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.
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.
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 RUclips 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.
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....
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.")
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'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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. :)
"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?
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.
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
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*
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.
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.
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.
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.*
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 RUclips if you wanna check it out.
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.
I remember seeing a documentary on a doctor that took a lethal dose of a drug to document it's effects in their entirety and who asked a colleague to check in at an agreed time to revive him, but the colleague for whatever reason was late and found the guy dead and all of the walls of his room contained the scribblings of exactly what the guy went through but sadly at some point in the night he had deliriously daubed over half of it with handprints covered in ink and paint and had written all sorts of nonsense over the rest. I think it was on an episode of Strange but True or something like that.
"don't look straight at the sun"
isaac newton: "alright, I'll look at a reflection of the sun then"
Isaac Newton: DoN't LoOk StRaIgHt At ThE sUn
Look up “sun gazing” on RUclips here if you want a laugh. People are doing it on purpose still 😂
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.
_No, Isaac_
joe chu that’s a big brain play right there
I’ve noticed that people who use a lot of their brain capacity for being really really clever don’t seem to have much left over for common sense.
maryavatar best comment of the year
I've noticed that too
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.)
As someone who has been called smart my whole life, I can confirm that I have about 3 common sense.
@@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.
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.
RMoribayashi yeah this is the one I expected to see
I think they've done a video that already, forget what it's called though
Ouch, I feel a burn. Sorry about that. I was trying to copy/paste the names from Wikipedia but RUclips 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.
Yeah he did it at my University no less! He still teaches there!
What university?
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.
Max Power that man was a badass
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....
Helicobacto piloris bacteria.
why not experiment on murderers, rapists and such, at least they would be usefull to humanity
Max Power altruism is great
My sister and I used to play a game called Who can stare at the sun the longest.. We weren't the smartest people
That’s good preparation for a game called “Who can learn Braille the fastest?”
SpongeBoob lol jesus dude
That's youthful exuberance.
You okay?
Glad I'm not the only one who stared at the sun as a kid..Has your vision gone bad from it? Mine gets worse every year..
"Newton was OK".
That's debatable.
SlideRulePirate imagine how much better he would have been if he could see the world he was changing
He did become a crazy angelic-communicating alchemist, so yeah...
JanPospisil42 he was already a crazy alchemist before though
He might be the smartest human who ever lived. Doesn't matter if he was OK.
His mercury drinking habit was a major cause for the deterioration of his mental state, yet another thing to learn from him: Don't drink mercury.
In this Video: Isaac Newton hated his eyeballs.
He almost had his Isaac-cidentally punctured by science...
+david bouy That eyesore made my eye sore
And almost accidentally invented the lobotomy
I almost did that
Kek Kek.
Yes.
Louis Slotin was a pretty _rad_ guy.
The raddest in fact!
I sievert you did there
He was pretty Curie-us
@@fionndempsey3
Well he _was_ a scientist, of *_core-s_* he was!
Too soon...
who puts vomit from multiple infected people in their eyes? WHO DOES THAT
Emma Armo I like you.
Emma Armo that's science
AND THATS SCIENCE FOR YOU.
I KNOW RIGHT?! That whole story was like...the old-timey Two Girls, One Cup. One Guy, Several Cups? Anyway GAAAAHHHHHHH. Ick. bleh
The same guys who "drink" beer or spirits by pouring them into their sinuses via their eye drainage tubes?
"Sometimes really smart people make really bad decisions."
- SciShow, 2017
Into the quotebook it goes.
Their decisions was beyond from bad
Slotin was screwed by his screwdriver.
his "slot" screwdriver at that.
Should have kept the slot-in.
His life rusted away
John OBrien Gardener he nailed it
He and his screw driver got a little “rusty.”
Fenrir the Rrowdy yea he got real srewed
I feel like 50% of science was just people trying to find new ways to get high.
Pixel Heart Chemists, basically.
That, and the other 50% is hipster suicidals who want to find a creative and unique way to take their own life.
I know right
Pretty much.
Just the other day I extraced DMT from mimosa hostilis tree bark it made me feel like a chemist
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.")
Did he stuck nails into his heels as well?
Does anyone else's eyes hurt just thinking about Isaac Newton's experiment?
Indeed they do
Yes.
I didn't expect the video to be a 'try not to cringe'.
My eyes hurt more thinking about Stubbin Ffirth's experiment.
I cringed a lot... Needles and eyes should not mix
The heart catheterization one was worse.
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.
Int: 18
Wis: 5
1 byte snack or someone else with cha 20 to convince them to do it 🤔
1 byte snack
Int: 18
Wis: 5
Luck: 99
Eh, I'm sure many of them knew what they were doing was risky, they were just brave and believed it was worth it.
LMAO
The stats your mad scientist D&D character has.
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.
He didn't MAKE the snake bite him, and so it isn't his fault and he wouldn't make it to this list.
That bites
@@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.
@@user-cx9nc4pj8wI'm sorry but that, right there sounds so much like victim blaming💀
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.
BECAUSE THEY ARE CURIOUS! It's not their fault for risking their life just out of curiosity. Even the saying "the curiosity killed the cat" proves it.
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.
not avoidable if someone throws a radioactive core at you
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.
Hehe I second that video!
Nah newton had it all wrong, the colors you see when you rub your eyes are other dimensions
No, he had it right! It was angels giving him secret knowledge!
Guys, guys, you're both wrong. These color spots are just small glitches in the Matrix code.
Nope just someone trying to breakthrough the tsukiyomi
No its not, its the different timelines. Theres just too many for us to see clearly
No it’s the magnetic Felds in the earth because it’s so flat they bounce from side to side and into ur eye and you can see it
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)
JeyTheGrey I was thinking this as well! Also Jonas Salk, who risked giving himself polio.
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.
My eyes physically ached after watching the part about Newton...
No, You don't do these things to yourself. You perform them on your *ex* (spouse, BF/GF etc.) That's why they're called... EXperiments.
booooh
Absolutely hilarious...
Ya,..
Roentgen did X-ray of his wife..he also got noble prize in 1901..
What exactly is your theory on?
EvErYwHeRe you must be.
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.
Don't forget about Lazear, he's the Yellow Fever Board member who actually caught it and died
davey getting his boys high lol
Man of culture
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.
"Because, sometimes, really smart people can make really bad decisions"
So many things can be said here....
listening to this now, these scientists sound like lunatics.
Normal people cannot think abnormally. It is their abnormality that leads them to greatness.
Without lunatics, we would still be hunting with sticks in caves
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.
don't know why everyone is taking my comment so seriously.
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.
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.
Doctors doing experiments on themselves were basically the only ethical option, you can't just do medical experiments on humans
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.
Seems like we have our first volunteer!
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.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unethical_human_experimentation
Of course you can do that, but probably only once
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.
Now, for the six scientists who used other people instead of themselves to prove a theory.
That's too common.
Rebeldoug You're gonna need a bigger list
I would have thought madame curie would have made the list.
... It wasn't known how dangerous radiation was in her time considering she discovered it. That's tragic, not stupid.
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. :)
These guys were that dedicated to this stuff.
"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?
I love the old timey scientists and their devil may care attitudes.
I've been wondering this for a while--why does Michael always wear a coat? Is he cold?
weehawk mans not hot
skeeeaaah, and a pum pum pum
weehawk he always wear black as well. what an emo
Aesthetic
Uh, fashion duh
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.
No one:
Literally No One:
Issac Newton: “I’m sticking this needle in my eye to see colors”
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.
What about that dude that took a lethal dosage of cocaine and wrote all over his walls to describe how he felt all the way through the process?
Living on the edge doesn't make me stupid,
It makes me a genius.
Thanks SciShow I learned something.
I'm conducting an experiment on the effect of beer and Doritos on my body. Where's my Nobel prize?
Take notes, and measurements, and follow the scientific method. Oh, and you might have to write a paper about your study.
There is some requirement for originality and previously unknown things. Be creative with this iteration of the test.
Don't forgrt the right citation
And that ladies & gentlemen, is the difference & importance of Knowledge & Wisdom.
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.
My heart was catheterized (and ablated) just six days ago!
I hope you're ok!
I love how slowly Michael explained what Isaac Newton did with his eyes. It added an element of suspense to it.
Did any of them become super villains?
+
To be honest nothing kills a person more then confidence
What about malaria? Cancer? Airway obstructions? Heart disease? Strokes?
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
this would've been really deep and profound if you didn't use the wrong then
Wtf Isaac
In dutch, the element strontium is really funny. "Stront" is basically a differen word for... well... feces
YoshiThe1st poep
In portuguese, the abbreviation for copper, Cu, literally means ass.
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
Really making the difference between being smart and being wise stand out, here
"Ignoring safety can end in tragedy"
Very true.
And just as true, ignoring safety can lead to saving millions of lives.
Isaac Newton is my idol, gotta make the "stupid and dangerous" list twice. YOLO.
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*
A s c r e w d r i v e r
dogederp :
Did you see the movie "Fat Man Little Boy"?
Not a sonic one, whadda shame
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.
its 1am, im drunk, and im cackling at '1000 rads'
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.
Newton did not DISCOVER gravity, he DESCRIBED gravity first.
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.
0:55 OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD I DON"T WANT TO HEAR THIS OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD!!!!!
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!
Yes!
Now I know not to use a screw driver to mess with my nuclear core, thanks Slotin!!!
I guess the screwdriver was out of place. It needs to be... Slot in
I have a great respect for them. I think it's beautiful, that people can risk their life for science
Risk big to win big?
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!
Cone starts with C and C is for color
C is also for Conspiracy
C is also for chit
C is also for "Coincidence?"
Rod starts with R, and R is for ... rocket? radiator? rambutan? … ???
C is for constitution
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.
But it's for science…I mean I wouldn't do it, I am not that stupid.
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.*
1:15 who the hell pokes a needle through their eye?! It’s almost as if he wants to be blind
The hosted part of the description is blank
Good job 👏🏻 One of the most interesting episodes
"Science is more an art, than a science."
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 RUclips if you wanna check it out.
Damn humans
+
I'm surprised you didn't mention the guy who discovered the bacteria that causes stomach ulcers. That was a recent one too.
The downfall of Newton started when the apple fell on his head. Darn gravity!
I love how when a scientist discovers or makes a psychoactive drug, they turn into frat boy.
9:54 And death... especially death
Another moral out of those stories
Common sense ain't so common
who else covered their eyes when hearing about the first one
i was covering my eyes the whole time during the first one lmao
Scishow needs to start putting disclaimers on the vids you shouldn't watch and eat at the same time. Lol 😯😕
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.
oh no, i have been shutted up by some random person on the internet.
o h n o
I ate with ease. Is that weird?
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.
Well i did too, n was doable
Apparently Slotin used his body as a shield to protect other observers from the supercritical core.
DANG IT NEWTON
I've had catheters in my jugular, but not self-guided ones. That made me shiver.
Davy got high AF
I remember seeing a documentary on a doctor that took a lethal dose of a drug to document it's effects in their entirety and who asked a colleague to check in at an agreed time to revive him, but the colleague for whatever reason was late and found the guy dead and all of the walls of his room contained the scribblings of exactly what the guy went through but sadly at some point in the night he had deliriously daubed over half of it with handprints covered in ink and paint and had written all sorts of nonsense over the rest. I think it was on an episode of Strange but True or something like that.
Rob Fraser that drug was cocaine; I saw that same episode
Moira should be on this list
We're probably the only two people who get this reference....
Moira Brown?
But she is so sweet
H2DNO The only two people who played obscure indie rpg Fallout 3.
Pika Zilla so true (I’m assuming you’re talking about Overwatch)
Whoever did the camera work for this episode improved over others I've seen.
_I a m u n c o m f o r t a b l e ._
*nods quickly in agreement*
I shouldn't have started eating before watching this...
Safety is number one priority
Stubbins Ffirth sounds exactly like what I'd expect a guy willing to drink black vomit to be named.
Even the smartest of people can be idiots sometimes.
Like most politicians.
Me: NOT THE EYES NOT THE EYES
Sci show: this is the worst one
Me: UH OH...
Me:that wasn't so bad
Me off guard: NOT THE VEINS PLEASE
That thumbnail though
I like the sound of the host's voice. There's something very smooth and relaxing about it.