(playful music)
Did you know
that a surprising number of objects that you use every day
are thanks to accidents?
Let me show you what I mean.
In this episode,
we discover how a broken thermometer leads to revolution.
Something very interesting started to happen.
Find out how a failed experiment
gives rise to the world's greatest crime-fighting tool.
So something that was totally an accident
ended up impacting every single one of our lives.
And learn how a cut finger
leads to the age of plastics.
He has discovered, through a series of accidents,
a new material.
"Oops I Changed The World!"
There aren't many items of clothing you can wear,
whether you're a rockstar, a construction worker, a cowboy,
a pianist, supermodel, a toddler, or in your 80s.
But the chances are, you have a pair of blue jeans.
I've got about five to six jeans in my wardrobe.
Three at any time.
Over 10 pairs of jeans.
I have day jeans, evening jeans, black jeans, blue jeans,
jeans for all occasions.
Given how popular they are, it's perhaps no surprise
that the worldwide value of the jeans market today
is over $110,000,000,000.
I can't really imagine how much that is.
That's either one Jeff Bezos or Morocco's entire GDP.
Ah, thanks.
But there was once a time when blue clothing
was a rare sight.
Historically, dyes are made from natural products,
plants, shells, bugs.
Kula wood, which has a rich, warm brown tone.
Even foods.
Blue clothes were dyed with a pigment known as indigo
from the plant Indigofera.
In the ancient times of the Roman Empire,
it was actually traded along the Silk Road
and it was right up there with silk and gold in its value.
In fact, people actually called it blue gold.
Indigo is so expensive
that it was only worn by aristocrats or royalty.
Most people were wearing browns and greens,
very earthy colors.
So to be parading around in blue
was a really obvious sign of wealth and of power.
The reason why indigo is so expensive
is because it comes from hot climates like India.
In fact,
the name indigo comes from the ancient Greek for Indian.
It's also very labor intensive.
You need 200 pounds of leaves just to make one pound of dye.
The leaves are covered in water
and left to ferment into a muddy green pulp,
which contains a substance called indoxyl.
But it's not until oxygen gets into the mix
that the color blue develops.
Here they are trying something now
that seems to do the trick.
The mixture is stirred and that introduces air.
The oxygen in the air cause the indoxyl molecules
to combine together
and they precipitate out as a solid
and settle on the bottom.
And once it's all done,
it can be brought together and formed into a brick.
Given these bricks' value,
it's perhaps not surprising
that when the British colonize India in the 19th century,
they see money.
(coins rattling)
The British increase production of indigo
and export this blue gold
back to the mills of Northern England.
But the profits come at a huge ethical cost.
When the British came in,
they employed people to be landlords
known locally as zamindars,
and their job was to ensure that local farmers
dedicated at least 15% of their land
to the growing of indigo.
If any farmer refused to grow indigo,
they could actually be fined.
So the British Empire and the zamindars
are doing very well by this,
they're making loads of money,
but of course the farmers are left in poverty.
The conditions under which these farmers work are brutal
and some even say
that not a single chest of indigo made its way to Britain
without being stained in blood.
The British now have an almost total monopoly
on global indigo dye sales
and European demand for blue clothing
is at an all time high.
Other nations are looking for an opportunity
to break into the market.
And, ironically,
it's a British discovery that shows them the way.
In the mid 1800s,
William Henry Perkin is trying to make quinine
for the treatment of malaria,
when the whole thing turns mauve
and he invents the first synthetic dye.
It's purple, not the coveted blue,
but the world sees the potential
and the race is on to find a cheaper alternative
to natural indigo.
Speed forward to the 1890s
and a German chemist called Karl Heumann
is working on the problem.
Karl's working for a German company
that's investing heavily in finding this elusive blue dye.
They come close quite a few times,
but the problem is that compared to creating it naturally,
the synthetic dyes just aren't quite cheap enough
to be competitive.
Karl's working with aniline,
a chemical derived from coal tar.
The good news is,
he's had some success in turning it into indigo.
Unfortunately, it was only a little bit less expensive
than making it naturally.
They needed something that would really shake this up.
Karl goes on to develop a better method
using something called anthranilic acid.
The trouble is the process of making this acid is slow
and has low yields.
Enter Eugen Sapper, a colleague of Karl's.
Not much is known about this guy.
In one history book he's even referred to
as an insignificant worker.
(gasping)
Well, that's bit of a blow to the ego, isn't it?
But his blunder
has a more than significant effect on the company
and on the world.
Eugen is there working in his lab at BASF,
and he's making some of Karl's recipe
for the synthetic indigo.
Now, there are differing accounts
as to what happened next.
Some people say
that he was trying to measure the temperature,
some people say he needed something to stir it with,
but in any case,
Eugen reaches for a thermometer
and puts it into his mixture
as he's making the synthetic indigo.
(glass breaking) (screaming)
The thermometer breaks.
Now at this stage, he's probably thinking
oh great, another batch gone.
The thing is, this time,
something very interesting started to happen.
The mercury from the thermometer
reacts with the sulfuric acid in the mixture,
to form mercury sulfate.
Mercury sulfate, it turns out,
is the perfect catalyst for this reaction.
That just means that it makes the reaction go much quicker
and also gives you more product.
It's like you're mixing the ingredients for one cake,
but it gives you four.
(jaunty music)
Oh, cheers Greg.
Chocolate, my favorite.
Mm, can you make another one?
Thanks to Eugen's blunder,
synthetic indigo can now be made for a fraction of the cost
of natural indigo.
(crowd cheering)
Production begins in 1897.
Perfect timing, as blue jeans have just been invented.
First pair of jeans
was patented by a couple of guys from Bavaria.
You might have heard of one of them.
His name was Levi Strauss.
Levi's friend was a tailor called Jacob
and one day a lady approached Jacob with a problem.
She wanted him to create the perfect
almost indestructible pair of work trousers.
Jacob came up with the idea of introducing rivets
into the seams of the jeans,
to make them virtually indestructible,
(explosion)
hence the jeans we know today were born.
So these new pants take off.
No, not like that!
They're used
by all the people that do hard labor,
the cowboys, the miners.
But all that is about to change.
When James Dean famously wears a pair of blue jeans
in "Rebel Without a Cause",
suddenly every teenager in the land
needs to have a pair for themselves.
(mid tempo rock and roll music)
This new invention of the jeans stands the test of time.
Here it is 150 years later
and they've yet to go out of style.
I think my jeans feel very boring now,
I gotta go get my Bedazzler out.
Blue clothes are now everywhere,
thanks to the easy access to synthetic dye.
But this shift from natural to manmade dyeing
has a huge impact on British-ruled India.
2,700 square miles,
an area larger than the entire state of Delaware,
is dedicated to growing indigo.
But Eugen's new synthetic alternative
is driving down demand,
and Indian indigo production slumps.
In 1895, Indian exports of natural indigo
had totaled nearly nine and a half thousand tons.
Just 10 years later, it was little over a quarter of that.
With the demand for indigo dropping so much,
the farmers in India are really suffering
because they're still beholden to these zamindars,
to dedicate at least 15% of their land
to the growing of indigo.
And they're not making any money on this now.
And it becomes a full-blown humanitarian crisis.
Unable to pay the rent,
many farmers and their families
become trapped in a cycle of debt.
And so they revolt.
Now, it's at this time that Gandhi is returning to India
from South Africa.
Mahatma Gandhi.
A frail man with an iron-strong moral compass.
He has continued to preach his doctrines
of nonviolence and passive resistance.
And he receives a letter from an indigo farmer
in the Champaran region,
in the northeast part of the country,
who says, "Can you please help us?"
And that is exactly what Gandhi does,
he fights the cause of the indigo farmers.
The British in the region become very nervous,
because they know that a lot of people listen to Gandhi.
So when he gets there,
they arrest him for inciting civil disobedience.
Well, this enrages the farmers
and they do just that, engage in civil disobedience
and start really causing some trouble.
After Gandhi's release
he organizes his first satyagraha,
which is his method of instilling change
through nonviolence.
It was kind of like a ripple effect
and before we knew it,
we could see the whole of India uniting
to oppose the British rule.
(mid tempo music)
What started out as a disagreement over indigo
has exploded,
the pressure on the British intensifies
to the point that, in 1947, India gains its independence.
And, since then, the country has never looked back.
(upbeat music)
In the last 50 years, India has completely transformed.
The literacy rate has gone from 34% to 74%.
India now has one of the biggest economies,
with millions of people now being pulled out of poverty.
It has its own space program
and it's on its way to becoming a global superpower.
So Eugen Sapper
accidentally breaking a thermometer in a German lab,
sets in motion a chain of events
that frees India from the yoke of colonialism.
To think that this all started
from someone spilling mercury, is utterly mind-blowing.
(playful music)
Still to come,
the problem with exploding balls.
This is the Wild Wild West.
When one of these balls explodes,
everyone pulls out their guns.
(gun firing)
And the curse of the killer sausage poison.
This toxin is the most dangerous chemical
known to humankind.
But before that.
(gavel banging)
Did you know that there've been courts of law
for over 4,000 years?
But for most of that time,
convicting a criminal involved more courtroom drama
than solid evidence.
A few hundred years ago,
forensic science wasn't even a science.
I mean, people would find a body by a river
and just assume that they had drowned.
Even if they found a mark on the head,
they might just say, well, maybe they bumped their head
on a rock or something.
You really didn't have the idea of processing evidence
in a seriously analytic way,
that would allow you to make serious conclusions
about a case.
One minute, his eyes were a little like that.
He had a patch over one eye when he came into my dive.
Well, the guy that stuck me up had on horn-rimmed glasses.
He was wearing a Band-Aid across his nose
when he knocked me over.
One of the first major developments
in the world of forensic science is fingerprint matching.
When we look at our hands, we have these fingerprints,
we have these lines,
but not many people realized
that these were unique to individuals.
It isn't until the 1870s,
that the potential of fingerprints as a crime-fighting tool
occurs to anyone,
and that person is a Scottish doctor called Henry Faulds,
who's on a medical mission in Japan.
One day, he decides to go on an archeological dig
with his friend.
Whilst he's on the dig,
they discover this beautiful bit of pottery.
He noticed on one of the clay pots,
a well-preserved fingerprint
and he got really intrigued by this.
Henry gets so inspired by that pottery
with the fingerprints,
that he starts to play with some ink.
And he actually takes fingerprints of all his colleagues
and himself,
just to see the different variations.
What fascinates Henry
is how each person's fingerprint is totally unique.
So he's analyzing each one
and sort of looking at the differences.
Can't imagine being one of the first people
to really start to look at this scientifically.
Fingerprints are formed in the womb
as the embryo's hands touch their surroundings,
causing friction ridges.
So, even in identical twins, prints will be different
and these patterns remain the same throughout our lives.
Henry Faulds' collection of prints
comes in handy almost immediately,
when there's a theft at work.
When a bottle of alcohol went missing from the hospital,
some people accused Faulds' friend of taking it.
This is most unusual.
He finds a fingerprint on one of the beakers
and is able to prove that it wasn't his friend,
so his friend gets off the hook,
and they end up identifying who the criminal is
by his fingerprint.
(slow dramatic music)
After Faulds' initial success,
he's convinced that fingerprints
are a useful crime-fighting tool
and he offers his new insights to Scotland Yard,
who completely ignore them.
It isn't until two years later,
when a civil servant working in India
introduces the idea again, that it finally takes off.
Charles Darwin's cousin
actually did quite a lot of research on this
and found that the chance of getting it wrong
is like one in 64,000,000,000.
Given that there's fewer
than 8,000,000,000 people alive today,
that's pretty good odds.
(playful music)
It remained one of the best technologies
for identification for 100 years.
But what happens
when a crime scene has no fingerprints?
Fast forward to 1984, Ronald Reagan's in the White House,
Gorbachev's about to become Soviet leader,
and Cabbage Patch dolls
are flying off the shelves everywhere.
In England,
Alec Jeffreys is experimenting with a molecule
that's now a household name
but wasn't well known at the time,
deoxyribonucleic acid, AKA DNA.
At this time, very little is known
about just how much information you can get from DNA.
Most research at the time
was into how DNA stores information,
but Jeffreys is more interested
in how it differs between relatives.
So he takes DNA from his technician,
that technician's parents, a monkey, a cow, and a plant.
If this sounds
like some horrific Frankenstein experiment,
(creature shouts) (woman screaming)
it isn't.
He wants to compare DNA,
but DNA is not visible to the naked eye.
So he puts radioactive probes on it
and then puts that material on a photographic plate,
and leaves it there to see what it will reveal.
Quite frankly, I never expected it would work
in 1,000,000 years.
Well that's not very hopeful!
But when he returns after the weekend to develop the plates.
He sees all these splotches
and he's like, oh no, I've messed it up.
It looks like his experiment is a disaster,
but a few minutes later, the penny drops.
He realizes that actually there are patterns in there
and what he can surmise is that the plant's DNA
is quite different from those of the animals.
But most importantly,
the technician's DNA
is quite similar to those of her parents.
And, as a matter of fact,
he can see that it's a combination.
Quite unexpectedly,
the image clearly shows
that not only does the DNA of each species
have its own particular pattern,
but so does each person,
and its unique like a personal barcode.
Obviously, this wasn't just a matter
of individual identification
made possible with these patterns,
but also establishing family relationships.
And I think, having seen that,
I mean, everything then happened very, very quickly.
And it was that sort of eureka moment
that he realized just how significant and unique
everybody's DNA was.
Alec Jeffreys
had discovered how to produce simple patterns
of the genetic material DNA,
as characteristic and invariable as fingerprints.
And it's been hidden
inside every cell in our bodies
since the beginning of time.
You're probably wondering how does it work?
"Elementary, my dear Watson."
Well, it's really not,
it's actually quite complicated, but I love your enthusiasm.
DNA is only composed of four subunits
and we give these subunits letters to name them,
G, C, A, and T.
Now, the order in which these appear
are what make your genes unique.
This is like letters and words
that then compose a whole book.
You're only using a limited number of letters,
but the possibilities are endless.
So DNA is responsible for making different proteins,
which then make up different genes,
which will identify, say, someone's characteristics,
brown hair, blonde hair,
blue eyes, brown eyes, et cetera.
Then there's other parts of the DNA
that were thought once as being junk DNA,
but turns out they're actually very useful
in identifying humans.
These junk areas
differ hugely between individuals.
So mine might be very different than yours.
So you can have often very repeating patterns
like GCA, GCA, GCA, and it just keeps on going.
And I might have 10 of those in a row,
where someone else might have 30.
By comparing these repeating patterns
in the junk DNA,
scientists can determine whose belongs to who
with startling accuracy.
The chance of any two people having the exact same DNA
is astronomically small.
One in 575,000,000,000,000.
And there's only been
around 107,000,000,000 people that have ever lived,
so your DNA won't just not match anyone's alive now,
it won't match anyone's ever.
One night over dinner,
Alec and his wife Susan were discussing his discoveries.
I would've loved to be a fly on wall in that conversation.
Honey, I'm home, I've just invented DNA fingerprinting.
It was then that Susan made an interesting point,
what if DNA fingerprinting
could help resolve immigration cases
and especially those family disputes?
Sure enough,
the following March, Alec has his first chance
to put his new discovery to the test.
A young boy called Andrew
has been stopped coming into Britain.
Now, he's a British citizen
and his mother is standing right next to him,
but Andrew refers to his mother as auntie,
which in their culture is normal.
However, border control think that his passport is fake
and they want to deport him back to Ghana.
Alec ends up comparing the DNA fingerprint of Andrew,
his mom, and of his siblings.
And I think you can immediately see the first band
or genetic character in Andrew,
this clearly comes from his mother.
Here's another character which comes from his mother.
The son is who he says he is, who the family says he is,
and it's a smashing success.
So this ends up all over the news,
the newspapers, the media,
everyone is so excited
about this newfound way of identifying ourselves.
I think it was just the look on that woman's face
that, more than anything else,
gave me enormous satisfaction.
And it wasn't long
before police came knocking on his door,
asking for help in resolving some crimes.
There's a horrific case
where a schoolgirl has been murdered.
It's believed to be linked to another death
three years previously.
The police are confident that they have their killer
and want Alec to prove his guilt.
Their suspect is a 17 year-old boy
who has a learning disability
and they, for sure, think that it's him.
So they gather all the data and send it over to Alec.
Jeffreys and his team
were give samples taken from both crime scenes.
The entire case would rest on this groundbreaking work.
The police are right
and the DNA samples taken from the two murder scenes
do match,
but Jeffreys' test proves these crimes
weren't committed by the teenage suspect.
His DNA fingerprint is completely different.
The police didn't believe it.
They actually asked for these tests to be run several times
and each time it came up negative for him.
The evidence doesn't lie here.
The teenage boy is the first person in history
to be exonerated by DNA.
(upbeat music)
In the 35 years since its discovery,
DNA fingerprinting has been used in many surprising ways.
It can authenticate caviar, fine wine.
It's even used in wildlife forensics,
where we can see if certain materials
are taken from illegal or unreputable sources.
One use of DNA fingerprinting
that Jeffreys couldn't have foreseen,
is to clean up a London borough,
not of crime, but of dog poop.
There's literally facilities
where you have to send in the DNA of your pet to them,
so that if you end up not cleaning up after your dog,
they can identify who you are.
In the UK they've got a mandate to microchip
and so adding DNA registration to that requirement
that's already in motion, is a natural next step.
In motion, you have a way with words, sir.
And it doesn't take a brain the size of Alec's
to work out where this is being done.
(atmospheric music)
So something that was totally an accident
ended up impacting every single one of our lives.
This is so important for, not just our immediate future,
but our long-term future as we evolve more as a species.
(playful music)
Coming up,
does poison make camels more attractive?
I don't know, I'm not an expert on camel beauty.
I'll leave it for you to decide.
But first, this.
We now live in a plastic age,
but did you know that this adaptable material
was discovered by accident?
The story starts back in the 1860s.
(jaunty music)
Michael Phelan is a superstar,
a professional billiards player,
and a passionate promoter of the game.
But he's also a man with a problem,
he needs to find a new material for his balls.
He doesn't like what's going on
with the slaughter of elephants,
so he offers a prize
for anyone who can come up with a replacement
for the ivory billiard balls, of $10,000.
Which is a quarter of million dollars in today's money.
That's a lot.
Hang on, hang on, just go back a bit.
What did you say these balls were made of?
Ivory, and that's made from elephant tusks
and these are pretty much just giant overgrown teeth.
And when I say giant, I mean giant.
They can be as big as 80 kilograms,
which translates to 176 pounds.
That's as heavy as a full-grown kangaroo.
But as we all know,
there's nothing in nature that's truly perfect.
Nope, not even you.
Because ivory is essentially an animal product,
each ball is a slightly different consistency.
Another issue with using an elephant tusk
is just like the human tooth has a channel
with nerves and pulp,
so do the tusks.
Now, when they formed a billard ball,
they would have a channel through them,
so they would fill it with ebony wood
and that's why certain billiard balls
have that little spot on it.
That's where it came from.
(bugle fanfare)
Nowadays, it's hard to imagine
quite how popular billiards was at the time.
This is during the Civil War
and yet the game receives more press coverage
than some of the battles.
It's one of the most popular amusements
in the Western world.
Chicago alone has 830 pool halls,
but all those pool tables need balls
and the elephant population is dwindling.
Each elephant tusk
makes about three to 5 billard balls,
so just to service the British market,
something like 12,000 elephants
are being slaughtered every year.
Then add to that the American market, the European market,
this is a species that's just being wiped out.
The world's largest land animal
is heading towards extinction,
a new material is needed.
Finding a replacement for the ivory
meant that you had to find something
that was similar in properties,
in particular, it needs to have the same density.
So, that way, when it's the exact same size,
it'll have the same weight.
The average billiard ball at the time
was around seven ounces,
which is about the weight of a hamster.
Why do you keep measuring things in animals?
Anyway, remember our billiard superstar, Michael Phelan?
Well in 1863, he puts an advert in the papers,
offering a handsome fortune
to anyone who can come up with a suitable replacement
for ivory balls.
So there's a chap called John Hyatt.
He's a printer, he's not even a chemist
or a scientist of any description.
But he sees the announcement with a big reward attached
and thinks, hm,
maybe I can come up with a solution to this.
John tries experimenting
by gluing paper and sawdust together.
It's not hugely successful
(groaning in pain)
and one day he manages to cut himself.
He goes to the cabinet
and he gets this antiseptic called collodion.
It's used at the time, but not now.
While he's treating his cut finger,
he accidentally spills the collodion and it's a big mess.
Everything seems to be going wrong for poor old John,
until he notices that the antiseptic has hardened.
Now, why is that?
Well, collodion is essentially cellulose nitrate
mixed with ether and alcohol to turn it into a liquid.
But when the ether and alcohol evaporate,
it just leaves that hardened substance.
This is his eureka moment.
He realizes that he has discovered,
through a series of accidents, a new material.
This material
could hold the key to the billiard ball problem.
Hyatt's new material has potential,
but he finds that it can't really be shaped
and, without that, it's pretty useless.
Driven by the huge prize money,
John is spurred on to keep investigating.
He spends seven years experimenting
and working out what may modify this material
to make it moldable.
John throws everything into this project.
What he's looking for
is something that he can add to this hardened material,
that would allow him to shape it into a billiard ball
and eventually he comes across camphor,
from the camphor tree.
Camphor is an ingredient used in ointments
and mothballs,
no wonder his search took so long!
Luckily, he didn't mothball the entire project.
Anyway, camphor allows the cellulose nitrate molecules
to be separated.
Just think of spaghetti that's cooled off,
they kind of all stick together and clump together,
but if you add oil,
then they can like slide around and the spaghetti loosens.
The camphor breaks down some of the linkages
in the cellulose nitrate, turning it from a quite hard resin
into a material that can be molded and shaped.
Adding some heat and pressure,
he's able to create the perfect size,
perfect weighted billard ball.
He calls this material celluloid,
which is the granddaddy of all plastics that we know today.
But while celluloid solves the ivory shortage
and probably helps save the elephants,
it isn't perfect.
Unfortunately, when the new balls hit each other.
Which is kind of the point of the game.
Every so often, there's an explosion.
The nature of the cellulose nitrate
is similar to that of TNT,
where the N stands for nitrate.
These nitrates were very flammable and unstable
and so you get this exothermic reaction
when they collided.
Unsurprisingly,
this quirky habit of exploding balls
put a few people on edge.
One day, John receives a letter
from a guy who owns a billiards saloon in Colorado.
There's a little problem with these balls exploding.
(explosion)
No, no, no, it's not the explosion of the balls themselves,
but this is the Wild Wild West.
When one of these balls explodes,
everyone pulls out their guns
and, next thing you know, you're in a standoff.
(gun firing)
This problem is eventually solved
37 years later in 1907,
with the invention of the resin balls we still use today.
History isn't clear whether John ever receives his reward,
but it doesn't really matter,
he's just created the first commercial plastic.
The accidental discovery of this celluloid plastic
was totally mind-blowing for manufacturing.
It really opened up new opportunities
for creating all kinds of products.
Combs, jewelry, hand mirrors, knife handles,
ornaments, collars, cuffs, dice, toys.
Cast in lead molds
and converted into consumer products by machining.
Celluloid is a polymer,
the first ever manufactured, and its impact is immeasurable.
Many scientists can see its huge potential
and begin tweaking the recipe.
(mid tempo music)
Polymers are really long molecules
that are made up of a repeating unit,
a little bit like the links in a chain.
These can be modified chemically to be softer or harder,
stronger or lighter,
depending on what you need to use them for.
These properties
are what makes this wonder material so useful
for so many things, filling the world around us.
Plastics are everywhere.
Let's take a typical day.
You wake up, you unplug your phone from its charger,
you get up, you squeeze your toothpaste out of the tube.
You brush your teeth.
Yeah, I think we get the picture.
Get home, you cook dinner.
Ah, she's still going.
You go to bed, you turn your light off, so much plastic
all day, every day.
Nowadays, there's even stealthy plastics
that you don't even know are there.
They're in sponges, chewing gum, baby wipes,
coffee cups.
I mean they're ubiquitous, they're everywhere.
Plastics have not just entered our homes,
they've also revolutionized the medical world.
It's created heart valves that are safe to use,
prosthetics that fit exactly,
and even things like gloves and syringes
used by doctors and nurses, are all made of plastic.
Ignition, liftoff.
Plastics are so versatile and flexible,
they've enabled mankind to venture into space.
We have a liftoff.
In fact, without plastics,
Neil Armstrong wouldn't have been able
to set foot on the moon.
That's one small step for man,
one giant leap for mankind.
They're incorporated into the visors of their helmets
and other parts of their helmets,
their space suits have tubing throughout it
to keep them at a safe temperature.
So plastics are literally above our heads,
orbiting the earth.
One of the reasons
that plastics are so brilliant
is that they're incredibly durable
and virtually indestructible,
but that's also their downfall.
Plastics are so hard to break down,
it is thought that any plastic that's ever been made
still persist to this day.
It's been estimated that, up to 2015,
we've made something like 9,000,000,000 tons of plastics.
I mean, it's just such an awful concept
because it's gonna stick around, you know,
in the soil, in the oceans, in the landfill,
it's not going away.
But that's okay
'cause we'll just recycle it, right?
'Cause they've got those little arrows
on the triangle on the bottom, right?
Actually, in reality, the process is complicated,
it's really expensive, the end product is inferior,
and in fact it just doesn't happen.
91% of plastic isn't recycled.
So the cruel irony is that we've barely saved the elephants
and the wondrous substance that was created
in order to do that though,
is basically destroying the planet.
But there is hope,
researchers are working furiously
to come up with a solution to tackle the plastic problem.
Thankfully, science is always coming up
with innovative solutions
and in 2017, some Pakistani scientists found a mushroom
that's actually able to break down plastics.
And since then,
it seems there are about 50 types of mushrooms
that have a craving for plastic.
So here we are today,
we have this super invention that transforms our lives.
There may be a big problem with it,
but now, through innovation,
we now have solutions for mitigating that problem.
We're not there yet, we still have a long way to go,
but I'm confident that we'll get there.
(playful music)
This story begins with sausages.
Yummy.
German sausages.
Do you mean wieners?
That's right!
It's the late 18th century
and we're in the southwestern kingdom of Württemberg.
Imagine the scene, beauty spots, powdered wigs.
But there's a strange affliction
stalking the land
that's slowly killing people,
and it seems to be connected with their diet.
Now, you don't normally associate sausages
with difficulties in breathing and swallowing,
double vision, and death,
but that's exactly what's happening.
These sausages are more Frankenstein than frankfurter.
Into the picture
steps the region's chief medical officer, Justinus Kerner.
Kerner comes and starts looking at these people
and realizes that, unlike other poisonings,
it is a problem of muscle control,
in that their muscles stop working.
Kerner manages to identify the toxin
that's causing this paralysis.
He names it botulus, after the Latin word for sausage.
But the more he studies it, the more he wonders.
Dr Kerner's mind works a little bit differently
to you and me.
We'd be thinking, oh my God, avoid those sausages,
but he's thinking, hm, that's interesting,
maybe there's something in the sausages
that could be made to work to our benefit.
For years,
Kerner searches for a medical use for this poison,
but it's in vain.
It's another seven decades
before the bacteria that produces the neurotoxin
is properly identified.
It was Clostridium botulinum,
which makes the most deadly toxin known to humans.
So it turns out that this bacteria survives
and actually thrives within soil,
which is where a lot of our food grows.
But it needs a lack of oxygen to do its deadly work.
Here's one example.
If the bacterium gets in something like a tin can,
it's got plenty of nutrients to eat
and of course it's anaerobic,
and these are the perfect conditions for it.
I remember my grandmother telling me
whenever she would open a can,
she would check to see if it had bulged
and she would tap it to hear if it had a hollow sound.
And it's because when she grew up,
it wasn't terribly uncommon
to hear of somebody getting botulism poisoning
from canned food.
Create appetizing new additions.
If you are unlucky enough to eat tainted food,
it's bad news,
because the botulism toxin attacks the nerves and muscles,
stopping them from working properly.
Now, we have about 600 muscles in our body
and many of these rely on signal from our brain,
sending messages down and talking to the muscles
at the neuromuscular junction.
And if you interfere with these molecules
drifting over and landing on the muscle,
the muscle won't know that it's supposed to become active.
If the muscle can't contract, it causes paralysis.
And if enough toxin gets into your body,
it can cause bigger muscle groups to also become paralyzed,
such as the lungs
and this, inevitably, can be fatal.
The toxin is so deadly
that less than a microgram can kill a human adult,
that's a millionth of a gram.
Just one kilogram.
Killergram,
I see what you did there, Suze.
Which is about the size of this bag of sugar,
could kill every human on the planet.
This toxin is the most dangerous chemical
known to humankind.
So perhaps it should be no surprise
that armies try out botulism as a biological weapon.
There were some crazy ideas in WWII
and the Americans came up with a real humdinger,
and this was to get Chinese prostitutes
to have tiny, tiny, tiny capsules of this toxin
in their hair pins,
which they then administer into drinks
and serve up to Japanese army clients,
thereby bumping off Japanese officers.
And given the high rates of botulism
in the area at the time, it was the perfect crime.
It sounds like a foolproof plan,
but before they can put it into action, they hit a problem.
So some batches of the toxin
were sent over to the US Navy
just off the shore of China,
and they tested it out on stray donkeys.
Now, the donkeys refused to die,
in fact, they showed no signs of damage whatsoever.
And because the donkeys survive,
the operation is abandoned.
It isn't until much later on
that a critical bit of information comes to light.
It is thought that donkeys
may be one of the few animals that are immune to botulism.
What a pain in the ass!
Or not.
(donkey honking)
Fast forward to 1977,
two American researchers are experimenting
with medical uses for botulism.
They paralyzed the face muscles of a cross-eyed chimp
with an injection of the poison and it cures him,
finally confirming Kerner's hunch
that there was something to be gained
from the killer sausage toxin.
Took about 150 years,
but the assumptions from Justinus turned out to be right.
(crowd clapping)
A decade later,
botulism is approved for medical use on humans.
So eye spasms is a really debilitating condition
(atmospheric music)
and it affects about 4% of Americans,
so that's more than the population of New York.
Scale that up to worldwide
and the number of people who can be cured
probably stretches into the hundreds of millions.
Now that we have a cure
that can alleviate a lot of those symptoms,
this is a really big deal for a lot of people.
One of the people administering this new technique
to stop muscle spasms and misalignment in the eye,
is Jean Carruthers, based in Vancouver.
She's the last of the Jeans in this show,
I promise.
Jean is using teeny tiny amounts of this toxin
to stop the muscles around the eye
from spasming or misaligning.
So Jean's treating people who have blepharospasm,
that's a kind of involuntary spasm of the eyelids
and, you know, it can be so bad
that people are basically, effectively blind.
I mean, they even have to be led in by their partners,
into the surgery.
It's something incredibly life-compromising.
One day, she's treating a patient who points out
that she hasn't had the middle of her forehead injected.
She said, "You didn't treat me here.
I know I'm not spasming there,
but every time you treat me there,
I get this beautiful untroubled expression."
This chance exchange
leads Jean to a bright new idea,
that will go on to change the face of Hollywood, literally.
Now, by a happy coincidence,
Jean's husband just so happens to be a dermatologist
and he's treating people
who complain about having deep frown lines
that are prematurely aging them.
And he's using a traditional method, fillers,
which is pretty ugly, painful,
and ultimately doesn't work that well.
(playful music)
Jean thinks that her muscle paralysis toxin
could be the solution her husband has been looking for.
So she needs to test this theory on somebody
and she is one of the first that she gets to do this on.
She injects herself.
Just as Jean suspected,
the botulism toxin paralyzes the wrinkles away.
So what happens when you smile or you frown,
you have a contracting and a releasing
of the muscles in your face,
that's just how it moves naturally.
Now the problem is, over time, as we start to age,
these creases become a little bit more pronounced.
By using this botulism,
you paralyze those muscles
and you can't form those creases.
And without those creases, you don't get any wrinkles.
In 2001,
a name for this treatment is registered as a trademark.
Botox. No, it's absolutely true.
Botox really gained popularity in the early 2000s,
when personalities in reality shows
like "The Real Housewives"
regularly receive Botox injections on camera.
Botox is now the most popular cosmetic procedure
across the world.
You'd be hard-pressed to find somebody in Hollywood
that hasn't had a treatment.
It's so popular that, in 2019,
more than 6,000,000 people got Botox around the world,
that's a lot of needles.
By 2027,
the global industry is set to be worth 7.7 billion dollars.
But it's not just cosmetics
that's benefited from the taming of botulism.
Botox can actually be used
for treating a lot of different medical conditions.
Anything from preventing sweaty palms
to reducing painful muscle spasms
for those with cerebral palsy,
and even to reduce migraines.
Migraines are a horrible condition to suffer from
and I've seen it in my own personal life,
since my wife suffers from them on a almost daily basis.
And it impacts roughly one in eight people
in the United States today.
Sufferers are forced to either miss work
or just leave their careers altogether.
That costs the US economy a lot of money,
we're talking about billions of dollars each year.
There's even research
to suggest that Botox may help alleviate an illness
that affects 264,000,000 people worldwide.
Depression is something, it's like a personal prison.
It's like being in a cell that you can't get out of.
People often don't understand
the torment that people are going through.
They can't meet friends, they can't go to work,
they feel anxious.
So the current treatments for that
are things like psychotherapy and mood-boosting drugs.
Now, for some people that might offer a bit of respite,
but for a lot of people, it just doesn't work.
Now, nobody set out to do a clinical study
on Botox and depression,
but they realized with enough people getting this treatment,
that they had the data right there to look at.
So, a group looked at 40,000 people
who had undergone Botox treatment.
People that had received Botox
reported an up to 88% reduction
in the symptoms of depression,
which, when you think about it, is incredible.
♪ Happiness starts with a smile ♪
A clue to what's happening here
can be found in the smile experiments of the 1970s.
♪ Just put one on and your troubles will be gone ♪
♪ 'Cause happiness starts with a smile ♪
What they found was that, basically,
if you smile a lot more,
believe it or not, you're also happier.
And with Botox,
well basically you're prevented from frowning.
♪ Just take that frown, turn it around ♪
It's almost like Botox
that makes people more beautiful on the outside,
also makes them feel more beautiful on the inside.
Somebody says, "Oh, Dolly, you always just look so happy",
I said, "That's the Botox."
(audience laughing)
A few years ago,
the Botox story took another strange turn,
when its cosmetic properties
began being used outside the human race.
(mid tempo music)
Now, you're not gonna believe this,
but in Saudi Arabia every year
there is a beauty contest for camels
and it's big, big money.
And, in 2018, there were a few camels
that actually got disqualified for having Botox done.
Apparently, Botox makes a camel more beautiful.
I don't know, I'm not an expert on camel beauty.
I'll leave it for you to decide.
So it's thanks to deadly sausages,
cross-eyed chimps,
and a chance encounter in a Canadian doctor's office
that we have such young-looking camels nowadays.
Is that the lesson here?
(whimsical music)
(ambient music)