaker 1: we could use the weapon against the cancer? They took
• 1:01:09
  Speaker 1: a derivative of the gas, a slightly modified version called
• 1:01:14
  Speaker 1: nitrogen mustard, and they injected it into a patient with
• 1:01:18
  Speaker 1: advanced lymphoma. It worked. The tumors shrank. The cancer cells,
• 1:01:26
  Speaker 1: which divide faster than normal cells, absorb the poison and died.
• 1:01:32
  Speaker 1: The patient went into remission. This was the birth of chemotherapy,
• 1:01:37
  Speaker 1: the treatment that has saved millions of lives, the treatment
• 1:01:42
  Speaker 1: that we use to fight the emperor of all maladies.
• 1:01:46
  Speaker 1: He is a direct descendant of the yellow gas that
• 1:01:49
  Speaker 1: drifted across the trenches of Flanders. We took a sword
• 1:01:54
  Speaker 1: designed to kill soldiers, and we beat it into a
• 1:01:57
  Speaker 1: scalpel to kill tumors. It is a brutal form of medicine.
• 1:02:03
  Speaker 1: Chemotherapy is poison. That is the truth of it. We
• 1:02:08
  Speaker 1: are poisoning the patient just enough to kill the cancer,
• 1:02:11
  Speaker 1: but hoping not to kill the patient. It is a race,
• 1:02:16
  Speaker 1: a game of chicken played on a cellular level. And
• 1:02:20
  Speaker 1: just like the willow bark and the foxglove and the mold,
• 1:02:25
  Speaker 1: it reminds us that the line between a weapon and
• 1:02:29
  Speaker 1: a cure is purely a matter of intent. The universe
• 1:02:34
  Speaker 1: does not care if a molecule is good or bad.
• 1:02:39
  Speaker 1: It only cares what it interacts with. Speaking of interactions
• 1:02:45
  Speaker 1: and the strange things we put in our bodies, We
• 1:02:48
  Speaker 1: must talk about the glow. Close your eyes and picture
• 1:02:53
  Speaker 1: the 1920s. The Jazz Age. The flappers. The music. And
• 1:03:00
  Speaker 1: the radium. Marie Curie had discovered radium a few years earlier.
• 1:03:06
  Speaker 1: It was a new element. It was magical. It produced
• 1:03:12
  Speaker 1: energy out of nowhere. It glowed in the dark with
• 1:03:17
  Speaker 1: a soft, pale green light. People were mesmerized. They didn't
• 1:03:25
  Speaker 1: understand radiation. They didn't know about DNA damage. They just
• 1:03:31
  Speaker 1: saw energy. And they thought, if it has energy, it
• 1:03:36
  Speaker 1: must be good for us. So, we put radium in everything.
• 1:03:42
  Speaker 1: There was radium chocolate. Radium toothpaste to make your teeth shine.
• 1:03:48
  Speaker 1: Radium cosmetics to give your face a healthy glow. People
• 1:03:53
  Speaker 1: bought jars of water lined with radium called Radithor and
• 1:03:59
  Speaker 1: drank it every morning to cure arthritis, impotence, and fatigue.
• 1:04:06
  Speaker 1: Imagine waking up in 1925. You brush your teeth with
• 1:04:13
  Speaker 1: radioactive paste You drink a glass of radioactive water. You
• 1:04:18
  Speaker 1: feel energized. You feel modern. You are slowly dismantling your
• 1:04:26
  Speaker 1: own bones from the inside out, but you do not
• 1:04:29
  Speaker 1: know it yet. The most tragic story of this era
• 1:04:33
  Speaker 1: belongs to the radium girls. These were young women, some
• 1:04:39
  Speaker 1: as young as 14, who worked in factories painting watch dials.
• 1:04:44
  Speaker 1: They used a paint made of glue, water, and powdered radium.
• 1:04:51
  Speaker 1: It made the numbers on the watches glow in the
• 1:04:54
  Speaker 1: dark so soldiers could see the time at night. To
• 1:04:58
  Speaker 1: get the numbers precise, the girls were taught a technique. Lip, dip, paint.
• 1:05:06
  Speaker 1: They would put the paintbrush in their mouth to sharpen
• 1:05:09
  Speaker 1: the tip. They would dip it in the radium. They
• 1:05:12
  Speaker 1: would paint a number. And they would do it again. Lip. Dip. Paint.
• 1:05:20
  Speaker 1: Hundreds of times a day, they were swallowing the glow.
• 1:05:24
  Speaker 1: At first, it seemed fun. The girls would paint their
• 1:05:28
  Speaker 1: fingernails with the leftovers. They would paint their teeth so
• 1:05:32
  Speaker 1: they would smile in the dark at parties. They were
• 1:05:36
  Speaker 1: called the ghost girls because they shimmered. But then, the
• 1:05:42
  Speaker 1: pain started. Their teeth began to fall out. Their jaws
• 1:05:48
  Speaker 1: began to crumble. The radium, which looks chemically similar to calcium,
• 1:05:54
  Speaker 1: was being absorbed by their bodies and built directly into
• 1:05:58
  Speaker 1: their skeletons. They were becoming radioactive structures. They developed massive tumors.
• 1:06:06
  Speaker 1: Their bones snapped under their own weight. It took years
• 1:06:11
  Speaker 1: for the world to admit that the magic element was
• 1:06:15
  Speaker 1: a killer. The radium girls fought for justice from their deathbeds.
• 1:06:19
  Speaker 1: Their sacrifice is the reason we have workplace safety laws today.
• 1:06:25
  Speaker 1: If you go to their graves and hold a Geiger
• 1:06:29
  Speaker 1: counter over the dirt, it will still click. They are
• 1:06:33
  Speaker 1: still glowing a hundred years later. It is a somber
• 1:06:37
  Speaker 1: thought for a bedtime story, isn't it? But it serves
• 1:06:41
  Speaker 1: a purpose. It reminds us that what we consider healthy
• 1:06:46
  Speaker 1: today might be viewed with horror tomorrow. It teaches us humility.
• 1:06:53
  Speaker 1: We are stumbling in the dark, feeling for the light switch.
• 1:06:58
  Speaker 1: Sometimes we find the light. Sometimes we touch a live wire.
• 1:07:04
  Speaker 1: But you, lying there in the dark, you're safe from
• 1:07:08
  Speaker 1: the radium. We learned We stopped. The watch on your
• 1:07:13
  Speaker 1: wrist glows with safe, non-radioactive phosphorescence. The water on your
• 1:07:19
  Speaker 1: nightstand is just water. The toothpaste is just toothpaste. We
• 1:07:25
  Speaker 1: learn by making mistakes. Terrible, painful mistakes. And sometimes, the
• 1:07:33
  Speaker 1: mistake is not what we use, but what we fail
• 1:07:37
  Speaker 1: to believe. Let us travel back to Vienna in the 1840s.
• 1:07:43
  Speaker 1: We are entering a hospital, a large, echoing building of stone.
• 1:07:50
  Speaker 1: This is the Vienna General Hospital, and it has two
• 1:07:54
  Speaker 1: maternity clinics, Clinic 1 and Clinic 2. In Clinic 2,
• 1:08:01
  Speaker 1: the babies are delivered by midwives. It is a calm place.
• 1:08:07
  Speaker 1: The mothers usually survive. In Clinic One, the babies are
• 1:08:12
  Speaker 1: delivered by doctors and medical students. It is a place
• 1:08:17
  Speaker 1: of death. Women begged not to be taken to Clinic One.
• 1:08:22
  Speaker 1: They would give birth in the street rather than go there.
• 1:08:25
  Speaker 1: Because in Clinic One, a mysterious illness called childbed fever
• 1:08:31
  Speaker 1: stalked the wards. Women would give birth. And days later,
• 1:08:37
  Speaker 1: they would spike a fever, scream in agony, and die.
• 1:08:44
  Speaker 1: The doctors blamed everything. They blamed the ventilation. They blamed
• 1:08:50
  Speaker 1: the magnetic fields. They blamed the diet. They blamed the
• 1:08:56
  Speaker 1: constipation of the womb. Enter Ignaz Semmelweis, a young, intense
• 1:09:05
  Speaker 1: Hungarian doctor. He was obsessed with the numbers. Why did
• 1:09:11
  Speaker 1: clinic one have a mortality rate three times higher than
• 1:09:15
  Speaker 1: clinic two? He looked at the differences. The midwives in
• 1:09:19
  Speaker 1: clinic two stayed in the ward. They knit. They cleaned.
• 1:09:25
  Speaker 1: But the doctors in clinic one? They were men of science.
• 1:09:30
  Speaker 1: They started their day in the morgue. They performed autopsies
• 1:09:34
  Speaker 1: on the women who had died the day before. They
• 1:09:37
  Speaker 1: wanted to learn. They cut open the bodies to study
• 1:09:40
  Speaker 1: the anatomy. Then, with their hands still smelling of the morgue,
• 1:09:46
  Speaker 1: They would walk upstairs to the maternity ward and deliver
• 1:09:51
  Speaker 1: a baby. They didn't wash their hands. Why would they?
• 1:09:56
  Speaker 1: They were gentlemen, and gentlemen are clean by definition. Semmelweis
• 1:10:02
  Speaker 1: had a horrifying realization. The doctors were carrying cadaverous particles,
• 1:10:09
  Speaker 1: death particles, from the morgue to the mothers. They were
• 1:10:13
  Speaker 1: the delivery system of the disease. He ordered the doctors
• 1:10:17
  Speaker 1: to wash their hands in a solution of chlorinated lime. Bleach.
• 1:10:22
  Speaker 1: The doctors were furious. They were insulted. You are telling
• 1:10:28
  Speaker 1: us we are dirty? We are doctors. But Semmelweis insisted,
• 1:10:35
  Speaker 1: and the results were instant. The death rate dropped from
• 1:10:40
  Speaker 1: 18% to 1%. The fever vanished. He had saved thousands
• 1:10:47
  Speaker 1: of lives. He had found the answer. So, naturally, the
• 1:10:54
  Speaker 1: medical community celebrated him? No. They destroyed him. They mocked him.
• 1:11:02
  Speaker 1: They fired him. They refused to believe that invisible particles
• 1:11:07
  Speaker 1: on their hands could cause death. It went against everything
• 1:11:13
  Speaker 1: they knew. They ostracized him so severely that he had
• 1:11:18
  Speaker 1: a mental breakdown. He was lured into an asylum, beaten
• 1:11:22
  Speaker 1: by the guards, and died of an infected wound. A
• 1:11:27
  Speaker 1: wound caused by the very bacteria he had spent his
• 1:11:32
  Speaker 1: life warning people about. It took another 20 years for
• 1:11:36
  Speaker 1: Louis Pasteur and Joseph Lister to prove the germ theory
• 1:11:41
  Speaker 1: of disease. Semmelweis was right. But he was right too early.
• 1:11:48
  Speaker 1: It is a chilling reminder that science is not just data.
• 1:11:53
  Speaker 1: It is people. And people are stubborn. People are proud.
• 1:11:59
  Speaker 1: Even the smartest people in the room can be blinded
• 1:12:03
  Speaker 1: by their own ego. But tonight, we wash our hands.
• 1:12:08
  Speaker 1: We use sanitizer. We understand the invisible world, Semmelweis's tragedy,
• 1:12:15
  Speaker 1: is our safety. The hospital room is sterile because he
• 1:12:21
  Speaker 1: was willing to be the villain. The history of medicine
• 1:12:26
  Speaker 1: is a graveyard of egos. But let us move away
• 1:12:30
  Speaker 1: from the doctors and look at the patients again. Or rather,
• 1:12:34
  Speaker 1: let us look at the tools we use to diagnose them.
• 1:12:38
  Speaker 1: We have talked about plants. We have talked about mold. Now,
• 1:12:42
  Speaker 1: we must talk about a creature that is older than
• 1:12:45
  Speaker 1: the dinosaurs. Travel with me to the coast of the
• 1:12:49
  Speaker 1: Atlantic Ocean. It is a moonlit night in May. The
• 1:12:54
  Speaker 1: tide is high. Crawling out of the dark water are
• 1:12:58
  Speaker 1: hundreds of strange armored creatures. They look like helmets with tails.
• 1:13:06
  Speaker 1: They are horseshoe crabs. They are not really crabs. They
• 1:13:11
  Speaker 1: are more closely related to spiders. They are living fossils.
• 1:13:17
  Speaker 1: They have been patrolling the ocean floor for 450 million years.
• 1:13:22
  Speaker 1: They watched the dinosaurs rise. They watched the meteor fall.
• 1:13:27
  Speaker 1: They watched the mammals take over. And they kept crawling.
• 1:13:34
  Speaker 1: But they have a secret. their blood. If you were
• 1:13:38
  Speaker 1: to crack open a horseshoe crab, you would see that
• 1:13:42
  Speaker 1: its blood is not red. It is blue. Baby blue.
• 1:13:50
  Speaker 1: It is copper-based, not iron-based like ours. But the color
• 1:13:56
  Speaker 1: is not the important part. The important part is what
• 1:14:00
  Speaker 1: the blood does. The horseshoe crab lives in the ocean,
• 1:14:05
  Speaker 1: a place teeming with bacteria. If its shell gets cracked,
• 1:14:09
  Speaker 1: bacteria rush in. The crab does not have an immune
• 1:14:12
  Speaker 1: system like ours. It does not have white blood cells
• 1:14:16
  Speaker 1: that hunt down invaders. Instead, its blood contains a special
• 1:14:21
  Speaker 1: cell called an amoebocyte. When these cells detect even a single,
• 1:14:29
  Speaker 1: microscopic trace of bacterial toxin, they instantly explode. They release
• 1:14:35
  Speaker 1: a gel that clots the blood immediately. They seal off
• 1:14:39
  Speaker 1: the wound in seconds. It is a biological containment system.
• 1:14:45
  Speaker 1: In the 1950s, scientists realized how sensitive this was. They
• 1:14:50
  Speaker 1: harvested the blue blood. They created a substance called LALL.
• 1:14:58
  Speaker 1: It is the most sensitive detector of bacteria on Earth.
• 1:15:05
  Speaker 1: Every time you get an injection, every time a surgeon
• 1:15:09
  Speaker 1: puts an implant in a body, every time a pacemaker
• 1:15:12
  Speaker 1: is installed, that object has been tested with the blood
• 1:15:17
  Speaker 1: of a horseshoe crab. If you put a drop of
• 1:15:19
  Speaker 1: the crab blood on a surgical tool and it turns
• 1:15:23
  Speaker 1: into a gel, you know it is contaminated. If it
• 1:15:27
  Speaker 1: stays liquid, you know it is safe. We literally owe
• 1:15:32
  Speaker 1: our sterile medical world to the blood of an ancient
• 1:15:35
  Speaker 1: sea monster. We harvest them by the thousands, drain a
• 1:15:41
  Speaker 1: cup of their blue blood, and release them back into
• 1:15:44
  Speaker 1: the ocean. It is a strange vampirism. We drain the
• 1:15:50
  Speaker 1: ancient ones to protect the modern ones. Imagine the crab
• 1:15:55
  Speaker 1: drifting in the cold dark of the ocean, 400 million
• 1:15:59
  Speaker 1: years of survival encoded in its blue veins. And now,
• 1:16:04
  Speaker 1: A part of that survival is protecting the needle that
• 1:16:07
  Speaker 1: delivers your flu shot. We are all connected. The crab,
• 1:16:13
  Speaker 1: the mold, the tree, the human. It is a single,
• 1:16:21
  Speaker 1: vast web of biology. We are borrowing survival strategies from
• 1:16:26
  Speaker 1: everything around us. And speaking of borrowing and immortality, There
• 1:16:32
  Speaker 1: is one human who achieved it, but she did not
• 1:16:37
  Speaker 1: ask for it. Her name was Henrietta Lacks. The year
• 1:16:43
  Speaker 1: was 1951. Henrietta was a young mother in Baltimore. She
• 1:16:50
  Speaker 1: went to the hospital complaining of a knot inside her.
• 1:16:55
  Speaker 1: It was cervical cancer, a tumor. Her doctor took a
• 1:16:59
  Speaker 1: sample of the tumor cells without telling her. This was
• 1:17:03
  Speaker 1: standard practice at the time. He put the cells in
• 1:17:07
  Speaker 1: a petri dish. Normally, human cells outside the body die
• 1:17:13
  Speaker 1: in a few days. They are fragile. They need the
• 1:17:18
  Speaker 1: warmth of the host. Scientists have been trying for decades
• 1:17:23
  Speaker 1: to keep human cells alive in the lab, but they
• 1:17:27
  Speaker 1: always failed. But Henrietta's cells were different. They didn't die.
• 1:17:33
  Speaker 1: They grew. They doubled every 24 hours. They were aggressive.
• 1:17:40
  Speaker 1: They were unstoppable. Henrietta passed away in October of that year.
• 1:17:46
  Speaker 1: The cancer took her. She left behind five children and
• 1:17:50
  Speaker 1: a husband who missed her. But in the lab, Henrietta
• 1:17:55
  Speaker 1: was still alive. Her cells, nicknamed HeLa cells, kept growing.
• 1:18:03
  Speaker 1: Scientists realized they had found the Holy Grail, an immortal
• 1:18:09
  Speaker 1: human cell line. They began to ship vials of HeLa
• 1:18:14
  Speaker 1: cells all over the world. To Russia, to Japan, to space.
• 1:18:21
  Speaker 1: HeLa cells were used to test the polio vaccine. They
• 1:18:25
  Speaker 1: were used to study the effects of the atomic bomb.
• 1:18:29
  Speaker 1: They were used to create chemotherapy drugs. They were used
• 1:18:34
  Speaker 1: to map the human genome. If you could weigh all
• 1:18:37
  Speaker 1: the HeLa cells that have been grown since 1951, they
• 1:18:42
  Speaker 1: would weigh more than 50 million metric tons. They would
• 1:18:46
  Speaker 1: weigh as much as 100 Empire State Buildings. Henrietta Lacks
• 1:18:51
  Speaker 1: is everywhere. There are parts of her living in frozen
• 1:18:55
  Speaker 1: freezers in every major city on Earth. She has traveled
• 1:19:00
  Speaker 1: further than any human being in history, but for decades,
• 1:19:05
  Speaker 1: her family didn't know. They were living in poverty, unable
• 1:19:10
  Speaker 1: to afford health insurance while their mother's cells were generating
• 1:19:14
  Speaker 1: billions of dollars for the pharmaceutical industry. It is a
• 1:19:20
  Speaker 1: ghost story. A story of a woman who achieved immortality
• 1:19:25
  Speaker 1: without her consent. A woman whose tragedy became the foundation
• 1:19:30
  Speaker 1: of modern biology. Every time a scientist looks through a
• 1:19:34
  Speaker 1: microscope at a human cell, there is a good chance
• 1:19:39
  Speaker 1: They are looking at Henrietta. We are standing on the
• 1:19:42
  Speaker 1: shoulders of giants, but also on the shoulders of mothers
• 1:19:47
  Speaker 1: and crabs and milkmaids. The structure of our safety is
• 1:19:54
  Speaker 1: built from their stories. It is heavy, isn't it? The
• 1:19:59
  Speaker 1: weight of all this history. But it is also comforting.
• 1:20:05
  Speaker 1: It means you are not alone in the dark. You
• 1:20:07
  Speaker 1: are surrounded by the legacy of survival. The bed you
• 1:20:12
  Speaker 1: lie in is a raft floating on an ocean of discovery.
• 1:20:16
  Speaker 1: The current is slow now. The water is calm. Let
• 1:20:22
  Speaker 1: us look at one last curiosity before we fully surrender
• 1:20:27
  Speaker 1: to the drift. Let us look at something cold. Sleep
• 1:20:31
  Speaker 1: is often compared to winter, a time of hibernation. a
• 1:20:37
  Speaker 1: time of slowing down. In the forests of North America,
• 1:20:43
  Speaker 1: there is a tiny frog, the wood frog. It is small, brown, unassuming.
• 1:20:52
  Speaker 1: It looks like a dead leaf. When winter comes, the
• 1:20:57
  Speaker 1: temperature drops below freezing. The ground becomes hard as iron.
• 1:21:03
  Speaker 1: The water turns to ice. Most animals hide. They burrow
• 1:21:10
  Speaker 1: deep underground. They find a cave. They keep their internal
• 1:21:16
  Speaker 1: fire burning. The wood frog does not hide. It crawls
• 1:21:23
  Speaker 1: under a pile of leaves. It curls up and it
• 1:21:28
  Speaker 1: does something impossible. It lets itself freeze solid. The water
• 1:21:35
  Speaker 1: in its blood turns to ice. Its heart stops beating.
• 1:21:39
  Speaker 1: Its brain stops thinking. Its lungs stop breathing. If you
• 1:21:44
  Speaker 1: picked it up, it would be a hard, frozen pebble.
• 1:21:50
  Speaker 1: You could skip it across a pond. Clinically, it is dead.
• 1:21:55
  Speaker 1: But it is not dead. It is waiting. Before it freezes,
• 1:22:02
  Speaker 1: the frog's liver pumps a massive amount of glucose. sugar
• 1:22:08
  Speaker 1: into its cells. This sugar acts as a natural antifreeze.
• 1:22:14
  Speaker 1: It stops the sharp ice crystals from puncturing the cell walls.
• 1:22:19
  Speaker 1: It turns the inside of the cell into a thick,
• 1:22:23
  Speaker 1: sugary syrup that does not freeze. So the frog becomes
• 1:22:29
  Speaker 1: a biological popsicle. It spends the entire winter in suspended animation.
• 1:22:36
  Speaker 1: a state of halted time. And then, when the spring
• 1:22:41
  Speaker 1: sun warms the ground, the magic happens. The ice melts.
• 1:22:47
  Speaker 1: The heart gives a twitch. Then another. The blood begins
• 1:22:53
  Speaker 1: to flow. The brain reboots. Within an hour, the frog
• 1:22:58
  Speaker 1: hops away, looking for a mate. It has returned from
• 1:23:03
  Speaker 1: the dead. We humans have been obsessed with this idea. Cryogenics.
• 1:23:10
  Speaker 1: Freezing ourselves to wake up in the future. We want
• 1:23:13
  Speaker 1: to be the wood frog. We have built metal tanks
• 1:23:18
  Speaker 1: filled with liquid nitrogen. We have frozen heads and bodies,
• 1:23:24
  Speaker 1: hoping that one day science will figure out how to
• 1:23:27
  Speaker 1: thaw us without killing us. are waiting for the spring
• 1:23:33
  Speaker 1: that may never come. But you, you do not need
• 1:23:39
  Speaker 1: liquid nitrogen. You have a simpler technology. You have sleep.
• 1:23:45
  Speaker 1: Sleep is our mini-hibernation. It is our nightly rehearsal for
• 1:23:50
  Speaker 1: the void. We slow down the machine. We turn off
• 1:23:55
  Speaker 1: the consciousness. We drift into the gray space where time
• 1:23:59
  Speaker 1: does not exist. And just like the frog, we trust
• 1:24:04
  Speaker 1: that the sun will rise. We trust that the heart
• 1:24:08
  Speaker 1: will keep beating. We trust that the brain will reboot
• 1:24:13
  Speaker 1: in the morning. It is a leap of faith we
• 1:24:16
  Speaker 1: take every single night. And every single morning, we stick
• 1:24:22
  Speaker 1: the landing. The universe is full of these cycles. The
• 1:24:27
  Speaker 1: frog freezes and thaws The tide comes in and out.
• 1:24:33
  Speaker 1: The heart contracts and expands. You wake and you sleep.
• 1:24:40
  Speaker 1: It is a rhythm, a pulse. You are part of
• 1:24:44
  Speaker 1: that pulse. You cannot escape it, and you do not
• 1:24:48
  Speaker 1: need to. Feel the rhythm of your own breathing now.
• 1:24:53
  Speaker 1: It is the same rhythm as the tide. It is
• 1:24:56
  Speaker 1: the same rhythm as the seasons. and out expansion and contraction.
• 1:25:06
  Speaker 1: The science is fascinating, but the biology is simple. You
• 1:25:13
  Speaker 1: are a machine designed to rest. Let us drift a
• 1:25:18
  Speaker 1: little deeper now. Let us zoom in one last time
• 1:25:24
  Speaker 1: past the organs, past the cells, Past the molecules, let
• 1:25:31
  Speaker 1: us look at the engine that powers you. Inside almost
• 1:25:35
  Speaker 1: every cell in your body, there are tiny, bean-shaped structures
• 1:25:41
  Speaker 1: called mitochondria. You might remember them from high school biology,
• 1:25:48
  Speaker 1: the powerhouse of the cell. But they are stranger than that.
• 1:25:53
  Speaker 1: Billions of years ago, the Earth was a hostile ocean.
• 1:25:59
  Speaker 1: single-celled organisms floated in the soup. One day, a large
• 1:26:05
  Speaker 1: cell swallowed a smaller bacteria. Normally, the large cell would
• 1:26:12
  Speaker 1: digest the small one. It would eat it. But this time,
• 1:26:20
  Speaker 1: something different happened. The small bacteria didn't die. It made
• 1:26:25
  Speaker 1: a deal. It said, if you let me live, I
• 1:26:29
  Speaker 1: will generate energy for you. I will pay rent. The
• 1:26:34
  Speaker 1: large cell agreed. They became partners. They merged. That ancient
• 1:26:41
  Speaker 1: bacteria became the mitochondria. It has its own DNA. It
• 1:26:48
  Speaker 1: is separate from you, but it is part of you.
• 1:26:53
  Speaker 1: It is an alien living inside your cells. generating the
• 1:26:57
  Speaker 1: electricity that allows you to think, to move, to dream.
• 1:27:02
  Speaker 1: You are not just one person. You are a colony.
• 1:27:08
  Speaker 1: You are a symbiotic relationship between a host and a
• 1:27:12
  Speaker 1: billion ancient bacteria. Even now, as you lie still, they
• 1:27:18
  Speaker 1: are working. They are burning oxygen. They are creating ATP.
• 1:27:26
  Speaker 1: The fuel of life. They are keeping the pilot light
• 1:27:30
  Speaker 1: on while the furnace is turned down. You don't have
• 1:27:33
  Speaker 1: to tell them what to do. They know. They have
• 1:27:37
  Speaker 1: known for two billion years. So you can resign your
• 1:27:41
  Speaker 1: position as the CEO of your body for the night.
• 1:27:45
  Speaker 1: The night shift has arrived. The ancient bacteria are manning
• 1:27:50
  Speaker 1: the controls. The immune system is walking the perimeter. The brain...
• 1:27:56
  Speaker 1: is starting its filing process. You are free to leave
• 1:28:00
  Speaker 1: the office. The heavy blanket is not just a piece
• 1:28:04
  Speaker 1: of fabric. It is a cocoon. Think of all the
• 1:28:08
  Speaker 1: things we have seen tonight. The mold in the window.
• 1:28:12
  Speaker 1: The bark on the tree. The clover in the field.
• 1:28:18
  Speaker 1: The gas in the trench. The glow in the watch.
• 1:28:22
  Speaker 1: The crab in the sea. the frog in the ice.
• 1:28:27
  Speaker 1: They are all part of the story that ends with
• 1:28:29
  Speaker 1: you lying here, safe, warm, and alive. The history of
• 1:28:36
  Speaker 1: medicine is a history of fear. Yes. but it is
• 1:28:41
  Speaker 1: also a history of comfort. We fought the darkness so
• 1:28:46
  Speaker 1: we could have this moment of light. We fought the
• 1:28:49
  Speaker 1: pain so we could have this moment of peace. The
• 1:28:52
  Speaker 1: struggle is for the daytime. The night is for the result,
• 1:28:58
  Speaker 1: and the result is this you are here you are
• 1:29:04
  Speaker 1: intact the world outside is vast and chaotic the wind
• 1:29:09
  Speaker 1: is blowing the stars are burning the galaxies are colliding
• 1:29:15
  Speaker 1: in the silence of space but in this room in
• 1:29:20
  Speaker 1: this bed there is only the slow steady rhythm of
• 1:29:25
  Speaker 1: your own existence the sleepless scientist has shown you the
• 1:29:30
  Speaker 1: monsters under the bed and shown you that we have
• 1:29:35
  Speaker 1: tamed them. We have put them in pill bottles. We
• 1:29:40
  Speaker 1: have turned them into vaccines. We have made them work
• 1:29:46
  Speaker 1: for us. The monsters are on the payroll now, so
• 1:29:51
  Speaker 1: there is nothing left to fear. The dialogue is over.
• 1:29:57
  Speaker 1: The lecture hall is empty. The lights are dimming in
• 1:30:02
  Speaker 1: the library. You can hear the silence now. It is
• 1:30:07
  Speaker 1: a heavy, soft silence like velvet. Let it wrap around you.
• 1:30:15
  Speaker 1: Your eyelids are heavy. Gravity is pulling you down, gently
• 1:30:21
  Speaker 1: anchoring you to the earth. The wood frog waits for spring.
• 1:30:25
  Speaker 1: The crab waits for the tide. You wait for the morning,
• 1:30:30
  Speaker 1: but for now, the waiting is over. The doing is over.
• 1:30:37
  Speaker 1: There is only the being. Drift on the current. The
• 1:30:43
  Speaker 1: science is done. The history is written. The body is ready. Sleep,
• 1:30:50
  Speaker 1: but while the conscious mind seeks the void, the machinery
• 1:30:54
  Speaker 1: must not stop. The lungs must heave. The blood must
• 1:31:00
  Speaker 1: flow and sometimes the machinery breaks when the body forgets
• 1:31:06
  Speaker 1: how to breathe or how to process the fuel you
• 1:31:11
  Speaker 1: feed it. We have to build external machines to do
• 1:31:14
  Speaker 1: the work for us. We have to build iron lungs
• 1:31:18
  Speaker 1: and artificial hearts and chemical regulators. We have to turn
• 1:31:24
  Speaker 1: the human body into a cyborg just to survive at night. So,
• 1:31:30
  Speaker 1: let us pull back the covers one more time. We
• 1:31:33
  Speaker 1: are not done with the hospital. We have to visit
• 1:31:37
  Speaker 1: the ward where the silence was once the most terrifying
• 1:31:40
  Speaker 1: sound in the world. Imagine a room filled with metal cylinders. Large,
• 1:31:47
  Speaker 1: yellow or gray tubes, looking like submarines or perhaps boilers.
• 1:31:54
  Speaker 1: Rows and rows of them. Inside each cylinder is a child.
• 1:32:00
  Speaker 1: Only their head is visible, resting on a small pillow
• 1:32:05
  Speaker 1: outside the machine. A mirror is suspended above their face
• 1:32:09
  Speaker 1: so they can see the room or read a book
• 1:32:13
  Speaker 1: or see their parents. This is the polio ward in
• 1:32:17
  Speaker 1: the 1950s. Polio was a virus that targeted the nerves. Specifically,
• 1:32:24
  Speaker 1: the nerves that told the diaphragm to move. Breathing feels
• 1:32:29
  Speaker 1: automatic to you right now. You do not think about it.
• 1:32:34
  Speaker 1: But breathing is a mechanical act of violence against the atmosphere.
• 1:32:40
  Speaker 1: Your diaphragm muscle pulls down, creating a vacuum in your chest.
• 1:32:45
  Speaker 1: The air outside, which is under higher pressure, rushes in
• 1:32:50
  Speaker 1: to fill the void. It is a bellows, but when
• 1:32:55
  Speaker 1: the virus severed the connection, the bellows stopped. The child
• 1:33:00
  Speaker 1: would try to breathe, but the air would not move.
• 1:33:05
  Speaker 1: They would suffocate while fully conscious. So engineers built the
• 1:33:12
  Speaker 1: iron lung. It was a negative pressure ventilator. It worked
• 1:33:18
  Speaker 1: by changing the pressure of the entire room or rather
• 1:33:23
  Speaker 1: the tiny room inside the cylinder. The machine would pump
• 1:33:28
  Speaker 1: air out of the tank, creating a vacuum around the
• 1:33:33
  Speaker 1: child's body. This vacuum would pull the chest wall out,
• 1:33:37
  Speaker 1: forcing the lungs to expand. Then, the machine would pump
• 1:33:43
  Speaker 1: air back in, pushing the chest down and forcing the
• 1:33:48
  Speaker 1: air out of the lungs. Whoosh! click, whoosh, click. The
• 1:33:55
  Speaker 1: sound of the bellows was the heartbeat of the ward.
• 1:33:59
  Speaker 1: If the power went out, the nurses would have to
• 1:34:02
  Speaker 1: pump the machines by hand. If they stopped, the children stopped.
• 1:34:07
  Speaker 1: It is a terrifying thought to be encased in steel,
• 1:34:12
  Speaker 1: to have your breath, the most fundamental act of life,
• 1:34:16
  Speaker 1: outsourced to an electric motor and a rubber seal. But
• 1:34:21
  Speaker 1: for the people in those tanks, the machine was not
• 1:34:26
  Speaker 1: a prison. It was a lifeline. It was the only
• 1:34:31
  Speaker 1: thing standing between them and the dark. Some people lived
• 1:34:35
  Speaker 1: in these tanks for weeks. Some lived in them for years.
• 1:34:40
  Speaker 1: One man, Paul Alexander, lived in an iron lung for
• 1:34:45
  Speaker 1: over 70 years. He went to law school. He wrote
• 1:34:51
  Speaker 1: He lived a full life, all while his body was
• 1:34:55
  Speaker 1: encased in a metal tube that breathed for him. It
• 1:35:00
  Speaker 1: reminds us that the human spirit is stubborn. It will
• 1:35:05
  Speaker 1: find a way to exist even when the biology has failed.
• 1:35:09
  Speaker 1: It will use a machine as a lung if it
• 1:35:12
  Speaker 1: has to. And speaking of failures of the body and
• 1:35:16
  Speaker 1: the need for external help, let us talk about hunger.
• 1:35:21
  Speaker 1: Not the hunger of the stomach, but the hunger of
• 1:35:24
  Speaker 1: the blood. Diabetes. For most of human history, a diagnosis
• 1:35:30
  Speaker 1: of type 1 diabetes was a death sentence. It was
• 1:35:34
  Speaker 1: a slow, wasting death. The body would lose the ability
• 1:35:39
  Speaker 1: to unlock the doors of its cells. The blood would
• 1:35:44
  Speaker 1: be full of sugar, glucose, the fuel of life. But
• 1:35:48
  Speaker 1: the cells... could not access it. They were starving in
• 1:35:54
  Speaker 1: the middle of a feast. The sugar would build up
• 1:35:58
  Speaker 1: in the blood, turning it into a thick syrup. The
• 1:36:01
  Speaker 1: kidneys would try to flush it out. The patient would
• 1:36:05
  Speaker 1: be constantly thirsty, constantly urinating. They would eat and eat,
• 1:36:12
  Speaker 1: but they would waste away. The body, desperate for fuel,
• 1:36:17
  Speaker 1: would start to consume itself It would burn its own
• 1:36:21
  Speaker 1: fat and muscle. The only treatment before 1921 was the
• 1:36:27
  Speaker 1: starvation diet. Doctors would put patients on a diet of
• 1:36:32
  Speaker 1: as little as 400 calories a day. It was barely
• 1:36:37
  Speaker 1: enough to stay alive. It simply slowed the dying process.
• 1:36:43
  Speaker 1: Enter Frederick Banting, a Canadian surgeon. wasn't a researcher. He
• 1:36:50
  Speaker 1: was a struggling doctor who couldn't pay his bills. He
• 1:36:54
  Speaker 1: had an idea. He thought the pancreas held the key.
• 1:36:59
  Speaker 1: He managed to get a small lab at the University
• 1:37:02
  Speaker 1: of Toronto. He was given ten dogs and a medical
• 1:37:07
  Speaker 1: student named Charles Best. The summer of 1921 was hot.
• 1:37:13
  Speaker 1: The lab was stifling. It smelled of dog and chemicals.
• 1:37:21
  Speaker 1: Banting and Best worked tirelessly. They removed the pancreas from
• 1:37:25
  Speaker 1: a dog, making it diabetic. Then they took another pancreas,
• 1:37:32
  Speaker 1: mashed it up, filtered it, and injected the extract into
• 1:37:37
  Speaker 1: the dying dog. The dog woke up. It walked. Its
• 1:37:45
  Speaker 1: blood sugar dropped. They had found the key. They called
• 1:37:53
  Speaker 1: it iletin. We know it as insulin. But here is
• 1:37:58
  Speaker 1: the grim reality of mass production. To save the millions
• 1:38:03
  Speaker 1: of humans dying of diabetes, they needed millions of pancreases.
• 1:38:10
  Speaker 1: They went to the slaughterhouses. Imagine the stockyards of Chicago
• 1:38:15
  Speaker 1: or Toronto. In the 1920s, the noise, the smell of
• 1:38:21
  Speaker 1: blood and awful. Scientists and factory workers would collect the
• 1:38:26
  Speaker 1: frozen pancreases of cows and pigs by the ton. They
• 1:38:32
  Speaker 1: would grind them up in massive meat grinders. They would
• 1:38:36
  Speaker 1: treat the organ mash with acid and alcohol to extract
• 1:38:40
  Speaker 1: the precious hormone. For 60 years, if you were a diabetic,
• 1:38:45
  Speaker 1: You were injecting the ground-up essence of a pig or
• 1:38:49
  Speaker 1: a cow into your veins every single day. You were
• 1:38:54
  Speaker 1: borrowing the keys to the cell from a barnyard animal.
• 1:38:57
  Speaker 1: It wasn't until the 1980s that we figured out how
• 1:39:00
  Speaker 1: to use genetic engineering to make bacteria produce human insulin.
• 1:39:05
  Speaker 1: But for a lifetime, humanity survived on the spare parts
• 1:39:09
  Speaker 1: of the slaughterhouse. It is a visceral image. but it
• 1:39:14
  Speaker 1: is also beautiful in its efficiency. We are not so
• 1:39:20
  Speaker 1: different from the pig. Our locks are the same. Their
• 1:39:25
  Speaker 1: keys fit our doors. The universe is a salvage yard.
• 1:39:31
  Speaker 1: Nothing is wasted if you know how to use it.
• 1:39:35
  Speaker 1: And sometimes the most important discoveries are made not by
• 1:39:39
  Speaker 1: finding something new, but by looking at something old in
• 1:39:43
  Speaker 1: a new way or by simply making a mistake. Let
• 1:39:48
  Speaker 1: us talk about the rhythm of the heart. Your heart
• 1:39:52
  Speaker 1: is an electrical pump. It runs on a specific voltage,
• 1:39:59
  Speaker 1: a specific timing. Lube dub, lube dub. But sometimes the
• 1:40:06
  Speaker 1: wiring gets frayed. The signal gets blocked. The heart slows down.
• 1:40:13
  Speaker 1: It stops. In the 1950s, a man named Wilson Greatpatch
• 1:40:19
  Speaker 1: was building a device to record the sound of the heart.
• 1:40:23
  Speaker 1: He was an electrical engineer. He was soldering a circuit board.
• 1:40:28
  Speaker 1: He reached into his box of parts to grab a resistor.
• 1:40:32
  Speaker 1: He grabbed the wrong one. He installed a resistor with
• 1:40:36
  Speaker 1: a wrong resistance. When he turned the machine on, it
• 1:40:41
  Speaker 1: didn't record sound. It pulsed. Click, click, click. It produced
• 1:40:48
  Speaker 1: a steady, rhythmic electrical pulse. Great Batch stared at it.
• 1:40:54
  Speaker 1: He realized he wasn't looking at a recorder. He was
• 1:40:58
  Speaker 1: looking at a driver. He realized that if he made
• 1:41:02
  Speaker 1: this small enough and put it inside a chest, it
• 1:41:07
  Speaker 1: could tell a broken heart when to beat. He had
• 1:41:12
  Speaker 1: invented the pacemaker. The first ones were external. They were
• 1:41:18
  Speaker 1: plugged into the wall. Patients had to push a cart
• 1:41:21
  Speaker 1: around with their life support system. If there was a blackout,
• 1:41:25
  Speaker 1: they were in trouble. But soon they became battery powered.
• 1:41:31
  Speaker 1: They were encased in plastic and titanium. Today, millions of
• 1:41:37
  Speaker 1: people have a small silver computer implanted in their chest.
• 1:41:43
  Speaker 1: It sits under the skin, quiet, waiting. If the heart
• 1:41:49
  Speaker 1: misses a beat, the machine senses it. It sends a
• 1:41:54
  Speaker 1: small jolt of electricity, beat. It is a guardian angel
• 1:42:00
  Speaker 1: made of lithium and wire. And it happened because a
• 1:42:05
  Speaker 1: man grabbed the wrong resistor from a cardboard box. This
• 1:42:10
  Speaker 1: is the chaotic nature of progress. We stumble in the dark.
• 1:42:15
  Speaker 1: We trip over the answer. We have talked about electricity.
• 1:42:20
  Speaker 1: We have talked about chemistry. But we have not talked
• 1:42:24
  Speaker 1: about the light that sees through the skin. The year
• 1:42:28
  Speaker 1: is 1895. We are in the laboratory of Wilhelm Röntgen
• 1:42:36
  Speaker 1: in Germany. It is dark. He is playing with a
• 1:42:40
  Speaker 1: cathode ray tube. a glass bulb that shoots electrons. He
• 1:42:45
  Speaker 1: covers the tube with black cardboard. No light should escape,
• 1:42:50
  Speaker 1: but across the room on a bench, a piece of
• 1:42:54
  Speaker 1: paper painted with chemicals begins to glow. It is a
• 1:42:58
  Speaker 1: faint green fluorescence. Roentgen is confused. The tube is covered.
• 1:43:07
  Speaker 1: Light cannot get out. He puts his hand between the
• 1:43:10
  Speaker 1: tube and the paper, and he screams. Or, perhaps, he
• 1:43:18
  Speaker 1: just gasps, because on the paper, he does not see
• 1:43:22
  Speaker 1: the shadow of his hand. He sees the shadow of
• 1:43:26
  Speaker 1: his bones. He sees the skeleton of his own living hand,
• 1:43:31
  Speaker 1: stripped of the flesh, floating in the green mist. He
• 1:43:36
  Speaker 1: has discovered x-rays. The X stood for unknown. He calls
• 1:43:42
  Speaker 1: his wife, Anna Bertha. He asks her to put her
• 1:43:47
  Speaker 1: hand on a photographic plate. He turns on the tube.
• 1:43:52
  Speaker 1: When he develops the plate, there it is. The bones
• 1:43:56
  Speaker 1: of her fingers. The ring on her fourth finger floating
• 1:44:00
  Speaker 1: around the bone. When Anna saw the picture, she did
• 1:44:04
  Speaker 1: not marvel at the science. She shuddered. She said, I
• 1:44:10
  Speaker 1: have seen my death. To see the skeleton was to
• 1:44:14
  Speaker 1: see the grave. It was a taboo. It was penetrating
• 1:44:19
  Speaker 1: the veil of the body. But the doctors went wild
• 1:44:23
  Speaker 1: for it. Suddenly, they could see the bullet inside the
• 1:44:27
  Speaker 1: soldier without cutting him open. They could see the broken bone.
• 1:44:32
  Speaker 1: They could see the coin the child swallowed. But they
• 1:44:35
  Speaker 1: didn't know the dangers. They didn't know that the invisible
• 1:44:39
  Speaker 1: light was a stream of high-energy photons that could shred DNA.
• 1:44:45
  Speaker 1: In the early days, doctors would calibrate their x-ray machines
• 1:44:50
  Speaker 1: by taking an x-ray of their own hand every morning. Yep,
• 1:44:56
  Speaker 1: I can see my bones. Machine is working. Many of
• 1:45:01
  Speaker 1: those early radiologists lost their hands. They lost their fingers.
• 1:45:07
  Speaker 1: They died of leukemia. They were martyrs to the invisible light.
• 1:45:14
  Speaker 1: They bought your safety with their lives. Now, when you
• 1:45:19
  Speaker 1: get an x-ray, the technician wears a lead apron and
• 1:45:24
  Speaker 1: steps behind a wall. They know the dragon is in
• 1:45:28
  Speaker 1: the room. They respect it. But the image of Anabirtha's
• 1:45:32
  Speaker 1: hand remains. The first time we looked inside ourselves, without
• 1:45:38
  Speaker 1: a knife. The first time we became transparent, we are fragile, yes,
• 1:45:46
  Speaker 1: but we are also transparent to the right kind of eye.
• 1:45:52
  Speaker 1: Let us move from the light to the water, from
• 1:45:56
  Speaker 1: the invisible ray to the invisible killer in the glass. London, 1850.
• 1:46:01
  Speaker 1: For the Victorian city It is a city of fog
• 1:46:10
  Speaker 1: and horse manure, but mostly it is a city of smell.
• 1:46:15
  Speaker 1: The River Thames is an open sewer. The cesspools are
• 1:46:20
  Speaker 1: overflowing and the people are dying. Cholera is sweeping through
• 1:46:28
  Speaker 1: the Soho district. It is a horrific disease. It drains
• 1:46:33
  Speaker 1: the body of fluids in hours. A healthy man can
• 1:46:36
  Speaker 1: wake up in the morning and be dead by sunset,
• 1:46:40
  Speaker 1: his skin blue, his eyes sunken. The experts of the
• 1:46:45
  Speaker 1: time said it was miasma, bad air. They said the
• 1:46:51
  Speaker 1: smell of the city was killing people. They told people
• 1:46:55
  Speaker 1: to close their windows, to burn tar to clean the air.
• 1:47:00
  Speaker 1: But a doctor named John Snow, not the one from
• 1:47:05
  Speaker 1: the fantasy books, had a different idea. He was a skeptic.
• 1:47:12
  Speaker 1: He didn't believe in the bad air. He believed in
• 1:47:17
  Speaker 1: the water. He took a map of Soho, and he
• 1:47:21
  Speaker 1: started to draw dots. Every time someone died of cholera,
• 1:47:26
  Speaker 1: he put a black dot on the map at their address.
• 1:47:29
  Speaker 1: He walked the streets. He talked to the grieving families.
• 1:47:33
  Speaker 1: Where did you get your water? He asked. The dots
• 1:47:37
  Speaker 1: began to cluster. They swarmed around a single point. A
• 1:47:41
  Speaker 1: water pump on Broad Street. It was a popular pump.
• 1:47:46
  Speaker 1: The water was cold. It tasted good. People came from
• 1:47:51
  Speaker 1: blocks away to fill their buckets. Coffee shops used it.
• 1:47:55
  Speaker 1: Pubs used it to mix with their spirits. Snow realized
• 1:48:01
  Speaker 1: that the pump was the assassin. He went to the
• 1:48:05
  Speaker 1: city officials. They didn't believe him. The water is clear,
• 1:48:11
  Speaker 1: they said. The smell is in the air. But snow
• 1:48:16
  Speaker 1: was persistent. He convinced them to do one thing. He
• 1:48:21
  Speaker 1: convinced them to remove the handle from the pump. They
• 1:48:25
  Speaker 1: took the handle off. The people could not pump the water.
• 1:48:30
  Speaker 1: The outbreak stopped. It turned out that a cesspool next
• 1:48:34
  Speaker 1: to the pump had leaked. The bacteria from a sick
• 1:48:38
  Speaker 1: baby's diaper leaked had seeped through the bricks and into
• 1:48:42
  Speaker 1: the well. The clear, cold, tasty water was teeming with death.
• 1:48:50
  Speaker 1: John Snow's map was the beginning of epidemiology, the idea
• 1:48:55
  Speaker 1: that we can track a disease like a criminal. We
• 1:48:59
  Speaker 1: can find its hideout. Today, we have clean water coming
• 1:49:03
  Speaker 1: out of a tap in the wall. We don't think
• 1:49:06
  Speaker 1: about it. But that tap? is guarded by the ghost
• 1:49:10
  Speaker 1: of John Snow and his map of black dots. We
• 1:49:15
  Speaker 1: have tamed the water. We have filtered the monsters out.
• 1:49:20
  Speaker 1: But sometimes, the monsters are not in the water. They
• 1:49:25
  Speaker 1: are in the stomach. For decades, doctors believed that stomach
• 1:49:32
  Speaker 1: ulcers were caused by stress. They were caused by spicy food.
• 1:49:38
  Speaker 1: They were caused by being a CEO with a bad temper.
• 1:49:42
  Speaker 1: Take a vacation, the doctors would say. Drink some milk.
• 1:49:47
  Speaker 1: Calm down. But in Australia, in the 1980s, two researchers
• 1:49:54
  Speaker 1: named Barry Marshall and Robin Warren found something else. They
• 1:50:00
  Speaker 1: looked at the stomachs of people with ulcers and they
• 1:50:03
  Speaker 1: saw a bacteria, Helicobacter pylori. a corkscrew-shaped germ burrowing into
• 1:50:11
  Speaker 1: the lining of the stomach. They told the medical community,
• 1:50:15
  Speaker 1: It's an infection, they said. We can cure it with antibiotics.
• 1:50:21
  Speaker 1: The medical community laughed. Bacteria can't live in the stomach,
• 1:50:26
  Speaker 1: they said. The acid is too strong. It would dissolve
• 1:50:31
  Speaker 1: them like a penny. Marshall and Warren were ignored. They
• 1:50:39
  Speaker 1: were ridiculed. So, Barry Marshall did something that fits perfectly
• 1:50:47
  Speaker 1: into the annals of the sleepless scientist. He went full
• 1:50:52
  Speaker 1: mad scientist. He took a beaker. He filled it with
• 1:50:56
  Speaker 1: a cloudy, foul-smelling broth teeming with the bacteria. And he
• 1:51:02
  Speaker 1: drank it. He swallowed the culture. Days later, he started
• 1:51:07
  Speaker 1: to vomit. His breath smelled like death. He had given
• 1:51:13
  Speaker 1: himself massive gastritis. He biopsied his own stomach and proved
• 1:51:19
  Speaker 1: the bacteria were there. Then, he took antibiotics and cured himself.
• 1:51:26
  Speaker 1: He proved his point by using his own body as
• 1:51:30
  Speaker 1: the petri dish. He won the Nobel Prize. It turns
• 1:51:35
  Speaker 1: out The bacteria survives the acid by hiding in the
• 1:51:40
  Speaker 1: mucus lining of the stomach and, by producing a chemical
• 1:51:45
  Speaker 1: that neutralizes the acid around it, it creates a little
• 1:51:48
  Speaker 1: space suit for itself. Thanks to a man who drank
• 1:51:52
  Speaker 1: a beaker of germs, we now know that ulcers can
• 1:51:56
  Speaker 1: be cured with a week of pills. We don't need surgery.
• 1:52:00
  Speaker 1: We don't need bland diets for life. It is a
• 1:52:04
  Speaker 1: reminder that sometimes the established truth is wrong. And sometimes
• 1:52:12
  Speaker 1: you have to do something incredibly stupid to prove it.
• 1:52:16
  Speaker 1: The history of medicine is full of people doing stupid things,
• 1:52:22
  Speaker 1: dangerous things, like the time we decided to put maggots
• 1:52:26
  Speaker 1: back into wounds. We are in the trenches of World
• 1:52:31
  Speaker 1: War I again. The mud is deep. The artillery is loud.
• 1:52:37
  Speaker 1: Two soldiers are brought into the field hospital. Both have
• 1:52:41
  Speaker 1: shattered legs. Both have been lying in no man's land
• 1:52:46
  Speaker 1: for two days before being rescued. One soldier's wound is clean.
• 1:52:53
  Speaker 1: It is packed with mud, but there are no bugs.
• 1:52:58
  Speaker 1: The other soldier's wound is crawling. It is filled with maggots.
• 1:53:03
  Speaker 1: Thousands of writhing white larvae. The doctors recoil in horror.
• 1:53:12
  Speaker 1: They rush to clean the maggots out. But when they
• 1:53:16
  Speaker 1: wash the larvae away, they see something shocking. Underneath the maggots,
• 1:53:25
  Speaker 1: the tissue is pink. It is healthy. There is no infection.
• 1:53:31
  Speaker 1: There is no gangrene. The soldier with the clean wound,
• 1:53:36
  Speaker 1: he dies of sepsis. The bacteria killed him. The soldier
• 1:53:41
  Speaker 1: with the maggots, he survives. The maggots, specifically the larvae
• 1:53:49
  Speaker 1: of the green bottle fly, are picky eaters. They do
• 1:53:53
  Speaker 1: not have teeth. They secrete an enzyme that dissolves meat.
• 1:53:58
  Speaker 1: But here is the trick. They only eat dead meat.
• 1:54:02
  Speaker 1: They dissolve the necrotic, rotting tissue, and they leave the
• 1:54:07
  Speaker 1: healthy living tissue alone. They are microscopic surgeons. They clean
• 1:54:14
  Speaker 1: the wound with a precision that a scalpel cannot match.
• 1:54:18
  Speaker 1: And they secrete chemicals that kill bacteria, including the superbugs
• 1:54:24
  Speaker 1: that resist antibiotics. For a while, maggot therapy was popular.
• 1:54:31
  Speaker 1: But then... penicillin came along and we decided that pills
• 1:54:37
  Speaker 1: were more civilized than bugs. But today, the bugs are back.
• 1:54:43
  Speaker 1: You can get a prescription from maggots. The FDA has
• 1:54:47
  Speaker 1: approved them as a medical device. They arrive in a
• 1:54:51
  Speaker 1: sterile container. They are placed into a non-healing diabetic ulcer.
• 1:54:57
  Speaker 1: They are the cleanup crew of last resort. It is Gross. Absolutely.
• 1:55:05
  Speaker 1: But it is effective. It forces us to confront our
• 1:55:08
  Speaker 1: own biological nature. We are meat. And sometimes, the best
• 1:55:16
  Speaker 1: way to save the meat is to let nature do
• 1:55:19
  Speaker 1: what it does best. Recycle. From the maggot, let us
• 1:55:25
  Speaker 1: jump to the leech. The leech has a bad reputation.
• 1:55:31
  Speaker 1: We associate it with medieval doctors bleeding people to death
• 1:55:36
  Speaker 1: to balance their humors. And yes, that was bad science.
• 1:55:42
  Speaker 1: But the leech is making a comeback too. In modern microsurgery,
• 1:55:47
  Speaker 1: when a surgeon reattaches a severed finger or an ear,
• 1:55:52
  Speaker 1: they can sew the arteries together easily. Arteries are thick.
• 1:55:58
  Speaker 1: They are high pressure. The blood flows In just fine.
• 1:56:03
  Speaker 1: But the veins? The veins that drain the blood out?
• 1:56:08
  Speaker 1: They are thin. Fragile. Often, they cannot be reconnected immediately.
• 1:56:16
  Speaker 1: So the blood pumps into the reattached finger. But it
• 1:56:20
  Speaker 1: has nowhere to go. The finger swells. It turns purple.
• 1:56:25
  Speaker 1: It will die. Enter the leech. Herudo medicinalis. The surgeon
• 1:56:32
  Speaker 1: places a medicinal leech on the end of the finger.
• 1:56:37
  Speaker 1: The leech bites. It injects a powerful anticoagulant and anesthetic.
• 1:56:44
  Speaker 1: It sucks out the excess blood. It acts as a
• 1:56:48
  Speaker 1: temporary vein. It keeps the blood flowing until the body
• 1:56:52
  Speaker 1: can grow new veins of its own. The leech is
• 1:56:56
  Speaker 1: a biological pump, a disposable medical device that has been
• 1:57:01
  Speaker 1: evolved over millions of years to be the perfect vampire. So,
• 1:57:08
  Speaker 1: if you ever lose a finger and wake up in
• 1:57:10
  Speaker 1: the hospital to see a worm attached to your hand,
• 1:57:13
  Speaker 1: do not panic, say thank you. That worm is buying
• 1:57:19
  Speaker 1: you time, time. That is what all of this is about,
• 1:57:25
  Speaker 1: buying time. Whether it is the iron lung buying time
• 1:57:29
  Speaker 1: for the nerves to heal or the leech buying time
• 1:57:32
  Speaker 1: for the veins to grow, or the chemotherapy buying time
• 1:57:36
  Speaker 1: against the tumor, we are always bargaining with entropy. And
• 1:57:41
  Speaker 1: sometimes we try to cheat the ultimate deadline. Let us
• 1:57:46
  Speaker 1: look at the frozen man, not the wood frog this time,
• 1:57:52
  Speaker 1: but a human. In 1991, hikers in the Oatstall Alps
• 1:57:58
  Speaker 1: on the border of Austria and Italy found a body.
• 1:58:03
  Speaker 1: He was sticking out of the ice. They thought he
• 1:58:06
  Speaker 1: was a lost hiker, maybe from a few years ago.
• 1:58:11
  Speaker 1: But when they examined him, they realized he was wearing
• 1:58:15
  Speaker 1: leather leggings. He had a copper axe. He had a
• 1:58:20
  Speaker 1: quiver of arrows. This was Ötzi, the Iceman. He had
• 1:58:27
  Speaker 1: been dead for 5,300 years. He was a time traveler.
• 1:58:37
  Speaker 1: The ice had preserved him perfectly. We know what he
• 1:58:43
  Speaker 1: ate for his last meal. Ibex meat and wheat. We
• 1:58:48
  Speaker 1: know he had tattoos. Sixty, one of them. Mostly lines
• 1:58:54
  Speaker 1: on his joints. likely for arthritis pain. We know he
• 1:59:00
  Speaker 1: had Lyme disease. We know he had parasites. He is
• 1:59:05
  Speaker 1: the most studied patient in history. Ötzi teaches us that
• 1:59:11
  Speaker 1: the cold is the ultimate preserver. He is the proof
• 1:59:15
  Speaker 1: of concept for the wood frog theory. He didn't come
• 1:59:19
  Speaker 1: back to life. Obviously, he was murdered. shot in the
• 1:59:26
  Speaker 1: back with an arrow, but his body defied the rot.
• 1:59:32
  Speaker 1: He reminds us that we are organic matter, and organic
• 1:59:38
  Speaker 1: matter can be paused. We are obsessed with pausing. We
• 1:59:44
  Speaker 1: are obsessed with stopping the clock, but the clock must tick.
• 1:59:48
  Speaker 1: Let us look at the eyes. The window to More accurately,
• 1:59:55
  Speaker 1: the lens to the brain. Have you ever wondered how
• 1:59:59
  Speaker 1: we figured out how to fix a cataract? A cataract
• 2:00:03
  Speaker 1: is when the lens of the eye becomes cloudy. It
• 2:00:06
  Speaker 1: is like looking through wax paper. Eventually, you go blind.
• 2:00:12
  Speaker 1: In the ancient world, in India and Rome, they performed
• 2:00:16
  Speaker 1: a procedure called couching. The surgeon would take a sharp
• 2:00:21
  Speaker 1: thorn or a needle, They would poke it into the eye,
• 2:00:27
  Speaker 1: and they would physically push the cloudy lens backward, knocking
• 2:00:32
  Speaker 1: it out of place so it fell into the bottom
• 2:00:35
  Speaker 1: of the eyeball. Imagine that. A needle in the eye.
• 2:00:41
  Speaker 1: No anesthesia. The patient could see again. Sort of. Everything
• 2:00:47
  Speaker 1: was blurry because they had no lens, but they could
• 2:00:50
  Speaker 1: see light and motion. It was brutal, but it worked.
• 2:00:57
  Speaker 1: But the modern cure for cataracts came from World War II.
• 2:01:02
  Speaker 1: Sir Harold Ridley was an ophthalmologist treating pilots. These pilots
• 2:01:08
  Speaker 1: flew spitfires and hurricanes. The canopies of these planes were
• 2:01:12
  Speaker 1: made of a new material, PMMA, per specs, plastic. When
• 2:01:21
  Speaker 1: a canopy was shattered by enemy fire, Shards of plastic
• 2:01:25
  Speaker 1: would fly into the pilot's eyes. Ridley noticed something strange.
• 2:01:30
  Speaker 1: The eyes didn't reject the plastic. The body didn't attack it.
• 2:01:36
  Speaker 1: The plastic sat in the eye, inert, quiet. Glass would
• 2:01:41
  Speaker 1: cause an infection. Metal would rust. But this specific plastic
• 2:01:47
  Speaker 1: was biologically invisible. Ridley thought, if the eye tolerates this plastic,
• 2:01:54
  Speaker 1: Maybe I can make a fake lens out of it?
• 2:01:56
  Speaker 1: He created the intraocular lens. Today, millions of people have
• 2:02:02
  Speaker 1: cataract surgery. The doctor removes the cloudy natural lens and
• 2:02:07
  Speaker 1: slides in a tiny piece of plastic. That plastic is
• 2:02:12
  Speaker 1: the great grandchild of the windshield of a World War
• 2:02:15
  Speaker 1: II fighter plane. We are walking museums of warfare. The
• 2:02:20
  Speaker 1: chemo from the trenches. The lens from the cockpit. The
• 2:02:26
  Speaker 1: ambulance from the battlefield. Conflict breeds innovation. It is a
• 2:02:34
  Speaker 1: sad truth. When we try to kill each other, we
• 2:02:38
  Speaker 1: learn how to heal each other. And speaking of conflict,
• 2:02:42
  Speaker 1: let us talk about the ultimate conflict. The one between
• 2:02:47
  Speaker 1: you and the sun. Skin cancer. Melanoma. For years, we
• 2:02:56
  Speaker 1: cut it out. We burned it. But recently, we found
• 2:03:01
  Speaker 1: a new way. We found a way to take the
• 2:03:05
  Speaker 1: brakes off the immune system. Your immune system is a killer.
• 2:03:11
  Speaker 1: We established that it wants to kill everything that isn't you. So,
• 2:03:18
  Speaker 1: your body has checkpoints, little chemical handshakes, that tell the
• 2:03:23
  Speaker 1: immune system, calm down, do not attack. This is a
• 2:03:28
  Speaker 1: friendly cell. Cancer cells are clever. They learn the secret handshake.
• 2:03:36
  Speaker 1: They show the fake ID to the immune system. They say,
• 2:03:40
  Speaker 1: I am friendly. Do not eat me. And the white
• 2:03:47
  Speaker 1: blood cells walk right past them. Scientists figured out how
• 2:03:53
  Speaker 1: to block that handshake. They created checkpoint inhibitors. It is
• 2:03:58
  Speaker 1: like taking the muzzle off a guard dog. Suddenly, the
• 2:04:02
  Speaker 1: immune system sees the cancer for what it is. It
• 2:04:06
  Speaker 1: wakes up. It attacks. It is not a drug that
• 2:04:11
  Speaker 1: kills the cancer. It is a drug that lets you
• 2:04:15
  Speaker 1: kill the cancer. It is unleashing the beast within. We
• 2:04:21
  Speaker 1: so powerful our bodies are so capable we just need
• 2:04:27
  Speaker 1: to know how to talk to them how to give
• 2:04:31
  Speaker 1: them permission we are nearing the end of our rounds
• 2:04:36
  Speaker 1: the chart is almost full but there is one more
• 2:04:41
  Speaker 1: story a story of a very small very brave experiment
• 2:04:48
  Speaker 1: the year is 1984. A baby is born in California.
• 2:04:55
  Speaker 1: She is known as Baby Faye. She is born with
• 2:05:00
  Speaker 1: a fatal heart defect. Her heart is too weak to
• 2:05:04
  Speaker 1: sustain her. She is dying. There are no human infant
• 2:05:10
  Speaker 1: hearts available for transplant. Her surgeon, Leonard Bailey, proposes the unthinkable.
• 2:05:19
  Speaker 1: He wants to transplant the heart of a baboon into
• 2:05:24
  Speaker 1: the baby. A xenotransplant. The world watches. The ethics committees argue.
• 2:05:32
  Speaker 1: People protest outside the hospital. You are playing God, they shout.
• 2:05:39
  Speaker 1: You are making a monster. But the parents just want
• 2:05:43
  Speaker 1: their baby to live. They do the surgery. The baboon heart.
• 2:05:50
  Speaker 1: inside the human chest. It works. For 21 days, Baby
• 2:05:56
  Speaker 1: Faye lives. She is pink. She cries. She sleeps. She
• 2:06:02
  Speaker 1: eventually died. Her body rejected the alien heart. The immune
• 2:06:07
  Speaker 1: system was too strong. But for 21 days, the barrier
• 2:06:12
  Speaker 1: between species was broken. Baby Faye taught us so much
• 2:06:17
  Speaker 1: about rejection. about the immune system, about the compatibility of life. Today,
• 2:06:25
  Speaker 1: we are transplanting pig hearts into humans. We are growing
• 2:06:30
  Speaker 1: organs in labs. We are standing on the threshold of
• 2:06:34
  Speaker 1: a world where we can swap parts like a mechanic
• 2:06:38
  Speaker 1: swaps a carburetor. Baby Faye was the pioneer. She was
• 2:06:44
  Speaker 1: the explorer who went first. The history of medicine is
• 2:06:48
  Speaker 1: written in the lives of the brave, the volunteers, the desperate,
• 2:06:53
  Speaker 1: the soldiers, the milkmaids, the babies. They are the sleeper
• 2:07:00
  Speaker 1: agents of history. They laid down the path so you
• 2:07:04
  Speaker 1: could walk on it. So here you are lying in
• 2:07:10
  Speaker 1: the dark. Your heart is beating thanks to the calcium
• 2:07:14
  Speaker 1: and the electricity. Your lungs are breathing thanks to the pressure.
• 2:07:20
  Speaker 1: Your blood is flowing thanks to the lack of clots.
• 2:07:24
  Speaker 1: Your immune system is watching thanks to the memory of
• 2:07:27
  Speaker 1: the cowpox. You are a symphony of survival. Every scar
• 2:07:33
  Speaker 1: on your body is a memory. Every vaccine in your
• 2:07:38
  Speaker 1: arm is a library. Every pill in your cabinet is
• 2:07:43
  Speaker 1: a weapon. You are the most heavily defended creature in
• 2:07:48
  Speaker 1: the history of the Earth. You have the armor of
• 2:07:51
  Speaker 1: the willow tree, the shield of the horseshoe crab, the
• 2:07:56
  Speaker 1: vision of the fighter pilot, the metabolism of the Gila monster,
• 2:08:01
  Speaker 1: the endurance of the wood frog. You are not just
• 2:08:06
  Speaker 1: a human. You are a chimera, a collection of the
• 2:08:11
  Speaker 1: best tricks nature ever invented. And right now, the trick
• 2:08:16
  Speaker 1: you need is the simplest one of all. The shutdown.
• 2:08:21
  Speaker 1: The brain is an energy hog. It uses 20% of
• 2:08:26
  Speaker 1: your calories. It is expensive to run. It needs to defragment.
• 2:08:32
  Speaker 1: It needs to wash away the toxins that build up
• 2:08:35
  Speaker 1: during the day. When you sleep, your brain cells actually shrink.
• 2:08:42
  Speaker 1: They get smaller. This opens up gaps between the cells
• 2:08:47
  Speaker 1: and fluid cerebrospinal fluid rushes through the gaps. It washes
• 2:08:54
  Speaker 1: the brain. It is a dishwasher cycle for your mind.
• 2:08:59
  Speaker 1: If you do not sleep, the trash builds up. The
• 2:09:03
  Speaker 1: thoughts get cobwebs. So, let the cycle begin. Imagine the
• 2:09:10
  Speaker 1: fluid washing over the cortex, cleaning out the worries, cleaning
• 2:09:16
  Speaker 1: out the noise, cleaning out the fear, The science is done.
• 2:09:20
  Speaker 1: The data is collected. You do not need to understand
• 2:09:26
  Speaker 1: the mechanism to enjoy the result. You do not need
• 2:09:32
  Speaker 1: to know how the engine works to ride in the car.
• 2:09:36
  Speaker 1: You are the passenger tonight. The sleepless scientist is driving.
• 2:09:42
  Speaker 1: The universe is the road and the destination is the void.
• 2:09:49
  Speaker 1: The soft, warm, safe void. Let gravity win. Let the
• 2:09:57
  Speaker 1: muscles go slack. Let the jaw unhinge. Let the shoulders drop.
• 2:10:05
  Speaker 1: You are heavy. You are sinking into the mattress. The
• 2:10:11
  Speaker 1: atoms in your body are vibrating a little slower. The
• 2:10:16
  Speaker 1: temperature is dropping a fraction of a degree. You are
• 2:10:21
  Speaker 1: entering the wood frog state, the hibernation. It is safe here.
• 2:10:26
  Speaker 1: The bacteria are friendly. The viruses are locked out. The
• 2:10:32
  Speaker 1: monsters are in the zoo. There is nothing left to solve.
• 2:10:36
  Speaker 1: Just the rhythm, in, out, lub, dub. The oldest music
• 2:10:44
  Speaker 1: in the world. Listen to it. Trust it. The vessel
• 2:10:48
  Speaker 1: is sound.