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the year 2020 will no doubt be a big year for science.
It's a new decade, and at times like these, we often take the opportunity to look back and see how far we've come.
Scientists who came before us made sure our food and drugs are free from poison and built the devices that make our modern lives possible.
So as we forge ahead into the new year, let's take some time to think the intrepid researchers, volunteers and even the occasional dog who got us to this point first up.
Imagine volunteering to be poisoned in the name of making food safer for everyone.
That really happened in the early 20th century.
These experiments weren't terribly safe or ethical or rigorous, but they are the reason you can be confident your food doesn't have washing powder in it.
Let's go to Stephan for more.
I think we can all agree that food is pretty great, so participating in an experiment where almost all you have to do is eat three delicious meals every day for up to a year.
Sounds kind of like the dream.
But imagine knowing that hidden in one of the foods, maybe the butter.
Maybe the freshly picked peas is a substance that's probably toxic.
It sounds unthinkable today, but that was the set up of some of the strangest and most infamous human experiments in American history.
Known as the Poison squads.
They ran for five years, starting in 1902 And even though they wouldn't pass any scientific ethics committee today, they were revolutionary at the time because people started to realize that maybe they should make sure the things they're safe to eat before eating.
The trials were the brainchild of Harvey Washington Wiley, the head chemist with the U.
S Department of Agriculture.
Back then, food additives didn't have to be tested or even put on labels.
And he wasn't really okay with the idea that no one in America had any way of knowing what they were actually eating unless they had grown or raised it themselves.
Formaldehyde, for example, regularly popped up in milk to keep it from sour.
Yeah, the known carcinogen that we used to preserve dead bodies would also often find borax.
A mineral that contains sodium and boron in meat made the meat firmer, which made it seem fresher, especially when combined with an extra pinch of salt and red food color.
These days, borax is a common ingredient in things like detergent and pesticides, and we're not talking tiny, insignificant amounts of this stuff either.
But no one had bothered to investigate whether these additives were actually safe to eat.
So with 5000 bucks from the government, Wiley hired a chef, promised a bunch of otherwise great free food and recruited a dozen healthy young men as volunteers.
He took their weight and vitals made them collect their urine and feces and gave them weekly physical.
Then they started with a low dose of a specific chemical and went up, stopping on Lee.
When the men were too sick to continue, the first poison squad tackled borax, and it's derivative boric acid because they were so calm.
At first, the chef had the chemicals in butter or milk.
But the volunteers could taste the metallic flavor and instinctively avoided it because no one wants to eat butter that tastes like their silverware.
Wylie still needed the men to get the right dosage, so he just put the borax and pills for them to pop about halfway through their meals.
Bon appetit.
Guys on the poison squad reported stomach pains and feeling less hungry when they were fed to 23 grams of borax a day, four grams.
They became very tired, developed headaches and couldn't work normally.
Sounds like an average Monday to me, but apparently in their case, it was caused by the borax through other trials.
Wylie also found that if they took a lower dose of half a gram a day for long enough, they'd get similar symptoms.
Today, we know that eating Boar X can cause tissue damage, which could eventually lead to fund things like vomiting and convulsions.
So thanks for saving us from that one poison squad.
Thankfully, though, almost no one walked away from these experiments with any obvious long term problems.
Wylie also tested copper sulfate, which was added to things like canned peas to make them bright green, as well as formaldehyde, sodium benzoate and Saleh Selic acid.
And while the effects on the men varied wildly, concluded that none of the additives were safe.
Today, any scientists looking back at these trials would be horrified by not only the ethical problems because giving people potentially deadly substances even if they know about them is never okay, but also the poor experimental design.
For one thing, the participants knew they were eating a potential poison, which could have easily skewed the symptoms they reported and made them feel more sick than they actually were.
Not to mention that, for the most part, the experiment had no real control group.
In between testing each substance, the squads were given a break for several weeks.
They weren't asked to continue reporting symptoms or to keep collecting their urine or fecal sample.
You also can't really conclude much from a small and specific group of people widely thought that if healthy young men got sick, the same chemical would also be unsafe for women and Children.
It's not really how biology works, though, and a few dozen white guys didn't exactly represent all of America.
But even though there were a lot of flaws with this experiment, it was the first time somebody thought to test food additives and study them one at a time.
Later, research that was actually reliable lead to almost all of these additives being banned from food except for sodium benzoate, which is a common preservative in acidic foods, like orange juice and soda, but we only use it because we've tested it and it's considered safe.
Journalists love covering the happenings in the D.
C lead kitchen.
So people across the country started thinking seriously about the things that might be used to preserve their food.
In 1906 partly because of the public's new awareness, Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act, a precursor to today's more rigorous regulations.
Those concerns also led to the creation of the FDA, which is the organization that makes sure the ingredients in your food aren't going to kill you.
For the most part, anyway, if you decide to crack open 10,000 cans of baked beans, there's not much they can do to help that one's on you.
Since Wiley was so instrumental in protecting America's food, he's often called the father of the agency.
So the poison squads were a really horrible idea and full of sketchy science.
But because of the progress we've made since then, going to the supermarket today is a whole lot safer.
I don't know.
I hear formaldehyde laced beans.
They're pretty tasty.
A lot of our historical episodes have looked at medicine and health.
Maybe that's because saving a lot of lives is a pretty good way to be remembered.
But it's not just drugs that have changed our lives for the better.
Like all the work that went into bringing you the phone that's probably in your pocket right now, or at least somewhere within arm's reach Before phones.
Theo Ubiquitous Pocket electronic device Was the calculator less glamorous?
Sure, but there's a lot going on with that little four function piece of plastic your teachers passed around in elementary school.
Here's Hank with more.
We don't think of pocket calculators as being all that special these days.
They're cheap, easy to use and your phone conduce all that stuff anyway, right?
But the development of the pocket calculator mirrors the electron ICS revolution that brought us smartphones and modern computers.
In fact, some technologies we now take for granted found their first widespread use and electronic calculators in the 19 sixties and seventies, and the first sword of compact electronic calculators couldn't fit in your pocket.
They were the size of a typewriter and demanded so much power that they needed a wall outlet.
For example, the Anita Mark eight was available in the early 19 sixties and cost as much as a car at the time.
It performed basic arithmetic functions by using vacuum tubes, basically airtight chambers with filaments inside, which could shuttle electrons and precise ways to generate currents and active switches.
The name was short for either a new inspiration to arithmetic or a new inspiration to accounting, which gives you a clue as to who bought these expensive machines.
And soon there were a couple of major technological leaves that revolutionized calculators and also the rest of electronics and the whole world.
First, for calculators to become cheaper, more portable and less fragile.
Vacuum tubes were replaced with transistors and integrated circuits.
The transistor functions like a gate for electrons.
Basically, by applying electrical power, it can either be opened or closed.
These binary states are still the basic idea behind all electronics.
And typically transistors are made from a material called a semiconductor, which sometimes conducts electricity and sometimes doesn't.
Early transistor electronics, like the super popular transistor radio for consumers would string individual transistors together.
In Siri's, transistors were way smaller and sturdier than vacuum tubes.
But more complex devices like computers were still fairly big.
In the late 19 fifties, though, engineers invented the integrated circuit, a single semiconductor chip that had all parts of a circuit on it, including many transistors.
One of those engineers worked at Texas Instruments Company, knew it had something good on its hands, but struggled to find a good consumer outlet for these compact chips.
That is, until 1965 with the design of the first prototype Elektronik pocket calculator.
It was code named Cal Tech, measured about 10 by 15 centimeters and could perform the four basic arithmetic functions.
Addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.
It's chip required the equivalent of thousands of transistors.
They even built a version for testing without integrated circuits, which, according to one designer, took up on entire two tiered, two meter tall desk.
So integrated circuits really packed a punch These days we call the microchips, and we put them in the everything.
Altec also printed out results on a roll of tape using a thermal printer.
This was also pretty new at the time and worked by basically melting text into a special type of paper.
Like the receipts.
You go to the grocery store.
T.
I team actually wanted on electronic display.
But that technology wasn't great.
Yet led is that the time had poor visibility.
Ladies work based on passing an electric current or field through a semiconductor, which causes electrons to shift around and emit light.
The color of the light can be altered by introducing different elements, which is easier said than done.
It's taken decades to make Ellie D's in every color of the rainbow.
Early on, gallium and arsenic based led is were only capable of emitting infra red light and very dim red light because of the way electrons move through those particular elements.
Lots of pocket calculators after the Caltech did feature red led displays, but they demanded a ton off battery power because those early systems weren't very energy efficient.
The next revolution and calculators was the liquid crystal display, or LCD.
Liquid crystals have molecules that are free to move like liquid.
But conceptual into an ordered state like a crystalline, solid dual identity means they can block or transmit light and switch between states rapidly.
When there's an input like electricity.
That's why we use them In Elektronik displays.
The first LCDs were fragile and on Lee worked at high temperatures, but a breakthrough came in perfecting a mix of chemicals that behave as liquid crystals at room temperature.
Other developments made them quicker and more durable as well.
LCDs used less power than L E D's so calculators could run off a watch battery instead of large battery packs alongside digital watches.
Pocket calculators were the first widespread consumer use of the LCD display.
Nowadays, you'll hear about led and LCD technology is when you're researching what kind of TV you might want to buy.
Over the next few decades, calculators became slimmer, cheaper and more powerful.
They evolved from specialized tools for business to a status symbol to a basic tool that you're probably going to get for free as a promo at on event at certainly where I got mine.
But all this development eventually slowed to a crawl, so you wouldn't carry a separate calculator either.
Unless you're still in school.
I need it for the S A T or something.
They've stayed basic machines to help with learning, not flashy, Internet enabled devices, and that is how the golden age fizzled.
But calculators played a huge part in the consumer electronics revolution, popularizing display technology and the computer chip itself.
Nothing to sneeze at.
Funny, you should mention sneezing.
Yes, we're headed back to the world of medicine, specifically the flu.
There's a bacterium out there in the world called Hemophilus influenzae, which has nothing to do with influenza.
But for a while, scientists thought it did so.
They gave it that name.
How could they make such a huge mistake?
Stephan explains.
If you're coughing, sneezing are starting to feel under the weather.
You might blame a virus or possibly a bacteria, which is not something humans have known to do for very long.
Around 400 BC doctors might have blamed an imbalance of the four vital humors for your illness.
And around the 17 hundreds they might have pointed to an invisible disease carrying fog instead.
But today we know pathogens, viruses, bacteria and certain other microbes are responsible for many diseases.
But linking specific diseases to the microbes that cause them has been surprisingly tricky.
In 18 82 a scientist named Robert Coke demonstrated that the bacterium mycobacterium tuberculosis causes tuberculosis, and in 18 90 he also published a framework for future scientists to make similar discoveries, she created a checklist for researchers to reference any time they're trying to link a pathogen to a disease.
The steps are as follows.
First, researchers had to be able to find the pathogen in sick organisms, but not in healthy.
One second, it could be grown in pure culture, which means that a sample of the microbe could be taken from a sick organism.
And then the microbe could grow independently in 1/19 century version of a Petri dish.
Third, if they exposed a healthy organism to the stuff that they grew in Step two, that organism would get sick with the same disease.
And finally, though this step is sometimes considered optional, the same microbe that was isolated in Step one must be found again in the organism made sick and Step three.
These steps are now known as Coke's postulates.
The idea is that if the microbe meets all of the postulates, then you know it's the cause of the disease.
Unfortunately, his postulates had a few problems.
Take postulate one.
Tuberculosis can actually be found in healthy individuals that's called latent tuberculosis.
So it doesn't meet Cokes first.
Postulate.
This situation just didn't show up in his experiments, which were done in Guinea pig hostile.
It three isn't perfect either, assuming that any healthy organism exposed to a pathogen will get sick, ignores differences and immune systems.
Healthy organism might be able to fight off the infection or might already be immune to the disease.
But it was the second postulate that caused the most confusion.
Something grown in pure culture has to be the only living thing in the dish, and many pathogens just can't grow independently like that.
Viruses, for example, reproduced by hijacking molecular machinery and the cells of the organism they're infecting, meaning you can't grow them in a dish by themselves.
But bacteria often grown a dish just fine.
Because postulate to required the thing to grow in culture, researchers at the turn of the 20th century would almost conclusively blame bacteria for the diseases they were studying, which resulted in some false accusations.
Malaria, which is actually caused by blood infecting parasites, was blamed on a bacterium from Italian marshes in the 18 eighties, which they named bacillus.
Military canine distemper, sometimes deadly disease and dogs that causes symptoms like fever and vomiting was linked to a series of different bacteria before it was finally proven to be a virus in the 19 twenties, and the familiar influenza or the flu was misidentified as a bacterium in 18 92 by a colleague of Cokes, the bacterium came to be known as Hemophilus influenzae.
To study the flu, researchers needed samples of spit and snot from people with obvious symptoms.
But one thing that made influenza hard to study was that even though the flu usually reaches a peak in winter, the only time that scientists could reliably find large numbers of flu ridden folks at the same time was during a pandemic, and those could be decades apart.
So the first chance scientists had to check the results from 18 92 was during the next influenza pandemic in 1918 and the researchers were unable to replicate those initial results.
But it wasn't clear at the time if it was because of poorly controlled studies in the chaos of one of the worst pandemics in recent history and the end of World War one, or if they were just wrong.
A vaccine was developed in New York based on him a Phyllis, just in case there was at least one study around that time that managed to find evidence of the right answer.
Influenza is a virus, but it took until 1933 and another influenza pandemic for scientists to prove without a doubt that the flu is caused by a virus.
Thanks to the introduction of ferrets as a model organism, ferrets were the only small mammals they could find that could actually get the flu and show symptoms similar to ours.
So it seemed like Cokes postulates, especially the second really hindered research into any disease that didn't have a bacterium behind it.
What does that mean?
They're useless?
Not at all.
Since the 18 eighties, scientists have tweaked Cokes postulates overtime to match modern understandings of pathogens.
Today, the focus isn't just on microbes but on their genes.
Using genetic sequencing, scientists can gather information about all of the nucleic acids in a sample, whether DNA or RNA, and then use a modified version of Coke's postulates to figure out which genes are most associated with disease symptoms.
For example, in 1996 scientists at Stanford came up with a new set of postulates with seven jean centric point by using gene sequencing.
Scientists confined pathogens that haven't been isolated and identified before.
And there's no need to culture that Coke's postulates provided a solid foundation for researchers to begin linking diseases to their sources.
And, sure, there were a few mistakes.
But they provided a rigorous testable basis for understanding disease, even if we had to come along and make some changes later.
And even if some ferrets had to get the sniffles, incremental progress is the name of the game.
In science, being wrong is often not a bad thing, at least not with the right attitude.
But sometimes it's more about quiet persistence, even when your colleagues think you're wrong.
Some scientists air never recognized in their lifetimes despite saving tons of lives and practically defining their feel like Jon Snow.
Not that Jon Snow.
Here's Hank to tell us more these days.
Most people are like me.
They hear the name John Snow, and they think of Game of Thrones.
Or they think of that British news anchor.
But before there was Jon Snow, the news anchor, and before there was Jon Snow, the fan beloved brother of the night's watch, there was Jon Snow, with an H 19th century medical doctor from England.
But Dr Jon Snow, as a few claims to fame, including developing early anaesthetics and administering anesthesia for the queen while she delivered two of her kids.
But mostly he is remembered for the way he fought cholera in the 18 fifties.
His timely action and clever thinking stopped on Outbreak, and even though he was never recognized during his lifetime, he's now considered one of the founders of epidemiology.
Our story begins in mid 19th century London, which was, in a word, gross in two words, super gross.
Like many cities in the 18 hundreds, London saw a huge increase in population.
And with that came a huge increase in poop, which nobody knew quite how to deal with.
Sewer systems hadn't quite spread to the entire city.
So in places like the Soho district, people slashed their waste into the streets, dumped it into overflowing cess pools or trucked it over to the Thames River, the river that notably also served as the city's primary water supply during this period.
Maybe, unsurprisingly, London and the rest of Europe were also being plagued with persistent outbreaks of cholera.
Ah, highly infectious sometimes deadly diarrheal illness, and there was considerable disagreement over why we didn't know that bacteria and viruses were at the root of most infectious diseases.
So the prevailing idea was me.
Asthma theory would said that they were passed around by bad air.
This is where Jon Snow came in.
He had encountered cholera before in mining populations and had come to believe the disease was not spread by air but by ingesting stuff contaminated with human waste.
After all, the miners brought their meals toe work, didn't have a bathroom down there and probably didn't wash their hands before eating gross when snow observe the situation in London, he therefore concluded that cholera was being spread by tiny fecal particles in the water, and in 18 54 he got a chance to prove it.
A year before, a new collar outbreak reached a London borough near Snows home, and it killed more than 500 people in a matter of weeks.
Based on the area, Snow was suspicious of one water pump on Broad Street, specifically after his sample of the water turned up visible white flecks of organic material.
So he obtained a list of some people who had been killed by the outbreak and began talking to their families.
And ultimately, he found the common factor was where those victims had gotten their water.
That pump on Broad Street.
Snow then took his evidence to the local officials, who agreed to take the handle off the pump to prevent people from using it.
But even then, nobody really believes know about why, including Britain's General Board of Health.
It's possible that his sample size wasn't enough to convince them.
Or maybe it was the fact that he couldn't prove what in the water was causing the illness.
In any case, Snow was confident enough in his findings that when other cholera outbreaks appeared, he continued trying to find the contaminated water behind them, and ultimately that led him to Amore Citywide discovery.
At some point, Snow realized all the district's in London affected by the outbreaks, had their water piped in from one of two suppliers, one that got their water from upstream of London and one that got it from downstream.
He suspected the downstream water, as you might also suspect, had a bunch of sewage in it, so cholera should have been more common in the neighborhoods that drink it.
To prove this, he began rifling through hundreds off parliamentary death records, and he found that areas with downstream water had 14 times Maur deaths from cholera during the outbreak.
Now, to you and to me, that might seem like pretty conclusive evidence that sewage equals cholera.
But for various reasons, the idea still didn't catch on.
And that was the end of that.
Or at least it was nose last published attempt at convincing the medical community that sewage caused cholera.
He did continue to investigate it privately and do other kinds of research, but unfortunately he died prematurely only a few years after these events.
Thing is, though, snow was very right.
Cholera is typically a waterborne illness spread by sewage contaminated water.
It just took a few more decades of work and proof that microbes can cause diseases for scientists to finally prove and accept that.
Thankfully, for all of us, though, Snows methods didn't fade into obscurity.
Even if his work was rejected in the 18 fifties, his outbreak management strategies are still in use today.
His idea to map the origin of cases is a technique that is currently saving lives, and it was so unique that it was a foundation of modern epidemiology.
Looking back, Dr Jon Snow may not have had a sword he may not have had on Army at his command, but he did wield mass health information and help shape a major field of science.
So even though Snow wasn't celebrated during his lifetime, there's a lot to celebrate about him today because in the end there's no doubting that his contributions have helped save millions of lives.
Next, let's look at two serious tragedies that ultimately made our drugs safer.
There was a time in the United States that you had to label what was in your medication, but no one regulated what counted as medication, meaning you could sell poison to people as long as you were up front about it.
Weirdly enough.
And as you might predict, that resulted in a few deaths but also stronger rules.
Here's Stephan to explain what happened.
The history of medicine is full of some huge triumphs, but also some pretty terrible mistakes, Like in the 19 thirties, a company out to make a quick buck took a safe, effective drug and managed to make it a killer surrounding that tragedy are some pretty fascinating stories.
How it died became a wonder drug how the U.
S FDA became what it is today and how one scientist walked home with a Nobel Prize.
The drug in question is called Elixir self vanilla meid, and it was briefly manufactured and sold by the S.
E Massengill Company of Tennessee in 1937.
Before this deadly elixir was concocted, self vanilla might had a good rep as an effective drug, all on its own sofa.
Nilla mind is an antibiotic, so it's used to fight bacterial infections.
It works by interfering with bacteria's ability to make folic acid, which they need to reproduce.
It was derived from an earlier drug called Prentiss A, which had a vivid red color and was actually developed by the dye industry.
In 1932 chemist Gerhardt Doma found that this molecule wasn't just pretty.
It could cure bacterial infections and mice.
And once Prentiss will hit the market in 1935 it quickly gained popularity and saved a lot of lives.
In fact, Pontus ill and related compounds were some of the earliest widespread antibiotics penicillin had already been discovered, but it wasn't easily available yet.
Further research showed that there were two parts of the practice, all molecule.
One part was the die, and the other was the antibiotic.
The antibiotic half was salt vanilla mind, which researchers found could be used on its own, mostly in powder, a pill form well, it had potential side effects.
It was generally safe.
We actually still use self until, um, I do treat vaginal infections, though not very often, because there are other antimicrobials out there Nowadays.
The problem was that self vanilla might had already been synthesized by chemists and the patent had expired.
So anybody could make in Sal variance of Enter the Massengill Company, who found that their customers liked their drugs in syrup, for they set out to make a liquid version of self vanilla mind, and their researchers eventually found that the powder would dissolve in diethylene glycol.
At the time, diethylene glycol was known as a solvent.
It had a sweet taste and smell, and once the lab added some caramel and raspberry flavoring, they figured they had a nice medicine and released it as an antibiotic licks directly.
It sounds tastier than some of the cough syrups I've had, except for one thing.
Diethylene glycol is super poisonous.
Back then, there were one or two scientific studies about its toxicity, but they weren't widely known.
These days it's used as antifreeze, among other things, and we know it's not a sweet treat inside your body.
Diethylene glycol takes time to do its dirty work.
At first, the symptoms resembled drunkenness, but after several hours the poisoning gets worse.
While scientists aren't exactly sure how it kills, we do know it gets broken down by your liver into a nastier form.
From there, it shuts down the kidneys and can affect the nervous system to the instructions that shipped with the deadly elixir, Self Vanilla Meid said.
To keep giving it to patients until they got better.
Which means that some people were poisoned by well meaning loved ones who fed them antifreeze for days or weeks until they succumbed, usually from kidney failure.
In total, at least 105 people died, and if Mass and Jill had just fed it to a handful of mice before shipping a bunch of it out, this tragedy might have been prevented before 1938 the U.
S.
FDA on Lee had the power to prevent adulteration and mislabeled.
You couldn't, for example, sell tablets of flour and say it was medicine that was against the law.
You could sell something that was poisoned with zero safety testing beforehand, as long as it was what you said on the label Massengill Cos.
Elixir contained exactly what they said it did self vanilla meid and diethylene glycol with some water and flavor.
But they did technically break the law.
They called the stuff any licks, er, but that word was only supposed to be used for products that contained ethyl alcohol and Massengill syrup.
Had not the FDA seized on this technicality?
They used it to track down the tainted medicine and slapped Massengill with an unprecedented five, if not for the fine print that they would have been helpless and many more people could have died.
But a new law was rushed through Congress in 1938 giving the FDA increased power over drug safety.
That law is credited with preventing the infamous drug thalidomide, which was found to cause severe birth defects from hitting the U.
S.
Shelves many years later.
In the aftermath of this tragedy and new legislation, the chemist responsible for the antifreeze elixir committed suicide, and the senator who sponsored the 1938 drug law died shortly after it passed, reportedly of exhaustion.
Powder and pill forms of self vanilla mind were still being made in labs and widely used his antibiotics by American soldiers in World War Two.
As for Gerhard Oh Mok, developer of Pontus, Ill.
He won the 1939 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for helping to usher in the antibiotic air.
Because really practices, self vanilla, might and related compounds were used a lot at the time and can be safe and effective antibiotics, you know, as long as you don't take them with antifreeze.
Stephan mentioned thalidomide, and he's got that story, too.
Here's how incredibly subtle differences in chemistry can sometimes mean life or death.
On October 1st, 1957 a new over the counter drug was introduced in West Germany that was supposed to basically cure morning sickness during pregnancy.
It was called the Little My Thousands of Women purchased the drug and were relieved when their morning sickness disappeared and everything seemed great until later the next year, when thousands of infants were born with severe birth defects like brain damage and deformed limbs.
Doctors noticed the surge, but at first they couldn't figure out what was causing then Two doctors, Vatican Lens from Germany and William McBride from Australia both noticed that the mothers of these babies have all taken that amazing new morning sickness drug.
By 1961 Lens had proven the link between thalidomide and the birth defects, and it was pulled from the shelves.
But by then, thousands of infants had been born with those birth defects, and nearly 40% of them had passed away.
Rules for drug testing weren't as strict back then, and in this case, that cost thousands of lives.
Even though they were now aware that the little mind was a problem, scientists still didn't know why.
It turns out the answer lies in its chemistry or, more specifically, it's geometry.
What researchers didn't know what the time was that there were actually two versions of the Philippine mine molecule Thalidomide, which is made up of three connected rings of carbon and nitrogen atoms, plus some oxygen and hydrogen, is what's known as a Cairo molecule.
Cairo comes from the Greek for hand or claw, and chemists often think of Cairo molecules as being right handed or left handed.
That's because the different versions of Cairo molecules called an anti amours, are made up of all the same parts, but arranged differently.
Just like your hands, you try overlaying your right hand on your left.
You'll see that no matter which way you turn your hands, you can't make the match up, even if you make your thumbs line up.
One hand is palm up and the others palm down.
In other words, both hands have the same five fingers, but they're not identical.
And molecules like the little mite are the same way.
A Cairo molecule has an Adam, typically carbon, with four different groups attached to it.
That's called the Cairo Center.
A group could be anything from a single Adam to a long Chain two rings.
In some cases, two groups can even be connected.
These groups are kind of like your fingers in each an anti Um er.
The groups are attached the Cairo center in the opposite order, so they're mirror images of each other in the little mind For example, the Cairo Center is a carbon atom attached to one of the rings.
It's bonded to two other carbons.
Nitrogen and hydrogen.
If you position the version of the molecule that's considered right handed, called the are an anti armor, so the closest oxygen Adam to the Cairo center is below it.
The hydrogen atom attached to the center will be facing away from you.
But if you position the left handed or s in Antium er, the same way the hydrogen atom will be facing toward you.
In other words, the two and anti MIRs are mirror images of each other.
And because different receptors and enzymes in your body react with molecules and very specific ways, the fact that an anti MIRs are mere images means that they might react to things totally differently.
In the case of thalidomide, scientists discovered that the are in and humor helped with morning sickness, but the S.
An anti armor caused those severe birth defects.
One of the most famous or maybe infamous examples of how to an anti MERS affect the human body is methamphetamine.
You'd probably associate that name with the street drug, but the molecule can on Lee really break bad when it's in its our formation.
That s an anti murders commonly sold over the counter as of as a dilator and you can easily find it in vapor inhalers.
But the vapor inhaler you just spotted the pharmacy isn't filled with a dangerous drug because the s version will never be psychoactive.
After researchers discovered that on Lee the S version of thalidomide caused birth defects, they thought about isolating the are in and humor so they could continue to use it to treat morning sickness.
But it turns out that the little minds are an anti mercan, actually switch to the S version while inside the human body, meaning that even if they'd isolated 100% pure are thalidomide.
It still wouldn't be safe for pregnant women.
But in 1998 the FDA did approve the little mite almost 40 years after rejecting it based on the birth defect problems.
This time, though, it was approved for treating complications from Hansen's disease, a k a.
Leprosy and recent research is also leading some scientists to believe that in certain cases the little mite could help with a number of debilitating diseases.
including some forms of breast cancer.
They just make sure not to prescribe it to anyone who's pregnant.
I hope you're all enjoying this showcase of Stephen's shirts.
By the way, does he called dibs on all the history episodes?
Oh, wait, here's one from me.
It's about a deadly disease, a desperate race and one very, very good boy.
Even if you're not big on Alaskan history, you might have heard of the idea.
Rod Sled Dog Race.
Every year since 1973 people have raced their dog teams across the 1500 kilometer stretch of Arctic tundra between Anchorage and Nome, Alaska.
The race starts on the first Saturday in March, and to win, participants have to charge through some of the harshest conditions in the Northern Hemisphere.
But it's not an exercise in torture.
It's inspired by what's sometimes called the great race of mercy, where dog sled teams raced along much of the same trail to deliver an anti toxin that would save thousands of people from a deadly diphtheria outbreak in the winter of 1925 in the early 19 hundreds, most of Alaska's remote towns were pretty much inaccessible during winter train tracks connected the largest cities.
But the most reliable way to travel between most places was by dog sled, driven by so called mushers and pulled by teams of dogs.
Thes sleds were used to transport people, goods and mail during the long winters.
When the severe weather not boats and planes out of commission.
In January 1925 that dog sled transportation network became one town's last hope.
In December of 1924 Curtis Welsh, the only doctor in Nome, Alaska, was treating an outbreak of sore throats and coughs in the town's Children, which he initially diagnosed as tonsilitis, a simple viral infection.
When two of his patients died, he realized he was facing something much more serious.
Diphtheria, an extremely contagious disease caused by the bacterium corny bacterium diptheria.
It spreads through tiny droplets of mucus coughed or sneezed out by infected patients, which linger in the air and on surfaces.
At first, the disease looks a lot like tonsils, lettuce or even a common cold.
But it's way more deadly because the bacteria invade the patient's upper respiratory tract and produce a type of cell slaying protein known as an ex a toxin.
Once it makes it into host cells.
The XO toxin protein keeps them from manufacturing their own proteins, which rapidly kills them.
As dead and dying cells slough off the victim's nose and throat and mixed with the growing bacterial colonies, they form these thick, leathery grey coatings called pseudo membranes.
They could make it hard to swallow or even breathe.
And without treatment, the disease kills more than half of its victims.
Even back in 1924 it could be treated.
Scientists would inject diphtheria and animals that were less susceptible to the disease than collecting antibodies.
They produced a response and use them to make an antitoxin sirrah.
When it's traded with the antitoxin, the death toll from diphtheria drops toe one intent.
Unfortunately for the residents of Nome, the town supply of antitoxin had expired and the vaccine, developed in 1921 hadn't been administered y.
To keep the outbreak from getting even worse, Wells put the entire town under quarantine to reduce the spread between families and keep the disease from reaching the roughly 10,000 people in the rest of the region.
But without the antitoxin, thousands of people were risk of infection and death.
A national search found a suitable supply of the antitoxin in Anchorage, Alaska, but no one was sure how to get it to know the closest trains brought it to Nana, which is still more than 1000 kilometers away.
Planes back then were open cockpit and with the worst weather and 20 years they weren't an option and sea ice block the shipping routes.
So the governor of the Alaskan territory turned to 20 of the best male carrying dog sled teams to take the precious serum on the last leg of the journey.
Over five days, 20 mushers and 100 and 50 dogs carried the nine kilogram package of antitoxin between relay points, fighting whiteout, blizzard conditions and temperatures of negative 45 degrees Celsius across the trail that normally took 3 to 4 weeks to complete.
Four of the animals died in the process.
The teams averaged about 48 kilometres each, although some went much farther than others.
Leonard's Apollo and his lead dog, Togo, traveled 100 and 46 kilometers over the tundra and crossed the icy surface of the frozen Norton Sound.
Last team led by musher Gunner Cason and his lead dog, Balto, made the trek to Nome in a white out so bad that case and said he couldn't see any of his dogs.
He relied on Balto Sense of Smell to guide.
They reached Gnome in the early morning of February seconds, just five days and seven hours after the serum was picked up by the first mush ranks to the rapid delivery of the antitoxin on Lee.
Five of gnomes 1400 residents died during the outbreak.
The national publicity of gnomes Dire situation fueled a campaign by health officials toe widely vaccinate against diphtheria in the United States and that continues today with the T Doubt vaccine.
In the 19 Tony's, there were 300,000 cases and 13,000 to 15,000 deaths from diphtheria every year.
But the U.
S has only recorded five cases in the last decade, and the state of Alaska still runs a yearly immunization drive.
Alongside the commemorative, I did a Rod sled dog race, so in a way, those 20 teams saved an uncountable number of lives.
All dogs are good dogs, but like these guys were the best.
Finally, I said before that historical episodes like these are why our food and drugs air free from poison notice.
I didn't say drinks because if you want to be technical, alcohol is a poison.
But there was a time when the U.
S government made it Maur poisonous once more.
Here's Stephan to tell us why they thought that was a good idea.
On Christmas Eve, 1926 more than 60 people ended up in a single hospital in New York City.
They were violently ill and hallucinating, and despite doctor's best efforts, within a few days, about half of them died.
But it wasn't a virulent flu or poorly chosen mushrooms that caused their deaths.
It was alcohol that had been poisoned by the U.
S.
Government, which sounds like a conspiracy theory.
But it's the truth.
In the twenties, a chemical war between government regulators and illegal booze sellers resulted in tens of thousands of poisonings and hundreds, maybe even thousands, of deaths in the U.
S.
The Roaring Twenties were a decade filled with jazz flapper dresses, speakeasies and lavish parties like the ones in The Great Gatsby.
Even though America was supposed to be a dry country, the 18th Amendment which banned the production, sale, import and export of alcoholic beverages came into effect in 1920 it wasn't repealed until 1933.
But plenty of people still drank, even though that sometimes meant risking their lives.
When alcohol became illegal, people turned to the black market for their booze.
And thanks to heavy enforcement at ports of entry, smugglers could on Lee, bring in so much so the bootleggers that trafficked in illegal alcohol often stole industrial alcohol instead.
Ethanol, the main kind of alcohol and alcoholic beverages, is used in everything from cosmetics to pharmaceutical products, tau house paint.
But at the turn of the century, import taxes made it really expensive to use pure ethanol that way because it's technically drinkable.
So starting in 1906 almost 15 years before Prohibition, the U.
S government began adding toxic chemicals to industrial alcohol to make it cheaper, a tactic already used in other places like Europe, industrial formulas were spiked with well known toxic compounds like gasoline, chloroform and methanol, and because that made them undrinkable.
When the 18th amendment went into effect, they weren't covered by the ban.
But for the most part, all one had to do to make them drinkable was distilled them.
That's the process where alcohol is boiled and then it's vapor is collected and cooled, and when done carefully, it can get rid of small amounts of toxic additives if they're boiling.
Points are different from ethanol's.
During the first several years of Prohibition, the U.
S Treasury Department estimated tens of millions of gallons of industrial alcohol were stolen for human consumption.
So in 1926 President Calvin Coolidge used the help of chemists to make these already toxic alcohols even more dangerous, particularly by adding methanol.
There's already some methanol in most industrial alcohol formulations, but the government added Maur ah, lot more to the point where it was sometimes 10% of the entire product.
And that change is probably what caused so many poisonings and deaths.
No alcohol is great for you, but methanol is much worse than ethanol.
The two chemicals on Lee differ by a carbon and to Hydra Jin's, but that's enough to make one drinkable and the other lethal in your liver and enzyme called alcohol di hydrogen is removes hydrogen tze from alcohols.
Ethanol is converted to Asa Tal the hide and then eventually to acetic acid, the same stuff in vinegar.
Methanol is also processed by this enzyme, but the losses of hydrogen is create formaldehyde and then formic acid instead.
And formic acid is bad.
It inhibits a key enzyme that your cells need to convert sugar and oxygen into usable energy.
So even though they've got plenty of food, yourselves basically end up starved.
That's why the buildup of formic acid in someone's body can cause a range of horrifying effects, from holes in the stomach and intestines to vomiting, blood and kidney failure.
One of the most common symptoms, though, is hallucinations, like the ones experience by all those people rushed to that New York hospital in 1926.
That's because your optic nerves, the nerves that transfer visual information from your eyes to your brain, need a lot of energy to function.
So they're among the first to feel formic acid is toxic effects, and that damage could be permanent, which is why methanol poisoning frequently causes blindness on principle.
Even 10% methanol can be distilled away.
But the bootleggers chemists didn't have the best equipment, and they were pressed to work quickly, and since booze was illegal, no one was checking their product to make sure it was safe.
Although the exact figures aren't known.
By the time prohibition ended in 1933 some estimate that over 10,000 people had died from drinking government poisoned alcohol.
Killing people wasn't the goal, but it was the result, and these deaths became a hot button political issue.
So is the twenties came to a close regulator slowly started switching toa less toxic dyes and noxious compounds that couldn't be distilled away.
For example, in 1930 the U.
S government announced the discovery of Alka Tate, a sulfurous compound that smells like rotten eggs, which isn't exactly an appetizing sent for gin and tonic.
Some industrial formulations still included methanol, and some still do today.
But when the 18th Amendment was repealed, there was much less incentive to drink them.
So nowadays, thankfully, methanol poisoning is in the US are relatively rare.
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