(playful music)
Did you know, the surprising number
of objects that you use every day...
(coach crashing)
Are thanks to accidents.
Let me show you what I mean.
(air whooshing) (playful music)
In this episode, we learn how a Swiss chemist
unintentionally invented hippies.
He's really beginning to believe
that he's gone completely mad, and he can see why.
How a bid to help cotton farmers
is responsible for America's favorite sandwich.
It's kinda hard to imagine a world without it.
And the way a failed experiment helps feed
the world, but also almost destroys it.
(playful music)
"Oops, I changed the world!"
Turn on, tune in, drop out.
August 14th, 1969,
the decade that shook America is coming to a close.
We've got racial rights, women's rights,
gay rights, and the Vietnam war.
Thousands of angry young people are heading
to the streets, ready to fight for their rights.
A wave of counterculture is rising,
and at the crest of that wave
comes a music festival like no other.
(upbeat rock music)
Woodstock.
It's the soundtrack to a cultural revolution sweeping
across America and beyond.
And there's one mind-bending chemical fueling it all.
Lysergic acid diethylamide, also known as LSD.
It goes by many names; acid, Lucy,
California sunshine, blue heaven.
This stuff is really potent.
Not that I would know anything about that or anything.
The LSD experience is a religious experience.
The LSD kick is religious ecstasy.
LSDs world changing...
And mind-altering.
And mind-altering story
takes us on a psychedelic bike ride
from medieval madness to chemical warfare,
and the explosion of counterculture.
Sounds like it's gonna be quite a trip.
(yodeling)
Our accidental hero is Albert Hofmann, Swiss-born,
who has an idyllic childhood,
it's all chocolate, fondue and yodeling.
(upbeat music) (yodeling)
He graduates from the University of Zurich in 1929,
with a doctorate in medicinal chemistry,
and gets a job at Sandoz Laboratories in Basel.
He's a regular guy, tasked with working
on a very irregular fungus; ergot.
Ergot is a fungus that grows on rye crops.
Its proper name is Claviceps purpurea.
Their fruiting bodies emerge as these long,
dark finger-like protrusions from the ear of the grain.
It's extremely poisonous.
One of its toxic effects is a form
of gangrene called holy fire.
People felt a terrible fiery sensation
in their limbs, and the loss of blood
to their extremities eventually lead into,
basically, their hands and feet dropping off.
It also causes convulsions, seizures
and vivid hallucinations.
So imagine you're just snacking on some rye bread
or maybe an avocado toast and, hmm, tastes good, hm.
The next thing you know, you're on the ground,
you're rolling around, your limbs are falling off
and you're convulsing in pain.
People actually did think that their limbs
were being burned to charcoal,
which is a pretty bad thing to happen from eating bread.
(solemn music)
In the 10th century, there's an outbreak of this disease
which claims about 40,000 lives in Southern France.
So you can imagine how terrified people must have been.
Holy fire is a scourge across Europe
for many centuries.
But over time, doctors discover that ergot has medical uses.
In the 1500s it's noted that sows
that consume ergot go into labor.
So midwives think that a woman who has a stalled pregnancy
just needs a little bit of the fungus.
So it's interesting that ergot goes
through this whole PR transformation,
from this poison into something that houses a whole host
of potential solutions to problems.
(upbeat music) (yodeling)
Back to Albert Hofmann
and the scientists at Sandoz.
Who, in 1918, managed to isolate
a compound called ergotamine.
Sandoz commercialize ergotamine
to treat post childbirth bleeding and migraines.
But Albert's not done yet.
Hofmann, that wants to keep working on ergot
and identify more useful molecules.
He focuses his studies on lysergic acid,
one of the chemicals found in ergot.
Hoffman looks at the chemical structure
and realizes that by adding a specific chemical group
to lysergic acid, he can create a molecule
that has very similar structure to a drug used
as a circulatory and respiratory stimulant.
In 1938, he produces this analogous derivative,
it's a 25th compound in the series,
lysergic acid diethylamide, abbreviated to LSD-25.
Hofmann tests LSD-25 on a group of rats,
but it's not as effective
as existing respiratory stimulants.
He looks like a failure.
The test does note that the rats
become restless during the trial, but that's it,
the drug is apparently useless and is shelved.
(explosion thunders)
April 16th, 1943,
World War II rages throughout Europe,
everywhere, except good old neutral Switzerland, that is.
Where Hofmann is still busy working away with lysergic acid.
Hofmann has this nagging feeling about LSD-25,
like there's something more to it
that's worth taking another look.
(liquid burbling)
Hofmann creates a new LSD-25.
He's going through the last few steps of the process
when he starts to feel a little bit funny.
(feelgood music)
(air whooshing)
He starts to feel kinda restless and dizzy.
He says he experienced an extremely stimulated imagination
and that he perceived an uninterrupted stream
of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes
with intense kaleidoscopic play of colors.
Hofmann is basically having the world's first LSD trip.
And what do you do if you accidentally absorb
a chemical that makes you hallucinate?
Well, if you're Hofmann, you take it again, of course.
For science, you understand.
(tranquil rock music)
Hofmann figures a dose or a 1/4 of a milligram
should be safe.
A milligram is 1/1000 of a gram.
So this is like a tiny fraction of a grain of salt.
Within 40 minutes, Hofmann records
his first observations.
(tranquil rock music continues)
Hoffman wrote down in his lab book
that he experienced visual distortions,
symptoms of paralysis, a desire to laugh.
He really was struggling to physically write the last words.
He says to his assistant, "I'm going home,
I can't handle this."
Now, ordinarily, you'd think he'd be bundled
into a car and driven back by his assistant,
but he doesn't do that.
Instead, he attempts to cycle back home.
So Hofmann is riding his bicycle
and the world around him is distorting like a curved mirror.
He has this sensation that he's not moving,
but his lab assistant said that they
were going really, really fast.
Hoffman makes it to his bed,
where he slips deeper and deeper into his mind.
This sounds insane, but everyday objects,
like furniture, are transforming
into these grotesque creatures.
His next door neighbor comes over to check in on him
and they take the form of a malevolent witch wearing
a colored mask.
So Hofmann has what I think we can call a bad trip.
He's really beginning to believe
that he's gone completely mad, and he can see why.
Eventually, the hallucinations wear off,
and Hofmann feels better than ever.
What's really odd is that Hoffman doesn't experience
any kind of come down or hangover,
and he even says that he's experiencing the world
with a new kind of clarity.
Hofmann is left with no doubt LSD
is a powerful psychoactive drug.
The applications in neurology and especially psychiatry,
it could be huge.
Before they can do anything else,
they tested on a menagerie of animal subjects.
To bring about any noticeable changes in behavior,
they have to give relatively high doses.
So, mice lick themselves differently.
Cats space out and get frightened of mice.
In a chimpanzee community, the group freaks out
because the test subject doesn't adhere
to the social hierarchy.
Hofmann and the team approve LSD
for human trials, and begin distributing the drug
to medical practitioners for further tests.
Hofmann is convinced that it can help
with psychological disorders.
So he encourages psychiatrists to try LSD themselves,
because he believes it can offer a window
into the mind of someone suffering psychosis.
News of LSD's transformative property
soon spreads, eventually finding its way
to the US government.
(upbeat suspenseful music)
The US military wants to know if LSD can be weaponized,
they start by dosing regular soldier.
Two hours later, the squad that took LSD,
the results were chaotic.
Ordered to leave the field, he refused to go.
Then the CIA gets in on the act.
Spies, you know of that?
Only, we call them agents.
Then they see, in LSD,
a potential mind controlling substance,
and they start conducting experiments
under the code name MK-Ultra
(upbeat suspenseful music)
Beginning in 1953,
MK-Ultra is conducted in secret,
using a combination of CIA-funded academic studies
and some seriously dodgy practices.
They secretly administer the drug
to unsuspecting people on the street
and monitor the results.
And the CIA is basically dosing medical staff,
prisoners, you name it, in order to find out
whether LSD has mind controlling properties.
San Francisco, the cosmopolitan city,
truly the city of many wonders.
At a California psychiatric hospital,
a young writer called Ken Kesey
is volunteering as a guinea pig on an MK-Ultra project.
The experience has a profound effect on him.
Ken Kesey is determined to get the word out about LSD
and its mind-altering properties.
He hires the Grateful Dead to play the Acid Tests,
a series of parties where they play trippy music
and hand round LSD like its candy.
At about the same time,
Harvard psychologist, Timothy Leary,
is also investigating psychedelic drugs.
Professor Leary is doing controversial experiments
with another fungus-derived psychedelic
that's called psilocybin.
Harvard's not very impressed when they discover
that professor Leary is also taking the drugs himself,
and he's also administering them
to students outside of the experiment.
Leary is fired from Harvard in 1963,
but that doesn't stop him experimenting with psychedelics.
If anything, it spurs him on,
and he becomes more and more vocal
about the benefits of psychedelics.
We are now, whether we like it or not,
in the psychochemical age.
And he's remembered for the phrase that he comes up with,
that becomes a kind of a chant of the '60s.
Turn on, tune in, drop out.
(tranquil music)
The CIA has unwittingly help propel LSD
from a laboratory curiosity
to the epicenter of counterculture.
This is the now generation,
they feel disenchanted with the world around them,
while they may, for the most part,
be outside the mainstream of American life.
Plenty of iconic bands have admitted
to the use of LSD, and these include Pink Floyd,
Rolling Stones, and of course the legendary,
and late, Jimmy Hendricks.
And it really expanded their musical horizons.
Paul, how often have you taken LSD?
About four times.
Don't you believe that this was a matter
which you should have kept private?
You know, I'm quite prepared to keep it
as a very personal thing, if you will too.
If you'll shut up about it, I will.
A wave of LSD washes over American society
at a critical time in US history.
There's growing unrest about the Vietnam War,
the civil rights movement is gaining momentum,
and people are starting to realize
what's really important to them.
We are everywhere! We are everywhere!
It seems that it's actually unbrainwashing people
from any government messaging.
Just as ergot induces labor,
LSD speeds up the birth of the counterculture.
It's an anti-establishment movement,
and as you can imagine, the government,
they don't like it very much.
(upbeat rock music)
We must wage, what I have called,
total war against public enemy number one
in the United States, the problem of dangerous drugs.
The US government thought it could weaponize LSD,
but instead, it blew up in their face.
Obviously, now, they wanna put it back in the box.
A blanket ban on LSD across America
goes into effect in 1970.
The US successfully encourages the United Nations
to follow suit.
It's a bitter blow for scientists,
because it becomes next to impossible
to get LSD for research purposes.
This research could lead to life-changing therapies,
but it just fizzles out.
Some have used these drugs
to journey into the uncharted tunnels of the mind.
For four decades, LSD remained in the shadows
of illicit recreational use and fringe studies.
But the man can't keep a good thing down forever.
In 2016, researchers at Imperial College, London,
published the first scans of a brain on LSD.
This is a groundbreaking moment,
using cutting edge technology
to finally see exactly how LSD works.
In the control subjects, all of the activity remains
in the back of the brain, near the visual cortex.
However, on LSD, this activity spreads throughout the brain.
Every part of the brain is firing and contributing
to these incredibly vivid, wild images.
And the hope is that LSD can be developed
to treat psychological disorders
like depression and anxiety.
There's no doubt that Hofmann and his unplanned trip
on LSD changed the world in profound ways.
And I'm sure he'd be happy to know
that the research into LSD continues.
(playful music)
Coming up, how a failed yellow dye
explodes in popularity.
Here we go.
Literally.
(explosion thunders)
And, when cutting edge science
meant keeping a fridge full of pee.
Now this is something you don't wanna mix up
with your apple juice.
But first, you do know your nuts, don't you?
(wind howling)
April 25th, 1988.
A team of nine Soviet and four Canadian skiers
approach the North Pole.
They are traveling from Siberia
to Canada via the north pole, carrying 110-pound bags
the whole way.
It is an incredibly tough journey.
And it's cold, like, really, really cold.
On these expeditions, you really need over three times
your normal caloric intake.
You're burning so much fat just to stay warm,
you need to pig out.
With the risks involved, you really gotta be a little
bit nuts to trek all the way to the pole.
Funny you should say that.
As it turns out, in the Arctic,
your best friends are nuts, if you see what I mean.
So the Canadians are jumping on three ounces
of peanut butter a day.
They say it taste great, it's full of energy
and fat as well.
But the Canadians preferred fuel
is completely new to their Soviet counterparts.
At first, the Soviets are quite suspicious
of this substance, but they take it with vigor.
Oh, come on, Natasha,
everyone knows you have it with jelly, not vigor.
(dog whining) (dramatic music)
The good thing is, in that Arctic temperatures,
it doesn't stick to the roof of your mouth,
it's so cold that the viscosity of it changes.
(bright music)
We're all familiar with peanut butter
as a beloved national food, spread on sandwiches
from California to New York.
It's kinda hard to imagine a world without it.
But a world without it, there was.
Peanut butter's rise to fame comes down
to the unlikely story of a legendary scientist,
the world's weirdest recipe book, and a huge world fair.
I hope there's a nutty professor.
There's a nutty professor, right?
Well, after a fashion.
(air whooshes) (bright music)
The story starts in the late 1870s.
Cotton production in the south has recovered
to pre-war levels, which is a great achievement.
But it's not quite as good as it sounds.
Flooding the market with cotton only serves
to depress the price,
putting more financial pressure on farmers.
And if that's not enough,
the intensive farming of this single crop
is about to wreak havoc.
(concerned music)
The big problem with repeatedly growing cotton
is that it takes a terrible toll on the soil.
It pulls out a nutrients, and farmers now have
to spend their precious cash to put them back in.
And another problem, if you're only growing
one type of crop, is disease.
In the early 1900s, the boll weevil,
a beetle that feeds on cotton,
migrates north, through the US, from Mexico.
It's really tiny, it's less than 1/4 of an inch,
but the damage is massive.
Boll weevil is devastating for southern farmers,
and the cotton crop drops by 50%.
American cotton production is faltering pretty badly.
(exalted trumpeting)
Enter, one George Washington Carver,
an agricultural scientist who's climbed his way up
from the bottom of the heap.
(downbeat music)
Carver's backstory is pretty incredible.
He's born in Newton County, Missouri,
towards the end of the Civil War.
His parents are enslaved by plantation farmers.
(downbeat music continues)
His father is killed in a farming accident
before he's born.
Then, he and his mother are kidnapped
by marauding bushwhackers,
but a search party is only able to recover young George.
Carver is fostered by a couple
who encourage his thirst for knowledge.
But getting the education he craves
is a battle against segregation.
(bright music)
George was the first black student
at Iowa State University.
He was born into slavery and now he's in higher education.
Being the only black student, at that time,
must've been extremely tough.
But the fact that he was able to not just survive,
but do so well, shows a lot about the kind
of character that he had.
George's determination
and genius shine through.
And on gaining his masters in agriculture, in 1896,
he's in demand.
Carver gets an offer
from African American educator, Booker T. Washington.
He set up a new agricultural school
at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama,
and wants it to be run by black academics.
Carver seizes the opportunity.
Remember those cotton sharecroppers,
plagued by pests and poor soil?
(determined music)
He wants to use the 10-acre site at Tuskegee
to try and solve these problems.
At this time, fertilizers were just too expensive,
and Carver wanted to find a more cost-effective way
of improving the soil.
So he investigated rotating the crop.
So basically, switching from a soil-depleting crop,
like cotton, to a soil-enriching legume crop,
like peas and beans.
(determined music continues)
Legumes are nitrogen-fixing plants.
They bring nitrogen compounds into the soil.
Nitrogen is a critical nutrient for both plant,
and therefore, cotton growth.
(curious music)
Carver sets about searching
for the ultimate nitrogen-fixing legume.
Beans have fewer than 100 nitrogen-fixing nodules
on their roots, soya beans will have several hundred.
But there's one plant that produces over 1000 nodules.
(playful music) (air whooshing)
The peanuts.
They can introduce several hundred pounds
of nitrogen, in an acre of land, per season.
But peanuts are a nut, not a bean, right?
Wrong!
(upbeat country music)
Peanuts are actually more pea than nut.
Although they may look and taste like a nut,
they're actually legumes, with the unique distinction
that their pods grow underground.
Peanuts grow underground?
Yep, they sure do.
In fact, they're also known as the groundnut.
Carver proves that by rotating peanuts and cotton
you improve the health of the soil
and you also increase the yield of cotton produced overall.
To get the word out,
Carver goes on tour in a horse-drawn wagon
with all the mod cons.
Farming supplies, lecturing materials,
that sort of thing.
This traveling school is really instrumental
in breaking this continuous cycle of cotton crop planting,
and showing farmers that there's another way
to improve the soil.
But Carver and the wagon success,
highlights a major flaw.
The peanut crop is improving the health of the soil,
but the farmers don't exactly know what to do
with all of these peanuts that they have grown.
It seems the crop itself
is worth, well, peanuts.
In terms of economics, the supply outstrips the demand.
People don't see peanuts as an attractive product to buy.
You end up with barns full of peanuts going moldy,
and frustrated farmers.
(determined rock music)
Carver does what he does best,
and sets to work on the problem.
So Carver gets busy in his laboratory trying
to figure out different ways to commercialize peanuts.
Now, he doesn't come up with just one
or two or three products, no,
he comes up with over 300 products.
The list is as varied as it is long.
Peanut coffee, mock chicken, cheese, tutti-frutti,
shaving foam, axle grease, paper, glue,
the list goes on and on.
In 1916, he publishes a bulletin for farmers called,
"How to Grow the Peanuts: And 105 Ways of Preparing It
for Human Consumption."
Carver's timing is impeccable.
The bulletin helps solidify the humble peanut
as a useful cash crop.
By 1917, the farmers have produced
over a million bushels of peanuts,
raking in over $5 million worth,
in today's money, over a $100 million.
(air whooshing) (determined rock music)
Carver set out to save cotton,
but in doing so, he accidentally creates
a whole new southern farming industry.
And the peanut is here to stay.
But there's one thing that Carver didn't think of.
Peanut butter.
(film reel whirring) (elated music)
Ladies and gentlemen, step right up,
it's the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair,
featuring the latest and greatest products
and innovations from around the globe.
(elated music continues)
It's the biggest world fair of its time,
and it is an absolute spectacle.
Most rural people haven't been to a big,
busy city like St. Louis, let alone experience
the culture of all of these other countries.
Food is a major part of the display.
The ice-cream cone, burgers, and Dr. Pepper
are launched into the public eye at this fair.
In the middle of it all, C.H. Summer,
who's got a concession stand selling
his own type of peanut butter.
To say it's popular is an understatement.
He sells $705.11 worth.
That's over $20,000 in today's money.
(feelgood music)
Today, 13 states produce over 6 billion pounds
of peanuts a year.
Over 50% of this crop is then turned into peanut butter.
Peanut butter is so popular in America
that the average person consumes around seven pounds a year.
And why do Americans consume
so much peanut butter?
The PB and J.
(gentle music)
(elegant music)
World War II, Grapelade and peanut butter
are on the US army ration list,
and American soldiers quickly figured out
that the Holy Trinity of sliced bread, jelly
and peanut butter is a dish sent from one high.
After the war is over, American soldiers bring back
this revelatory new snack,
and sales a peanut butter skyrocket.
If you like peanuts, you'll like Skippy.
Skippy peanut butter.
Today, the average American eats around 1500 peanut butter
and jelly sandwiches before they even graduate
from high school.
(elegant music continues) (equations blipping)
Yeah, that kinda checks out.
But peanut butter is more
than just a go-to snack for hungry students.
(bright music)
In 2004, doctors tested a new therapeutic food based
on peanut butter in Niger.
A third of children with malnutrition were dying,
but after eating the paste, the death rate dropped to 5%.
(bright music continues)
Today it's used across the globe's,
it's probably saving millions of lives.
(anxious music)
Carver could never have predicted
his efforts to save the cotton industry
would've had such a profound impact on the world
long after his death.
Albert Einstein considered Carver one
of the 10 greatest scientist of his time.
Martin Luther King honors Carver
by saying, "What an incredible example he is,
raising himself from such paralyzing
conditions of circumstance."
Carver receives many honors.
President Roosevelt gives him his own national monument,
which is a first for an African American.
He's inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame
and of the US Department of Agriculture's Hall of Heroes.
Carver is a true American icon.
(intense music)
(playful music)
Still to come,
we look at what happens when the mentally unstable
meet the morally questionable.
The guinea pig snuffed it.
But first, an altogether less treatable
form of crazy.
(concerned music)
March 1st, 1954, on an island paradise in the Mid-Pacific.
(explosion thunders)
Zero seconds,
and the unbelievable explosion detonated.
The Castle Bravo hydrogen bomb
obliterates Bikini Atoll.
The shock wave visibly roared across
the ocean and hit the camera ship miles away
from ground point zero.
(solemn music)
It's just mesmerizing, isn't it?
It's just so much power on display.
The radiation is what sets the trees on fire,
just the radiation.
(air whooshing)
Within one second it forms a fireball
over four miles wide.
The mushroom cloud reaches 130,000 feet high,
touching the edge of the Earth's atmosphere.
It's the largest bomb that the US has ever detonated,
and it was 1000 times greater than the one
that went off at Hiroshima.
The 1954 H-bomb detonation
was another grim reminder to the world
of the horror that an atomic war
might bring to civilization.
It would be a long time before the area of the test
could be called safe enough for any kind
of life to resume there.
The earth have received its warning.
At the heart of these mega weapons
is a detonator that uses a conventional explosive,
accidentally created over 150 years ago, trinitrotoluene.
Aka TNT.
(suspenseful music)
(explosion thunders)
To find out how TNT got inside
the world's most powerful weapon,
we've got to wind the clock back to 1863.
(bright music)
This is the University of Gottingen, central Germany.
It's a scientific powerhouse in a country renowned
for its organic chemistry.
A lot of focus is the input on coal tar,
a dark syrup by-product of making a fuel called coke.
It's a complex mixture of organic molecules,
and German chemists are experts at using
these molecules to produce synthetic dyes.
It's a dye that a young chemist
called Julius Wilbrand is looking for
when he mixes a component of coal tar, called toluene,
into a mixture of sulfuric and nitric acid.
(clock ticking) (curious music)
He leaves the concoction bubbling away
and carefully purifies the product,
creating this yellow crystal form.
It looks like Wilbrand has made another synthetic dye.
But it turns out it's not that good
and it fades over time.
So basically, he leaves it on the laboratory shelf.
We don't know much about Wilbrand
after this little incident.
It seems that he went off to become a chemistry teacher.
But what he doesn't know is this stuff packs a punch.
Wilbrand has no idea
that he's just created what will become
one of the most mass produced explosives
in history, trinitrotoluene.
30 years later, and political tensions
are a breaking point throughout Europe.
The German Empire has been up and running
for a few decades, and it's really trying
to nudge its way through onto the world's stage,
and part of that involves building its naval power
against Great Britain, in particular.
Germany's excellence in organic chemistry
gives it an advantage in the development
of new types of explosives.
There's about two dozen explosive products
that are invented around this time,
so it's a magnificent era for blowing things up.
(explosion thunders) (upbeat music)
Enter the second hero in our story,
Carl Hausman, he's a leader
in Germany's synthetic dye industry,
and has just been invited by the Prussian War Ministry
to work as a consulting chemist
to the Royal Powder Mills in Henlow.
Hausman is aware of this yellow solution called TNT.
Now, he knows that it's a mediocre dye,
but he's also well aware that its structure
is packed with nitrogen, which, traditionally,
comes in pretty handy when you're talking about explosives.
(cannon fires)
And Hausman knows that a similar chemical
called picric acid is already being used
in artillery shells, but it has one big drawback.
The trouble with picric acid is that it has a tendency
to react with metals, at which point
it spontaneously explodes.
(explosion thunders) (upbeat music)
Hausman must be thinking that TNT
could also have explosive potential,
but it's inherently more stable.
I mean, Wilbrand didn't blow up, right?
So Hausman wants to see whether he can put
a detonator charge into TNT to see whether
that's enough to make it go bang.
He's pulling up the plunder.
Here we go.
(explosion thunders)
The results are impressive.
The explosion is huge, with a blast wave traveling
at 15,000 miles an hour, which is supersonic.
The chemistry of TNT is the secret
to its explosive power.
When TNT is detonated, the carbon oxygen
and nitrogen within the compound react really quickly,
producing huge amounts of gases.
The total volume of the gases produced
is 1000 times that of the starting material,
so you get this huge explosion.
The Germans begin to realize that TNT
could be the wonder substance that they've been looking for.
(explosion thunders) (solemn music)
Then, in 1914, European tensions erupt,
it's all out war, the likes of which
the world has never seen.
World war I really changes the rules of warfare,
it introduces modern warfare.
Up until then it's all been cavalry charges
and shrapnel exploding all over approaching infantry,
but now it's soldiers digging trenches.
And the question is, how many shells do you need
to bombard those trenches into submission?
Well, Tony, it turns out the answer is a lot.
Both sides in the First World War
now have to ramp up production of TNT.
But Britain's main problem is that
they can't get enough toluene to make the TNT they need.
600,000 tons of coal only produces 720 tons of toluene.
It's about 0.1%, which is so small.
Germany is in an even worse position.
Although it controls vast coal reserves,
Germany's reliant on imports
for that crucial end part of TNT.
The key material they need is ammonia,
to make the nitric acid.
With the Royal Navy controlling the high seas,
it can't get access to those raw materials.
But clever German chemists figure out a solution.
A German scientist, in a laboratory
in Karlsruhe, works out a system of catalysts
and high pressure devices that can produce ammonia,
drop by drop, from the air.
Fritz Haber figures out a way to convert nitrogen,
in the air, into ammonia.
It really is genius.
The air is 80% nitrogen.
Haber's got the process,
but he hasn't got the processing power.
You're never going to create enough ammonia on a lab bench.
This is where chemical engineer Carl Bosch comes in.
By 1918, Haber and Bosch had scaled up the process
to the point where they were creating 650 tons
of ammonia each day.
That ammonia pours
into Germany's artillery shells,
but in the end, it isn't enough.
The United States joining the war proves
to be the final straw for the German Empire and its allies,
and the whole thing collapses for them,
the kaiser surrenders.
And Britain, France and the United States
have won the First World War.
(crowd cheering)
By the Second World War, TNT is being used
in most explosives.
And this war, too, is ended by TNT.
(explosion thunders) (solemn music)
When it detonates the thermonuclear devices dropped
on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
But, before we condemn Wilbrand, Houseman, Harbor and Bosch
for the unimaginable misery their work's
been used to inflict, there's more to this story.
Because, the quest to mass-produce TNT also leads
to perhaps the world's biggest game-changing innovation,
a chemical solution to the soil depletion,
those pre-peanut cotton farmers suffered.
Remember the Haber-Bosch process that was used
to make ammonia, well that has contributed
to the huge scale production of fertilizer.
We produced 160 million tons of ammonia a year.
More ammonia means more fertilizer,
and more fertilizer means that more crops can grow,
sustaining an ever-growing human population.
About half of the world's food
now relies on ammonia fertilizer to grow.
The Haber-Bosch process is so fundamental
to food production that it's estimated that 50%
of the nitrogen in every human body comes from fertilizer.
Ever since the rollout of the Haber-Bosch process
the human population has been growing rapidly,
taking us to where we are today,
with 7.5 billion people on the world and counting.
So, somewhat ironically,
the accidental creation of an explosive,
used to end life on an industrial scale,
also enables us to feed an ever-growing human population.
Not bad for a so-so dye.
(playful music)
(explosion thunders)
1942, three years before the atomic bomb brings
the deadliest war in history to a shuddering close.
Interred in a Japanese prison of war camp
is a doctor whose discovery of a new mental health treatment
will transform the lives of millions.
(dramatic music)
Lithium.
(bright music)
It all starts in Singapore.
The fall of Singapore in the Second World War
was a huge blow to the allies, and it included
the capture of 15,000 Australian service personnel,
by the Japanese, who were then held at the Changi camp.
Among the prisoners is Major John Cade.
Cade was the son of a psychiatrist
and grew up around the grounds of mental asylums,
eventually following in his father's footsteps
and becoming a psychiatrist himself.
So it's no surprise then that when Cade was captured,
that he was put in charge of the psychiatry section
of the camp's hospital.
(gentle music)
He notices a connection between the lacking
of B vitamins and how this causes a disease
to form in the body known as beriberi,
which affects both the heart and the brain function.
And for the first time he suspects that mental illnesses,
which he's been surrounded by all his life,
may also have a chemical cause.
(anxious music)
Over centuries of medical science,
mental health has famously been one
of the most misunderstood facets of the human condition.
For the whole of human history people
have suffered from mental illness,
but in the past it was just shrugged off
with the term insanity or madness.
In extreme cases, people who suffered
with their mental health would be suspected
of demonic possession, a diagnosis reached with exorcism.
(demon screeching)
(chuckles) If you think exorcism sounds bad,
then wait until you hear about the alternatives.
Archeologists have found skulls with the evidence
of holes drilled into them, a practice called trepanning,
and this is something that we think ancient humans did
to alleviate bad spirits and to release them from the brain.
(concerned music)
In the 20th century, the drilling a hole
in your head technique gets an upgrade.
How does poking a stick in the brain sound?
(Betty moaning)
(broom thuds) (Betty shrieks)
Whether it was depression, OCD or schizophrenia,
the lobotomy was used as a treatment
in all these conditions.
A borehole is placed in the coronal suture
by means of successive drills.
So basically, going into the human head,
cutting connections in the brain,
and in a small number of cases it seems
to have kinda worked, but in a lot of cases
it left people stupefied, and sometimes
just completely unable to look after themselves.
This, and other questionable ethical practices,
like electroshock therapy and permanent incarceration
are a reflection of the extremely limited research
carried out into mental health.
But all that is about to change, thanks to John Cade.
Cade sees his patients mental health deteriorate
before his eyes, and on those patients that do pass away
he starts to perform autopsies
and notices that there are certain physical traits
in their brains that are correlated with their symptoms.
(upbeat music)
The work Cade started in
the prisoner of war camp would inspire his research
as he returns to Melbourne after the war.
Cade is working with a number of ex soldiers,
and who are suffering from a variety
of mental health conditions, including mania,
which is characterized by hyperactivity
and excessive euphoria.
(solemn music) (fist thudding)
In 1948, John Cade gets the idea
that mania could be caused by an excess
of chemicals in the body.
While depressive episodes were linked to chemical deficits.
So he begins to investigate by asking the nurses
if he can have samples of urine from the patients,
and then keeps them in his refrigerator at home.
Now, this is something you don't wanna mix up
with your apple juice.
I don't imagine it smelled nice either.
Cade has no access to advanced chemical analyst tools,
so he devices his own experiment.
No, don't drink it. Tony!
What he does is actually worse.
(scientist cackling)
He takes the urine, puts it in syringes
and injects it into the abdominal cavities of guinea pigs.
I'm talking about real, fluffy guinea pigs.
(upbeat jazz music)
And he keeps upping the dose of these injections
until the poor guinea pigs die,
and then he just calmly notes, in his notebook,
at what stage it was the guinea snuffed it.
(guinea pig groans)
(air whooshing) (chalk rasps)
I dunno where to begin with this.
Collecting bodily fluids without the patient's permission,
unregulated animal testing,
unsupported experimental methods.
Yeah, not great.
Cade discovers that the guinea pigs that received the urine
from the manic patients died much sooner
than those from the other patients.
So what does it have to say?
The patients who had some type of mental health problem
had more toxic urine.
(solemn music)
Cade's next move is to try and reduce
the toxicity in the manic patients urine
using a tried and tested bladder medicine, lithium.
Doctors have been prescribing lithium salts
for renal problems, meaning, stuff to do with
the kidneys, and bladder and gallbladder,
since the 19th century.
(air whooshing) (bright music)
So, Cade treats the toxic manic urine
with medicinal lithium salts
and tries again with the guinea pig injections.
Where is he getting all these guinea pigs from?
It's not as though they're running around underfoot.
As Cade hoped, the lithium salts do decrease
the toxicity of the urine, and it takes a greater dose
to prove fatal to the guinea pigs.
But, the lithium salts also have another consequence
that Cade hadn't anticipated.
(feelgood music)
Turned out that the guinea pigs start
to become a little bit more relaxed, quiet, subdued.
Looking at the relaxed rodents
gives Cade an idea.
He wonders if the lithium might help his patients.
For all his questionable ethics in animal testing,
John Cade was a religious man of honor,
and couldn't bring himself to test something on his patients
that he hadn't yet tested on himself.
Oh, suddenly the man has a conscience.
So what does he do? He tries it on himself.
He takes lithium salts for several weeks
to see if anything bad happens.
When he didn't curl up and die or develop
any other disturbing symptoms,
he decided it would be ethical to try it on his patients.
Cade selects his first human guinea pig
from the Bundoora Mental Hospital, one Bill Brand.
Bill Brand had been psychotic for something like 30 years,
and he'd been an inmate at Bundoora for much of that time.
Now, he showed all the symptoms of psychosis and mania.
He used to rummage around in the rubbish bins,
he tried to escape, obviously,
and he even cut the tips off two of his fingers.
Cade starts to give Bill Brand lithium,
administered daily, in liquid form.
After about three weeks on this course of lithium,
Brand's behavior actually starts to improve.
For a start, he stops rummaging around the bins,
his speech slows down, he starts to look after himself,
so the signs are good.
After two months on lithium,
Bill is able to leave Bundoora,
leave the place that he called home for three decades.
(backdrop whistles) (playful upbeat music)
And creates a more normal life for himself,
on the outside, finds a mainstream job.
When nine further patients shows similar signs
of recovery, Cade declares his lithium treatment
an outstanding success.
Great. Have a cigar.
Start the press, we'll put out a message.
Now this is all very exciting for Cade,
but it might not actually be
the groundbreaking new treatment he thinks it is.
Lithium has been prescribed for people
with mental health problems before.
Sorry, what?
In 1870, lithium bromide was used
for a more hypnotic purpose, to actually start
to ease or relax a patient.
Although it's not clear what guided
this 19th century investigation into lithium
for mental disorders, it is a popular remedy for a time.
Other physicians across the United States
prescribe lithium for mania.
But that literature is then promptly
and inexplicably forgotten.
So did all of those guinea pigs die for nothing?
(curious music)
No, those guinea pigs did not die for nothing,
because if John Cade didn't rediscover
the use of lithium for mental illness,
then it would've ended up, maybe,
staying a forgotten therapy for who knows how long?
Unfortunately, Cade's high hopes
come crashing back down when Bill Brand is readmitted
to Bundoora Hospital.
Bill, it seems, has stopped taking his treatment.
Unfortunately, once he's off the lithium,
he regresses badly back into the condition
that led him into the psychiatric institution
in the first place.
(determined music)
Cade's revolutionary findings
go largely unnoticed by the medical community.
That is, until Mogens Schou stumbles across
the paper in 1952.
Schou is a Danish psychiatrist with a bit more
of a formal approach to medical experimentation.
Schou conducts his own study, which is a lot closer
to how medical trials are performed today.
He did an example of what we would call
a single blind trial.
So, he rolled the dice
and half his patients got lithium, the other half didn't.
He found an 87% drop-off of manic and depressant episodes
in the group that underwent the lithium treatment.
Lithium was now offering a new lease of life
to patients who were seriously mentally unwell.
Today, Schou is recognized all over the world
for his pioneering work into producing
a viable treatment for bipolar disorder.
But, despite the evidence that lithium does work,
doctors still aren't sure exactly how it works.
Oh, well that's reassuring.
It's understood that lithium affects the brain
and also the spinal cord, and it increases
the connection between cells.
Neurological studies of bipolar patients
have revealed that they tend to have much lower volumes
of gray matter in the areas of the brain
that are linked to mood regulation.
But after lithium treatments,
brain scans show an increase in the gray matter
in the brain, in the areas that deal
with emotional processing and cognitive control.
(gentle feelgood music)
Now, some 70 years after his pioneering work,
John Cade is still remembered for his discovery
of lithium for mental health.
It's kind of incredible to be held up
as this amazing medical pioneer when he wasn't actually
the first person to make this discovery.
The discovery features some
pretty questionable medical ethics,
and not all of this treatments actually worked.
Yes, yes, okay, Simon.
Nevertheless, Cade's work has arguably had
the most far-reaching effects of any discovery
in psychological medicine made by an Australian.
Weirdly specific, but okay.
I like to think that Bill Brand
and those poor guinea pigs would be happy to know
that their participation in medical history
has helped the lives of millions of people across the world.
(playful music) (injection pops)
(gentle playful music)
(logo chimes)