- Hey, smart people, Joe here. I've got a gripe, and it's about the stories that we usually tell about how things are invented. I know what you're thinking, when you're a dad like me, griping It's just what you do.
But this one's for real because if we don't understand how invention and innovation really happen, we're not gonna be ready for what's coming. (upbeat music) In the face of all of that, what do we do? We keep telling these stories about lone geniuses toiling away, all alone, just plucking a new idea out of thin air like a literal light-bulb moment, emerging against all odds with some paradigm shattering invention that will change the world or destroy it.
That's not actually how it works. And today we're gonna tear that all down. I'm gonna tell you the real story of an invention that totally changed the world, a story I guarantee you haven't heard before.
And when we're done you're gonna see that innovation isn't magic, it's a messy process, it's full of lucky coincidences, chance connections, huge cultural forces and plenty of right place, right time energy. But you don't have to take my word for it. (upbeat music) Regardless of how you feel about it, and all the politics, and conspiracies, and internet discourse, it is undeniable that the mRNA vaccine, the ones we used for COVID-19 are an invention that totally changed the world.
Here's how you might read the story of that invention in a textbook, a guy named Edward Jenner invents the first vaccine when he has this light-bulb moment and figures out how to protect folks against smallpox. And a few 100 years later, scientists find a virus, take its picture with a big machine, sequence its genome, put part of it on some mRNA, loaded in a syringe, and give that shot to everyone. A nice tidy story of a genius guy having an idea, one thing just leads to another,* And here we are, the world's a different place than it was yesterday.
Sounds pretty good, but you're gonna like my version better because it turns out we don't get mRNA vaccines without soda water, and we don't get that without inventing the battery, and we can't get to batteries without going through cows. (cow mooing) Let's begin. You know, the last time I wore this, I had this brief little freak out about why we have seven days in a week.
(indistinct) 8, 34, 17, 8, 34, 7, 7, sine. Don't fight me about Pluto today. Please get rid of Mondays.
I'm sure that's not gonna happen again. - [Narrator] A few minutes later. - You could never predict that.
Our story starts here. See, the most fashionable thing to do in 18th century Europe was catch smallpox. Smallpox was bad, it was so common.
They're like 95% of European adults caught smallpox, and like 1 in 10 died of it. English doctors had no idea what to do, so they borrowed a technique from the Turks who had gotten the idea from India or China, and they started stabbing people. (suspenseful music) Well, more or less.
See, they would dip a knife into a smallpox blister, scoop out some puss, then cut a healthy person's skin. The hope was you get like a mild case of smallpox, recover, and then be protected from it, they called it inoculation. Problem was you might also get full-blown smallpox and die.
This guy, Edward Jenner, he was one of the unlucky ones. See, young Ed, he became incredibly sick after being stabbed with smallpox puss, but he lived and he ended up becoming a scientist. Not because he wanted to cure smallpox though, the guy was into birds.
- Wow. - You see, studying animals taught him that they had a lot in common with humans when it came to biology and medicine, so Edward Jenner had this hypothesis that diseases could jump between animals and humans. So animals could also help us fight disease.
So Jenner had heard that dairy farmers and milk maids didn't get smallpox, and he figured it was because they caught a similar-looking disease called cowpox instead, (cow mooing) and that gave them immunity to smallpox. In fact, the whole pretty milkmaid trope in literature comes from the fact that they weren't covered in smallpox scars like everyone else in Europe was. So in 1796, Jenner scrapes out some cowpox puss from a milkmaid named Sarah Nelmes who'd caught it from a cow named Blossom.
Then Jenner puts that puss into the arms of 8-year-old James Phipps, the son of his gardener. Now, young James, he got a little fever from the cowpox, but he bounced back. And when he was exposed to smallpox, nothing happened, James was I immune.
This practice of inoculating people with a mild cow disease to protect them from a serious human disease became known as vaccination, for the Latin for cow, vacca which is a much better name because blossom modification doesn't exactly roll off the tongue. So Edward Jenner convinced leaders all across Europe to support vaccination, including this guy Napoleon. Napoleon vaccinated his entire army against smallpox because he actually knew that illness could be a pretty deadly weapon.
Much better, I like that cow. See, back in 1809, Napoleon had flooded the Dutch countryside with mosquitoes to wipe out the Dutch army with malaria instead of bullets. You know, biological warfare version 1.
0. Napoleon had learned about malaria from his time in Egypt where he had this rule, he had forbidden his soldiers from entering foul-smelling areas like swamps because at the time, foul smells were what everyone thought caused malaria, not mosquitoes because that's what causes malaria. In fact, Mal Aria is Italian for foul air, which was found in wet, muddy swamps along with mosquitoes.
But Napoleon isn't in the swamps when he becomes buddies with old Edward Jenner, he's at war with the British. And the British needed better weapons, and they got them thanks to this guy, John Wilkinson. See, he had figured out how to make gun barrels out of a single piece of iron, you know, so they wouldn't explode in your face, and they were a little more accurate.
That made him super duper rich. You see, that money was pretty good news for his sister Mary. You see, she had fallen in love with this broke preacher turned scientist named Joseph Priestley.
Now, Priestley was just obsessed with gas. Along with discovering oxygen, yeah, he did that. Priestley built this machine that could test if a gas was flammable by creating electric sparks.
And he was so excited about this machine that he wrote a letter to a guy named Alessandro Volta. Alessandro Volta was an Italian physicist and chemist, and this is just the spark Volta needed (crickets chirping) because Volta was investigating some foul air bubbling up from a lake in Italy, you know, malaria and all. Now, when Volta sparked this marsh gas, it exploded because it was methane and that's what methane does.
But this spark turned Volta onto electrical experiments, and he decided he needed a way to save electricity so he can use it later. So he developed a storage system that he called the voltaic pile that could store charge. But Voltaic pile doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, does it?
Enter Ben Franklin, another one of those mythical lone genius types. See, he came up with a better name for an electricity storage device, battery. And that name caught on because Ben Franklin was like Tom Cruise levels of famous because of that kite and key experiment, which did not happen the way you think it did, you can click up there for that story.
But anyway, that experiment was featured in a book about the history of electricity written by Joseph Priestley. Let me fix Tom, much better. So smallpox-hating Edward Jenner is inspired by a cow to invent vaccination.
Vaccination strengthens Napoleon's army, so he picks a fight with the British, which leads to newer, better cannons, which makes a lot of money that gasman Priestley then uses to build his spark machine, which inspires Volta to build the battery, named by Ben Franklin, who becomes a celebrity thanks to Joseph Priestley. This little innovation love triangle is just the perfect example of how scientific discoveries are a lot more messy than magical, but we're just getting started. The next stop on our journey to modern vaccine takes us past batteries and into bubbles.
Old Joseph Priestley had another habit, visiting the brewery. In between pints he noticed that there was this layer of gas above the fermentation vats. And if you held a candle or a mouse in the gas, they were both extinguished, a sick guy.
He also noticed that pouring water from glass to glass in the presence of this mystery gas made it bubbly, and a delightful little refreshment. The gas was carbon dioxide, Priestley had invented soda water, and in doing so he stumbled across a bubbly beverage gold mine. In the 1700s, people believed that drinking mineral-infused water from just the right spring could cure anything that ails you.
Problem was a lot of that spring water tasted like straight up rotten garbage. So carbonated soda water was a huge improvement, and just what the doctor ordered, literally. Johann Jacob Schwepp, he was an inventor from Geneva, Switzerland, and he figured out how to mass produce this new elixir, and it became all the rage, especially in the British Isles.
Over in Dublin, the Protestant elite were meeting at this place called the Kildare Street Club. I probably shouldn't do Irish accents anymore. Anyway, they love this stuff, and they even commissioned their own special custom bubbly water from a local drink maker.
You know what they call it? Club Soda. you know, like this one.
Ah, 'cause they were a club, and they loved soda water, Club Soda. One of the members of the Kildare Street Club is the next key player in this quest toward mRNA vaccines. Back then, you really only had three ways to take medicine.
You could swallow it, rub it on your skin, or stick it up your, you know. But in 1844 Kildare Street Club member Francis Rynd, he figured out how to inject morphine straight into a muscle by taking two really thin pieces of metal and rolling them into a sharpened tube. Then in 1855, a doctor named Alexander Wood added a syringe to that hollow needle, turning it into a delivery device for any medicine that can't go in here or back there.
From carbonated water to the hypodermic syringe needle, another very unexpected connection. You could never predict that. I feel like we need some more lines.
This is a lot. Back in 1889, many of these newfangled scientific doo-dads like syringes, and phonographs, and telephones were on display at the Paris World's Fair. But they were all eclipsed by this, the Eiffel Tower, the fair's centerpiece.
Now, at the time the Eiffel Tower was the tallest manmade structure on Earth. But did you know it was only supposed to stand for 20 years, literally until the building permit ran out? Gustave Eiffel, the guy who designed it, turned it into an indispensable scientific research station.
So France would have to keep it, it worked. Right here at the top, Gustave had this apartment put in, so scientists could work there and make things like meteorological observations, test air pressure, you know, whatever he wanted to do. But the Eiffel Tower was also essential in creating an innovation that would absolutely change the world forever, the radio Telegraph.
Imagine, it's World War I, and the wireless telegraph station in the Eiffel Tower, well, it was letting the French listen in on enemy plans. One telegraph operator was this young physicist, named Louis De Broglie, sorry to French people. Louis's brother, Maurice, had attended this conference called the Solvay Conference in 1911, all about physics.
You know who else was at that conference? Marie Curie and Albert Einstein. So old Louis became so inspired by radio technology that he started working with his brother Maurice, to crack quantum physics.
See, that old Einstein guy at the Solvay Conference? He had shown that light seemed to do this weird thing, it came in chunks or particles that he called Quanta. So inspired by that, old Louis here proved that very small things like electrons, well, they can act like particles sometimes, and also act like waves, It was a pretty good idea, and it earned him the Nobel Prize in 1929.
It gave scientists this whole new way to think about light, scientists like Ernst Ruska. Who's Ernst Ruska? Ernst Ruska built the first electron microscope in 1933.
The electron microscope let scientists see extremely tiny things by bombarding them with electron waves that are like a thousand times shorter than visible light. Now, we could see molecules, atoms, and viruses because guess what machine they used to take a picture of that old spike protein on the COVID virus? An electron microscope, which we get thanks to World War I, Louis De Broglie, the Radio telegraph and this big old tower in Paris.
So this is one of those points in our story where some very strange things come together to lead us somewhere in a beautifully unexpected way. In Germany, after World War I, a young physicist named Erwin Schrodinger had read, old Louis De Broglie's work. Hold on, need a.
(gentle music) Now, in 1933, Schrodinger left Germany because he wasn't into that Nazi stuff, and he ended up in Dublin where he delivered these lectures on how he thought physics could help us unlock the secrets of biology. One of his really great ideas was that information could be stored on molecules inside cells, and that that molecular information could even store the instructions for life kind of like a teeny tiny encyclopedia. Well, he turned those lectures into a book called "What Is Life?
" in 1944. And you know, one of the people who heard those lectures and read that book was a fellow named Francis Crick. Crick was so inspired by Schrodinger's work that he started searching for this information molecule.
And of course, with the help of a guy named James Watson and Rosalind Franklin he founded in 1953, DNA! But Crick does not stop there, in 1960, he's in his office chatting with his friend, Sydney Brenner. And during this conversation they realized that if there was an intermediate molecule of RNA that could serve as like a messenger between DNA and making proteins, well, that'd be pretty cool.
Later that year Brenner confirmed the existence of Messenger RNA, mRNA. And in 1961, he and Crick showed that the protein instructions that are contained on mRNA were written in this three letter code. Now, we finally have all of this scientific ingredients that we need to make an mRNA vaccine.
We've got the concept of vaccination, the hypodermic needle, electron microscope, mRNA. This is how invention happens, folks. We couldn't have done it without Edward Jenner, Sarah Nelmes, James Phipps, Napoleon, John Wilkins, Joseph Priestley, top, Ben Franklin, and of course, we can't forget Soda Man, Schwepp, Francis Rynd and the Kildare Club, Alexander Wood, Gustave, Eiffel, the brothers, De Broglie, Albert Einstein, Ernst Ruska, Erwin Schrödinger, Francis Crick Rosalind Franklin, Sydney Brenner, and a whole lot of other scientists and regular people chasing their curiosity.
Oh, and one very heroic cow named Blossom. Much better. (cow mooing) That is a long list of connections.
Many of them are at the very least lucky, you'd be pretty hard-pressed to predict that any of that was gonna happen, but it did happen. That is how innovation works, not like this. (glass crackling) (cat meowing) This lone genius myth isn't just a total lie, it's bad for all of us.
It can keep people like you and me from following our curiosity to find new solutions to problems, especially if we don't feel genius-y enough. When in reality, what made the difference for all the people on this list was doing just that, keeping their minds open to learning something new when they least expected it, and from where they least expected it. That's what curiosity looks like.
You know, I think the worst part of this innovation myth is that it makes science sound like it works in this straight line, from idea to genius to solution. But real innovation isn't linear though, it involves a lot of ideas connecting in some pretty unclear ways, looping in and around each other, and till just the right concepts connect in just the right way at just the right time, thanks to forces like culture and coincidence. These are things you can never predict, but you can make yourself ready for when they do happen.
You know, for some reason though we still keep coming back to this idea that real innovators are these larger than life people with access to like a secret store of magical shower thoughts, that leaves out a lot of the story. Some might even say the best part of the story. Stay curious.
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Yeah, that's what I thought. Hey guys, one more thing before you go. We're really excited to tell you that PBS has a whole new slate of science shows coming to PBS Terra.
There's gonna be a series on animals, climate, scientific discoveries, and more. It's a whole festival of science happening over there, and I'm especially excited for "Hungry Planet" where you'll join Plant geneticist Niba as she journeys across the country exploring how food scientists, agriculture, and communities are working together to feed our changing world. There's a link down in the description, we hope you'll check it out.
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