Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
Speaker 1: is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. In today's Vault
Speaker 1: episode originally aired on December, it was about heavy water.
Speaker 1: That's right, because it's it's New Year's Day. Happy New
Speaker 1: Year's Joe. And when you think new Happy New Year's
Speaker 1: you think heavy water. So of course this just lines
Speaker 1: up perfectly. Drink up. Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind,
Speaker 1: production of my Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to
Speaker 1: Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm
Speaker 1: Joe McCormick. And today I wanted to start off by
Speaker 1: talking about something that may have come up in the
Speaker 1: past on the show of CORP. I don't quite remember,
Speaker 1: but I don't think we've ever gone into great detail
Speaker 1: on it. So there is this popular chemistry prank that
Speaker 1: that goes some thing like this. You you approach somebody
Speaker 1: with a petition or a public service announcement. Uh. And
Speaker 1: if I could do the Donald pleasants like Spirit of
Speaker 1: Dark and Lonely Water Voice, I would do this. But
Speaker 1: just imagine it. Can you imagine I'm I'm Donald Coleasant
Speaker 1: saying this to you. What if I told you there
Speaker 1: was a household chemical present in more than ercent of
Speaker 1: homes in America, which is used as an an ingredient
Speaker 1: in everything from packaged foods, to cleaning products to children's medicine.
Speaker 1: And yet this chemical has been proven to cause severe
Speaker 1: burns to the skin and mouth, can be lethal if
Speaker 1: it's inhaled, and is the primary constituent in acid rain.
Speaker 1: According to historical sources, this was the main ingredient in
Speaker 1: the poison that Socrates drank to commit suicide after his
Speaker 1: trial and Athens. It's so corrosive that it can eat
Speaker 1: holes in solid iron, and yet we expose our bodies
Speaker 1: to this chemical every time we have a cup of
Speaker 1: tea or take a shower. Studies have found that trace
Speaker 1: him of this compound linger in our decomposing bodies, even
Speaker 1: for months after we die. It is so addictive that
Speaker 1: the average human cannot at this point survive more than
Speaker 1: a few days without receiving a dose. This chemical is
Speaker 1: called die hydrogen monoxide, and it has already been found
Speaker 1: in nearly every natural environment on Earth, and if we
Speaker 1: don't ban it soon, there will not be a single
Speaker 1: patch of the planet left uncontaminated. Now there are million
Speaker 1: versions of this, but a lot of them will ask
Speaker 1: 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: it's clearly we're talking about something that's a threat to
Speaker 1: the children, uh, to America, to life as we know it.
Speaker 1: And it's it's funny because when I think about this prank,
Speaker 1: so obviously the joke is that what it's talking about
Speaker 1: is water. And so it's a joke that works on
Speaker 1: several levels. For one, it's an example of how even
Speaker 1: technically true statements can be extremely misleading without being put
Speaker 1: in the proper context. Uh. And I think it's also
Speaker 1: just used to sometimes suggest that people should get like
Speaker 1: better education and chemistry and the natural sciences, which sure,
Speaker 1: you know, fair enough, I I also wish I was
Speaker 1: better educated in chemistry. But I think it's on the
Speaker 1: other side it it does take advantage of something that
Speaker 1: is a totally justified anxiety that people have about chemistry
Speaker 1: in the natural world and especially the modern world, because
Speaker 1: when we make decisions about deadly risks about physical cause
Speaker 1: and effect, you know, our intuitions and our knowledge about
Speaker 1: how things work are are strongly biased towards perceiving physical
Speaker 1: threats within what you might call like the Newtonian physical domain,
Speaker 1: like threats from big moving objects somewhere between the size
Speaker 1: of a pebble and a landslide. But especially since the
Speaker 1: Industrial Revolution, the world is also full of chemical threats
Speaker 1: that are really somewhat invisible in this respect, like they
Speaker 1: don't really show up on the Newtonian physical domain. And
Speaker 1: so we've got some natural defenses against chemical threats like this.
Speaker 1: We've got our senses of taste and smell, and we
Speaker 1: have some aversion reactions in like our digestive system or
Speaker 1: respiration system, like sometimes you detect a noxious chemical and
Speaker 1: you bar for you start coughing or something. Are our
Speaker 1: bodies can can help detect and reject things. But we
Speaker 1: all know by this point that there are in fact
Speaker 1: extremely dangerous chemicals that are essentially undetectable to our senses,
Speaker 1: either because they have no strong smell or taste, or
Speaker 1: the relevant doses are so tiny that we wouldn't notice
Speaker 1: them before it's too late, or because maybe they don't
Speaker 1: have an effect until they've had until you've had extreme
Speaker 1: repeated exposure or consumed lots of chemicals. We're gonna be
Speaker 1: talking about one of the latter today, and so this
Speaker 1: is the kind of compound that we're going to be
Speaker 1: getting into, a chemical that has proven fascinating and very
Speaker 1: useful but also strangely dangerous depending on the context, a
Speaker 1: sort of Dopple gang or of water, the wetness of
Speaker 1: the shadow realm. Today, I wanted to talk about heavy water,
Speaker 1: and it is heavy, literally heavy, But I want to
Speaker 1: want to say this is not to be confused with
Speaker 1: hard water. Uh So, if you're out there, listen, We're
Speaker 1: talking about heavy water, not hard water. Hard water is
Speaker 1: just water with a high mineral content. Oh is that
Speaker 1: what it is? I think I literally didn't know that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is the one that, like you know, that can
Speaker 1: can mess with how your soap SuDS up, that sort
Speaker 1: of thing. Okay, uh though some people like it because
Speaker 1: it makes their hair look good, right or at least? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know. It's one of those things. I don't
Speaker 1: have a lot of experience with it, or maybe really
Speaker 1: even knowledge of of hard water. So when you brought
Speaker 1: up this topic, I initially thought you were talking about
Speaker 1: doing uh an episode or episodes about hard water, but
Speaker 1: it's not hard water again, heavy water. The washers in
Speaker 1: your shower will really rust after this episode. Alright, So
Speaker 1: for the rest of the episode, we're gonna discuss a
Speaker 1: few things that that we found interesting about heavy water,
Speaker 1: its role in the natural world and history, and maybe
Speaker 1: the question of whether you should drink it. Um So.
Speaker 1: At the molecular level, as we all know, regular water
Speaker 1: is made of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom.
Speaker 1: It's H two O, and this trifled structure makes for
Speaker 1: a really amazing and powerful polar molecule that acts as
Speaker 1: kind of master solvent that makes life itself possible. Every
Speaker 1: cell in your body depends on the particular chemical properties
Speaker 1: of this molecule. Without H two oh, nothing in the
Speaker 1: organic world works. Now. Heavy water is an alternative form
Speaker 1: of the same molecule, which relies on a different isotope
Speaker 1: of the hydrogen atom, known as deuterium. A normal hydrogen
Speaker 1: atom also known as protium just to distinguish it from deuterium,
Speaker 1: is composed of two sub atomic particles. So it's got
Speaker 1: a nucleus that is just one single proton and nothing
Speaker 1: else that has a positive charge, and then orbiting that
Speaker 1: it's got one single the electron, which has a negative charge.
Speaker 1: Deuterium adds a third element to the mix. It adds
Speaker 1: a single neutron to the nucleus of the hydrogen atom.
Speaker 1: Uh Now again, this makes it an isotope of hydrogen,
Speaker 1: and isotope is a is a version of an atom
Speaker 1: that has a different than usual number of neutrons in
Speaker 1: the nucleus, and a new neutron doesn't have a charge,
Speaker 1: but it does have mass. So an atom of deuterium
Speaker 1: is almost twice as heavy as an atom of ordinary hydrogen.
Speaker 1: Deuterium is a stable isotope, and it is found in nature.
Speaker 1: It's not something that's just a product of the Industrial
Speaker 1: Revolution or of nuclear reactors or something like that. It's
Speaker 1: found all throughout water in the Solar System, it's found
Speaker 1: all throughout Earth's oceans. Roughly one out of every sixty
Speaker 1: hydrogen atoms in the ocean is actually deuterium. So if
Speaker 1: deuterium occurs in nature, you might wonder, well, where does
Speaker 1: it come from? With most other elements, you can trace
Speaker 1: their origin to some form of nucleosynthesis within stars or
Speaker 1: during high energy events like supernova. However, almost all of
Speaker 1: the deuterium found in nature is a leftover product of
Speaker 1: the Big Bang. These atomic nuclei are not generated by stars,
Speaker 1: or when they are, they're usually destroyed soon after they're created.
Speaker 1: They've been the way they are for thirteen point eight
Speaker 1: billion years, and on Earth, one major place to find
Speaker 1: hydrogen is bound up in water molecules. Uh So, in
Speaker 1: most ways, deuterium behaves chemically the same as ordinary hydrogen.
Speaker 1: So deterium gets locked up into water molecules, uh and
Speaker 1: it just floats around there in the ocean. The technical
Speaker 1: name for a water molecule with deuterium in place of
Speaker 1: hydrogen is deuterium oxide or D two oh. So if
Speaker 1: you ever seen D two oh written out, that means
Speaker 1: heavy water water molecule with deuterium instead of regular hydrogen.
Speaker 1: It's also sometimes called deuterated water, but more commonly it's
Speaker 1: just known as heavy water. Now, as I've said, in
Speaker 1: many ways, deuterium behaves just like protium hydrogen, and so
Speaker 1: in many ways heavy water blends in with and behaves
Speaker 1: like regular water. But not in every way. And a
Speaker 1: lot of what we're gonna be doing in this episodes
Speaker 1: is exploring some of the fascinating and historically relevant and
Speaker 1: weird differences between regular water and heavy water. That's right.
Speaker 1: So one good place to start here and that the
Speaker 1: history of the discovery of heavy water is to go
Speaker 1: back to that's when chemists Author Lamb and Richard Lean
Speaker 1: of New York University tried to define the density of
Speaker 1: pure water and they kept getting varying results, which ultimately
Speaker 1: paved the road for the discovery of isotopes that's variant.
Speaker 1: Those are variants of particular chemical elements due to differences
Speaker 1: in neutrons. And then also the discovery of heavy water itself.
Speaker 1: And this is key because because again heavy water isn't
Speaker 1: something that's you know, entirely man made or anything like that.
Speaker 1: It's in water. It just constitutes one part in four thousand,
Speaker 1: five hundred. Yes, that that's correct. Now about that number.
Speaker 1: I was wondering about the ratios here because I saw
Speaker 1: I've seen that that ratio one hundred, and I've also
Speaker 1: seen the ratio of one out of every sixty four
Speaker 1: hundred um like. For example, of the one important publication
Speaker 1: on the evidence for the existence of heavy hydrogen back
Speaker 1: in one which was published in the journal Physical Review,
Speaker 1: was a letter by the American chemist Harold c. Uri
Speaker 1: which pegged deuterium as one out of every hydrogen atoms,
Speaker 1: but I've also seen it published elsewhere that it's it's
Speaker 1: now thought that at least one out of every sixty
Speaker 1: four hundred or I think more more like sixty twenty
Speaker 1: or sixty four fifty water molecules in Earth's ocean are
Speaker 1: heavy water. Um. So, I don't know if those numbers
Speaker 1: represents some kind of conflict, or if one represents a
Speaker 1: genuine difference in what you'd find in the water molecules
Speaker 1: in the ocean versus what you'd find just in hydrogen
Speaker 1: more broadly. I'm not quite sure about that. But the
Speaker 1: point either way is that uh is that deuterium is
Speaker 1: found in nature, but only in a in a very
Speaker 1: small proportion of hydrogen, and thus heavy water is found
Speaker 1: in nature, but only in a very small proportion. It's
Speaker 1: one out of thousands of molecules. Yeah, so it's kind
Speaker 1: of like if we had like a cash only society
Speaker 1: and you had some heavy nickels floating, they're right where
Speaker 1: the nickel itself like, it's it's not it's not worth more,
Speaker 1: it's not it's still just worth five cents, And factors
Speaker 1: into the figuring that way. But you can imagine scenarios
Speaker 1: where extra heavy nickels in enough. Uh you know, if
Speaker 1: there are enough of them within a larger amount of nickels,
Speaker 1: that could have an impact on things, etcetera. Or if
Speaker 1: you get into a situation sort of. This will discuss
Speaker 1: where people are like, oh man, these heavy nickels are great,
Speaker 1: I've got to get more of them. Can I like
Speaker 1: syst them out of the existing uh cash population of
Speaker 1: the existing world nickels. Can I make normal nickels into
Speaker 1: heavy nickels, etcetera. That's very good, Yeah, and you could.
Speaker 1: I can imagine you'd run into unfore seen problems if
Speaker 1: you suddenly decided you wanted to base your entire economy
Speaker 1: on heavy nickels, or I don't know, maybe a third
Speaker 1: of your economy. Uh. That'll tie into something we get
Speaker 1: into in a minute. So I mentioned him just a
Speaker 1: minute ago, that the American chemist Harold c Ury. I
Speaker 1: hope I'm saying his name right, you are e y Uh.
Speaker 1: He's a very important figure in the discovery of deuterium.
Speaker 1: He usually gets credit along with his collaborators for proving
Speaker 1: the existence of deuterium through spectroscopic experiments in nineteen thirty one,
Speaker 1: and he received the Nobel Prize for his discovery in
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty four. But I thought it would be useful
Speaker 1: to just look at a couple of the physical properties
Speaker 1: of heavy water. So one of the key differences between
Speaker 1: heavy water and ordinary water is that heavy water is
Speaker 1: literally heavier because of the extra neutrons in the deuterium.
Speaker 1: You remember, a deuterium atom is almost twice as heavy
Speaker 1: as a regular hydrogen atom. Because of that, D two
Speaker 1: oh is about ten heavier than an equal quantity of
Speaker 1: regular water. And you might wonder, a wait a minute,
Speaker 1: wy only ten percent heavier rather than double the weight.
Speaker 1: We'll remember oxygen with eight protons and eight neutrons, makes
Speaker 1: up the bulk of the mass of a normal water molecule.
Speaker 1: It's got oxygen and then the lighter hydrogen atom. So
Speaker 1: you're only increasing the weight of UH two of the
Speaker 1: three atoms and the two smaller ones in the water molecule.
Speaker 1: So so it's ten percent heavier. And this results in
Speaker 1: some very interesting party trick potential. For example, regular ice
Speaker 1: always floats in water, but with deuterium, if you make
Speaker 1: a heavy water ice cube, it will sink in water
Speaker 1: because it's got a greater density than the surrounding water. Also,
Speaker 1: heavy water is more viscous than regular water. It's a
Speaker 1: little bit. Uh, it's gonna be a little bit more
Speaker 1: like a like a jelly and maybe not to a
Speaker 1: you know, physically perceptible extent if you were to hold
Speaker 1: it in your hands, but it is more viscous, which
Speaker 1: would probably have measurable effects if say, the oceans were
Speaker 1: entirely made of deuterior m. Yes, and this is this
Speaker 1: is a great question that that had been asked on
Speaker 1: the Internet already. I think it originally showed up in
Speaker 1: a as a Cora question. Uh, what would the ocean
Speaker 1: be like if it was made out of heavy water?
Speaker 1: And uh, and is sometimes the case on Cora. You
Speaker 1: had a really insightful answer pop up, this one from
Speaker 1: Josh Velson, chemical engineering consultant for bio and petro chemicals.
Speaker 1: And it was such a neat answer that it was
Speaker 1: actually featured on Slate as well. Uh, so I recommend
Speaker 1: checking that out. But but I want to touch on
Speaker 1: some of the main points that Nelson makes, and I
Speaker 1: want to stress this would be if there was a
Speaker 1: 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 uh out there
Speaker 1: in the oceans would be ten point six percent heavier,
Speaker 1: Velson says that anything swimming outside of its pressure zone
Speaker 1: would basically be instantly crushed. Now we've discussed on the
Speaker 1: show before. However, you take certain deep sea organisms and
Speaker 1: you bring them up into shallower waters, you have some
Speaker 1: exploding effects that take place. And likewise, if you take
Speaker 1: something from shallower waters and plunge it down into the depths,
Speaker 1: there can be a crushing scenario. But this just means
Speaker 1: everything that these sort of things would be uh far
Speaker 1: more exaggerated. Yeah, I didn't even consider this, But so
Speaker 1: if the ocean is suddenly about ten percent heavier at
Speaker 1: the molecular level, the pressure at the bottom of the
Speaker 1: ocean would also be a lot higher. So so you're
Speaker 1: suddenly down there and it's like somebody's just like put
Speaker 1: an extra backpack on you. Yeah. Absolutely. Also, Velson says
Speaker 1: that everything floating in the ocean would displace more mass,
Speaker 1: so ships would need extra ballast to stay at the
Speaker 1: same level in a heavy water ocean. And then this
Speaker 1: is interesting, Velson writes, quote a large portion of the
Speaker 1: oceans would freeze instantly due to a higher freezing point.
Speaker 1: This would release a lot of heat into the atmosphere
Speaker 1: in the polar regions, causing a massive imbalance and resulting
Speaker 1: in some pretty spectacular polar cyclones unquote. Well, and then
Speaker 1: on top of this, the mass of the planet would change.
Speaker 1: This would alter the Moon's orbit, and basically it would
Speaker 1: just mess with weather and climate in a major way,
Speaker 1: resulting in earthquakes, tidal way, it's rising sea levels. But
Speaker 1: of course, to change the ocean is to change life
Speaker 1: as well. So we'll come back to this, and I'll
Speaker 1: come back to Nelson's points in a bit, all right, So,
Speaker 1: I know what you out there are already wondering, Should
Speaker 1: I drink it heavy water? Should I should? I? You know,
Speaker 1: get a big bucket of it and just gulp, gulp, gulp.
Speaker 1: It sounds like the the ultimate metal head like bottled water, right,
Speaker 1: heavy water. Oh yeah, they would sell it at the
Speaker 1: metal shows. That's really good. So there's actually a great
Speaker 1: article about the history of drinking heavy water in the
Speaker 1: journal Nature Chemistry by the American chemist Michelle Francel. We
Speaker 1: actually quoted a piece by her, uh at some point
Speaker 1: in the past year, because she wrote a thing that
Speaker 1: we did for Cupid's leadon narrow That was it. She
Speaker 1: wrote an article about the history of sugar of lead
Speaker 1: as 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 was published in Nature Chemistry in twenty nineteen. So
Speaker 1: she begins the story in nineteen thirteen talking about when
Speaker 1: the Hungarian chemist George to Heavish 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 Heavish a task here. He wanted to get him
Speaker 1: to take quantity of lead and find a way to
Speaker 1: chemically isolate all of the radioactive atoms of what was
Speaker 1: then known as radium D from the lead and this sample,
Speaker 1: and he Is she was unable to find a way
Speaker 1: to do this because what they were calling radium D
Speaker 1: was actually not radium but a radioactive isotope of lead
Speaker 1: that is now known as lead to tin. But in
Speaker 1: the process of working on this problem that he never
Speaker 1: ended up solving, he Is she realized a potentially very
Speaker 1: interesting implication of this failure. When a sample contains a radioisotope,
Speaker 1: a radioactive atom within a massive other atoms, you can
Speaker 1: use these radioactive atoms to track the movement of a
Speaker 1: chemical through a biological system. So, for example, if you're
Speaker 1: curious how lead in the soil is taken up by
Speaker 1: bean plants and then distributed around the plant's body, you
Speaker 1: can spike the soil with radioactive isotopes of lead, so
Speaker 1: the plant will take them up. Because they're still lead,
Speaker 1: it will treat him 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. Uh. And you can
Speaker 1: also use these radioactive tracers to track the absorption and
Speaker 1: elimination 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 Heavishet
Speaker 1: that are really interesting. He seems like a kind of
Speaker 1: mythic hero in a way, a sort of Romulus or
Speaker 1: Gilgamesh here, or maybe we should say Bill Gamesh, Uh
Speaker 1: Bill Gamesh to heav is she? So there were a
Speaker 1: couple of the most popular stories about his life that
Speaker 1: that I I couldn't pass up mentioning. The first one
Speaker 1: I found recounted in a short historical article in the
Speaker 1: Journal of Nuclear Cardiology, and it concerns how heavy she
Speaker 1: first demonstrated that tracer principle that I was just talking about.
Speaker 1: So this is by Strauss at all uh from and
Speaker 1: the authors here talk about while heav is she was
Speaker 1: working in Manchester in this 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, heavs. She started noticing that
Speaker 1: he didn't just hate his lodgings, he really hated the
Speaker 1: 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 boy earning house, right,
Speaker 1: so they give you not just a bed, but a
Speaker 1: bed and your daily meals. And he started to suspect
Speaker 1: that his landlady was recycling food. So you know, she
Speaker 1: makes you a great r bee frost and then you
Speaker 1: eat 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 disguised 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
Speaker 1: is she was not happy with it, because I think
Speaker 1: the problem was the beef was already suffering from freshness
Speaker 1: problems and was was being recycled to the point of
Speaker 1: possible food poisoning. So at some point, uh he called.
Speaker 1: He brought this up with his landlady to read from
Speaker 1: the article here quote. His suggestion that she served slee
Speaker 1: prepared 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 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 going to
Speaker 1: read from the article here quote. A few days later,
Speaker 1: the electroscope he smuggled into the dining room revealed the
Speaker 1: presence of the tracer, radioactive hash. Confronted with the irrefutable evidence,
Speaker 1: all the landlady could do was exclaimed, 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. Uh. That's
Speaker 1: the 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, Heaves she was working at
Speaker 1: an institute in Copenhagen, in the laboratory of the great
Speaker 1: physicist Niels Bore 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 Bore is
Speaker 1: in possession of two gold medals. They are Nobel prizes
Speaker 1: in fact, which are made of twenty three carrot 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 no Zis who were fleeing fleeing the Nazis.
Speaker 1: They had come to his institute and now they were occupied.
Speaker 1: Um so Bore 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 heavs she came up with an amazing solution,
Speaker 1: uh literally, a solution dissolve the metals. This was not easy,
Speaker 1: since gold is not very reactive. It's difficult to dissolve
Speaker 1: but heavy she knew that there was a solution that
Speaker 1: would do the trick known as aqua reggia which is
Speaker 1: a mixture of hydrochloric acid and nitric acid and a
Speaker 1: three to one ratio usually. So here I just want
Speaker 1: to read from the NPR piece. Heavish and his autobiography says,
Speaker 1: 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 medals 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 Boars Institute,
Speaker 1: they scoured the building for loot or evidence of wrongdoing,
Speaker 1: but left the beaker of orange Aqua regia untouched. Heavy
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 the same awards, but still neat for it's got
Speaker 1: that magic thing. You know, people always want to like
Speaker 1: melt down a symbol of one thing and turn it
Speaker 1: into another. I guess in this case, it was melting
Speaker 1: down a symbol of one thing and turning it back
Speaker 1: into itself, but still has some of the same kind
Speaker 1: of symbolic weight there. Yeah, there's kind of a you know,
Speaker 1: sitcom level um circular motion to the whole thing. Right,
Speaker 1: we come back at the end of the day, we
Speaker 1: still have the same awards again, they've been reformed into
Speaker 1: the same thing we're familiar with. Yeah, totally. But coming
Speaker 1: back from from those anecdotes so so so now we've
Speaker 1: got an idea of heaves She the character he as
Speaker 1: She the mythic hero, his life actually also ties into
Speaker 1: heavy Water. So there was one day in Manchester in
Speaker 1: the early nineteen tens where Heavy she was having a
Speaker 1: cup of tea with the English physicist Henry Moseley, and
Speaker 1: at the time Heavy she was pursuing his radioactive tracer
Speaker 1: experiments with plants, the ones that I was talking about earlier,
Speaker 1: like the plants and seeing how they take up lead
Speaker 1: and and all that. Uh So, the idea was again
Speaker 1: that you could learn how elements from the soil are
Speaker 1: metabolized in plant bodies by studying this with with radioactive tracers.
Speaker 1: And apparently Heavy she and Moseley, we're getting all riled
Speaker 1: up about this idea, and heavs She posed a question
Speaker 1: about whether it would be possible to ever mark the
Speaker 1: water molecules in a cup of tea with some kind
Speaker 1: of tracer that could track those molecules throughout the human body.
Speaker 1: And at the time they did not know of a
Speaker 1: way to do this with water molecules. But a couple
Speaker 1: of decades later, chemistry would come around with an answer
Speaker 1: in the form of discoveries by Harold Yuri, which we
Speaker 1: talked about previously, of heavy water. So not long after
Speaker 1: the existence of heavy water based on deuterium was confirmed
Speaker 1: in the lab, a number of world class scientists decided well,
Speaker 1: to hell with it, you know, let's let's put it
Speaker 1: in our mouths and see what happens. Was it was
Speaker 1: a different time of experimental regimes. And it's also funny
Speaker 1: because if you read the scientific papers of the time,
Speaker 1: often they're just like a paragraph long. They're just like,
Speaker 1: here's what we did, here's what it tasted like. Nobody died.
Speaker 1: So in the year ninety four, Herald Ury sent George
Speaker 1: to heavs She a sample of water that had been
Speaker 1: enriched to zero point five percent utterations. Remember, five percent
Speaker 1: of this water is still the regular stuff, but this
Speaker 1: would nevertheless represent a much higher concentration of heavy water
Speaker 1: than a normal glass, right, And that percentage is worth
Speaker 1: keeping in mind for later when we're talking about higher
Speaker 1: percentages in the human body. Right. So he is She
Speaker 1: and his assistant Eric Hawford decided to test the effects
Speaker 1: of a deuterium enriched aquatic environment on goldfish. So they
Speaker 1: took twenty small goldfish and immerse them temporarily but for
Speaker 1: steadily increasing periods of time in the deuterated water. Uh
Speaker 1: And so, to read from francel here quote, the overcrowded
Speaker 1: goldfish rapidly exchanged water with the deutorated water in the bowl,
Speaker 1: which became miserably less dense, noting no change in the
Speaker 1: behavior of the zero point two percent deutorated goldfish, though
Speaker 1: how this might be assessed with so many goldfish stuffed
Speaker 1: into a small glass for up to fifteen hours at
Speaker 1: a time is unclear. Heavy She apparently concluded it was
Speaker 1: safe to drink the heavy water and proceeded to run
Speaker 1: the experiment he described Mosley twenty years before. So the
Speaker 1: rationale here is, Okay, it seems good enough for a goldfish,
Speaker 1: good enough for me, I'm going to try it too well.
Speaker 1: But I like that France Will brings up again, Like
Speaker 1: it's not exactly clear how they were judging what the
Speaker 1: effects on goldfish were, given that they were like cramming
Speaker 1: lots of goldfish in a very small container of water.
Speaker 1: I guess they observed that the goldfish were not dead, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, if you're looking for them to like die
Speaker 1: instantly or explode or something. Yeah, So it's not clear
Speaker 1: exactly whether heavy She or Hoeford did the drinking, but
Speaker 1: one of them did, and they consumed a couple of
Speaker 1: the samples. They collected the heavy water from the drinker's urine,
Speaker 1: distilled it and measured its density, and about twenty minutes
Speaker 1: after the chugging deudated water started showing up in the
Speaker 1: urine and In this experiment heavy She and Hoverer found
Speaker 1: that the average molecule of swallowed water lingers in a
Speaker 1: human body a lot longer than it lingers in goldfish
Speaker 1: and humans. The metabolic half life of a dose of
Speaker 1: water is about nine days according to this test at least.
Speaker 1: But the big question I guess is were they okay? Well,
Speaker 1: if not, they didn't report anything. There was no sickness,
Speaker 1: also no notes about what the water tasted like. So
Speaker 1: after heavys She and Hofer published their paper on deuterium
Speaker 1: as a tracer for water and animal bodies, another professor
Speaker 1: decided to follow up by by addressing the question of
Speaker 1: toxicity head on. Now, obviously, whichever one of the the
Speaker 1: h is drank the heavy water was all right, But
Speaker 1: this wasn't an extremely deluded form was a small amount
Speaker 1: of it. A professor named Klaus Hanson of Oslo University
Speaker 1: performed a toxicity test on himself in front of an
Speaker 1: audience including the press and a bunch of medical professionals
Speaker 1: with equipment standing by like stomach pumps and stuff, and
Speaker 1: Hanson swallowed what Francill characterizes as a quote scant teaspoonful
Speaker 1: of heavy water. Now it turned out the life support
Speaker 1: equipment was not needed. Hansen was fine, though he did
Speaker 1: report what he called a dry burning sensation after swallowing um.
Speaker 1: And then Harold c Uri at Columbia University and his
Speaker 1: colleague Geno Faila decided to follow up on this by
Speaker 1: staging a blind taste test. So this is gonna be
Speaker 1: like the Pepsi challenge, but for juteri um uh. And
Speaker 1: they published the results in nineteen thirty five in a
Speaker 1: paper called Concerning the Taste of Heavy Water. As I mentioned,
Speaker 1: sometimes papers were very short back then, so I can
Speaker 1: actually just read the entire second paragraph of their paper
Speaker 1: here Tasting notes for heavy water. Right, Okay, so here's
Speaker 1: what they said. In order to make the experiment as
Speaker 1: objective as possible, a third person in a different room
Speaker 1: prepared the samples to be tasted. Each of us was
Speaker 1: then given two identical watch glasses, one containing one cubic
Speaker 1: centimeter of ordinary distilled water and the other the same
Speaker 1: amount of pure heavy water, especially prepared for biological experiments.
Speaker 1: One of us kept each sample in his mouth for
Speaker 1: a short time to make sure of its taste, then
Speaker 1: spat it out. The other repeated the same procedure, but
Speaker 1: swallowed the water. Neither of us could detect the slightest
Speaker 1: difference between the taste of ordinary distilled water and the
Speaker 1: taste of pure heavy water. It might be mentioned in
Speaker 1: this connection that one cubic centimeter of water is not
Speaker 1: too small an amount to taste properly. Since both of
Speaker 1: us could detect plainly the characteristic flat taste of distilled
Speaker 1: water in both cases, it may be concluded therefore, that
Speaker 1: pure deuterium oxide has the same taste as ordinary distilled water. UM. Now,
Speaker 1: this is funny because I've read some more recent studies.
Speaker 1: I think one that was that I found in a
Speaker 1: preprint server that has not been published yet that claims
Speaker 1: that they've redone this taste test and decided that that
Speaker 1: heavy water is noticeably sweeter. So they're disagreeing with Uri
Speaker 1: and Fila here. I'm not sure how to sort that out.
Speaker 1: But one of the things about these taste tests that
Speaker 1: Francill points out is that they were ridiculously expensive because
Speaker 1: at the time, the scant teaspoonful of heavy water that
Speaker 1: Klaus Hansen swallowed probably cost the equivalent of about a
Speaker 1: hundred thousand dollars in current US dollars. Uh. So, I
Speaker 1: don't know if that's a good use of experimental resources. Uh,
Speaker 1: it's probably It's probably not surprising that Urie 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 teaspoonful water
Speaker 1: is a vanishingly small sample compared to how much water
Speaker 1: is in an adult human body, it's probably just gonna
Speaker 1: be prohibited of ly expensive to do toxicity experiments on
Speaker 1: a human being with with this stuff. Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: 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 dto O is chemically a lot like regular H
Speaker 1: two oh, it's heavy hydrogen forms stronger bonds with the
Speaker 1: oxygen atoms in the water molecules than regular protium does,
Speaker 1: and this means it's harder than usual to break up
Speaker 1: heavy water molecules into their constituent parts, which in turn
Speaker 1: means lots of chemical reactions happen more slowly, and this
Speaker 1: starts to consistently slow down chemical reactions throughout the body
Speaker 1: if you replace too much of the water in your
Speaker 1: body with D two oh. If there's too much of
Speaker 1: it and chemical reactions get slowed down too much, all
Speaker 1: hell breaks loose cells don't divide, and there there's a
Speaker 1: kind of there are kinds of systemic collapse that that
Speaker 1: just come from this. So heavy water makes for a
Speaker 1: very strange, a peculiar type of poison. You know, from
Speaker 1: everything I've been reading, it's something that is usually harmless
Speaker 1: at doses of even probably a glassful. But if you
Speaker 1: can really load somebody up with heavy water to the
Speaker 1: extent that it replaces somewhere between twenty five and of
Speaker 1: the water in their body, it will absolutely kill them
Speaker 1: in a horrific way. It is a ridiculously expensive way
Speaker 1: to try and assassinate somebody, So I'm I'm kind of
Speaker 1: shocked it hasn't been done in a James Bond film.
Speaker 1: This seems perfect for the Bond world. That's a very
Speaker 1: good point. Now, I think heavy water is not going
Speaker 1: to be nearly as expensive as it was when those
Speaker 1: first taste test experiments were done, but still, I mean, yeah,
Speaker 1: it would be. It would be a needlessly elaborate method
Speaker 1: of assassination. I mean, surely one of those c s
Speaker 1: I shows considered it at some point. Maybe they did it.
Speaker 1: I mean, I'd I'd love to hear from anybody if
Speaker 1: if they if you have seen a heavy water murder
Speaker 1: episode of some sort of episodic detective show. I'd like
Speaker 1: to hear about it. Well, this does tie into one
Speaker 1: particular example that Francile Sites in her article. Uh that
Speaker 1: no one was killed fortunately in this example, but there
Speaker 1: was an instance of of heavy water poisoning. Though the
Speaker 1: heavy water turns out to be not necessarily the the
Speaker 1: important part of the story. So there was an Associated
Speaker 1: Press article from March five Francile Sites, and I went
Speaker 1: and looked up the original article. It's called power plant
Speaker 1: worker accused of spiking cooler with radioactive water. This happened
Speaker 1: in in Canada, so it's a dateline New Brunswick. And uh,
Speaker 1: just to read the lead here quote a nuclear power
Speaker 1: plant worker was charged Monday with spiking a lunch room
Speaker 1: cooler with radioactive water that eight men drank before the
Speaker 1: contamination was discovered. The eight who drank the contaminated water
Speaker 1: last month that the point Lapro plant have have a
Speaker 1: slightly higher chance of getting cancer, officials said, but are
Speaker 1: in no immediate health danger. Uh. And the article goes
Speaker 1: on to characterize this is probably some kind of practical
Speaker 1: oak gone awry. Does not seem like a very good joke. Again,
Speaker 1: no one died immediately from this, though, the person who
Speaker 1: spiked the water was charged with a crime. Uh. And
Speaker 1: this does tie into an interesting misconception, which is that
Speaker 1: heavy water is naturally radioactive and heavy water it's not.
Speaker 1: Deuterated water is not naturally radioactive unless it's been made
Speaker 1: radioactive by, say by for example, like being the cool
Speaker 1: and around a nuclear reactor. UM. Now, water with hydrogen three,
Speaker 1: remember heavy water is the kind we've been talking about,
Speaker 1: is with hydrogen two. Deuterium water with hydrogen three, also
Speaker 1: known as tritium, would be another story. It is definitely
Speaker 1: radioactive in all its forms, but far far less common
Speaker 1: 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 q and A that was published in Slate that
Speaker 1: I mentioned earlier. You know, you instantly replaced the world's
Speaker 1: oceans with heavy water, where 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 basically,
Speaker 1: the biological concerns here would start out UH milder. You know,
Speaker 1: it would be more about bloat and weight, lower blood pressure.
Speaker 1: But by the time you reached like the tent heavy
Speaker 1: water mark in particularly in humans, we would be just
Speaker 1: irreversibly sterile. And then certainly by the time you hit
Speaker 1: that fifty percent point, I mean, that's that's definitely in
Speaker 1: the fatal zone. UH. So you know, Velson writes that,
Speaker 1: you know that heavy water makes UH eukaryotic cell division
Speaker 1: 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, UH organisms that are
Speaker 1: heavy water tolerant, or much more heavy water tolerant than
Speaker 1: other organisms. So prokaryotes, I think, in general, are more
Speaker 1: tolerant of of being exposed to deutorated water than eukaryotes are.
Speaker 1: Bacteria are going to be better off, and maybe they
Speaker 1: could just like you know, re evolve new complex life
Speaker 1: forms in the UH in the deutorated world. I wonder
Speaker 1: if they would be like slower moving life forms because
Speaker 1: the deutorated earth would just like have slower chemical reactions
Speaker 1: in general. 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 that are, you know, some
Speaker 1: sci 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 organism
Speaker 1: is that um in their heavy form would not be
Speaker 1: found anywhere in the natural world, so as proposed by
Speaker 1: Cats and Crespy in us in the journal Science back
Speaker 1: in nineteen sixty six. There 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: UH heavy water isotopes, you know, following the path of
Speaker 1: hydrogen in biological systems. UH deuterated algae, for instance, which
Speaker 1: we've had since the nineteen sixties have a useful role
Speaker 1: in the study of photosynthesis. But um, yeah, I wish
Speaker 1: I could have found something about like the idea of
Speaker 1: the deuterated man heavy water, heavy water elephants or something
Speaker 1: like that, But I didn't find anything. That's how we
Speaker 1: get Middle Earth's sort of a chemical recycling event and
Speaker 1: and and ended up there. Um. I did find one
Speaker 1: example that I was looking at. Apparently there's some kind
Speaker 1: of 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 you, thank you. Thank
Speaker 1: Now there's another way that heavy water has been very important,
Speaker 1: and that's in the history and development of nuclear technology,
Speaker 1: and um, in developing nuclear reactors and in the history
Speaker 1: of the development of nuclear weapons. Yeah, this is all interesting,
Speaker 1: you know, looking at the twentieth century certainly a time
Speaker 1: in which our understanding of chemistry greatly evolved, and then
Speaker 1: of course we began to understand uh nuclear fission as well,
Speaker 1: and scientists around this time, so nuclear fission. Uh. This
Speaker 1: was a discovered in December of night. Around this time,
Speaker 1: scientists began to realize that heavy water could be as
Speaker 1: what is called a moderator. So in nuclear reactors, a
Speaker 1: moderator slows down the neutrons to speeds at which fission
Speaker 1: can occur. Uh. It helps to create the conditions in
Speaker 1: which a true fission chain reaction can occur and keep going.
Speaker 1: So a nuclear reactor using heavy water can make use
Speaker 1: of naturally occurring uranium rather than enriched in ranium, because again,
Speaker 1: you can't just kick a bunch of naturally occurring uranium
Speaker 1: and produce an atomic blast. So basically, 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 norways of the more 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: for the French and the Germans both were like, we
Speaker 1: want 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 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 achieved them. So it's again it's
Speaker 1: a one ring scenario. It's like, you know, give us
Speaker 1: 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's Side was a particular note. In this one,
Speaker 1: four Norwegian agents parachuted into the area. They joined up
Speaker 1: with four special agents of Special Forces agents that had
Speaker 1: been deployed earlier on a recon miss mission, and they
Speaker 1: all attacked the plant, destroying the heavy water section of
Speaker 1: the plant and costing the Germans something like fives of
Speaker 1: heavy water. I think these missions had no casualties. Also, well,
Speaker 1: these two missions that have 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 a resistance and special Forces here basically kept the
Speaker 1: nuclear program of the of Germany in a kind of
Speaker 1: preliminary stage. But of course the Allies did not know this.
Speaker 1: They just they just knew that some effort was underway
Speaker 1: and 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 f d A in seventeen, but it's
Speaker 1: an idea that's been around for a long time. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think the first patent was granted back in the
Speaker 1: nineteen seventies. Um, so yeah, it's interesting. Now, before anyone
Speaker 1: assumes this has anything to do with turning your water
Speaker 1: heavy or any sort of thing, the basic idea of
Speaker 1: these UH deuterated drugs is that the resulting drug has
Speaker 1: a longer half life due to lower rates of metabolism.
Speaker 1: So half life when we're talking about medication. It's it's
Speaker 1: the point at which it loses fifty of its effectiveness
Speaker 1: inside your body. So this isn't related to say shelf life. Uh,
Speaker 1: it's 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. Yeah. Um, And it's funny because we've
Speaker 1: talked about several different ways now. Essentially one of the
Speaker 1: ways that delorated water will kill you if you drink
Speaker 1: too much of it is it slows down metabolism and
Speaker 1: chemical reactions cell division in your body to a point
Speaker 1: where you can't survive anymore. But there are more moderated
Speaker 1: forms of consuming heavy water that people have long speculated,
Speaker 1: whether rightly or not. I mean, there is still an
Speaker 1: open question as to whether there's anything to these ideas,
Speaker 1: but have speculated that, well, maybe you could use this
Speaker 1: to slow down chemical reactions in the body in a
Speaker 1: good way, in a way that's actually desirable, such as
Speaker 1: in life extension or you know, human hibernation or things
Speaker 1: like that. So I wanted to read apart from in
Speaker 1: Francel's article where she says, quote Mounta banks have been
Speaker 1: promoting heavy water as a panacea almost since the moment
Speaker 1: you're re isolated the first sample. Even imminent chemists have
Speaker 1: not been immune. In a nineteen thirty seven Popular Science article,
Speaker 1: Chemiss James Kendall opined that the elderly might extend their
Speaker 1: lives by drinking heavy water. Quote the heavy water drinkers
Speaker 1: reactions would probably be slowed and possibly his mental processes also.
Speaker 1: But who wants to be fast at sixty Well, I mean,
Speaker 1: I guess you know sixty was there's 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, nor 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 Francial references in her article
Speaker 1: is by A. Zion Lee and Michael P. Snyder and
Speaker 1: bio essays in that is a it's a speculative article
Speaker 1: that explores this question. It's called quote can heavy isotopes
Speaker 1: increased lifespan studies of relative abundance and various organisms reveal
Speaker 1: chemical perspectives on aging. Now they sit again some of
Speaker 1: the same stuff we've been talking about, the the chemistry
Speaker 1: 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 happened 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 and
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. Francill points that out um
Speaker 1: but also as summarized by Francill, basically they're observation is
Speaker 1: that quote Yeast models have showed that heavier isotopes, including deuterium,
Speaker 1: become depleted in organisms with aging. They suggested as possible
Speaker 1: that periodically supplementing the diet with appropriate isotopeologus could extend
Speaker 1: human lifespans. So if like you, tend to lose deuterium
Speaker 1: as you get older, maybe supplementing the body with some
Speaker 1: some you know, a little bit of extra heavy water,
Speaker 1: a little bit of extra deuterium might do you some good. Again,
Speaker 1: totally speculative, not proven, but there are there are some
Speaker 1: interesting tidbits in other organisms that suggests the possibility here.
Speaker 1: So in the future, the idea of saying heavy water
Speaker 1: supplements are possible, even if you end up having to
Speaker 1: buy them from Goop as opposed to anywhere, right, I mean,
Speaker 1: I guess the question would be like, is this gonna
Speaker 1: end up being science based medicine or is this going
Speaker 1: to end up being some some pseudoscientific miracle cure hawked
Speaker 1: on you know whatever. Conspiracy theory show um. But either
Speaker 1: way you're it's going to be for sale. Now. An
Speaker 1: inn resting thing I ran across Joe was that UM
Speaker 1: Apparently by by you can look at Mars, and by
Speaker 1: looking at the ratio between deudorated water and normal water
Speaker 1: on Mars, scientists are able to get a better picture
Speaker 1: of how much water Mars lost in the past. So basically,
Speaker 1: the more heavy water present, which is harder to lose,
Speaker 1: than the more water you lost over time. So to
Speaker 1: come back to that idea of like heavy nickels and
Speaker 1: normal nickels in your like personal Scrooge McDuck bank, if
Speaker 1: you were afraid that lepri cons we're stealing your nickels
Speaker 1: and lepricns are incapable of carrying them the heavier heavy nickels,
Speaker 1: then you could go to your Scrooge McDuck vault and
Speaker 1: you look in there and you count the heavy nickels,
Speaker 1: and you could you could determine how many normal nickels
Speaker 1: have been stolen by lepricns based on the resulting ratio.
Speaker 1: That's 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, deudorde 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 Ms. Frisbee and the Rats
Speaker 1: of Nim, wrote in nineteen seventy two novel titled A
Speaker 1: Report from Group seventeen, and it has 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
Speaker 1: know again, I mean more viscous. It doesn't actually exist,
Speaker 1: but it also infloy The idea of it also influenced
Speaker 1: Kurt Vonnicut's Ice nine concept and Cat's Cradle. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: and for those not familiar, Ice nine one of the
Speaker 1: great plot devices of all time. It's a it's an
Speaker 1: alternate form of the water molecule that freezes at room temperature,
Speaker 1: and it can act as a seed crystal. So basically
Speaker 1: the premises you drop this in a lake and suddenly
Speaker 1: the entire lake will freeze at room temperature. It's bad.
Speaker 1: It's bad and doesn't exist. Uh, unlike heavy water, which
Speaker 1: is which does exist and is in you right now. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's the interesting thing. Um, it's weird how reading about this, uh,
Speaker 1: and I keep thinking about heavy water holding these uh
Speaker 1: opposing ideas in my head at the same time. I
Speaker 1: guess it's like an exercise in scientific negative capability because
Speaker 1: I keep thinking of heavy water simultaneously as something that's natural,
Speaker 1: found in all the oceans of the world. It's in
Speaker 1: your body right now. It's gonna be harmless at the
Speaker 1: levels that you ingested, but also is like a horrific poison,
Speaker 1: if you know, if ingested in the wrong way. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, of course, we we often have to think
Speaker 1: about that in terms of a lot of different things,
Speaker 1: including just normal water, right, I mean, um, as well
Speaker 1: as like various household spices, um, you know, moderation and
Speaker 1: all things. Right, I mean, that's what holds the world
Speaker 1: to get holds their bodies together. Just dealing with without
Speaker 1: any you know, ethical interpretations of the statement like there
Speaker 1: is a there is a balance, there's a chemical balance
Speaker 1: in all things, and that's kind of I mean, that's
Speaker 1: kind of one of the big take homes of the
Speaker 1: chemical revolution. In addition to you know, developing all these
Speaker 1: chemicals of life and then also these chemicals of death
Speaker 1: during the twentieth century, you know, just are are our
Speaker 1: sudden you know, increasing understanding of just all of these
Speaker 1: little bonds that hold us together. Extremely good point. One
Speaker 1: last thing I'll just say again, don't start buying heavy
Speaker 1: water for life extension unless it's actually backed up by science.
Speaker 1: Correct check the research on that. All right, Well, again,
Speaker 1: we would love to hear from everyone out there about
Speaker 1: heavy water. If you have any experience with heavy water,
Speaker 1: thoughts on heavy water, or indeed have you if you
Speaker 1: have read science fiction or had any kind of science
Speaker 1: fiction based thoughts around heavy water organisms, we would love
Speaker 1: to hear from you. In the meantime, if you would
Speaker 1: like to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: your Mind, you can find us wherever you get your
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