Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of
Speaker 1: My Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb, and I'm Joe McCormick. And
Speaker 1: today I wanted to start off by talking about something
Speaker 1: that may have come up in the past on the
Speaker 1: show before. I don't quite remember, but I don't think
Speaker 1: we've ever gone into great detail on it. So there
Speaker 1: is this popular chemistry prank that that goes something like this.
Speaker 1: You you approach somebody with a petition or a public
Speaker 1: service announcement. Uh. And if I could do the Donald
Speaker 1: pleasants like Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water Voice, I
Speaker 1: would do this. But just imagine it. Can you imagine
Speaker 1: I'm Donald Pleasant saying this to you? What if I
Speaker 1: told you there was a household chemical present in more
Speaker 1: than of homes in America which is used as an
Speaker 1: an ingredient in everything from packaged foods to cleaning products
Speaker 1: to children's medicine. And yet this chemical has been proven
Speaker 1: to cause severe burns to the skin and mouth, can
Speaker 1: be lethal if it's inhaled, and is the primary constituent
Speaker 1: in acid rain. According to historical sources, this was the
Speaker 1: main ingredient in the poison that Socrates drank to commit
Speaker 1: suicide after his trial and Athens. It's so corrosive that
Speaker 1: it can eat holes in solid iron, and yet we
Speaker 1: expose our bodies to this chemical every time we have
Speaker 1: a cup of tea or take a shower. Studies have
Speaker 1: found that trace amounts of this compound linger in our
Speaker 1: decomposing bodies, even for months after we die. It is
Speaker 1: so addictive that the average human cannot at this point
Speaker 1: survive more than a few days without receiving a dose.
Speaker 1: This chemical is called dihydrogen monoxide, and it has already
Speaker 1: been found in nearly every natural environment on Earth, and
Speaker 1: if we don't ban it soon, there will not be
Speaker 1: a single patch of the planet left uncontaminated. Now, there
Speaker 1: are million versions of this, but a lot of them
Speaker 1: will ask people to kind of sign on and be like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, we've got to get this thing out of
Speaker 1: our out of our homes and all that. Yeah, because
Speaker 1: then it's clearly we're talking about something that's a threat
Speaker 1: to the children, uh, to America, to life as we
Speaker 1: know it. And it's it's funny because when I think
Speaker 1: about this prank, so obviously the joke is that what
Speaker 1: it's talking about is water. And so it's a joke
Speaker 1: that works on several levels. For one, it's an example
Speaker 1: of how even technically true statements can be extremely misleading
Speaker 1: without being put in the proper context. Uh. And I
Speaker 1: think it's also just used to sometimes suggest that people
Speaker 1: should get like better education and chemistry in the natural sciences,
Speaker 1: which sure, you know, fair enough, I also wish I
Speaker 1: was better educated in chemistry. But I think it's on
Speaker 1: the other side it it does take advantage of something
Speaker 1: that is a totally justified anxiety that people have about
Speaker 1: chemistry in the natural world and especially the modern world,
Speaker 1: because when we make decisions about deadly risks about physical
Speaker 1: cause and effect, you know, our intuitions and our knowledge
Speaker 1: about how things work are are strongly biased towards perceiving
Speaker 1: physical threats within what you might call like the Newtonian
Speaker 1: physical domain, like threats from big moving objects somewhere between
Speaker 1: the size of a pebble and a landslide. But especially
Speaker 1: since the Industrial Revolution, the world is also full of
Speaker 1: chemical threats that are really somewhat invisible in this respect,
Speaker 1: like they don't really show up on the Newtonian physical domain.
Speaker 1: And so we've got some natural defenses against chemical threats
Speaker 1: like this. We've got our senses of taste and smell,
Speaker 1: and we have some aversion reactions in like our digestive
Speaker 1: system or respiration system. Like sometimes you detect a noxious
Speaker 1: chemical and you bar where you start coughing or something.
Speaker 1: Our our bodies can can help detect and reject things.
Speaker 1: But we all know by this point that there are
Speaker 1: in fact extremely dangerous chemicals that are essentially undetectable to
Speaker 1: our senses, either because they have no strong smell or taste,
Speaker 1: or the relevant doses are so tiny that we wouldn't
Speaker 1: notice them before it's too late, or because maybe they
Speaker 1: don't have an effect until they've had until you've had
Speaker 1: extreme repeated exposure or consumed the lots of chemicals we're
Speaker 1: gonna be talking about one of the latter today, and
Speaker 1: so this is the kind of compound that we're going
Speaker 1: to be getting into. A chemical that has proven fascinating
Speaker 1: and very useful, but also strangely dangerous depending on the context.
Speaker 1: A sort of Dopple gang or of water. The wetness
Speaker 1: of the shadow realm. Today, I wanted to talk about
Speaker 1: heavy water, and it is heavy, literally heavy but I
Speaker 1: want to want to say this is not to be
Speaker 1: confused with hardwater. Uh So, if you're out there listening,
Speaker 1: we're talking about heavy water, not hardwater. Hard water is
Speaker 1: just water with high mineral content. Oh is that what
Speaker 1: it is? I think I literally didn't know that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is the one that, like, you know, they can
Speaker 1: can mess with how your soap SuDS up, that sort
Speaker 1: of thing. Oh okay. Uh though some people like it
Speaker 1: because it makes their hair look good, right or at
Speaker 1: least yeah, I don't know. It's one of those things.
Speaker 1: I don't have a lot of experience with it or
Speaker 1: maybe really even knowledge of of hard water. So when
Speaker 1: you brought up this topic, I initially thought you were
Speaker 1: talking about doing, uh an episode or episodes about hard water.
Speaker 1: But it's not hard water. Again heavy water. The washers
Speaker 1: in your shower will really rust after this episode. Alright,
Speaker 1: So for the rest of the episode, we're going to
Speaker 1: discuss a few things that that we found interesting about
Speaker 1: heavy water, its role in the natural world and history,
Speaker 1: and maybe the question of whether you should drink it.
Speaker 1: Um So at the molecular level, as we all know,
Speaker 1: regular water is made of two hydrogen atoms and one
Speaker 1: oxygen atom. It's H two O, and this trifled structure
Speaker 1: makes for a really amazing and powerful polar molecule that
Speaker 1: acts as kind of master solvent that makes life itself possible.
Speaker 1: Every cell in your body depends on the particular kular
Speaker 1: chemical properties of this molecule. Without H two O, nothing
Speaker 1: in the organic world works. Now. Heavy water is an
Speaker 1: alternative form of the same molecule which relies on a
Speaker 1: different isotope of the hydrogen atom, known as deuterium. A
Speaker 1: normal hydrogen atom also known as protium, just to distinguish
Speaker 1: it from deuterium, is composed of two sub atomic particles.
Speaker 1: So it's got a nucleus that is just one single
Speaker 1: proton and nothing else that has a positive charge, and
Speaker 1: then orbiting that it's got one single electron which has
Speaker 1: a negative charge. Deuterium adds a third element to the mix.
Speaker 1: It adds a single neutron to the nucleus of the
Speaker 1: hydrogen atom. Uh. Now, again, this makes it an isotope
Speaker 1: of hydrogen, and isotope is a is a version of
Speaker 1: an atom that has a different than usual number of
Speaker 1: neutrons in the nucleus, and a new a neutron doesn't
Speaker 1: have a charge, but it does have mass, so an
Speaker 1: atom of deterium is almost twice as heavy as an
Speaker 1: a time of ordinary hydrogen. Deuterium is a stable isotope,
Speaker 1: and it is found in nature. It's not something that's
Speaker 1: just a product of the Industrial Revolution or of nuclear
Speaker 1: reactors or something like that. It's found all throughout water
Speaker 1: in the Solar System, it's found all throughout Earth's oceans.
Speaker 1: Roughly one out of every sixty hydrogen atoms in the
Speaker 1: ocean is actually deuterium. So if deuterium occurs in nature,
Speaker 1: you might wonder, well, where does it come from? With
Speaker 1: most other elements, you can trace their origin to some
Speaker 1: form of nucleosynthesis within stars or during high energy events
Speaker 1: like supernova. However, almost all of the deuterium found in
Speaker 1: nature is a leftover product of the Big Bang. These
Speaker 1: atomic nuclei are not generated by stars, or when they are,
Speaker 1: they're usually destroyed soon after they're created. They've been the
Speaker 1: way they are for thirteen point eight billion years, and
Speaker 1: on Earth, one major place to find hydrogen is bound
Speaker 1: up in water molecules. So in most ways, deuterium behaves
Speaker 1: chemically the same as ordinary hydrogen, so deterium gets locked
Speaker 1: up into water molecules, uh, and it just floats around
Speaker 1: there in the ocean. The technical name for a water
Speaker 1: molecule with deuterium in place of hydrogen is deuterium oxide
Speaker 1: or D two oh. So if you ever seen D
Speaker 1: two oh written out, that means heavy water water molecule
Speaker 1: with deuterium instead of regular hydrogen. It's also sometimes called
Speaker 1: deuterated water, but more commonly it's just known as heavy water. Now,
Speaker 1: as I've said, in many ways, deuterium behaves just like
Speaker 1: protium hydrogen, and so in many ways heavy water blends
Speaker 1: in with and behaves like regular water, but not in
Speaker 1: every way. And a lot of what we're gonna be
Speaker 1: doing in this episode is exploring some of the fascinating
Speaker 1: and historically relevant and weird differences between regular water and
Speaker 1: heavy water. That's right. So one good place to start
Speaker 1: here and that the history of the discovery of heavy
Speaker 1: water is to go back to nineteen That's when chemist
Speaker 1: Author Lamb and Richard Lean of New York University tried
Speaker 1: to define the density of pure water and they kept
Speaker 1: getting varying results, which ultimately paved the road for the
Speaker 1: discovery of isotopes. That's variant those are variants of particular
Speaker 1: chemical elements due to differences in neutrons. And then also
Speaker 1: the discovery of heavy water itself. And this is key
Speaker 1: because because again heavy water isn't something that's you know,
Speaker 1: entirely man made or anything like that. It's in water.
Speaker 1: It just constitutes one part in four thousand, five hundred. Yes,
Speaker 1: that that's correct. Now about that number. I was wondering
Speaker 1: about the ratios here because I saw I've seen that
Speaker 1: that ratio one ind and I've also seen the ratio
Speaker 1: of one out of every sixty four hundred UM. Like.
Speaker 1: For example, of one important publication on the evidence for
Speaker 1: the existence of heavy hydrogen back in one which was
Speaker 1: published in the journal Physical Review, was a letter by
Speaker 1: the American chemist Harold C. Yuri which pegged deuterium as
Speaker 1: one out of every hydrogen atoms. But I've also seen
Speaker 1: it published elsewhere that it's it's now thought that at
Speaker 1: least one out of every sixty four D or I
Speaker 1: think more more like sixty twenty or sixty four fifty
Speaker 1: water molecules in Earth's ocean are heavy water UM. So
Speaker 1: I don't know if those numbers represents some kind of
Speaker 1: conflict or if one represents a genuine difference in what
Speaker 1: you'd find in the water molecules in the ocean versus
Speaker 1: what you'd find just in hydrogen. More broadly, I'm not
Speaker 1: quite sure about that, but the point either way is
Speaker 1: that UH is that deuterium is found in nature but
Speaker 1: only in a in a very small proportion of hydrogen.
Speaker 1: And thus heavy water is found in nature but only
Speaker 1: in a very small proportion. It's one out of thousands
Speaker 1: of molecules. Yeah. So it's kind of like if we
Speaker 1: had like a cash only society and you had some
Speaker 1: heavy nickels, they're right where the nickel itself like it's
Speaker 1: it's not it's not worth more, it's not. It's still
Speaker 1: just worth five cents, and factors into the figuring that way.
Speaker 1: But you can imagine scenarios where extra heavy nickels in enough.
Speaker 1: Uh you know, if there are enough of them within
Speaker 1: a larger amount of nickels, that could have an impact
Speaker 1: on things, etcetera. Or if you get into a situation
Speaker 1: sort of this will discuss where people are like, oh man,
Speaker 1: these heavy nickels are great, I've got to get more
Speaker 1: of them. Can I like syth them out of the
Speaker 1: existing Uh, cash population of the existing world nickels. Can
Speaker 1: I make normal nickels into heavy nickels, etcetera. That's very good, Yeah,
Speaker 1: and you could. I can imagine you'd run into unforeseen
Speaker 1: problems if you suddenly decided you wanted to base your
Speaker 1: entire economy on heavy nickels, or I don't know, maybe
Speaker 1: a third of your economy. Uh, that'll tie into something
Speaker 1: we get into in a minute. So I mentioned him
Speaker 1: just a minute ago, that the American chemist Harold c Uri.
Speaker 1: I hope I'm saying his name right, you are, e
Speaker 1: y Uh. He's a very important figure in the discovery
Speaker 1: of deuterium. He usually gets credit along with his collaborators
Speaker 1: for proving the existence of deuterium through spectral copic experiments
Speaker 1: in nineteen thirty one, and he received the Nobel Prize
Speaker 1: for his discovery in nineteen thirty four. But I thought
Speaker 1: it would be useful to just look at a couple
Speaker 1: of the physical properties of heavy water. So one of
Speaker 1: the key differences between heavy water and ordinary water is
Speaker 1: that heavy water is literally heavier because of the extra
Speaker 1: neutrons in the deuterium. You remember, a deuterium atom is
Speaker 1: almost twice as heavy as a regular hydrogen atom. Because
Speaker 1: of that D two oh is about ten percent heavier
Speaker 1: than an equal quantity of regular water. And you might wonder,
Speaker 1: a wait a minute, why only ten percent heavier rather
Speaker 1: than double. The way We'll remember, oxygen with eight protons
Speaker 1: and eight neutrons makes up the bulk of the mass
Speaker 1: of a normal water molecule. It's got oxygen and then
Speaker 1: the lighter hydrogen atom. So you're only increasing the weight
Speaker 1: of UH two of the three atoms and the two
Speaker 1: smaller ones in the water molecule. So so it's ten
Speaker 1: percent heavier. And this results in some very interesting party
Speaker 1: trick potential. For example, regular ice always floats in water,
Speaker 1: but with deuterium, if you make a heavy water ice cube,
Speaker 1: it will sink in water because it's got a greater
Speaker 1: density than the surrounding water. Also, heavy water is more
Speaker 1: viscous than regular water. It's a little bit uh it's
Speaker 1: gonna be a little bit more like a like a jelly,
Speaker 1: and maybe not to a you know, physically perceptible extent
Speaker 1: if you were to hold it in your hands, but
Speaker 1: it is more viscous, which would probably have measurable effects
Speaker 1: if say the oceans were entirely made of deuterium. Yes,
Speaker 1: and this is this is a great question that that
Speaker 1: had been asked on the Internet already. I think it
Speaker 1: originally showed up in as a Cora question, Oh what
Speaker 1: would the ocean be like if it was made out
Speaker 1: of heavy water? And uh and is is sometimes the
Speaker 1: case on Cora. You had a really insightful answer pop up,
Speaker 1: this one from Josh Velson, chemical engineering consultant for bio
Speaker 1: and petro chemicals, and it it was such a neat
Speaker 1: answer that it was actually featured on Slate as well. Uh,
Speaker 1: So I recommend checking that out. But but I want
Speaker 1: to touch on some of the main point that Nelson makes,
Speaker 1: and I want to stress this would be if there
Speaker 1: is a magical instant change, you know, like snap your fingers. Now,
Speaker 1: our oceans are just all heavy water. So it's not
Speaker 1: a realistic scenario, but it's one of those thought experiment
Speaker 1: scenarios that I think helps to underline what we're talking
Speaker 1: about here with heavy water and how it affects It
Speaker 1: would affect you know, various systems. So, first of all,
Speaker 1: since any given portion of the water out there in
Speaker 1: the oceans would be ten point six percent heavier, Velson
Speaker 1: says that anything swimming outside of its pressure zone would
Speaker 1: basically be instantly crushed. Now we've discussed on the show before. However,
Speaker 1: you take certain deep sea organisms and you bring them
Speaker 1: up into shallower waters, you have some exploding effects that
Speaker 1: take place. And likewise, if you take something from shallower
Speaker 1: waters and plunge it down into the depths, there can
Speaker 1: be a crushing scenario. But this just means everything, uh
Speaker 1: that these sort of things would be, uh, are more exaggerated. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I didn't even consider this. But so if the ocean
Speaker 1: is suddenly about ten percent heavier at the molecular level,
Speaker 1: the pressure at the bottom of the ocean would also
Speaker 1: be a lot higher. So so you're suddenly down there
Speaker 1: and it's like somebody's just like put an extra backpack
Speaker 1: on you. Yeah. Absolutely. Also, Velson says that everything floating
Speaker 1: in the ocean would displace more mass, so ships would
Speaker 1: need extra ballast to stay at the same level in
Speaker 1: a heavy water ocean. And then this is interesting, Velson writes, quote,
Speaker 1: a large portion of the oceans would freeze instantly due
Speaker 1: to a higher freezing point. This would release a lot
Speaker 1: of heat into the atmosphere in the polar regions, causing
Speaker 1: a massive imbalance and resulting in some pretty spectacular polar
Speaker 1: cyclones unquote. Well, and then on top of this, the
Speaker 1: mass of the planet would change, This would alter the
Speaker 1: Moon's orbit, and basically it would just mess with weather
Speaker 1: and climate in a major way, resulting in earthquakes, tidal way,
Speaker 1: it's rising sea levels. But of course, to change the
Speaker 1: ocean is to change life as well. So we'll come
Speaker 1: back to this and I'll come back to Nelson's points
Speaker 1: in a debt. Thank alright. So I know what you
Speaker 1: out there are already wondering, Should I drink it? Heavy water?
Speaker 1: Should I? Should I? You know, get a big bucket
Speaker 1: of it and just gulp, gulp, gulp. It sounds like
Speaker 1: the the ultimate metal head like bottled water, right, heavy water?
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, they would sell it at the metal shows.
Speaker 1: That's really good. So there's actually a great article about
Speaker 1: the history of drinking heavy water in the journal Nature
Speaker 1: Chemistry by the American chemist Michelle Francel. We actually quoted
Speaker 1: a piece by her, uh at some point in the
Speaker 1: past year, because she wrote a thing that we did
Speaker 1: for Cupid's Lead and Narrow. That was it. She wrote
Speaker 1: an article about the history of sugar of lead as
Speaker 1: it was used in ancient Rome. That was really good.
Speaker 1: But this piece is called The Weight of Water. So
Speaker 1: it's published in Nature Chemistry in twenty nineteen. So she
Speaker 1: begins the story in nineteen thirteen talking about when the
Speaker 1: Hungarian chemist George to Heavis She was visiting the lab
Speaker 1: of Ernest Rutherford in Manchester, England. Now, eventually both of
Speaker 1: these scientists would have Nobel Prizes for their discoveries, but
Speaker 1: at this point Rutherford was the was the senior scientist,
Speaker 1: and Heavis she was more of a young student, you know.
Speaker 1: He was still learned in the ropes. And Rutherford had
Speaker 1: given Heavis she a task here. He wanted to get
Speaker 1: him to take a quantity of lead and find a
Speaker 1: way to chemically isolate all of the radioactive atoms of
Speaker 1: what was then known as radium D from the lead
Speaker 1: in this sample. And Heavis she was unable to find
Speaker 1: a way to do this because what they were calling
Speaker 1: radium D was actually not radium, but a radioactive isotope
Speaker 1: of lead that is now known as lead to ten.
Speaker 1: But in the process of working on this problem that
Speaker 1: he never ended up solving, he is She realized a
Speaker 1: potentially very interesting implication of this failure. When a sample
Speaker 1: contains a radioisotope, a radioactive atom within a massive other atoms,
Speaker 1: you can use these radioactive atoms to track the movement
Speaker 1: of a chemical through a biological system. So, for example,
Speaker 1: if you're curious how lead in the soil is taken
Speaker 1: up by bean plants and then distributed around the plant's body,
Speaker 1: you can spike the soil with radioactive isotopes of lead,
Speaker 1: so the plant will take them up because they're still lead,
Speaker 1: it will treat them the way it normally treats lead,
Speaker 1: but because they're radioactive, they're radioisotopes, you can track what
Speaker 1: the plant is doing them with them. You can use
Speaker 1: equipment to track exactly how these isotopes are metabolized through
Speaker 1: the roots, the stem, the leaves, and you can also
Speaker 1: use these radioactive tracers to track the absorption and elimination
Speaker 1: of elements in animal bodies. So you could find out, well,
Speaker 1: when when somebody ingests lead, does the body immediately purge
Speaker 1: it or does the lead stick around? How long does
Speaker 1: it take the body to purge it? Where does it
Speaker 1: go in the body. And it turns out you can
Speaker 1: use radioactive tracers to find out lots of things about
Speaker 1: what's going on in the body, not just in basic
Speaker 1: biological research, but actually in medicine. Radioactive tracers are used
Speaker 1: in medicine all the time. Now Here, I wanted to
Speaker 1: mention a couple of anecdotes that came across about heavys
Speaker 1: She that are really interesting. He seems like a kind
Speaker 1: of mythic hero in a way, a sort of Romulus
Speaker 1: or Gilgamesh here, or maybe we should say Bill Gamesh,
Speaker 1: uh Bill Gamesh to heav is She. So there were
Speaker 1: a couple of the most popular stories about his life
Speaker 1: that that I I couldn't pass up mentioning. The first
Speaker 1: one I found recounted in a short historical article in
Speaker 1: the Journal of Nuclear Cardiology, and it concerns how heavy
Speaker 1: she first demonstrated that tracer principle that I was just
Speaker 1: talking about. So this is by Strauss at all, uh
Speaker 1: from and the authors here talk about while heaves She
Speaker 1: was working in Manchester in lab in the early nineteen tens,
Speaker 1: he was living at a boarding house that had been
Speaker 1: recommended to him by Rutherford. By the way, so his
Speaker 1: boss is like, hey live in this place, and apparently
Speaker 1: it was just miserable there, he is. She started noticing
Speaker 1: that he didn't just hate his lodgings, he really hated
Speaker 1: the food at his boarding house. He had a sensitive stomach,
Speaker 1: he suffered from indigestion, and he started to suspect something
Speaker 1: was going on. What he thought was happening was that, uh,
Speaker 1: now this is an old school boarding house, right, so
Speaker 1: they give you not just a bed, but a bed
Speaker 1: and your daily meals. And he started to suspect that
Speaker 1: his landlady was recycling food. So you know, she makes
Speaker 1: you a great R. B. Frost and then you eat
Speaker 1: a little bit of it and you don't finish it.
Speaker 1: There's some still on your plate, he is. She suspected
Speaker 1: that the landlady was just taking whatever you couldn't finish
Speaker 1: off of your plate and then taking it back to
Speaker 1: the kitchen and then mixing it up and serving it
Speaker 1: again in some disgyised form the next day. Well, that's
Speaker 1: just being a good mom. You know. You can appreciate,
Speaker 1: you know, of refraining from food waste here. But he is.
Speaker 1: She was not happy with it because I think the
Speaker 1: problem was the beef was already suffering from freshness problems
Speaker 1: and was was being recycled to the point of possible
Speaker 1: food poisoning. So at some point, uh he called. He
Speaker 1: brought this up with his landlady to read from the
Speaker 1: article here quote. His suggestion that she served freshly prepared
Speaker 1: meat more than once a week was met with indignation.
Speaker 1: How could he, she insisted, accuse her of serving anything
Speaker 1: but the freshest of ingredients. Uh, so have is? She
Speaker 1: decided to put this claim to the test using a
Speaker 1: really amazing method, in fact, using some of the exact
Speaker 1: same techniques that he had just been discovering recently in
Speaker 1: Rutherford's lab that we were just talking about. So one Sunday,
Speaker 1: when he is she had eaten as much as he could,
Speaker 1: he secretly spiked the food left on his plate with
Speaker 1: a number of radioactive isotopes. And I'm just gonna read
Speaker 1: from the article here quote. A few days later, the
Speaker 1: electroscope he smuggled into the dining room revealed the presence
Speaker 1: of the tracer radioactive HASH. Confronted with the irrefutable evidence,
Speaker 1: all the landlady could do was exclaim, this is magic.
Speaker 1: The first radio tracer investigation had successfully followed leftover meat
Speaker 1: from the Sunday meal to the kitchen meat grinder, into
Speaker 1: the hashpot, and back into the dining room table. So
Speaker 1: when in doubt, you know, spike your food with radio isotopes. Truly,
Speaker 1: this is one of the great adventures in science right here.
Speaker 1: There's actually a much higher stakes one though, that's a
Speaker 1: story about Heaves. She's life from World War two. So uh,
Speaker 1: there's a there's a great NPR piece about this from
Speaker 1: two thousand eleven by Robert Cruel, which that I'm relying
Speaker 1: on here. I can't say the title or it will
Speaker 1: ruin the story, but it goes like this. So in
Speaker 1: the summer of nineteen forty heavy she was working at
Speaker 1: an institute in Copenhagen, in the laboratory of the great
Speaker 1: physicist Niels Boor. Uh Denmark had been invaded by the
Speaker 1: Nazis earlier that year, I think that was in April
Speaker 1: of nineteen forty, and it was now occupied with German
Speaker 1: troops raiding homes and marching in the streets, and they
Speaker 1: just arrived in Copenhagen later in the summer when the
Speaker 1: story takes place. So at the time, Nils Boor is
Speaker 1: in possession of two gold medals. They are Nobel prizes.
Speaker 1: In fact, which are made of twenty three care at gold.
Speaker 1: But they're not his. They belonged to two German physicists,
Speaker 1: Max von Laua and James Frank, who were both at
Speaker 1: risk within Germany. Frank himself was Jewish and von Laua
Speaker 1: was not, but he was known for his very fierce
Speaker 1: opposition to the Nazi Party. Now they had sent their
Speaker 1: Nobel medals secretly to Boor's institute for safe keeping. But
Speaker 1: here we're faced with a problem. At the time, Germany
Speaker 1: was at war and it was actually illegal to remove
Speaker 1: gold from the country, So by sending their gold medals
Speaker 1: to Boor's lab, Frank and von Laua had committed what
Speaker 1: would probably be a capital offense back home. And worse,
Speaker 1: it couldn't really be covered up because their names were
Speaker 1: engraved on the gold medals. So Boor and his colleagues
Speaker 1: were thinking, oh no, if if our institute is raided
Speaker 1: and uh, it probably will be Born knew his lab
Speaker 1: would be searched because it was known to be a
Speaker 1: safe haven for Jewish scientists and and other people opposed
Speaker 1: to the Nazis who were fleeing fleeing the Nazis, they
Speaker 1: had come to his institute and now they were occupied.
Speaker 1: Um so Boor realized they had to do something to
Speaker 1: hide these medals because if they were discovered, you know,
Speaker 1: these scientists back in Germany would probably be put to death.
Speaker 1: So Boor and his colleague at the time, Heavish, discussed
Speaker 1: their options. They thought about maybe we could bury it,
Speaker 1: bury it in the gardens, but they worried that the
Speaker 1: Nazis would dig all over the grounds and probably find them.
Speaker 1: And then Heavys she came up an amazing solution, uh literally,
Speaker 1: a solution dissolve the metals. This was not easy since
Speaker 1: gold is not very reactive, it's difficult to dissolve. But
Speaker 1: Heavish she knew that there was a solution that would
Speaker 1: do the trick, known as aqua reggia, which is a
Speaker 1: mixture of hydrochloric acid and nitric acid and a three
Speaker 1: to one ratio. Usually so here, I just want to
Speaker 1: read from the NPR piece, and Heavish in his autobiography
Speaker 1: says because gold is quote exceedingly unreactive and difficult to dissolve,
Speaker 1: it was slow going, but as the minutes ticked down,
Speaker 1: both metals were reduced to a colorless solution that turned
Speaker 1: faintly peach and then bright orange. By the time the
Speaker 1: Nazis arrived, both awards had liquefied inside a flask that
Speaker 1: was then stashed on a high laboratory shelf. Then, says
Speaker 1: science writer and Radio Lab contributor Sam Keene in his
Speaker 1: book The Disappearing Spoon quote, when the Nazis ransacked Bares Institute,
Speaker 1: they scoured the building for loot or evidence of wrongdoing,
Speaker 1: but left the beaker of orange Aqua regia untouched. Hev
Speaker 1: she was forced to flee to Stockholm in nineteen forty three,
Speaker 1: but when he returned to his battered laboratory on v Day,
Speaker 1: he found the innocuous beaker undisturbed on a shelf. And
Speaker 1: there's a codage of the story that's pretty interesting. So
Speaker 1: after the war was over, heavy She again used chemistry
Speaker 1: to re extract the same gold from the beakers, had
Speaker 1: that sent to Stockholm, where it was reformed into new
Speaker 1: medals that were again presented to the original recipients. Interesting,
Speaker 1: I mean, kind of unnecessary. I guess that the same
Speaker 1: gold to actually go back to create the you know,
Speaker 1: the same awards, but still neat. It's got that magic thing,
Speaker 1: you know, people always want to like melt down a
Speaker 1: symbol of one thing and turn it into another. I
Speaker 1: guess in this case it was melting down a symbol
Speaker 1: of one thing and turning it back into itself, but
Speaker 1: still has some of the same kind of symbolic weight there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's kind of a you know, sitcom level um circular
Speaker 1: motion to the whole thing. Right, we come back at
Speaker 1: the end of the day, we still have the same words. Again,
Speaker 1: they've been reformed into the same thing we're familiar with. Yeah, totally.
Speaker 1: But coming back from from those anecdotes so so so
Speaker 1: now we got an idea of heavs She the character
Speaker 1: hes She, the mythic hero. His life actually also ties
Speaker 1: into heavy Water. So there was one day in Manchester
Speaker 1: in the early nineteen tens where heavy She was having
Speaker 1: a cup of tea with the English physicist Henry Moseley,
Speaker 1: and at the time heavy She was pursuing his radioactive
Speaker 1: tracer experiments with plants, the ones that I was talking
Speaker 1: about earlier, like the bean plants and seeing how they
Speaker 1: take up lead and and all that. Uh So, the
Speaker 1: idea was again that you could learn how elements from
Speaker 1: the soil are metabolized in plant bodies by studying this
Speaker 1: with with radioactive tracers, and apparently heav is she and Moseley,
Speaker 1: we're getting all riled up about this idea, and he
Speaker 1: is She posed a question about whether it would be
Speaker 1: possible to ever mark the water molecules in a cup
Speaker 1: of tea with some kind of tracer that could track
Speaker 1: those molecules throughout the human body. And at the time
Speaker 1: they did not know of a way to do this
Speaker 1: with water molecules. But a couple of decades later, chemistry
Speaker 1: would come around with an answer in the form of
Speaker 1: discoveries by Harold Yuri, which we talked about previously, of
Speaker 1: heavy water. So not long after the existence of heavy
Speaker 1: water based on deuterium was confirmed in the lab, a
Speaker 1: number of world class scientists decided, well, to hell with it,
Speaker 1: you know, let's let's put it in our mouths and
Speaker 1: see what happens. It was. It was a different time
Speaker 1: of experimental regimes. And it's also funny because if you
Speaker 1: read the scientific papers of the time, often they're just
Speaker 1: like a paragraph long. They're just like, here's what we did,
Speaker 1: here's what it tasted like. Nobody died. So in the
Speaker 1: year ninety four, Harold Ury sent George to Heavish a
Speaker 1: sample of water that had been enriched to zero point
Speaker 1: five percent duterations. Remember, of this water is still the
Speaker 1: regular stuff, but this would nevertheless represent a much higher
Speaker 1: concentration of heavy water than a normal glass, right, and
Speaker 1: that percentage is worth keeping in mind for later when
Speaker 1: we're talking about higher percentages in the human body. Right.
Speaker 1: So heav is She and his assistant Eric Hawfer decided
Speaker 1: to test the effects of a deuterium enriched aquatic environment
Speaker 1: on goldfish. So they took twenty small goldfish and immersed
Speaker 1: them temporarily but for steadily increasing periods of time in
Speaker 1: the deutorated water. Uh and so, to read from francel
Speaker 1: here quote, the overcrowded goldfish rapidly exchanged water with the
Speaker 1: deutorated water in the bowl, which became miserably less dense,
Speaker 1: noting no change in the behavior of the zero point
Speaker 1: two percent deutorated goldfish. Though how this might be assessed
Speaker 1: with so many goldfish stuffed into a small glass for
Speaker 1: up to fifteen hours at a time is unclear. Have
Speaker 1: She apparently concluded it was safe to drink the heavy
Speaker 1: water and proceeded to run the experiment. He described Mosley
Speaker 1: twenty years before. So the rationale here is, Okay, it
Speaker 1: seems good enough for a goldfish, good enough for me.
Speaker 1: I'm going to try it too well. But I like
Speaker 1: that francel brings up again, like it's not exactly clear
Speaker 1: how they were judging what the effects on goldfish were,
Speaker 1: given that they were like cramming lots of goldfish in
Speaker 1: a very small container of water. I guess they observed
Speaker 1: that the goldfish were not dead, right, I mean, if
Speaker 1: you're looking for them to like die instantly or explode
Speaker 1: or something. Yeah, So it's not clear exactly whether heavys
Speaker 1: She or Hoefer did the drinking, but one of them did,
Speaker 1: and they consumed a couple of the samples. They collected
Speaker 1: the heavy water from the drinker's urine, distilled it, and
Speaker 1: measured its density, and about twenty minutes after the chugging,
Speaker 1: deuterated water started showing up in the urine. And in
Speaker 1: this experiment, heavys She and Hopfer found that the average
Speaker 1: molecule of swallowed water lingers in a human body a
Speaker 1: lot longer than it lingers in goldfish and humans. The
Speaker 1: metabolic half life of a dose of water is about
Speaker 1: nine days according to the test at least. But the
Speaker 1: big question I guess is were they okay? Well, if not,
Speaker 1: they didn't report anything. There was no sickness, also no
Speaker 1: notes about what the water tasted like. So after heavys
Speaker 1: She and Hoper published their paper on deuterium as a
Speaker 1: tracer for water and animal bodies, another professor decided to
Speaker 1: follow up by by addressing the question of toxicity head on. Now, obviously,
Speaker 1: whichever one of the the h is drank the heavy
Speaker 1: water was all right. But this wasn't an extremely deluded
Speaker 1: form was a small amount of it. A professor named
Speaker 1: Klaus Hanson of Oslo University performed a toxicity test on
Speaker 1: himself in front of an audience including the press and
Speaker 1: a bunch of medical professionals, with equipment standing by like
Speaker 1: stomach pumps and stuff, and Hansen swallowed what Francill characterizes
Speaker 1: as a quote scant teaspoonful of heavy water. Now it
Speaker 1: turned out the life support equipment was not needed. Hansen
Speaker 1: was fine, though he did report what he called a
Speaker 1: dry burning sensation after swallowing um. And then Harold c
Speaker 1: Uri at Columbia University and his colleague Geno Fhaila decided
Speaker 1: to follow up on this by staging a blind taste test.
Speaker 1: So this is going to be like the Pepsi challenge,
Speaker 1: but for juterium. Uh. And they published the results in
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty five in a paper called concerning the Taste
Speaker 1: of Heavy Water. As I mentioned, sometimes papers were very
Speaker 1: short back then, so I can actually just read the
Speaker 1: entire second paragraph of their paper here Tasting notes for
Speaker 1: heavy water. Right, Okay, so here's what they said. In
Speaker 1: order to make the experiment as objective as possible, a
Speaker 1: third person in a different room prepared the samples to
Speaker 1: be tasted. Each of us was then given two identical
Speaker 1: watch glasses, one containing one cubic centimeter of ordinary distilled
Speaker 1: water and the other the same amount of pure heavy water,
Speaker 1: especially prepared for biological experiments. One of us kept each
Speaker 1: sample in his mouth for a short time to make
Speaker 1: sure of its taste, then spat it out. The other
Speaker 1: repeated the same procedure, but swallowed the water. Either of
Speaker 1: us could detect the slightest difference between the taste of
Speaker 1: ordinary distilled water and the taste of pure heavy water.
Speaker 1: It might be mentioned in this connection that one cubic
Speaker 1: centimeter of water is not too small an amount to
Speaker 1: taste properly. Since both of us could detect plainly the
Speaker 1: characteristic flat taste of distilled water in both cases, it
Speaker 1: may be concluded therefore, that pure deuterium oxide has the
Speaker 1: same taste as ordinary distilled water. Um. Now, this is
Speaker 1: funny because I've read some more recent studies. I think
Speaker 1: one that was that I found in a preprint server
Speaker 1: that has not been published yet that claims that they've
Speaker 1: redone this taste test and decided that that heavy water
Speaker 1: is noticeably sweeter. So they're disagreeing with Urie and Fila here.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure how to sort that out. But one
Speaker 1: of the things about these taste tests that franc Will
Speaker 1: points out is that they were ridiculously expensive, because at
Speaker 1: the time, the scant teaspoonful of heavy water that Klaus
Speaker 1: Hansen swallowed probably cost the equivalent of about a hundred
Speaker 1: thousand dollars in current US dollars. Uh. So, I don't
Speaker 1: know if that's a good use of experimental resources. Uh,
Speaker 1: it's probably. It's probably not surprising that Uri found these
Speaker 1: human experiments wasteful, even though he did one. After all,
Speaker 1: so like if a scant teaspoonful is a hundred thousand
Speaker 1: dollars worth of product, you know, and a tea spoonf
Speaker 1: of water is a vanishingly small sample compared to how
Speaker 1: much water is in an adult human body. It's probably
Speaker 1: just going to be prohibitively expensive to do toxicity experiments
Speaker 1: on a human being with with this stuff. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean this seems even above and beyond iracous prices for water, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, this is crazy, Yeah, exactly. You make yourself
Speaker 1: a heavy water still suit, don't don't lose a drop.
Speaker 1: So if you were trying to understand the physiological effects
Speaker 1: of heavy water at scale, you would need to test
Speaker 1: it on a much smaller organism. And eventually some research
Speaker 1: of this was carried out to figure out exactly what
Speaker 1: deuterated water does to plant and animal bodies. That the
Speaker 1: more research of this kind was done throughout the twentieth century.
Speaker 1: A study in nineteen thirty six by Henry Barber and
Speaker 1: Jane Trace found that heavy water was in fact quite
Speaker 1: lethal if it could replace about of the water in
Speaker 1: in the body. And I think this was determined with
Speaker 1: with small mammals like mice um and this is sometimes
Speaker 1: shorthanded to about one third. There there are various percentages
Speaker 1: that are given, but basically you do not want one
Speaker 1: third to you know, half of your body water replaced
Speaker 1: by deuterated water. This creates immense problems. Um Replacement of
Speaker 1: ordinary water with heavy water seems to kill the mammalian
Speaker 1: body once you pass certain thresholds by primarily interfering with
Speaker 1: mitosis or cell division, and in this way its effects
Speaker 1: are strangely similar to what you would see with large
Speaker 1: doses of chemotherapy. Metabolism slows down and cells stop dividing
Speaker 1: and reproducing, and this can lead to of course sterility
Speaker 1: and in the reproductive system, but also interior degradation of
Speaker 1: the function of multiple organs throughout the body and a
Speaker 1: kind of cytotoxic collapse before death. UH. The chemical principle
Speaker 1: that's responsible for this is known as the kinetic isotope effect.
Speaker 1: So I'll try to do the simple version as best
Speaker 1: to understand it. Again, deuterium is chemically pretty much the
Speaker 1: same as regular hydrogen. It's got the same charge, the
Speaker 1: same proton and electron, but because of the heavier nucleus um,
Speaker 1: even though it will usually engage in the same chemical reactions,
Speaker 1: there is a tendency for the changes in the isotopic
Speaker 1: composition to affect the rate of chemical reactions. So even
Speaker 1: though detail is chemically a lot like regular H two oh,
Speaker 1: it's heavy hydrogen forms stronger bonds with the oxygen atoms
Speaker 1: in the water molecules than regular protium does, and this
Speaker 1: means it's harder than usual to break up heavy water
Speaker 1: molecules into their constituent parts, which in turn means lots
Speaker 1: of chemical reactions happen more slowly, and this starts to
Speaker 1: consistently slow down chemical reactions throughout the body. If you
Speaker 1: replace too much of the water in your body with
Speaker 1: D two oh. If there's too much of it and
Speaker 1: chemical reactions get slowed down too much, all hell breaks
Speaker 1: loose cells don't divide, and there there's a kind of
Speaker 1: there are kinds of systemic collapse that that just come
Speaker 1: from this. So heavy water makes for a very strange
Speaker 1: and peculiar type of poison, you know, from everything I've
Speaker 1: been reading. It's something that is usually harmless at doses
Speaker 1: of even probably a glassful. But if you can really
Speaker 1: load somebody up with heavy water to the extent that
Speaker 1: it replaces somewhere between twenty five and of the water
Speaker 1: in their body. It will absolutely kill them in a
Speaker 1: horrific way. It is a ridiculously expensive way to try
Speaker 1: and assassinate somebody. So I'm I'm kind of shocked it
Speaker 1: hasn't been done in a James Bond all. This seems
Speaker 1: perfect for the Bond world. That's a very good point. Now,
Speaker 1: I think heavy water is not going to be nearly
Speaker 1: as expensive as it was when those first taste test
Speaker 1: experiments were done, but still, I mean, yeah, it would be.
Speaker 1: It would be a needlessly elaborate method of assassination. I mean,
Speaker 1: surely one of those CSI shows considered it at some point.
Speaker 1: Maybe they did it. I mean, I'd I'd love to
Speaker 1: hear from anybody if if they if you have seen
Speaker 1: a heavy water murder episode of some sort of episodic
Speaker 1: detective show, I'd like to hear about it. Well, this
Speaker 1: does tie into one particular example that Francile sites in
Speaker 1: her article. Uh that no one was killed fortunately in
Speaker 1: this example, but there was an instance of of heavy
Speaker 1: water poisoning. Though the heavy water turns out to be
Speaker 1: not necessarily the the important part of the story. So
Speaker 1: there was an Associated Press article from March fifth n
Speaker 1: that Francill sites, and I went and looked up the
Speaker 1: original article. It's called power plant worker accused of spiking
Speaker 1: cooler with radioactive water. This happened in in Canada, so
Speaker 1: it's a dateline New Brunswick and uh, just to read
Speaker 1: the lead here quote, a nuclear power plant worker was
Speaker 1: charged Monday with spiking a lunch room cooler with radioactive
Speaker 1: water that eight men drank before the contamination was discovered.
Speaker 1: The eight who drank the contaminated water last month at
Speaker 1: the point Lapro plant have have a slightly higher chance
Speaker 1: of getting cancer, officials said, but are in no immediate
Speaker 1: health danger. Uh. And the article goes on to characterize
Speaker 1: this is probably some kind of practical joke gone awry.
Speaker 1: Does not seem like a very good joke. Again, no
Speaker 1: one died immediately from this, though. The person who spiked
Speaker 1: the water was charged with a crime. Uh. And this
Speaker 1: does tie into an interesting misconception, which is that heavy
Speaker 1: water is naturally radioactive and heavy water it's not deudated.
Speaker 1: Water is not naturally radioactive unless it's been made radioactive
Speaker 1: by say by for example, like being the cool and
Speaker 1: around a nuclear react um. Now water with hydrogen three.
Speaker 1: You remember, heavy water is the kind we've been talking
Speaker 1: about is with hydrogen two deuterium. Water with hydrogen three,
Speaker 1: also known as tritium, would be another story. It is
Speaker 1: definitely radioactive in all its forms, but far far less
Speaker 1: common in nature. So if you were to drink heavy water,
Speaker 1: it would not naturally be a radioactivity risk. It would
Speaker 1: be this poisoning risk if you drank enough of it
Speaker 1: and it replaced enough of the water in your body. Right,
Speaker 1: And and that kind of brings us back to that
Speaker 1: Velson uh q and a that was published in Slate
Speaker 1: that I mentioned earlier. You know, you instantly replaced the
Speaker 1: world's oceans with heavy water. Well, you have these immediate concerns,
Speaker 1: but then obviously that water is going to make its
Speaker 1: way into organisms, and so Velson writes, you know that
Speaker 1: basically the biological concerns here would start out uh milder.
Speaker 1: You know, it would be more about bloat and weight,
Speaker 1: lower blood pressure. But by the time you reach like
Speaker 1: the heavy water mark in particularly in humans, we would
Speaker 1: be just irreversibly sterile. And then certainly by the time
Speaker 1: you hit that fifty percent point, I mean, that's that's
Speaker 1: definitely in the fatal zone. Uh So, you know, Velson
Speaker 1: writes that, you know that heavy water makes eukaryotic cell
Speaker 1: division impossible due to the impact on the my mitotic spindle,
Speaker 1: so most multicellular eukaryotic life would just snuff it extinct
Speaker 1: within a few years. Yeah, I was looking at some
Speaker 1: some possible exceptions. There are interestingly, organisms that are heavy
Speaker 1: water tolerant, or much more heavy water tolerant than other organisms.
Speaker 1: So prokaryotes, I think, in general, are more tolerant of
Speaker 1: of being exposed to deuturated water than eukaryotes are. Bacteria
Speaker 1: are going to be better off, and maybe they could
Speaker 1: just like you know, re evolve new complex life forms
Speaker 1: in the h in the deutorated world. I wonder if
Speaker 1: they would be like slower moving life forms because the
Speaker 1: deutorated earth would just like have slower chemical reactions. And
Speaker 1: jem Role well, you know, I did a lot. I
Speaker 1: was thinking the same things. I was looking around a
Speaker 1: lot to find some examples or you know, some sci
Speaker 1: fi visions of what heavy water organisms might consist of,
Speaker 1: and and I was not able to find anything. But
Speaker 1: I did find some some stuff about the idea of
Speaker 1: of of heavy water organisms that have would have would
Speaker 1: be cultivated for their use in magnetic resonant studies, and
Speaker 1: these were proposed back in the late nineteen sixties. These
Speaker 1: would again be cultivated versions of natural world world organisms
Speaker 1: that UM in their heavy form would not be found
Speaker 1: anywhere in the natural world, so as proposed by Cats
Speaker 1: and Crespy in us in the journal Science back in
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty six. There are various uses and products one
Speaker 1: could derive from their cultivation. Higher plants and even simple
Speaker 1: organisms like you mentioned can resist full deuteration, but there
Speaker 1: are possibilities for other life forms. So so some of
Speaker 1: the main benefits here would be their use in studying
Speaker 1: UM heavy water isotopes, you know, following the path of
Speaker 1: hydrogen in biological systems. Deuterated algae, for instance, which we've
Speaker 1: had since the nineteen sixties, have a useful role in
Speaker 1: the study of photosynthesis. But um, yeah, I wish I
Speaker 1: could have found something about like the idea of the
Speaker 1: deuterated man heavy water heavy water elephants or something like that,
Speaker 1: But I didn't find anything. That's how we get Middle Earth.
Speaker 1: There's a sort of a chemical recycling event and and
Speaker 1: and ended up there. Um. I did find one example
Speaker 1: that I was looking at Apparently there's some kind of
Speaker 1: nematode worm that can survive and reproduce in almost pure,
Speaker 1: pure deuterated water. Interesting, there's always a worm. That should
Speaker 1: be a slogan of this show. You know, whatever you're
Speaker 1: saying about biology, it's like it's true in most cases,
Speaker 1: but there's always a worm. Thank Now there's another way
Speaker 1: that heavy water has been very important, and that's in
Speaker 1: the history and development of nuclear technology and um, in
Speaker 1: developing nuclear reactors and in the history of the development
Speaker 1: of nuclear weapons. Yeah, this is all interesting, you know,
Speaker 1: looking at the twentieth century certainly a time in which
Speaker 1: our understanding of chemistry greatly evolved, and then of course
Speaker 1: we began to understand uh, nuclear fission as well, and
Speaker 1: scientists around this time, So nuclear fission, uh, this was
Speaker 1: a discovered December of night. Around this time, scientists began
Speaker 1: to realize that heavy water could be used as what
Speaker 1: is called a moderator. So in nuclear reactors, a moderator
Speaker 1: slows down the neutrons to speeds at which fission can occur. Uh.
Speaker 1: It helps to create the conditions in which a true
Speaker 1: fission chain reaction can occur and keep going. So a
Speaker 1: nuclear reactor using heavy water can make use of naturally
Speaker 1: occurring uranium rather than enriched in ranium, because again, you
Speaker 1: can't just kick a bunch of naturally occurring uranium and
Speaker 1: produce an atomic blast. So basically, uh, scientists in Germany
Speaker 1: and in the UK they realized kind of early on
Speaker 1: what heavy water could potentially do. Now, an interesting wrinkle
Speaker 1: here is that the US atomic weapons program ended up
Speaker 1: depending far more on graphite as a moderator than heavy water.
Speaker 1: But the Germans came to believe that graphite wouldn't cut it,
Speaker 1: so they focused on heavy water. UM heavy water was
Speaker 1: obtained by um electrolysis, and a leading facility producing it
Speaker 1: was Norway's of the Moor facility. So the French and
Speaker 1: the Germans both attempted to buy the entire stock. I
Speaker 1: think the Germans had purchased some, but then there uh
Speaker 1: the French and the Germans both were like, we want
Speaker 1: to buy it all, and aware of the military possibilities. Norway,
Speaker 1: which was at that point neutral, sold it all to
Speaker 1: France and and it was smuggled out of the country.
Speaker 1: In that same year, however, the Germans took Norway and
Speaker 1: the plant became a military target for the Allies because
Speaker 1: of course, the whole situation here is it's suspected that
Speaker 1: Germany is working on creating an atomic weapon, right, and
Speaker 1: so the idea and they didn't know exactly how things
Speaker 1: would shake out, but it looked at the time like
Speaker 1: heavy water might be a really crucial element in achieving
Speaker 1: nuclear weapons, right, and so there was obvious like terror
Speaker 1: among the Allies that like, oh no, if they get
Speaker 1: their hands on too much heavy water, they could build
Speaker 1: a nuclear reactor that could potentially lead to weapons capabilities
Speaker 1: or whatever before we achieve them. So it's it's again
Speaker 1: it's a one ring scenario. It's like, you know, give
Speaker 1: us the weapon of the enemy, don't let them have it, right, Yeah. So,
Speaker 1: as a result, this facility was targeted five different times
Speaker 1: um by the Norwegian Special Forces, by the r a F,
Speaker 1: by the British Army, by the US Air Force, and
Speaker 1: by the Norwegian Resistance. And these were efforts again to
Speaker 1: try and prevent the Germans from developing an atomic weapon. UM.
Speaker 1: Operation Gunner Side was a particular note in this one
Speaker 1: for Norwegian age. It's parachuted into the area. They joined
Speaker 1: up with four special agents of Special Forces agents that
Speaker 1: had been deployed earlier on a recon miss mission, and
Speaker 1: they all attacked the plant, destroying the heavy water section
Speaker 1: of the plant and costing the Germans something like fives
Speaker 1: of heavy water. I think these missions had no casualties. Also, well,
Speaker 1: these two missions that I mentioned here had no casualties.
Speaker 1: There was one of the attempts UM ended up involving
Speaker 1: a plane crash and the the agents involved were executed
Speaker 1: by the Germans. But but this particular mission, I think, yeah,
Speaker 1: you're correct on UM. Now, it would ultimately turn out
Speaker 1: that the Germans were not nearly as close as suspected UM,
Speaker 1: but this certainly put a dent in their efforts. Basically,
Speaker 1: the immediate demands of the war, combined with the efforts
Speaker 1: by resistance and special forces here basically kept the nuclear
Speaker 1: program of the of Germany in a kind of preliminary stage.
Speaker 1: But of course the lies did not know this. They
Speaker 1: just they just knew that some effort was underway and
Speaker 1: it needed to be curved. Now, in more recent years,
Speaker 1: there are all kinds of interesting uses that have been
Speaker 1: discovered for deuterium and UH and heavy water that might
Speaker 1: not have even been imagined early on, or maybe some
Speaker 1: of which were imagined early on, but nobody knew if
Speaker 1: they would ever be achieved. One of the examples that
Speaker 1: I was just recently looking at is this interesting idea
Speaker 1: of deuterated drugs, apparently the first one of which was
Speaker 1: approved by the FDA in seventeen, but it's an idea
Speaker 1: that's been around for a long time. Yeah, I think
Speaker 1: the first patent was granted back in the nineteen seventies. Um,
Speaker 1: so yeah, it's interesting. Now, before anyone assumes this has
Speaker 1: anything to do with turning your water heavy or any
Speaker 1: sort of thing, the basic idea of these, uh, deuterated
Speaker 1: drugs is that the resulting drug has a longer half
Speaker 1: life due to lower rates of metabolism. So half life
Speaker 1: when we're talking about medication, it's it's the point at
Speaker 1: which it loses fifty of its effectiveness inside your body.
Speaker 1: So this isn't related to say, shelf life. Uh, it's
Speaker 1: about how the drug functions in the body itself, right,
Speaker 1: so it can like act more slowly over a longer
Speaker 1: period of time. Um. And it's funny because we've talked
Speaker 1: about several different ways now essentially one of the ways
Speaker 1: that deuterated water will kill you if you drink too
Speaker 1: much of it, is it slows down metabolism and chemical
Speaker 1: reactions cell division in your body to a point where
Speaker 1: you can't survive anymore. But there are more moderated forms
Speaker 1: of consuming heavy water that people have long speculated, whether
Speaker 1: rightly or not, I mean, this is still an open
Speaker 1: question as to whether there's anything to these ideas, but
Speaker 1: have speculated that, well, maybe you could use this to
Speaker 1: slow down chemical reactions in the body in a good way,
Speaker 1: in a way that's actually desirable, such as in life
Speaker 1: extension or you know, human hibernation or things like that.
Speaker 1: So I wanted to read apart from in Franceles article
Speaker 1: where she says, quote mounta Banks have been promoting heavy
Speaker 1: water as a panacea almost since the moment you're re
Speaker 1: isolated the first sample. Even imminent chemists have not been immune.
Speaker 1: In a nineteen thirty seven Popular Science article, chemists James
Speaker 1: Kendall opined that the elderly might extend their lives by
Speaker 1: drinking heavy water. Quote the heavy water drinkers reactions would
Speaker 1: probably be slowed and possibly his mental processes also. But
Speaker 1: who wants to be fast at sixty? Well, I mean,
Speaker 1: I guess you know, sixty was a different sixty seven,
Speaker 1: I guess. But so the idea here is just don't
Speaker 1: drink too much of it, drink a balance of it,
Speaker 1: and you'll be okay. It's kind of a never finish
Speaker 1: your second drink approach to life. Yes, now, I want
Speaker 1: to be extremely clear, we are not advocating that anyone
Speaker 1: do this or claiming that this would be effective. But
Speaker 1: it is something that people have continued to speculate about.
Speaker 1: So that one article that Francill princes in her article
Speaker 1: is by A. Zion Lee and Michael P. Snyder and
Speaker 1: bio Essays in sixteen that is a it's a speculative
Speaker 1: article that explores this question. It's called quote can heavy
Speaker 1: isotopes increased lifespan? Studies of relative abundance and various organisms
Speaker 1: reveal chemical perspectives on aging. Now they site again some
Speaker 1: of the same stuff we've been talking about, the the
Speaker 1: chemistry of the kinetic isotope effects which slow down chemical reactions.
Speaker 1: And this sort of slows down all kinds of processes
Speaker 1: that happen in the body that are in a way
Speaker 1: that they are metabolic processes that are associated with the
Speaker 1: advancing of age. And so the authors here right quote.
Speaker 1: Previous isotope analyses have recorded pervasive enrichment or depletion of
Speaker 1: heavy isotopes in various organisms, strongly supporting the capability of
Speaker 1: biological systems to distinguish different isotopes. This capability has recently
Speaker 1: been found to lead to general decline of heavy isotopes
Speaker 1: in metabolites during yeast aging. Conversely, supplementing heavy isotopes in
Speaker 1: growth medium promotes longevity. Whether this observation prevails in other
Speaker 1: organisms is not known, but it potentially bears promise in
Speaker 1: promoting human longevity. So some of the ideas explored here.
Speaker 1: The implications would be that you could possibly ingest certain
Speaker 1: amounts of heavy water to trigger um UH to trigger
Speaker 1: a sort of state of hibernation, which could be useful
Speaker 1: and say like interstellar travel. France Will points that out
Speaker 1: um but also as summarized by France Will, basically their
Speaker 1: observation is that quote. Yeast models have showed that heavier isotopes,
Speaker 1: including deuterium, become depleted in organisms with aging. They suggested
Speaker 1: as possible that periodically supplementing the diet with appropriate isotopeologus
Speaker 1: could extend human lifespans. So if like you tend to
Speaker 1: lose deuterium as you get older, maybe supplementing the body
Speaker 1: with some some you know, a little bit of extra
Speaker 1: heavy water, a little bit of extra deuterium might do
Speaker 1: you some good. Again, totally speculative, proven, but there are
Speaker 1: there are some interesting tidbits and other organisms that suggests
Speaker 1: the possibility here. Huh. So in the future, the idea
Speaker 1: of say, heavy water supplements are possible, even if you
Speaker 1: end up having to buy them from Goop as opposed
Speaker 1: to her anywhere else, right, I mean, I guess the
Speaker 1: question would be like, is this gonna end up being
Speaker 1: science based medicine or is this going to end up
Speaker 1: being some some pseudo scientific miracle cure hawked on, you
Speaker 1: know whatever conspiracy theory show. Um, But either way you're
Speaker 1: it's going to be for sale. Now. An interesting thing
Speaker 1: I ran across Joe was that um, apparently by by
Speaker 1: you can look at Mars, and by looking at the
Speaker 1: ratio between deodded water and normal water on Mars, scientists
Speaker 1: are able to get a better picture of how much
Speaker 1: water Mars lost in the past. So basically, the more
Speaker 1: heavy water present, which is harder to lose than the
Speaker 1: more water you lost over time. So to come back
Speaker 1: to that idea of like heavy nickels and normal nickels
Speaker 1: in your like personal Scrooge a duck bank, if you
Speaker 1: were afraid that lepricns were stealing your nickels and lepricns
Speaker 1: are incapable of carrying them the heavier heavy nickels, then
Speaker 1: you could go to your Scrooge McDuck vault and you
Speaker 1: look in there and you count the heavy nickels, and
Speaker 1: you could you could determine how many normal nickels have
Speaker 1: been stolen by lepricns based on the resulting ratio. That's
Speaker 1: really cool, and I love your analogy, by the way,
Speaker 1: but this does highlight the way that even if it
Speaker 1: turns out that you know, deuturated water is not going
Speaker 1: to extend human lifespans or anything like that, I think
Speaker 1: deuterium and heavy water will absolutely remain extremely important scientific
Speaker 1: atoms and molecules for for research because there are a
Speaker 1: secondary indicator of all kinds of things. You can find
Speaker 1: out a lot about the world by looking at at
Speaker 1: heavy water content and how it behaves. Yeah, I just
Speaker 1: wish I could have found a heavy water alien. I
Speaker 1: really wanted to find some somebody talking about heavy water
Speaker 1: aliens and heavy water people. So well, hey, that's that's
Speaker 1: open field. Somebody somebody set up a homestead there. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: somebody right about it. Now. The one thing that is
Speaker 1: kind of related to all this in science fiction is
Speaker 1: that you have had some some some science fiction writers
Speaker 1: who have dealt with various proposed alternate versions of water.
Speaker 1: So author and National geographic journalist Robert C. O'Brien, who
Speaker 1: lived nineteen eighteen through nineteen seventy three, uh, most famous
Speaker 1: as being the author of Miss Frisbee and the Rats
Speaker 1: of Nim, wrote in nineteen seventy two novel titled a
Speaker 1: Report from Group seventeen, and it had a lot to
Speaker 1: do with Nazi plots and a form of water that
Speaker 1: essentially brainwashes individuals. So heavy water apparently might have played
Speaker 1: a role in this idea along with this concept of
Speaker 1: polly water. This was a hypothesized, uh, polymerized form of water.
Speaker 1: They would have been kind of like a syrup, you know, again,
Speaker 1: more viscous. It doesn't actually exist, but it also infloy
Speaker 1: the idea that also influenced Kurt Vonneket's Ice nine concept
Speaker 1: and Cat's Cradle. Oh yeah, and for those not familiar.
Speaker 1: Ice nine one of the great plot devices of all time.
Speaker 1: It's a it's an alternate form of the water molecule
Speaker 1: that freezes at room temperature, and it can act as
Speaker 1: a seed crystal. So basically the premises you drop this
Speaker 1: in a lake and suddenly the entire lake will freeze
Speaker 1: at room temperature. It's bad. It's bad, and it doesn't exist. Uh,
Speaker 1: unlike heavy water, which is which does exist and is
Speaker 1: in you right now. Yeah, that's the interesting thing. Um,
Speaker 1: it's weird how reading about this. Uh, And I keep
Speaker 1: thinking about heavy water holding these uh opposing ideas in
Speaker 1: my head at the same time. I guess it's like
Speaker 1: an exercise in scientific negative capability, because I keep thinking
Speaker 1: of heavy water simultaneously as something that's natural, found in
Speaker 1: all the oceans of the world. It's in your body
Speaker 1: right now. It's gonna be harmless at the levels that
Speaker 1: you ingested, but also is like a horrific poison, if
Speaker 1: you know, if ingested in the wrong way. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: of course we have we often have to think about
Speaker 1: that in terms of a lot of different things, including
Speaker 1: just normal water, right I mean, um, as well as
Speaker 1: like various household spices, um, you know, moderation and all things, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, that's what holds the world together, holds their
Speaker 1: bodies together, just dealing with without any you know, ethical
Speaker 1: interpretations of the statement like there is a there is
Speaker 1: a balance. There's a chemical balance in all things. And
Speaker 1: that's kind of I mean, that's kind of one of
Speaker 1: the big take homes of the chemical revolution. In addition
Speaker 1: to you know, developing all these chemicals of life and
Speaker 1: then also these chemicals of death during the twentieth century,
Speaker 1: you know, just are are are sudden you know, increasing
Speaker 1: understanding of just all of these little bonds that hold
Speaker 1: us together. Extremely good point. One less thing I'll just
Speaker 1: say again, don't start buying heavy water for life extension
Speaker 1: unless it's actually backed up by science. Correct check the
Speaker 1: research on that. All right, Well, again, we would love
Speaker 1: to hear from everyone out there about heavy water. If
Speaker 1: you have any experience with heavy water, thoughts on heavy water,
Speaker 1: or indeed have you if you have read science fiction
Speaker 1: or had any kind of science fiction based thoughts around
Speaker 1: heavy water organisms, we would love to hear from you.
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