The number of scientists killed or sickened by chemistry experiments was huge, and Newton could have gotten a 3rd entry on this list in that category as well.
Despite criticism from his peers, researcher Barry Marshall was so certain that the bacteria _H. pylori_ was the cause of peptic ulcers he drank a solution of them. He did get ill and promptly cured himself with antibiotics. He and colleague Robin Warren won the 2005 Nobel prize in Medicine for their work.
Ouch, I feel a burn. Sorry about that. I was trying to copy/paste the names from Wikipedia but RU-vid was being picky about pasting text with links. That added an extra step or two and I pasted the same name twice. Whoops. Fixed it thanks to you.
No, you only hear about sensationally disastrous cases. There is plenty of science that is done safely and brings us great scientific innovations. Hospitals and Healthcare facilities have improved immeasurably over my lifetime. and the people who came up with improvements to treatments like chemo for cancer and medicines for AIDS-related complex, and even the vaccine for human papilloma virus are unsung heroes. Chemo was found to make people allergic, so they mitigated that with large infusions of Benadryl. Antinausea medicines are infused before chemo treatments so that it can help patients survive with their appetites intact. Instead of allowing immune systems to erode, chemo treatments are also accompanied by medicine to promote the proliferation of white cells. This can even be done at home to prevent the need of coming to the hospital more times than necessary. And some of the greatest unsung heroes and heroines are the doctors and nurses, because they have better bedside manner and greater understanding of patients as well as diseases and are willing to be a healing TEAM with patients. They treat patients as peers. (But then I've always demanded my Healthcare givers treat me as a peer; I've fired many who didn't.)
@@ginnyjollykidd you are absolutely right but it's still funny to see extremely smart people have an extreme lack of common Sense and self preservation (as long as it doesn't literally kill them). I'm an archeology and anthropology student and it's a pretty accepted fact among us students that whoever decided to get into this field and excels at it has a few screws loose since 90% of our teachers makes some pretty stupid decisions sometimes. Specially my prehistory teacher who literally was on the team (and one of its heads) that discovered the oldest homo sapiens remains is a bit of a dufus.
At least they experimented on themselves and not on prisoners or poor people. There was an Australian doctor who swallowed a bacterial culture to prove the cause of stomach ulcers wasn't stress or diet. He got a Nobel Prize too.
Yes, Barry Marshall, I was looking for this! Drinking a beaker of bacteria you KNOW causes stomach ulcers for proof! I was 100% sure it was going to be on the list....
Wow, number 6 literally saved my life last year when my digestive system broke down and stopped working. I was on a PICC line with TPN which is nutrients in the blood stream directly in to the heart.
I think my favourite of the less crazy ones was Schmidt - an entomologist who composed an insect sting pain scale: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schmidt_sting_pain_index (yes, he let various insects sting him and then described the pain on a scale. Here's his description of the strongest pain, from a bullet ant: "pure, intense, brilliant pain...like walking over flaming charcoal with a three-inch nail embedded in your heel.")
I'm surprised Karl Patterson Schmidt wasn't on the list. He was a herpetologist who was bitten by a boomslang snake, which at the time was not known to be highly venomous. In order to better understand it's venom, he refused any medical attention and instead took detailed notes on his experiences until he died about 24 hours later.
@@phierle1061 he didn't "make" the snake bite he but he almost definitely encouraged it. snakes don't jut waste their venom, they need to feel threatened.
I love SciShow. Each talk is relatively short in total time and there's a lot of interesting stuff packed in. The key to its success (in my opinon), is the clever editing out of any pause to reduce the chance of boredom, thereby losing the viewer's concentration. With occasional touches of humour, each video talk is pacy, tight and is as comprehensive on its topic as it is entertaining. Thanks SciShow people.
Oh man, I almost fainted during this video. But from now on I won't criticize movies if a scientist dies in them because of their curiosity (like that idiot biologist with the snake-like creature in Prometheus) because apparently brilliant scientists are sometimes also brilliantly dumb too.
Well, it's not exactly blameworthy I guess cause they only limited the casualties to themselves, but yeah. From our point of view now, it does seem risky and avoidable.
sorgec1 Brilliant point of view. Can we have a video now of scientists who did stupid and dangerous things to themselfes without achieving a brakethrough in science? There must be a ton I guess.
The segment on heart catheterization caught my eye. I was in hospital back in 2014 and required a _PIC Line_ for advanced antibiotic treatment of a post-op infection. (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peripherally_inserted_central_catheter) There was no discomfort except just at the insertion site on my left upper arm, which quickly passed.
What about Barry Marshall? The guy who (with his partner) said in 1983 that there are certain abcteria that can survive in the stomach (despite the acidic niche) and cause ulcers, gastritis and somatch ache in general. He wasn't taken seriously at the time, so to prove his point, he simply drank a sample of the bacteria culture to show that it is responsible for causing stomach ache. He indeed was later diagnosed with gastritis and with antibiotic treatment (like he predicted), it went away. He was later awarded the nobel price in medicine. (I know not as gross as Stubbins Ffirth, but pretty badass nontheless, if you ask me)
I think Anatoli Bugorski deserves to be mentioned: while working at his synchrotron, he put his head inside the accelerator, as usual, to check the presence of the beam. or better: Anatoli thought that, as usual, he was going to check for a beam of muon, so he inserted his eye in the accelerator. In this case it's quite safe to do it, because muons rarely interact with matter, and he was expecting to see the usual little sparkle inside his eye, sign for beam-on. this also happens to astronauts in the ISS, they see these little sparkles that are caused by the interaction of muons from the space at high energies and the retina of their eyes and it's absolutely safe. to produce muons, the beam of protons had to collide against a target, and he was expecting the target to be inserted that time too but... he saw a beam of protons at 80 GeV, blasting through his head, digging a hole from his eye to his nape. he survived. Don't do it with the beam of the LHC
Yeah, but that was a lab accident because of maleficent serendipity - the bulb that was supposed to warn him the proton beam was active had burned out, just before he got to the room. The door hadn't been locked because he forgot to. The proton beam wasn't supposed to be on because he was looking for the muon beam having been there, and nobody else in the test booth got the memo he had gone in because the alarms didn't function due to being off at the time. They thought he was out of the way. It was just a really, really terrible accident, and Bugorski's story is amazing for his experiencing and living through something that by all means, should have killed him.
No James Carroll?? You talked about how Yellow Fever was actually spread by mosquitoes but didn't even give an honourable mention to Carroll who purposely allowed the infected mosquito to bite him and get infected himself to prove it was vector-borne!!
Or the guy who (I forget his name) proved that he could cure Syphilus, so he gave himself Syphilus, then gave himself Malaria - and the Malaria cured his Syphilus, he was right! Science.
madbear3512 the point is that you don’t know if it will be successful to cure at all, and so 20 people just died. That’s the ethical issue. I see where you’re coming from though.
I'm pretty sure the standard procedure is to experiment on volounteers who would die anyway of whatever disease you're researching. Many people will take a risky experiment over certain death.
There's a good chance that the procedure to remove WPW from my heart wouldn't have been created and I'd have been left to a life of consuming drugs that inhibit normal functionality if Werner Forssmann hadn't risked sticking a catheter in his heart. So as dumb as it was I'm grateful for that.
Mike, same goes for my dad. He was hospitalized, and my parents were divorced. My mom woke me up in the middle of the night when I was 17 so I could give the doctor consent over the phone to cath my dad's heart. Luckily for me, my mom was an ICU nurse for many years, so she was able to quickly explain what it was and how it would help. PS, I'm really glad you're ok, Mike.
Yeah no, Madame Curie does not count because she and her husband were working with radiation at a time where nobody KNEW what radiation poisoning was. Her items and notes to this day are still kept in lead-lined safes because of how contaminated they are. A tragic death of one of the Grande Dames of science, but she helped us all understand what radiation is and how it works, without her we wouldn't have a lot of knowledge about that sort of chemistry that we have now. :)
Without these "lunatics", technology and science wouldn't be where they are today. As long as you're not harming anyone who doesn't consent to be harmed and understand the risks, self-experimentation is not only acceptable, but noble.
patrick watkins These "lunatics" helped advanced civilization in ways normies can only dream of, except the guy who ate vomit. He got the wrong conclusion.
Slotin's DIY method, through the arm then guided by x-ray (fluoroscopy, specifically), is pretty much still how heart catheterization is done in many cases today, if not most.
"May I ask you something? Your people used to call the core "Demon." Was that an insult or a compliment?" "...An insult, to be sure. But one with a modicum of respect."
They let me pick. Did I ever tell you that? Choose whichever core I wanted. You know me. I did my research, watched as it became the experimental artifact we needed it to be. Like the others, it was uniform and polished and had high neutron flux. A natural experimental subject. But it had something they didn't. Something no one saw but me. Can you guess?
The line between brilliance and insanity is how helpful you end up being to those around you when you are overtaken by the urge to do something abnormal and bizarre.
Slotin wasn't studying the Demon Core for research. He was testing its criticality factor - that is, how close to critical the amount of material in the sphere itself was. There are many ways to increase the criticality of the core - adding more fissionable material to it (the process used in Little Boy dropped on Hiroshima), compressing it (the process used in Fat Man on Nagasaki, and presumably to be used eventually on the Demon), or by raising the environmental reflection of neutrons back into the core, the process used here. The idea was to make sure the core was within a few percent of critical mass of material, just less enough that it doesn't get critical until that is desired. The Demon was to be assembled into what was to be Crossroads/Able, the first test conducted after the war. He was running the test to show another physicist, Alvin Graves, how to do it because Graves would have to do it at Bikini Atoll. It wasn't a far-scoped study of reactors (which don't use bomb-grade materials and have very different control mechanisms) but a short term pragmatic check of a test bomb core. In Daghlian's case, the narrative and the test on the screen mention a "reactor". There was none such, just the core surrounded by metal bricks.
Ah, well let's say you're between 18 and 25 years of age in a first-world country. You're most likely to die in a car accident, if you die in that age range. Any older? Alcohol! Older still? Heart disease! And if you're pre-civilization era, you've got ~90% chance of dying to some mosquito-based disease
Great video- and you are so right that really smart people can make some bad decisions, which sometimes are big, bad decisions. Having worked in research facilities, what I saw was an intense desire to get to an answer, and that genius single- mindedness was like the blinders on a horse. Severe tunnelvision. I'm not saying it was bad, or good either. It just is.
Shout out to Barry Marshall, who drank a Helicobacter Pylori culture to prove that bacteria could survive in the stomach. He ended up with gastritis and a Nobel Prize.
In Slotin's Demon Core incident, 9 men were in the room, including Slotin. Those closest to the core when it flashed died of various cancers over the next few years. The ones further away took decades for their cancer to kill them. The only exception was an army private who was acting as security; he died as a sergeant during the Vietnam conflict instead a couple of decades later.
As someone who used nitrous oxide quite excessively I think its kind of amazing, that even the first person who knew about it got high with his friends
Davey: “Yes, sir, I am perfectly healthy. I inhale tons of potentially toxic gases, but they have no effect on me.” ... “Oh look, I’ve 50.” Heart and brain: *YEET*
Although the benefit of self experience was maybe a big part of many if these experiments, you got to give these guys credit for taking on these risks directly on themselves instead of subjecting others as has frequently been done in the past!
While I was living in graduate student accommodation a couple of years ago, I had a flatmate who was doing malaria research and was working with mosquitoes. The mosquitoes he was studying were the kind that can carry malaria, but were not actually carrying malaria. The mosquitoes were supposed to drink blood from time to time, which was animal blood fed to them through a special pouch. Sometimes the blood delivery to the lab was late... then he would *put his own arm in there and let them bite him*. For science!
3:47 There is no "typical" dose of N2O because everyone tolerates it differently. Dentists have control over the mixture (although some units have a lockout at 70/30). I would say what is more typical than what you said is that dentists usually start around 30/70, and increase the percent nitrous oxide from 30 until the desired amount of analgesia has been reached. Even if the machine doesn't have a max. cap. lockout, dentists aren't supposed to go over 70/30. I'm not sure why 30 percent oxygen was chosen as the lower legal limit since there's less than that percent oxygen in air. Its also completely non-addictive and the half life is only 30 seconds, so the effects wear off seconds after you stop inhaling it. The only way its dangerous at all that we know of is if the concentration were high enough to displace all or almost all of the oxygen. Inhaling pure nitrous would kill you, but not because anything about the nitrous itself is deadly...its just that your body cannot do anything with the oxygen in the N2O molecule as far as using it to breathe. You'd continue breathing normally, but you'd fall asleep quickly and you would not wake up if nothing changed. EDIT: 3:59 He may have inhaled 15 liters of pure nitrous in 7 minutes, but he also took several breaths of air during that 7 minutes as well....otherwise he would be dead.
The movie Fat Man and Little Boy filmed the Slotin criticality accident. They changed the name and history a bit "having the accident even before the Trinity test" but the details of the accident, how it happened, what it looked like and the horrible way he died were all filmed pretty damn accurately. The scenes all over RU-vid if you wanna check it out.
They weren't stupid, back then nothing was considered a "dumb mistake" if it was for science, especially since they all did it out of curiosity or something else.
Nobody important The screwdriver guy was LAZY. The experiment coulda been done using spacers(which don't fall out of your hand and cause you to get *Insta-camcer* )...
Dat Engie The screwdriver radiation poisoning guy was lazy and crazy. Hed have lived for another 40 or 50 years if he just FOLLOWED THE PROCEDURE FOR THE ALREADY DEVELOPED EXPERIMENT *INSTEAD OF USING A STUPID SCREWDRIVER.*
Your fault for clicking the video, also eating and watching a disgusting video and triggering disgust or the urge to gag are only in certain people, it doesn't harm anyone. It's like reverse Epilepsy, the few people who suffer from it can DIE if exposed to flashing colours.
And now you know lol. I never eat and watch SciShow for this very reason. That might have been because I binge watched a bunch of videos at like 2am and wasn't eating and disgusted by some of the videos.
Depends on how you classify life and also how you classify things. The quaking aspen grove in Utah is 80,000 years old, but it hasn’t been the same thing alive for that long. There’s some lichen (I think, maybe moss) that’s really really old. And there’s a tree that’s over 5,000 years old. Those are the ones I know about at least. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I understand perfectly. Clearly you are far superior than any other farts in history. Did you learn to make conclusions without any facts? Is that what you were taught? I'm terribly sorry that your concept of a real scientist is perverted . A scientists ,a real one does not conform to any image.
Devan you are doing an efficient job at fortifying my point while trying to disprove it. I had facts that led me to the conclusion I stated, there isn't any mystery on how I came to that conclusions. Scientists don't necessarily have any image to conform to, it isn't necessarily in the job description. My perception of scientist's is hardly perverted, i'd like for you to notice you came to the conclusion my concept of a scientist was perverted without any "facts" or evidence. I also never claimed I was superior to any "farts" in history, which is an exaggeration. Laura that is true, you don't have to speak English to be intelligent or a scientist. I'm basing my opinion of what has been presented to me, his literary abilities (I'm assuming he's natively English, which admittedly isn't a good) and his manner.
... He did WHAT with vomit?!? Excuse me while I add the 1700’s to the “under no circumstance should you travel to this century if time travel is ever invented” list.