Speaker 1: Picture the precise moment just before a total disaster. You
Speaker 1: are standing in the sterile, highly classified room at Los Alamos.
Speaker 2: Right the heart of the Manhattan Project.
Speaker 1: Exactly, and you are currently holding a flathead screwdriver. But
Speaker 1: you aren't you fixing a hinge or adjusting a cabinet
Speaker 1: or something.
Speaker 2: You're doing something much much worse.
Speaker 1: You are wedging the blade of that screwdriver between two
Speaker 1: heavy beryllium hemispheres. You are trying to manually prop open
Speaker 1: a casing that encloses a highly radioactive plutonium core, which
Speaker 1: is just terrifying to even think about it is, or
Speaker 1: I mean, imagine a completely different scene centuries earlier. You
Speaker 1: are a highly educated medical professional and you are willingly
Speaker 1: enthusiastically pouring the infected black vomit of a dying patient
Speaker 1: directly into your own open wounds.
Speaker 2: I mean it sounds like this set up to a
Speaker 2: psychological thriller, right, or maybe a dark comedy about the
Speaker 2: end of the world. Yes, totally, but it's not. It
Speaker 2: is the actual historical record of human.
Speaker 1: InCor, and it forces us to ask the ultimate question,
Speaker 1: where is the line between a visionary genius and an
Speaker 1: absolute catastrophic idiot?
Speaker 2: That is a very thin line.
Speaker 1: Sometimes it really is so welcome to thrilling threads. In
Speaker 1: this deep dive, we are going to explore twenty five
Speaker 1: of the most deranged, unethical, and just baffling scientific experiments
Speaker 1: in human history.
Speaker 2: We are going to unpack the historical records, the medical journals,
Speaker 2: and the psychological case studies.
Speaker 1: Right to understand exactly why these highly educated, deeply respected
Speaker 1: individuals thought these horrific ideas were valid.
Speaker 2: And exploring that why is so crucial because these weren't
Speaker 2: cartoon villains operating in secret layers. You know, now, there
Speaker 2: were real people, exactly real people driven by a genuine
Speaker 2: desire to know, to push boundaries, to cure diseases, or
Speaker 2: just to understand the cosmos. But they did it by
Speaker 2: abandoning the very guard rails that separate rigorous science from
Speaker 2: utter madness.
Speaker 1: For you listening right now, we know we live in
Speaker 1: an era where we rely heavily on scientific consensus, and
Speaker 1: usually I mean that trust is incredibly well placed.
Speaker 2: Oh absolutely, the scientific method is the best tool we have.
Speaker 1: But today we are going to look at the moments
Speaker 1: when that method completely derailed and to really grasp this
Speaker 1: kind of scientific Hubris. We have to start at the
Speaker 1: very foundation of modern science itself.
Speaker 2: We need to look at the man who actually championed
Speaker 2: the concept of empirical data.
Speaker 1: Yes, and how his utter lack of practical foresight completely
Speaker 1: killed him.
Speaker 2: You were talking about Francis Bacon. Of course, he is
Speaker 2: widely considered the father of empiricism.
Speaker 1: Right, exactly. Bacon was a British renaissance man. He was
Speaker 1: deeply involved in politics, philosophy, writing, you name it.
Speaker 2: And prior to Bacon, a lot of what people called
Speaker 2: science was really just inherited wisdom.
Speaker 1: Like people just read Aristotle and took it as absolute gospel.
Speaker 2: Right. But Bacon's core belief was radical for the time. Yeah,
Speaker 2: he said knowledge actually required physical evidence.
Speaker 1: You can't just doom something works because some ancient Greek
Speaker 1: philosophers said, so, you have to test it.
Speaker 2: You have to build knowledge from the ground up through
Speaker 2: systematic observation.
Speaker 1: So we go to sixteen twenty six. He is in Highgate,
Speaker 1: North London. It is freezing outside, there is thick snow
Speaker 1: absolutely everywhere.
Speaker 2: And Bacon gets an idea about food storage.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he wonders about the thermodynamics of meat preservation. Specifically,
Speaker 1: could snow and ice be used to preserve flesh and
Speaker 1: prevent puture.
Speaker 2: Faction, which, to be fair, is actually a brilliant hypothesis.
Speaker 2: He was conceptually centuries ahead of the modern freezer.
Speaker 1: He really was.
Speaker 2: He understood that cold might inhibit whatever processes cause meat
Speaker 2: to rot, even if he didn't know fully understand bacterial
Speaker 2: decomposition yet.
Speaker 1: Right, the problem wasn't his hypothesis at all. The problem
Speaker 1: was his methodology. He acquires a pluck ten and he
Speaker 1: decides to stuff it with snow right there in the
Speaker 1: freezing cold, right out in the elements, exactly. And I
Speaker 1: want to pause here because this is where his immense
Speaker 1: intellect completely detaches from base common sense.
Speaker 2: He doesn't go inside, he.
Speaker 1: Doesn't bring the snow indoors, he doesn't have an assistant
Speaker 1: do it. He stands in the freezing winter air, plunging
Speaker 1: his bare hands into the snow to stuff a dead bird.
Speaker 2: And consequently he catches a severe chill, which very quickly
Speaker 2: develops into pneumonia.
Speaker 1: And the mechanism of that is purely physiological, right, Yeah, it.
Speaker 2: Is Prolonged exposure to extreme cold causes severe vasoconstriction, that
Speaker 2: is the narrowing of blood vessels to preserve core body.
Speaker 1: Heat, so the blood rushes away from the extremities.
Speaker 2: Exactly, and this impairs the local immune response in the
Speaker 2: respiratory tract when you combine that with the physical exertion
Speaker 2: and the environmental pathogens of seventeenth century London. While his
Speaker 2: lungs just filled with fluid and.
Speaker 1: He died shortly after. He never even got to find
Speaker 1: out if his chicken experiment actually worked.
Speaker 2: It is tragic, really.
Speaker 1: It is like inventing the seatbelt but accidentally strangling yourself
Speaker 1: with it while trying to figure out how the buckle works.
Speaker 2: That is a great analogy. What's fascinating here is the
Speaker 2: sheer irony of it all. The man who champion the
Speaker 2: idea of systematic observation completely lacked basic situational awareness.
Speaker 1: He just missed the big picture.
Speaker 2: He applied his massive intellect to unlocking the secrets of
Speaker 2: the natural world, but entirely forgot that he was a
Speaker 2: fragile biological component of that exact same world.
Speaker 1: He needed a warmer coat, not just a sharper mind.
Speaker 1: So Bacon's failure was an accidental byproduct of his curiosity.
Speaker 1: But what happens when a scientist views their own agonizing
Speaker 1: pain not as an accident, but as a necessary ingredient
Speaker 1: for discovery.
Speaker 2: That takes us into some very dark territory.
Speaker 1: It does that brings us to our next pair of researchers.
Speaker 1: We see scientists taking that same disregard for their own
Speaker 1: safety and applying it to deadly aggressive viruses. Let's look
Speaker 1: at Stubbins A. Firth and Jesse William Lazier.
Speaker 2: Ah the yellow fever gambles. This is where self experimentation
Speaker 2: really crosses the line from careless enthusiasm to something deeply,
Speaker 2: deeply disturbing.
Speaker 1: I am still trying to wrap my head around Stubben's effort.
Speaker 1: It's the seventeen nineties in Philadelphia. Yellow fever is just
Speaker 1: ravaging the population.
Speaker 2: It was a terrifying disease and nobody had any idea
Speaker 2: how it spread.
Speaker 1: Right, and Effirth has a theory. He wants to prove
Speaker 1: that the disease is not passed from person to person
Speaker 1: via bodily fluids.
Speaker 2: So to test this, he exposes himself to infected bodily
Speaker 2: fluids the most aggressive ways imaginable.
Speaker 1: It is so gross. Tell them what he did well.
Speaker 2: He started by making surgical incisions. On his own arms.
Speaker 2: He then took the vomit of yellow fever patients, specifically
Speaker 2: the black moment oh man yeah, which is actually partially
Speaker 2: digested blood resulting from severe gastro intestinal hemorrhaging, and he
Speaker 2: poured it directly into his open wounds.
Speaker 1: And when he didn't get sick from that, he just
Speaker 1: doubled down. He poured the vonnut into his eyes, He.
Speaker 2: Fright it in a pan and inhaled the fume.
Speaker 1: He drank it undiluted. He rubbed infected blood, urine and
Speaker 1: saliva all over his body.
Speaker 2: And the crazy part is he never contracted the disease.
Speaker 1: Right after all this, he claimed absolute victory. He publishes
Speaker 1: findings and proudly announced to the medical community that he
Speaker 1: had definitively proven yellow fever is not contagious through bodily.
Speaker 2: Fluids, which is completely wrong.
Speaker 1: Wait I am stuck on this part. If Effith is
Speaker 1: literally drinking the fresh vomit and rubbing the blood of
Speaker 1: a yellow fever patient into open cuts, how on earth
Speaker 1: does he not get the virus to stomach acid kill
Speaker 1: it or was he just naturally immune?
Speaker 2: That is the core of why this experiment is so
Speaker 2: scientifically tragic. F Firth was basically a textbook example of
Speaker 2: conformation bias, just blinding a researcher to flawed.
Speaker 1: Methodology because he wanted to be right.
Speaker 2: Right. Yellow fever is a viral disease, and we now
Speaker 2: know it is mosquito born. But f Frith was sourcing
Speaker 2: his materials from late stage.
Speaker 1: Patients, the ones producing the black vomit.
Speaker 2: Exactly, by the time a patient is producing that black vomit,
Speaker 2: their body is in the final catastrophic stages of the disease.
Speaker 2: They are dying from hepatic and renal failure.
Speaker 1: So the disease has already run its course.
Speaker 2: Yes, crucially, the very phase, which is the period where
Speaker 2: the virus is actively replicating and present in high concentrations
Speaker 2: in the bloodscreen and fluids, that peaks very early in
Speaker 2: the infection. Oh wow, So by the time the patient
Speaker 2: is hamorrhaging into their stomach, their immune system has actually
Speaker 2: cleared the active virus from their blood. There were essentially
Speaker 2: no activierians in the fluids he.
Speaker 1: Was ingesting, So he was eating late stage womut for
Speaker 1: literally nothing. He was just torturing himself for absolutely no
Speaker 1: scientific gain.
Speaker 2: He brute forced a negative result and thought it was
Speaker 2: a breakthrough.
Speaker 1: But then fast forward to the late eighteen hundreds, we
Speaker 1: have Jesse William Lazier working with the US Army Yellow
Speaker 1: Fever Board. He encounters research from a Cuban doctor, Carlos Finlay,
Speaker 1: suggesting mosquitoes are the actual vector.
Speaker 2: Right, Lazir had previously worked with malaria, so he understood
Speaker 2: the bug vector theory. The mechanism made perfect sense to him, and.
Speaker 1: To definitively prove it, what does he do?
Speaker 2: He allowed himself to be bitten by eighties Egyptu mosquitoes
Speaker 2: that he deliberately allowed to fee on infected yellow fever
Speaker 2: patients during their highly infectious phemic phase.
Speaker 1: The early phase.
Speaker 2: Yes, the early phase, and unlike E. F.
Speaker 1: Frith, Lazir actually contracts the disease. He dies just over
Speaker 1: two weeks.
Speaker 2: Later, but his death proved the theory and fundamentally changed
Speaker 2: global public health.
Speaker 1: Now I have to challenge the historical framing of these
Speaker 1: two men here, because often Lazier is painted as this
Speaker 1: heroic martyr and Efforth is just seen as a disgusting idiot.
Speaker 2: That's the standard narrative.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but aren't they operating on the exact same psychological wavelength.
Speaker 1: Lazir took a calculated risk based on new data, and E. F.
Speaker 1: Frith was acting on sheer ego. Sure, but at their
Speaker 1: core both men completely devalue their own humanity in the
Speaker 1: face of a hypothesis.
Speaker 2: They stopped being people and became disposable laboratory equipment. Exactly.
Speaker 2: That is a very sharp psychological distinction. You are right
Speaker 2: that the outcomes shouldn't dictate how we view the methodology ethically.
Speaker 2: They share an alarming.
Speaker 1: Trait which was very common back then.
Speaker 2: Oh absolutely, in the scientific culture of those eras. The
Speaker 2: body of the researcher was viewed as the ultimate unassailable
Speaker 2: testing ground. If you weren't willing to risk your own life,
Speaker 2: your data was somehow suspect.
Speaker 1: It's a complete inversion of how we view scientific ethics today,
Speaker 1: where human life is paramount right. And if risking death
Speaker 1: wasn't bad enough, what about risking immense, agonizing voluntary pain
Speaker 1: for almost no reason at all.
Speaker 2: This one is rough.
Speaker 1: That brings us to nineteen thirty three and the absolutely
Speaker 1: baffling partnership of Herbert Willard and Edward Carmichael.
Speaker 2: The referred pain studies.
Speaker 1: The testicle weights let's just call it what it is,
Speaker 1: fair enough. These two scientists, these two buddies, decided they
Speaker 1: needed to map the phenomenon of referred pain, which, for
Speaker 1: you listening, is when you feel pain in one part
Speaker 1: of your body, but the actual injury is somewhere else.
Speaker 2: Oh wait, like arm pain during a heart attack.
Speaker 1: Exactly. So they took turns lying on a table while
Speaker 1: the other one literally piled weights onto their testicles.
Speaker 2: Can't understand the why we have to look at the
Speaker 2: neuro anatomy. They were trying to map visceral pain, which
Speaker 2: is pain from internal organs, is notoriously difficult to.
Speaker 1: Localize because the nerves get all jumbled up.
Speaker 2: Essentially, Yes, the nerve pathways converge in the spinal cord
Speaker 2: with somatic nerves which come from the skin and muscles,
Speaker 2: and the brain just gets confused about where the signal
Speaker 2: is originating.
Speaker 1: And the testicles.
Speaker 2: The testicles are unique because they are visceral organs, but
Speaker 2: they're located.
Speaker 1: Externally, so they were easily accessible organs for testing. Still,
Speaker 1: I am just picturing them in the lab like, all right, Edward,
Speaker 1: my turn for the weights, Hand me the five pounder.
Speaker 1: It's absurd sometimes the injected local anesthetics first. Sometimes they didn't.
Speaker 1: They just lay there adding weight to see if the
Speaker 1: pain radiated to their lower back or abdomen.
Speaker 2: It highlights that strange, almost fratthouse mentality of early twentieth
Speaker 2: century research. There was this underlying belief that true rugged
Speaker 2: science required you to suffer.
Speaker 1: No pain, no scientific gain exactly.
Speaker 2: Boundary pushing frequently bordered on the masochistic. If you weren't
Speaker 2: willing to subject your own anatomy to crushing trauma for
Speaker 2: a journal article, you just weren't committed.
Speaker 1: But before we judge history too harshly and think this
Speaker 1: is just some relic of the nineteen thirties, this kind
Speaker 1: of reckless self experimentation is actually happening right now in
Speaker 1: the world of biohacking.
Speaker 2: Right the modern iteration of this hubris.
Speaker 1: Let's look at Gabriel Asina.
Speaker 2: Biohacking is driven by this belief that the human body
Speaker 2: is just biological hardware waiting for a user installed software.
Speaker 1: Update totally bypassing clinical trials or ethical review boards. Licina
Speaker 1: wanted to give humans night vision, so he concocted a
Speaker 1: mixture containing chlorin E six, which is actually an FDA
Speaker 1: approved drug used to treat night blindness and occasionally in
Speaker 1: cancer treatments, and he mixed it with insulin and dimdithilsal
Speaker 1: foxide to help the compound penetrate the cellular membrane of
Speaker 1: the eye, and then he just dropped this chemical cocktail
Speaker 1: directly onto his own eyeballs.
Speaker 2: The mechanism of chlorin E six is fascinating, honestly. It
Speaker 2: acts as a photosensitive It essentially amplifies light.
Speaker 1: And it kind of worked right temporarily.
Speaker 2: Yes, Lacina did temporarily experience enhanced night vision. He could
Speaker 2: see shapes in a dark field that the control group
Speaker 2: couldn't see at all. But the critical flaw here is
Speaker 2: a profound misunderstanding of the eyes delicate biochemistry.
Speaker 1: Right, because the human eye regulates light for a very
Speaker 1: good reason exactly.
Speaker 2: The retina is packed with photoreceptor cells, rods and cones.
Speaker 2: When you chemically force those cells to become hypersensitive to
Speaker 2: light by bypassing the people's natural dilation limits, you're generating
Speaker 2: reactive oxygen species.
Speaker 1: In the retina, which sounds very bad.
Speaker 2: It is you are rendering the eye incredibly vulnerable to phototoxicity.
Speaker 1: It's like turning your eyes into a camera stuck on
Speaker 1: maximum exposure. You walk outside into the morning sun, and
Speaker 1: you risk completely frying your.
Speaker 2: Retinas, permanent damage.
Speaker 1: The hubris to risk permanent, irreversible blindness just to avoid
Speaker 1: buying a flashlight.
Speaker 2: It's crazy because it's not about the flashlight. It's about
Speaker 2: the ego of transcendence. It's the thrill of thinking, I
Speaker 2: am the one who outsmarted a million years of evolution.
Speaker 1: Outsmarting evolution. Wow. Well, if tampering with the eyes is terrifying,
Speaker 1: what about tampering with the very fluid that keeps us alive?
Speaker 2: Blood?
Speaker 1: Let's move into the alchemy of blood, milk and metaphysics,
Speaker 1: starting with the vampire Bolshevik himself, Alexander Bogdanov.
Speaker 2: Bogdanov is such a deeply complex historical figure. We're in
Speaker 2: the Soviet Union now in nineteen twenty eight. He was
Speaker 2: a revolutionary, a pioneer of systems theory, a science fiction writer,
Speaker 2: and a physician.
Speaker 1: A real renaissance man, but in all the wrong ways.
Speaker 2: He became utterly obsessed with blood transfusions as a means
Speaker 2: of rejuvenation. He didn't just want to cure disease. He
Speaker 2: believed he could achieve a kind of functional immortality through
Speaker 2: parabiotic exchange.
Speaker 1: He literally believed his own blood was somehow uniquely resilient.
Speaker 1: So he teams up with a twenty one year old
Speaker 1: student who is suffering from both tuberculosis.
Speaker 2: And malaria, a terrible combination.
Speaker 1: Bogdanov proposes a total blood spe He thinks, you know,
Speaker 1: my old wives immune blood will cure this kid's diseases,
Speaker 1: and his young, vibrant blood will make me youthful again.
Speaker 2: It was a mutual exchange built on a complete and
Speaker 2: menological fantasy. What Bogdanov didn't account for is the brutal,
Speaker 2: microscopic reality of blood compatibility.
Speaker 1: Which we all know about now right.
Speaker 2: Humans have distinct blood types, determined by the presence or
Speaker 2: absence of specific antigens on the surface of their red
Speaker 2: blood cells.
Speaker 1: And if you mix the wrong types.
Speaker 2: Your immune system recognizes the transfused blood as a hostile
Speaker 2: foreign invader. Bogdanov suffered a massive acute hemolytic transfusion reaction.
Speaker 2: What does that actually do to the body, Well, his
Speaker 2: body produced IgM anti bodies that aggressively attacked the student's
Speaker 2: red blood cells, causing them to rupture. This releases massive
Speaker 2: amounts of free hemoglobin into the bloodstream, which is highly
Speaker 2: toxic to.
Speaker 1: The kidneys, so his kidneys shut down.
Speaker 2: He experienced acute tubular necrosis, His kidneys failed, and he
Speaker 2: died a miserable, completely preventable death.
Speaker 1: And the most bitter eyey of all this, the twenty
Speaker 1: one year old student with TB and malaria actually made
Speaker 1: a complete recovery after getting Bogdanov's blood.
Speaker 2: It is almost a dark comedy, it really is.
Speaker 1: But bogdanov'shubris was thinking his ideological belief in a shared
Speaker 1: communal bloodstream could override biological reality. We can look at
Speaker 1: nineteen twenty eight and shake our heads knowing that Karl
Speaker 1: Lansteiner had actually discovered ABO blood groups back in nineteen
Speaker 1: oh one.
Speaker 2: Bogdanov really should have known better.
Speaker 1: You really should have. But before blood typing scientists got
Speaker 1: even more desperate, Let's rewind to eighteen fifty four in
Speaker 1: Canada with James Bobble and Edwin Hotter.
Speaker 2: Ah the milk transfusions. This represents an era where medical
Speaker 2: desperation collided with a fundamental lack of physiological understanding.
Speaker 1: This one gives me visceral horror. We have to remember
Speaker 1: that medicine in the mid nineteenth century was terrifying.
Speaker 2: Truly the Dark Ages of medicine.
Speaker 1: This is an era where people were trying to cure
Speaker 1: aggressive mental illness by injecting patients with the blood of
Speaker 1: docile lambs. Just oh is calm put its blood in
Speaker 1: the angry.
Speaker 2: Man literal magical thinking exactly.
Speaker 1: So, Bubvell and Hotter are looking for a universal donor
Speaker 1: fluid because human to human transfusions are just killing everyone.
Speaker 1: They look at blood under early microscopes and they see
Speaker 1: white blood cells. Then they look at.
Speaker 2: Cow's milk and they deduce purely based on visual similarity
Speaker 2: and well wishful thinking, that the fat globules in cow's milk,
Speaker 2: which looks somewhat similar to colomicrons and white blood cells
Speaker 2: under a rudimentary lens, could miraculously transform into white blood
Speaker 2: cells once injected into the human blood stream.
Speaker 1: They injected unsterilized cow's milk directly into human veins.
Speaker 2: It's hard to even process.
Speaker 1: And by some absolute inexplicable fluke of nature. Their very
Speaker 1: first patient, a man dying of cholera, actually showed signs
Speaker 1: of improvement, which was.
Speaker 2: The absolute worst thing. They could have happened.
Speaker 1: Because it encouraged them. Walk me through what actually happens
Speaker 1: to the body in that moment when you inject milk
Speaker 1: into a vein.
Speaker 2: The physiological mechanism of what they were doing is staggering.
Speaker 2: When you inject a foreign, unsterilized complex emulsion of bovine
Speaker 2: proteins and large fat globules directly into the vascular system,
Speaker 2: you are triggering multiple fatal cascades like what First, the
Speaker 2: fat globules can coalesce causing fat embolism syndrome. This physically
Speaker 2: blocks the microvasculature in the lungs.
Speaker 1: And brain, so you basically suffocate from the inside.
Speaker 2: And second, the foreign proteins trigger systemic inflammatory response syndrome
Speaker 2: or SERS, leading to massive anaphylaxis.
Speaker 1: And the next five patients they injected with milk promptly
Speaker 1: ded course.
Speaker 2: They did, but again they were operating in a total
Speaker 2: void of knowledge. They saw milk as pure nourishing and
Speaker 2: visually analogous to blood components.
Speaker 1: So if they couldn't master the physical fluids of the body,
Speaker 1: what about the metaphysical This brings us to nineteen oh
Speaker 1: seven and doctor Duncan McDougall.
Speaker 2: This is a classic.
Speaker 1: He asked a question that still haunts internet forums today.
Speaker 1: Can we measure the soul?
Speaker 2: The famous twenty one grams experiment? This is a perfect
Speaker 2: case study in how deeply flawed science becomes immortalized as
Speaker 2: pop culture. Fact.
Speaker 1: McDougall built these specially designed, highly sensitive industrial scales in
Speaker 1: his office. He placed six dying patients on these beds,
Speaker 1: intending to weigh them at the exact moment of death.
Speaker 2: His hypothesis was deeply literal. The soul has physical mass,
Speaker 2: and when it leaves the body upon death, the scale
Speaker 2: should register a drop.
Speaker 1: And he published his findings claiming that the human soul
Speaker 1: weighs exactly twenty one grams, or roughly three quarters of
Speaker 1: an ounce.
Speaker 2: But if you deconstruct his methodology, it completely disintegrates.
Speaker 1: Oh, it's a statistical joke. First, he only had six subjects.
Speaker 1: I mean, getting a dying person to agree to spend
Speaker 1: their final moments on a doctor's industrial scale is a
Speaker 1: tough cell anyway. But even worse, out of those six subjects,
Speaker 1: how many actually showed this twenty one gram drop?
Speaker 2: Exactly one? One single patient showed the weight drop that
Speaker 2: aligned with his hypothesis.
Speaker 1: He threw out eighty three percent of his own data.
Speaker 1: Two of the patients lost weight and then gained back,
Speaker 1: one lost weight twice.
Speaker 2: And McDougall just shrugged and blamed the scales.
Speaker 1: Right, he said they weren't calibrated correctly for those patients,
Speaker 1: But assume the scale was perfectly accurate for the one
Speaker 1: guy who fit his theory.
Speaker 2: Furthermore, the physics of a dying body are incredibly complex.
Speaker 2: At the moment of death, there is a sudden spike
Speaker 2: in core temperature because the blood stops circulating to cool
Speaker 2: the body, which leads.
Speaker 1: To a sudden burst of sweating and moisture evaporation exactly.
Speaker 2: There is also the immediate exhalation of air from the lungs.
Speaker 2: McDougall's rudimentary scales were entirely incapable of accurately accounting for
Speaker 2: insensible fluid.
Speaker 1: Loss, and yet if you go online today you will
Speaker 1: see millions of people repeating the fact that the soul
Speaker 1: weighs twenty one grams.
Speaker 2: There was a major Hollywood movie named after it.
Speaker 1: Right, it's clickbait from nineteen oh seven that is still
Speaker 1: working over a century later. People desperately want empirical science
Speaker 1: to validate their metaphysical beliefs, even if the science is
Speaker 1: absolute garbage.
Speaker 2: It's the allure of a simple, comforting number applied to
Speaker 2: the ultimate, incomprehensible mystery of death. It really is, and
Speaker 2: it segues perfectly into our next realm of inquiry, because
Speaker 2: if the internal mysteries of the body and soul were elusive,
Speaker 2: the external forces of the universe were actively trying to
Speaker 2: obliterate these scientists.
Speaker 1: We're moving from the messy biological stuff to the invisible,
Speaker 1: terrifying forces of nature. Let's go to Saint Petersburg, Russia,
Speaker 1: in seventeen fifty three and look at George Wilhelm Richmond.
Speaker 2: The mid eighteenth century was the era of electricity as
Speaker 2: a literal magic trick. At this time, electricity wasn't powering homes,
Speaker 2: it was parlor tricks.
Speaker 1: In theoretical physics, Benjamin Franklin was flying kites to prove
Speaker 1: lightning was electrical, and Witchman wanted to quantify that atmospheric power.
Speaker 2: Richmond invented a device called an electrical nomen to capture
Speaker 2: and measure lightning. He's basically an early lighting jar connected
Speaker 2: to a metal rod.
Speaker 1: He has a wire running from the roof of his
Speaker 1: house down into his laboratory. A mass of thunderstorm rolls in.
Speaker 1: He is standing there with his engraver, waiting to.
Speaker 2: Capture the moment, and the device works.
Speaker 1: It works entirely too well.
Speaker 2: He had created a perfect conduit for a massive atmospheric
Speaker 2: potential gradient.
Speaker 1: A glowing orb of ball lightning shoots out of the apparatus.
Speaker 1: It strikes Richmond right in the forehead, travels completely through
Speaker 1: his body, blows a hole straight through his shoe, shatters
Speaker 1: the doorframe of the lab, and instantly.
Speaker 2: Kills him dielectric breakdown of the air. He successfully captured lightning,
Speaker 2: and it successfully utilized him as the path of least
Speaker 2: resistance to the ground.
Speaker 1: Boom dead.
Speaker 2: It is a visceral reminder that these scientists were playing
Speaker 2: with primordial forces. They barely understood. They were treating the
Speaker 2: atmosphere like a predictable laboratory environment, completely underestimating the raw,
Speaker 2: untamed current of the phenomena they were cording.
Speaker 1: But at least a thunder storm is visible. You can
Speaker 1: hear the thunder, you can see the lightning. What happens
Speaker 1: when the force of nature is entirely.
Speaker 2: Invisible that brings us to Marie Curie, and I want.
Speaker 1: To be extremely clear here as we explore this for
Speaker 1: you listening this, this isn't idiocy. This is pure, unadulterated tragedy.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, Marie Currey stands entirely apart on this list. She
Speaker 2: won two Nobel Prizes. She discovered radium and polonium. Her
Speaker 2: rigorous hands on methodology fundamentally changed the landscape of physics
Speaker 2: and chemistry.
Speaker 1: But she didn't know what we know now about the
Speaker 1: invisible world. The very elements she discovered were slowly destroying
Speaker 1: her on a cellular level.
Speaker 2: She died in nineteen thirty four from a plastic anemia
Speaker 2: directly caused by her massive, prolonged exposure to radiation.
Speaker 1: She used to carry test tubes of radioactive isotopes in
Speaker 1: her pockets. She kept them in her desk drawer because
Speaker 1: she liked the faint blue light they gave off in
Speaker 1: the dark.
Speaker 2: The mechanism of her death is herrowing ionizing radiation possesses
Speaker 2: enough energy to detach electrons from atoms, causing massive damage
Speaker 2: to cellular DNA.
Speaker 1: Just ripping the cells apart.
Speaker 2: Specifically, it induces double strand breaks in the DNA of
Speaker 2: himatopoietic stem cells in the bone marrow. Her radiation exposure
Speaker 2: literally stopped her bone marrow from producing new red and
Speaker 2: white blood.
Speaker 1: Cells, so severe that to this day her laboratory notebooks
Speaker 1: are dangerously radioactive. You have to sign a waiver and
Speaker 1: wear protective gear just to look at them. In the
Speaker 1: library in France.
Speaker 2: She had to be buried in a leadlined coffin.
Speaker 1: Her story highlights the devastating personal cost of being the
Speaker 1: first across a scientific frontier. Before Curie, humanity had absolutely
Speaker 1: no concept of ionizing radiation.
Speaker 2: She was a pioneer walking blindly into a minefield so
Speaker 2: that those who followed her could have a map. It's
Speaker 2: the tragic martyrdom of true discovery.
Speaker 1: But that's the infuriating part. Curie didn't know the danger.
Speaker 1: Decades later, nuclear physicists did know the danger. They had
Speaker 1: the map.
Speaker 2: And they still chose to tap dance on the minefield.
Speaker 1: Which brings us back to our intro to nineteen forty
Speaker 1: six and.
Speaker 2: Lewis Lutin the demon Core.
Speaker 1: Slotin was operating in the most dangerous room on planet
Speaker 1: Earth at the Los Alamos Laboratory. He was working with
Speaker 1: a massive volatile fourteen pounds fear of plutonium. The experiment
Speaker 1: was called tickling the Dragon's Tail, very apt name. He
Speaker 1: was trying to bring the core right to the edge
Speaker 1: of a sustained fission reaction.
Speaker 2: The setup was essentially a plutonium core surrounded by two
Speaker 2: half spheres of beryllium. Beryllium acts as a neutron reflector.
Speaker 2: When the halves close around the core, the neutrons emitted
Speaker 2: by the plutonium bounce back into it, accelerating the fission process.
Speaker 1: And if it they closed completely.
Speaker 2: If the spheres close completely, the core goes prompt critical
Speaker 2: unleashing a lethal burst of hard radiation.
Speaker 1: The protocol dictated that he should use a series of
Speaker 1: mechanical shims to safely keep the beryllium hemispheres apart. But
Speaker 1: Slatin was a cowboy. How did this brilliant physicist manipulate
Speaker 1: this apocalyptic sphere with.
Speaker 2: The standard flathead screwdriver.
Speaker 1: He just wedged it in the gap and twisted his
Speaker 1: wrist to raise and lower the heavy dome.
Speaker 2: His colleagues begged him to stop. Enrico Fermi reportedly told
Speaker 2: him he would be dead within a year if he
Speaker 2: kept doing it. But there was a deeply ingrained machismo
Speaker 2: culture in the Manhattan Project era.
Speaker 1: It is exactly like to find the exact biting point
Speaker 1: of a car's clutch, But if you stall, the car
Speaker 1: instantly emits a lethal dose of gamma radiation.
Speaker 2: And of course, on May twenty first, the screwdriver slipped.
Speaker 1: The top beryllium deflector fell, fully encasing the core. The
Speaker 1: room instantly flashed with a brilliant blue light.
Speaker 2: That blue flash was likely a combination of Cherenkov radiation
Speaker 2: in the fluid of their eyeballs and the ionization of
Speaker 2: the air in the room. The core had gone prompt critical.
Speaker 1: Sloden reacted instantly. He ripped the dome off, stopping the
Speaker 1: reaction and saving the lives of the other men in
Speaker 1: the room. But in that split second, he bathed himself
Speaker 1: in a massive lethal dose of neutron and gamma radiation.
Speaker 2: The cellular damage was instantaneous and irreversible. He died nine
Speaker 2: agonizing days later.
Speaker 1: Sluttin's death wasn't a martyrdom for discovery like Curi's. It
Speaker 1: was a sacrifice to his own ego.
Speaker 2: It raises an important question about the psychology of expertise.
Speaker 2: When you are the absolute best in the world at
Speaker 2: something deeply dangerous familiarity, Breed's contempt.
Speaker 1: Slaton stopped respecting the plutonium and the physics of the
Speaker 1: universe do not care about your ego.
Speaker 2: They really don't.
Speaker 1: Speaking of volatile elements and massive egos, let's talk about
Speaker 1: Jack Parsons. This guy is a blockbuster movie waiting to happen.
Speaker 2: Parsons represents the weirdest intersection of high level chemistry and
Speaker 2: literal magic in the twentieth century.
Speaker 1: He was a brilliant self taught chemist and rocket scientist.
Speaker 1: He practically pioneered castable composite solid state propellants, the exact
Speaker 1: chemical engineering that eventually helped get space shuttles into orbit.
Speaker 1: But by night, by night, he was a dedicated, practicing occultist.
Speaker 1: He was running an Orto Temple Orientis magical lodge in
Speaker 1: Los Angeles, corresponding with Elister Crawley and conducting rituals in
Speaker 1: the desert trying to summon elemental entities. It is quite
Speaker 1: the resume, and he even formed a close relationship with
Speaker 1: l Ron Hubbard, yes, the future founder of scientology, who
Speaker 1: then proceeded to steal parsons money run off with his
Speaker 1: sister in law and buy a yacht.
Speaker 2: It sounds like pulp fiction, but Parsons' life demonstrates how
Speaker 2: highly compartmentalized human intelligence can be. You can apply rigorous
Speaker 2: mathematical formulas to the thermodynamics of rocket propulsion during the
Speaker 2: day and then completely abandoned empirical evidence for ritual magic
Speaker 2: at night.
Speaker 1: The human brain is just remarkably adept at holding two
Speaker 1: entirely contradictory worldviews simultaneously.
Speaker 2: It really is.
Speaker 1: And his end was just as explosive as his rockets.
Speaker 1: He died in a massive explosion in his home laboratory.
Speaker 1: He dropped a batch of mercury fulminate. Now, the rumors
Speaker 1: have always spiraled. Was it a government assassination because he
Speaker 1: lost to security clearances due to his occult ties or
Speaker 1: was it just sloppy lab practices from a guy whose
Speaker 1: life was completely unraveling?
Speaker 2: Well, mercury fulminate is a highly sensitive primary explosive. It
Speaker 2: is notoriously unstable and sensitive to friction in shock. Given
Speaker 2: his history of increasingly erratic behavior, is lack of sleep,
Speaker 2: and the sheer volatility of the compound he was handling,
Speaker 2: Auckham's razor strongly points to a fatal in judgment.
Speaker 1: When your personal life collapses into chaos, your professional riggor
Speaker 1: usually follows suit exactly. Parsons just tried to blend science
Speaker 1: with the occult. Our next subject tried to replace science
Speaker 1: entirely with a vision. Enter Hans Herberger and the Velveslaer
Speaker 1: or the World Ice doctrine.
Speaker 2: This takes us into a deeply fraught period of history
Speaker 2: Austria and Germany in the first half of the twentieth century.
Speaker 1: Herberger was an engineer who claimed he received a theory
Speaker 1: of the universe, not through mathematical observation, not through telescopes,
Speaker 1: but in a literal vision. He believed that cosmic ice
Speaker 1: was the central binding force of reality.
Speaker 2: He claimed the Milky Way was just a ring of
Speaker 2: ice blocks, and that ice crashing into the sun caused sunspots.
Speaker 1: The thermodynamics of his theory were non existent. It completely
Speaker 1: violated basic Newtonian physics and thermodynamics, but he aggressively promoted
Speaker 1: it to the public. By passing the scientific community entirely.
Speaker 1: He appealed directly to the masses, and.
Speaker 2: It became a massive point of discourse. As totalitarianism rose
Speaker 2: in Germany. Political fact actually started arguing over this ice theory.
Speaker 1: It's important we look at how this happens Impartially, they
Speaker 1: were debating whether the world ice doctrine was an aryan
Speaker 1: theory rooted in northern mythology and pitting it against mainstream,
Speaker 1: rigorous physics like Einstein's theory of relativity, which they dismissed
Speaker 1: as Jewish influenced science.
Speaker 2: And to be clear, we are simply observing the mechanics
Speaker 2: of how a fundamentally bad idea becomes weaponized. Herberger's nonsense
Speaker 2: was elevated not because it was empirically sound, but because
Speaker 2: it was politically useful to an extremist regime.
Speaker 1: It allowed them to create an alternate reality, a separate
Speaker 1: science that aligned with their ideological prejudices.
Speaker 2: When ideology dictates the results of science, truth is the
Speaker 2: first casualty. Pseudoscience thrives when the state needs to legitimize
Speaker 2: its own mythology.
Speaker 1: If political ideology driving science creates absurdities in physics, wait
Speaker 1: until you see what it does to biology. Let's travel
Speaker 1: to the Soviet Union in the nineteen twenties and the
Speaker 1: bizarre attempts of doctor Ilya Ivanov.
Speaker 2: Ivanov was a highly respected veterinary re productive expert. He
Speaker 2: had successfully pioneered artificial insemination and horses, and he received
Speaker 2: massive state funding for a singular, horrifying goal to prove
Speaker 2: human evolution by creating a human ape hybrid. A human z.
Speaker 1: I'van all received funding from the Soviet state because they
Speaker 1: wanted to use this biological aberration as a propaganda tool.
Speaker 2: Right They wanted a living, breathing missing link to support
Speaker 2: their state mandated atheistic stance against American Christian fundamentalism, which
Speaker 2: was heavily pushing creationism at the time.
Speaker 1: Again, we are just looking at the history here. And bizarrely,
Speaker 1: he also got funding from the French Pastor Institute.
Speaker 2: He was granted access to a primate research station in
Speaker 2: French Guinea. He and his son literally traveled there armed
Speaker 2: with a pistol in case the animals fought back and
Speaker 2: attempted to artificially inseminate three female chimpanzees with human sperm.
Speaker 1: It failed, thankfully.
Speaker 2: Yes, the chromosomal barriers to hybridization are immense. Humans have
Speaker 2: forty six chromosomes, chimpanzee forty eight. While hybridization is possible
Speaker 2: in some closely related species. The genetic divergence here was
Speaker 2: simply too vast.
Speaker 1: But Ivanov didn't stop there. When the chimpanzees didn't conceive,
Speaker 1: he thought, well, let's reverse the direction.
Speaker 2: This is where it gets incredibly ground.
Speaker 1: He purchased a male orangutan named Tarzan, and he actually
Speaker 1: found human women in the Soviet Union, who the records suggests,
Speaker 1: were likely deeply vulnerable or coerced, who agreed to be
Speaker 1: inseminated with orangutan sperm.
Speaker 2: The only thing that stopped it was biology itself. The
Speaker 2: orangutan died of a brain hemorrhage before the experiment could proceed.
Speaker 1: And shortly after the political winds shifted, Stalin's regime decided
Speaker 1: they no longer wanted to fund human ape hybrids, and
Speaker 1: Ivanov was swept up in a scientific purge and exiled
Speaker 1: to Kazakhstan.
Speaker 2: It connects right back to Herberger's cosmic ice. When science
Speaker 2: is used merely as a weapon for ideological point scoring,
Speaker 2: ethics completely vanish.
Speaker 1: The subjects, whether they are chimpanzees or vulnerable human women,
Speaker 1: are reduced to props in a political theater. The scientific
Speaker 1: method requires objectivity, ideology demands obedience.
Speaker 2: Precisely, it is a hallmark of totalitarian science. The conclusion
Speaker 2: is predetermined by the state, and the scientist's only job
Speaker 2: is to force the data to fit the narrative, no
Speaker 2: matter the ethical cost.
Speaker 1: So breeding humans and apes is biologically impossible, But what
Speaker 1: if we just raised them together. Moving on to nineteen
Speaker 1: thirty one, comparative psychologist Winter Kellogg has a bright idea.
Speaker 1: Let's raise a baby chimpanzee alongside a human infant and
Speaker 1: see what happens.
Speaker 2: The Chimp and Child experiment. Kellog adopted a seven month
Speaker 2: old female chimpanzee named Gua into his home, raising her
Speaker 2: alongside his own ten month old infant son Donald.
Speaker 1: The goal was to observe cognitive development and see if
Speaker 1: human socialization could elevate the chimpanzee's intellect to human levels.
Speaker 2: They treated Gua exactly like a human child. They dressed her,
Speaker 2: fed her in a high chair, and tested her constantly,
Speaker 2: and at first they were impressed. Gua learned music up
Speaker 2: a spoon. She recognized people by their clothes faster than
Speaker 2: Donald did. She was excelling in motor skills.
Speaker 1: But then Gua hit a biological wall. She's a chimpanzee.
Speaker 1: She lacks the physiological apparatus for human speech, but Here's
Speaker 1: the punchline of the century. The experiment had to be
Speaker 1: abruptly halted not because Gua was getting aggressive, but because
Speaker 1: the human baby Donald started acting like a chimp.
Speaker 2: Donald began mimicking Gua's vocalizations. He was grunting, barking, and
Speaker 2: panting when he wanted food. His own language development was
Speaker 2: being severely compromised because his primary peer was an ape.
Speaker 1: I have to ask, as someone who spends time around kids,
Speaker 1: any parent in the world could have told him that
Speaker 1: Toddler's mimic whatever is making the loudest noise in the house.
Speaker 1: How did a highly educated psychologist miss this fundamental aspect
Speaker 1: of child development?
Speaker 2: Because he fell victim to the observer effect and he
Speaker 2: was completely blinded by his primary hypothesis. He was so
Speaker 2: intensely focused on the upward to mobility of the chimpanzee
Speaker 2: that he ignored the highly malleable neuroplastic nature of his
Speaker 2: own podler.
Speaker 1: He just assumed the kid would be the baseline.
Speaker 2: Exactly in developmental psychology, particularly referencing Vygotsky's theories children learn
Speaker 2: through social interaction and imitation, Kellogg forgot that socialization is
Speaker 2: a two way street. He thought he was introducing Gua
Speaker 2: to a human environment, but he actually introduced Donald to
Speaker 2: a chimpanzee environment.
Speaker 1: He nearly broke his own kid's cognitive development for a
Speaker 1: journal article. But let's take a quick breath. Not all
Speaker 1: animal tampering is grim or abusive. Sometimes it's just wonderfully
Speaker 1: hilariously absurd. We need a palate cleanser. Let's talk about
Speaker 1: the Ignobel Prize winning study of chickens with dinosaur tails.
Speaker 2: This is a delightful pivot. The Ignobel Prizes celebrate science
Speaker 2: that first makes you laugh and then makes you think.
Speaker 1: Scientists wanted to understand the biomechanics of how a theropod
Speaker 1: dinosaurs like the t rex walked. Since modern birds are
Speaker 1: living descendants of theropod dinosaurs, they looked at chickens.
Speaker 2: But a chicken center of gravity is entirely different because
Speaker 2: it doesn't have a massive, heavy counterbalancing tail.
Speaker 1: So what did these researchers do. They literally strapped artificial
Speaker 1: dinosaur tails, essentially toilet plungers, acting as counterweights onto the
Speaker 1: back ends of chickens.
Speaker 2: It is brilliant in its mechanical simplicity. By artificially shifting
Speaker 2: the center of mass backward. They forced the chickens to
Speaker 2: alter their kinematic gait. The birds adapted by adopting a
Speaker 2: heavily crouched, almost horizontal posture, driven heavily by the femur
Speaker 2: rather than the lower leg.
Speaker 1: It is a phenomenal mental image, a flock of chickens
Speaker 1: strutting around a lab with plunger tails, walking like tiny
Speaker 1: feathered Jurassic part extras. And it actually gave us mathematically
Speaker 1: valid data on dinosaur locomotion.
Speaker 2: It proves that you don't need to torture yourself or
Speaker 2: traumatize an animal to do good science. Sometimes you just
Speaker 2: need some arts and crafts, an understanding of physics, and
Speaker 2: a sense of humor.
Speaker 1: It's harmless, observational, and elegant. It respects the animal while
Speaker 1: still answering a complex biomechanical question. It is a stark
Speaker 1: contrast to the darkness we usually find when scientists try
Speaker 1: to force biology to behave.
Speaker 2: Speaking of force biology to behayes, let's plunge back into
Speaker 2: the darkness. If understanding the body is hard, understanding consciousness,
Speaker 2: memory and the mind is a total labyrinth. Let's start
Speaker 2: with James McConnell in the nineteen fifties, The Cannibal Flatworms.
Speaker 1: McConnell was a researcher who became fixated on the concept
Speaker 1: of memory, how is it stored? At the time, the
Speaker 1: mainstream understanding, which remains true today, is that memory is
Speaker 1: a function of neural synapses in the brain, relying on
Speaker 1: synaptic plasticity. But McConnell posited a radical alternative. What if
Speaker 1: memory is purely chemical, specifically, what if it's encoded in
Speaker 1: RNA molecules throughout the entire body edible memory.
Speaker 2: He believed your memories were just as present in your
Speaker 2: big toe as they were in your brain. To prove this,
Speaker 2: he took plenarian flatworms, very simple organisms with basic neural structures.
Speaker 2: He would condition one flatworm teaching you a trick, like
Speaker 2: navigating a basic team mase or reacting to a light shock.
Speaker 2: And then then he would take that educated flatworm, chop
Speaker 2: it up into tiny pieces, and feed it to an
Speaker 2: uneducated flatworm.
Speaker 1: And he claimed, based on his data, that the cannibal
Speaker 1: flatworm absorbed the knowledge of the first through digestion, the
Speaker 1: intelligence supposedly transferred via the consumed RNA.
Speaker 2: He literally claimed you could become smarter by eating a
Speaker 2: smart person, He said, I'm going to teach this worm,
Speaker 2: chop it up and make a genius smoothie. But you
Speaker 2: and I both know there is a massive, gaping hole
Speaker 2: in this biological theory.
Speaker 1: The biochemistry of digestion. The digestive system of plenarians, much
Speaker 1: like humans, secretes enzymes designed to completely break down complex macromolecules.
Speaker 1: When an organism consumes RNA nucleuses, break it down into
Speaker 1: basic nucleotides for fuel. You don't absorb the genetic or
Speaker 1: chemical memory of a steak when you eat it, you
Speaker 1: break it down into amino acids.
Speaker 2: So why did McConnell think it worked.
Speaker 1: Poor experimental controls. The worms weren't absorbing memory. They were
Speaker 1: likely just absorbing stress hormones from the chopped up worms,
Speaker 1: which made them generally more reactive to stimuli, which McConnell
Speaker 1: misinterpreted as learning.
Speaker 2: McConnell fell so deeply in love with his revolutionary hypothesis
Speaker 2: that he actively ignored established biological reality.
Speaker 1: He became a laughing stock in the scientific community. He
Speaker 1: ended up publishing his own semi satirical magazine called The
Speaker 1: Worm Runner's Digest, just to share his theories. Because peer
Speaker 1: reviewed journals stopped taking him seriously. From chemical memory, Let's
Speaker 1: move to subconscious programming. Nineteen forty two Laurence Lashan and
Speaker 1: the Sleep Learning Summer Camp.
Speaker 2: Lashawan wanted to test whether the subconscious mind could absorb
Speaker 2: and act upon complex declarative information delivered during sleep. He
Speaker 2: specifically wanted to see if he could cure a group
Speaker 2: of young boys of chronic nail biting.
Speaker 1: So he sets up this summer camp. The original plan
Speaker 1: is to use a phonograph in the boy's cabin to
Speaker 1: play a repeating message while they are deeply asleep. The
Speaker 1: message is simple, my fingernails taste terribly bitter. But the
Speaker 1: phonograph breaks and Leshan, undeterred, decides he must continue the
Speaker 1: experiment manually.
Speaker 2: Which leads to one of the most uns settling images
Speaker 2: in the history of psychology.
Speaker 1: Picture being a little kid at summer camp. You wake
Speaker 1: up in the pitch black of your cabin, and there
Speaker 1: is a grown man standing in the shadows, murmuring hurry,
Speaker 1: fingernails taste terribly bitter, over and over and over again.
Speaker 1: It is pure nightmare fuel.
Speaker 2: It is a profound violation of boundaries, and scientifically it
Speaker 2: is completely flawed. He claimed the results proved sleep learning
Speaker 2: work because the nail biting decreased. But how could you
Speaker 2: possibly control for the trauma of a shadowy figure whispering
Speaker 2: in the dark. Did they stop biting their nails because
Speaker 2: of subconscious auditory programming or because they were terrified into
Speaker 2: a state of hypervigilance.
Speaker 1: Seriously, I'd stop biting my nails too if I thought
Speaker 1: the fingernail demon was watching me sleep. Furthermore, we know
Speaker 1: now that while the brain processes sounds during sleep to
Speaker 1: monitor for threats, the thlamic gait largely prevents that auditory
Speaker 1: information from being encoded into declarative memory. But this idea
Speaker 1: of programming children brings us to the dark father of
Speaker 1: behaviorism himself, John Watson, and the infamous Little Albert experiment.
Speaker 2: Watson believe that human behavior had nothing to do with
Speaker 2: inner consciousness or inherited traits, but was entirely about conditioned responses.
Speaker 2: We are biological machines that can be programmed through external stimuli.
Speaker 1: To prove this, he took a healthy, nine month old
Speaker 1: human baby known as Little Albert. He introduced Albert to
Speaker 1: a harmless white laboratory rat. At first, Albert liked the rat.
Speaker 1: He was curious. He reached out to play with it,
Speaker 1: but then Watson introduced the classical conditioning. Every time Albert
Speaker 1: reached for the rat, Watson would stand behind the baby
Speaker 1: and smash a heavy metal hammer against a suspended steel bar.
Speaker 2: A deafening traumatic acoustic shock. He paired the visual stimulus
Speaker 2: of the white rat with a terrifying noise. He hijacked
Speaker 2: the infants amygdala, wiring a fear response where none existed.
Speaker 2: He repeated this until the mere sight of the rat,
Speaker 2: or anything white and fuzzy like a Santa Claus mask
Speaker 2: or a rabbit, would cause the infant to break down
Speaker 2: in hysterical tears.
Speaker 1: He intentionally manufactured a phoebe and a helpless infant just
Speaker 1: to prove he could. He broke a baby sense of safety,
Speaker 1: and the mother eventually pulled Albert from the study, and
Speaker 1: Watson never deconditioned him. He just let the kid go
Speaker 1: out into the world terrified of fuzzy things. But I
Speaker 1: want to track Watson's career trajectory because it is incredibly cynical.
Speaker 1: Watson eventually got fired from academia due to a highly
Speaker 1: publicized extramarital affair. Where did he go.
Speaker 2: He took his profound understanding of human psychological manipulation, classical conditioning,
Speaker 2: and fear based programming, and he went to work on
Speaker 2: Madison Avenue.
Speaker 1: In advertising, it is too perfect. The man who figured
Speaker 1: out how to make a baby terrified of a rat
Speaker 1: goes on to help invent modern consumer branding. He figured
Speaker 1: out that you don't sell a product based on facts
Speaker 1: or utility. You sell it by pairing it with an
Speaker 1: emotional response, usually fear, anxiety, or inadequacy. Buy this toothpaste,
Speaker 1: or your teeth will rot and you will die alone.
Speaker 1: It's the Little Albert experiment operating on a global commercial scale.
Speaker 2: It is a chilling legacy. It shows how rigorous psychological methodologies,
Speaker 2: when completely divorced from ethics, can be seamlessly integrated into
Speaker 2: corporate manipulation.
Speaker 1: Now, speaking of inappropriate environments for psychology, let's look at
Speaker 1: the urinal study of the nineteen seventies. The official title
Speaker 1: was Personal Space Invasions in the Lavatory Suggestive Evidence for Arousal.
Speaker 2: A team of researchers wanted to empirically prove the existence
Speaker 2: of parareesis, more commonly known as stage fright. Does a
Speaker 2: male subject experience a measurable delay in the onset of
Speaker 2: maturition if his personal space is violated.
Speaker 1: So to test this, they literally lurked in public restrooms.
Speaker 1: They had confederates deliberately stand at urinals immediately adjacent to
Speaker 1: unknowing subjects, effectively boxing them in, while a researcher hit
Speaker 1: in a bathroom stall with a stopwatch and sometimes a periscope,
Speaker 1: timing exactly how long it took the unsuspecting subject to pe.
Speaker 2: Physiologically, they were testing the autonomic nervous system. Urination requires
Speaker 2: para sympathetic relaxation of the sphincter. Stress triggers the sympathetic
Speaker 2: nervous system the fight or flight response, which titans that sphincter. Scientifically,
Speaker 2: they did confirm their hypothesis proximity increases latency, but ethically
Speaker 2: it is a staggering invasion of privacy. You cannot obtain
Speaker 2: informed consent for a psychological experiment when your subject's pants
Speaker 2: are down in a public restroom. It's a study that
Speaker 2: prioritizes a banal curiosity over basic human dignity.
Speaker 1: The urinal study was harmless in the grand scheme, just
Speaker 1: deeply weird and violating. But this next psychological experiment is
Speaker 1: world famous. It is foundational to modern sociology, It is
Speaker 1: taught in every high school psychology class, and it is
Speaker 1: almost completely faked. I'm talking about Philip Simbardo and the
Speaker 1: Stanford Prison experiment.
Speaker 2: This is perhaps the most heavily mythologized experiment of the
Speaker 2: twentieth century. Zimbardo created a mock prison in the basement
Speaker 2: of Stanford University, assigning Male's student volunteers randomly to be
Speaker 2: either guards or prisoners. The narrative that entered pop culture
Speaker 2: is that the guards spontaneously became sadistic and the prisoners
Speaker 2: suffered immediate psychological break downs, proving that ordinary people are
Speaker 2: inherently evil when given unchecked systemic power.
Speaker 1: But when you actually read the transcripts and look at
Speaker 1: the methodology, it is a masterclass in manipulation. Zimmardo didn't
Speaker 1: just sit back and observe organic behavior. He actively coached
Speaker 1: the guards. He told them exactly how to be cruel.
Speaker 1: He gave the mirrored sunglasses to dehumanize them. He told
Speaker 1: them to create a sense of powerlessness in the prisoners.
Speaker 1: He essentially directed a stage play and passed it off
Speaker 1: as organic human behavior.
Speaker 2: The term in psychology is demand characteristics. The participants were
Speaker 2: acting in the way they believed the researcher wanted them
Speaker 2: to act. One of the most sadistic guards later admitted
Speaker 2: he was just doing his best John Wayne impression because
Speaker 2: he thought that's what the sety required.
Speaker 1: So why did it become so famous if it was faked?
Speaker 2: Because the vulnerability lies in the scientific narrative. Zimbardo wanted
Speaker 2: a specific result to align with his theories on authority.
Speaker 2: He engineered the conditions to guarantee that result, and then
Speaker 2: aggressively marketed that narrative to a public that would hungry
Speaker 2: for explanations regarding human cruelty. In the post WWII Vietnam era,
Speaker 2: pop culture fell for it because it told a compelling,
Speaker 2: cynical story that absolved the individual of responsibility. The real
Speaker 2: lesson of the Stanford prison experiment is that scientists can
Speaker 2: manipulate variables to tell a fascinating story, and the public
Speaker 2: will buy it if it feels profound.
Speaker 1: When the story becomes more important than the empirical truth,
Speaker 1: people get hurt, which brings us to our final group
Speaker 1: of scientists. When science becomes torture. Let's start with a
Speaker 1: man who primarily tortured himself, but to an unimaginable degree.
Speaker 1: Joseph Barcroft.
Speaker 2: Barkroff was a prominent physiologist working with the British military
Speaker 2: during World War One. His focus was on oxygenation, blood circulation,
Speaker 2: and survive in the brutal realities of chemical warfare.
Speaker 1: I am amazed this man survived to old age. To
Speaker 1: understand the effects of mustard gas and hydrogen cyanide, Barkroft
Speaker 1: didn't just rely on animal models. He walked straight into
Speaker 1: a sealed glass chamber filled with hydrogen cyanide gas, exposing
Speaker 1: himself directly, and stayed in there with a dog for
Speaker 1: ten solid minutes.
Speaker 2: The mechanism of cyanide poisoning is terrifying. It inhibits cytochrome
Speaker 2: psychoxidase in the mitochondria, essentially halting cellular respiration. The cells
Speaker 2: can't use oxygen and usuffocate. On a microscopic level, the
Speaker 2: dog died quickly. Barcroft survives because of his immense mass
Speaker 2: compared to the dog, but it was a massive lethal.
Speaker 1: Risk and that wasn't an isolated incident. To study the
Speaker 1: vascular response to extreme cold, he locked himself naked inside
Speaker 1: a freezing chamber until he was severely hypothermic and lost consciousness.
Speaker 1: To study hypoxia and high altitude of climatization, he sealed
Speaker 1: himself in a low oxygen glass chamber for an entire week.
Speaker 1: When he finally emerged, his skin was entirely bright blue
Speaker 1: due to severe oxygen deprivation.
Speaker 2: He was pushing the absolute limits of human physiological endurance.
Speaker 2: He survived at all, which is the only reason we
Speaker 2: look back at him with awe and tit of pity.
Speaker 2: But it highlights that obsessive drive. He treated his body
Speaker 2: as a highly calibrated, disposable instrument.
Speaker 1: But Barcroft was only hurting himself. What happens when that
Speaker 1: absolute monolithic arrogance is turned outward onto the most vulnerable
Speaker 1: people in society entered Doctor Henry Cotton, the Butcher of
Speaker 1: the asylum.
Speaker 2: This is one of the darkest chapters in medical history.
Speaker 2: In nineteen oh seven, Cotton became the medical director of
Speaker 2: the New Jersey State Hospital for the Insane, and he
Speaker 2: developed a singular, overarching theory. He believed that all mental illness,
Speaker 2: from schizophrenia to severe depression, was the direct result of hidden,
Speaker 2: localized physical infections in the body, poisoning the brain.
Speaker 1: His logic was incredibly flawed. He noticed that people with
Speaker 1: high fevers sometimes hallucinate. Therefore, he deduced, if you are hallucinating,
Speaker 1: you must have an infection, and his cure was an
Speaker 1: antibiotics because they didn't exist yet. His cure was surgical mutilation.
Speaker 1: He started by pulling teeth. If a patient was depressed,
Speaker 1: he yanked all their teeth out. When that didn't cure them,
Speaker 1: he decided the infection must be deeper.
Speaker 2: He moved to the tonsils, then the stomach, and the
Speaker 2: testicles the ovaries. He performed partial and total collectomies, removing
Speaker 2: massive sections of the colon from unconsenting psychiatric patients.
Speaker 1: He was systematically dismantling human beings, and the mortality rate
Speaker 1: was catastrophic. Forty five percent of his patients died from
Speaker 1: his surgeries. That is essentially a coin toss on whether
Speaker 1: you survived a trip to his operating room.
Speaker 2: The physiological shock of multiple major surgeries on already compromised individuals,
Speaker 2: combined with the lack of modern antibiotics, led to massive
Speaker 2: rates of parasonitis and sepsis.
Speaker 1: And the most infuriating part. He was praised for it.
Speaker 1: He was celebrated by the medical establishment and high society.
Speaker 1: He eventually opened a lucrative private practice, yanking the teeth
Speaker 1: and colons out of wealthy, miserable socialites who had more
Speaker 1: money than since.
Speaker 2: Cotton represents the absolute apex of medical arrogance combined with
Speaker 2: a tragic lack of institutional oversight. Because he spoke with authority,
Speaker 2: because he was charismatic, and because he offered a simple
Speaker 2: physical cure for complex psychological trauma, establishment looked the other
Speaker 2: way while he slaughtered his patients. He never faced consequences.
Speaker 1: He never faced consequences. That phrase echoes so loudly when
Speaker 1: we look at our final story because Cotton's horrific psychiatric
Speaker 1: cures perfectly parallel the US government's obsession with mind control
Speaker 1: during the Cold War. Let's talk about Tusco the Elephant
Speaker 1: and the CIA's Sydney.
Speaker 2: Gallib We are moving from misguided medical theory into pure,
Speaker 2: unadulterated sadism. Funded by the Steed Apparatus.
Speaker 1: In nineteen sixty two, researchers at the University of Oklahoma
Speaker 1: decided they needed to know what happens when you give
Speaker 1: an elephant LSD, so they took Tusco, a massive male
Speaker 1: Indian elephant at the local zoo, and they didn't just
Speaker 1: give him a little bit to see if he would hallucinate.
Speaker 1: They calculated what they thought was a corresponding dose for
Speaker 1: his massive body weight. They injected him with two hundred
Speaker 1: and ninety seven milligrams of LSD.
Speaker 2: To contextualize that pharmacology, that is approximately three thousand times
Speaker 2: the typical human recreational dose. LSD is an incredibly potent
Speaker 2: serotonin two a receptor agonist. In checking that volume into
Speaker 2: a mammalian nervous system isn't an experiment, it is a
Speaker 2: chemical assault.
Speaker 1: Tusco started trumpeting wildly, collapsed to the ground in five minutes,
Speaker 1: and began seizing. Within two hours, he was dead. They
Speaker 1: literally fried his brain instantly. But if scientists were willing
Speaker 1: to do that to an elephant out of sheer curiosity,
Speaker 1: what were they willing to do to humans in the
Speaker 1: name of national security? Enter Sidney Gottlieb, the head chemist
Speaker 1: of the CIAS and Culture Project.
Speaker 2: Gottlieb's mandate was to explore LSD and other psychotropic drugs
Speaker 2: as potential brainwashing and interrogation agents, and he operated with
Speaker 2: methodologies that were explicitly derived from Nazi war criminals in
Speaker 2: the Japanese Unit seven thirty one.
Speaker 1: Gottlieb was a complete loose cannon. He had a habit
Speaker 1: of casually slipping huge, unregulated doses of LSD into the
Speaker 1: drinks of his own CIA colleagues without their knowledge, just
Speaker 1: to observe the effects. One of his victims was Frank Olsen,
Speaker 1: a biological warfare scientist. Gottlieb drugged Olson's drink at a
Speaker 1: company retreat.
Speaker 2: Olsen suffered a massive humilis cliating an entirely unprompted psychological breakdown.
Speaker 2: The trauma of the non consensual dosing triggered a downward
Speaker 2: spiral of extreme paranoia that culminated in nineteen fifty three
Speaker 2: when Olsen plummeted to his death from a hotel window
Speaker 2: in New York, a death that remains highly contested regarding
Speaker 2: whether he jumped in a state of drug induce psychosis
Speaker 2: or was pushed to silence him.
Speaker 1: Gottlieb caused an innocent man's death through a completely non consensual, illegal,
Speaker 1: and scientifically useless drugging. And what happened to Godleeb? Did
Speaker 1: he go to jail? Was he prosecuted. No, the project
Speaker 1: eventually collapsed, the documents were mostly destroyed, and Gottloud retired
Speaker 1: with a full pension. And do you know what he
Speaker 1: became in his retirement, a middle and high school speech therapist.
Speaker 2: It is a profound historical injustice and scientifically, it represents
Speaker 2: the total catastrophic abandonment of the scientific method. M culture
Speaker 2: produced zero actionable intelligence, It produced no scientific breakthroughs in
Speaker 2: the understanding of the human mind. It was merely the
Speaker 2: apparatus of science being utilized as a come for unchecked
Speaker 2: state sponsored sadism. Gottlieb operated in a total moral vacuum,
Speaker 2: entirely insulated from consequence by the cloak of national security.
Speaker 1: It genuinely makes my blood boil the thought of getting
Speaker 1: speech therapy from the CIA's most infamous and mad scientist.
Speaker 1: It's just beyond belief.
Speaker 2: If we synthesize everything we've discussed today, from Francis Bacon
Speaker 2: freezing in the snow to Sydney Gottlieb hiding in the shadows,
Speaker 2: a clear, terrifying pattern emerges. The scientific method is incredibly robust.
Speaker 2: It is the best tool we have for understanding reality.
Speaker 2: But the humans wielding that tool are incredibly fragile. Whenever ego,
Speaker 2: extreme desperation, or political ideology is allowed to override rigorous,
Speaker 2: pure reviewed methodology, the results are invariably catastrophic.
Speaker 1: You've seen scientists poison themselves, mutilate the vulnerable, manipulate data
Speaker 1: to tell a good story, and torture animals, all under
Speaker 1: the lofty banner of advancing human knowledge. But we have
Speaker 1: to look in the mirror too. We sit here comfortably
Speaker 1: and look back at cow's milk, transfusions and radioactive cosmetics
Speaker 1: as sheer idiocy. But what currently accepted scientific or medical
Speaker 1: practice that we do today will have broadcasters in twenty
Speaker 1: one twenty six calling us absolute idiots? Is it our
Speaker 1: overreliance on broad spectrum antibiotics, pumping ourselves full of microplastics,
Speaker 1: the way we allow algorithms to rewire our dopamine pathways.
Speaker 2: The greatest arrogance of the present is believing we have
Speaker 2: finally reached the end of ignorance exactly?
Speaker 1: So what's your stand out of all the stories we
Speaker 1: explore today, which scientists cross the line the furthest Was
Speaker 1: it the radioactive ego of loose slowtin, the cannibal flatworms
Speaker 1: of James McConnell, or the CIA's acid tests, or maybe
Speaker 1: someone else entirely think about it and leave a comment
Speaker 1: to let us know.
Speaker 2: Question everything, especially the things you are told are absolute certainties.
Speaker 1: Thank you for joining us on thrilling threads. Keep questioning,
Speaker 1: keep digging, and remember, next time you have a brilliant
Speaker 1: idea that involves a flathead screwdriver and a nuclear core,
Speaker 1: maybe just put the tool down and walk away. We'll
Speaker 1: see you next time.