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In 1815, with Europe at war, | 0:00:05 | 0:00:07 | |
four young Germans decided to do a particularly foolhardy experiment. | 0:00:07 | 0:00:12 | |
One which would transform their lives and ours, as well. | 0:00:12 | 0:00:16 | |
One of them, a pharmacist, had created some intriguing crystals | 0:00:18 | 0:00:22 | |
which he carefully measured out. | 0:00:22 | 0:00:24 | |
He was keen to see what effects they would have on his body. | 0:00:26 | 0:00:28 | |
He dissolved them in alcohol and then diluted it with water. | 0:00:30 | 0:00:35 | |
Since the crystals had recently been made | 0:00:35 | 0:00:38 | |
and only previously tested on dogs, | 0:00:38 | 0:00:40 | |
they had very little idea what was going to happen. | 0:00:40 | 0:00:43 | |
The answer was, not much. So they did it again. | 0:00:46 | 0:00:50 | |
Prost! | 0:00:55 | 0:00:56 | |
Ah! | 0:00:58 | 0:00:59 | |
This time, there was a pounding headache, | 0:00:59 | 0:01:02 | |
nausea and extreme flushing. | 0:01:02 | 0:01:05 | |
So, naturally, they decided to go even more extreme. | 0:01:05 | 0:01:09 | |
They put the crystals directly on their tongues | 0:01:09 | 0:01:12 | |
and washed them down with another shot of alcohol. | 0:01:12 | 0:01:15 | |
Their leader, Friedrich Serturner, | 0:01:19 | 0:01:21 | |
described falling to the ground semiconscious. | 0:01:21 | 0:01:24 | |
In terrible pain and fingers twitching with every heartbeat. | 0:01:24 | 0:01:30 | |
Somehow, he managed to crawl his way | 0:01:30 | 0:01:32 | |
over to a bottle of really strong vinegar. | 0:01:32 | 0:01:36 | |
He swallowed it down and the rest, | 0:01:36 | 0:01:38 | |
he poured into the mouths of his unconscious assistants. | 0:01:38 | 0:01:42 | |
They were all violently sick. | 0:01:42 | 0:01:44 | |
Serturner had saved their lives by making them vomit, | 0:01:46 | 0:01:49 | |
but he noted that for the next few days, | 0:01:49 | 0:01:51 | |
they continued feeling ill. Aches, sickness and constipation. | 0:01:51 | 0:01:57 | |
Swallowing the crystals had produced classic symptoms of opium overdose. | 0:01:57 | 0:02:02 | |
Serturner was thrilled. | 0:02:02 | 0:02:04 | |
He was the first person ever to extract the essence of opium. | 0:02:04 | 0:02:08 | |
A white powder that he called morphium. | 0:02:08 | 0:02:11 | |
He had given birth to a whole new science | 0:02:11 | 0:02:14 | |
and opened a Pandora's box of good and evil. | 0:02:14 | 0:02:18 | |
This series tells the extraordinary story of what Serturner unleashed. | 0:02:20 | 0:02:24 | |
The remarkable medicines which today protect us | 0:02:25 | 0:02:28 | |
against devastating disease. | 0:02:28 | 0:02:30 | |
Just over there is a monster of biblical proportions. | 0:02:31 | 0:02:35 | |
The smallpox virus. | 0:02:35 | 0:02:37 | |
And the agonies of mortal life. | 0:02:38 | 0:02:42 | |
I have here a big lump of raw opium. | 0:02:43 | 0:02:46 | |
You almost want to lick it. | 0:02:46 | 0:02:48 | |
Drugs that can be terrifyingly lethal. | 0:02:49 | 0:02:52 | |
This is THE most poisonous substance known to man. | 0:02:52 | 0:02:55 | |
Or incredibly pleasurable. | 0:02:58 | 0:03:00 | |
Ooo, yes! | 0:03:02 | 0:03:04 | |
Blimey, wow! | 0:03:04 | 0:03:06 | |
HE LAUGHS | 0:03:06 | 0:03:07 | |
It's a story of two centuries of greed, luck and genius. | 0:03:11 | 0:03:15 | |
In this programme, I'm going to be telling the remarkable | 0:03:16 | 0:03:19 | |
stories of the men who abolished pain. | 0:03:19 | 0:03:22 | |
And by doing so created the world's most popular, desirable | 0:03:22 | 0:03:26 | |
and addictive drugs. | 0:03:26 | 0:03:27 | |
This is such an odd and unnatural thing to do. | 0:03:45 | 0:03:49 | |
I'm not sure I'm going to be able to do it, but let's see. | 0:03:49 | 0:03:52 | |
POUNDING HEARTBEAT | 0:03:52 | 0:03:53 | |
OK. | 0:04:02 | 0:04:03 | |
Argh! Cor! That is just absolutely horrible! | 0:04:05 | 0:04:10 | |
I'm pushing a needle right through my hand. | 0:04:10 | 0:04:12 | |
I don't know if it's got through the other end. Sticking out there. | 0:04:12 | 0:04:16 | |
Ah! | 0:04:16 | 0:04:17 | |
This is only possible | 0:04:17 | 0:04:19 | |
because my hand has been numbed with local anaesthetic. | 0:04:19 | 0:04:22 | |
The fact that I can do that is a testimony, | 0:04:22 | 0:04:25 | |
if you like, to modern medicine. | 0:04:25 | 0:04:27 | |
200 years ago, we had almost nothing. | 0:04:27 | 0:04:30 | |
We had a few herbal medicines. | 0:04:30 | 0:04:32 | |
If you were having your teeth pulled out or your leg cut off, | 0:04:32 | 0:04:34 | |
then you were going to be in an awful lot of pain. | 0:04:34 | 0:04:37 | |
Pain is such a visceral thing that it's not surprising | 0:04:37 | 0:04:40 | |
that the quest to find a way to control it | 0:04:40 | 0:04:43 | |
has been such a driving force in the history of drugs. | 0:04:43 | 0:04:47 | |
For centuries, there was only one substance | 0:04:52 | 0:04:54 | |
that could reliably relieve pain. Opium. | 0:04:54 | 0:04:58 | |
A resin extracted from poppies, | 0:04:59 | 0:05:01 | |
it is one of mankind's oldest and most addictive drugs. | 0:05:01 | 0:05:04 | |
Yet opium would give rise to today's giant pharmaceutical industry. | 0:05:05 | 0:05:11 | |
Opium's always been popular. | 0:05:11 | 0:05:12 | |
It's always been very easy to tell what opium does | 0:05:12 | 0:05:15 | |
because it acts in a very obvious way. It acts very quickly. | 0:05:15 | 0:05:19 | |
The Sumerians called it the Joy Plant. | 0:05:19 | 0:05:22 | |
By the beginning of the 19th century, | 0:05:23 | 0:05:25 | |
opium was widely available in Europe. | 0:05:25 | 0:05:27 | |
It was particularly popular when dissolved in alcohol, | 0:05:27 | 0:05:31 | |
as a medicine called laudanum. | 0:05:31 | 0:05:33 | |
The trouble is, the raw material was expensive and it was unreliable. | 0:05:35 | 0:05:39 | |
So no wonder pharmacists began to ask themselves, | 0:05:39 | 0:05:42 | |
"What exactly is in opium that gives it its seemingly-magical qualities?" | 0:05:42 | 0:05:47 | |
One of those pharmacists was | 0:05:48 | 0:05:50 | |
the 20-year-old German Friedrich Serturner, | 0:05:50 | 0:05:53 | |
whose attempts to produce morphium nearly ended in his death | 0:05:53 | 0:05:57 | |
and the death of all his assistants. | 0:05:57 | 0:06:00 | |
His experiments would unlock the key, not just to pain relief, | 0:06:00 | 0:06:03 | |
but to all modern medicines. | 0:06:03 | 0:06:04 | |
It took Serturner two years of trial and painful error | 0:06:07 | 0:06:11 | |
before he discovered how to extract morphium from opium resin. | 0:06:11 | 0:06:15 | |
I'm hoping to do it in rather less time than that. | 0:06:15 | 0:06:18 | |
But because morphium is now a Class A drug, | 0:06:18 | 0:06:20 | |
I'm going to have to do it in a licensed premises. | 0:06:20 | 0:06:24 | |
Serturner would have started with raw opium | 0:06:29 | 0:06:32 | |
which comes from the sap of the poppy. | 0:06:32 | 0:06:35 | |
Now, I have an enormous great block of the stuff here. | 0:06:35 | 0:06:38 | |
It still smells sort of yeasty. | 0:06:40 | 0:06:43 | |
Time to extract morphium. | 0:06:45 | 0:06:47 | |
First, Serturner added a standard solvent. Alcohol. | 0:06:50 | 0:06:55 | |
The alcohol should already be beginning to extract | 0:06:55 | 0:06:59 | |
the chemicals from the raw opium. | 0:06:59 | 0:07:01 | |
This, in essence, is laudanum. | 0:07:01 | 0:07:03 | |
A sort of tonic they used in the 19th century. | 0:07:03 | 0:07:06 | |
They gave it to squawking babies. | 0:07:06 | 0:07:08 | |
One of the ideas which actually comes from alchemy | 0:07:14 | 0:07:17 | |
is the idea that there might be some active principle. | 0:07:17 | 0:07:20 | |
Something that lay at the heart of your substance | 0:07:20 | 0:07:23 | |
which gave it its power. | 0:07:23 | 0:07:25 | |
And from there, it's actually not a huge step to say, | 0:07:25 | 0:07:28 | |
what if we take away the alcohol, what are we left with? | 0:07:28 | 0:07:32 | |
Are we left with that fundamental principle? | 0:07:32 | 0:07:35 | |
The first thing he extracted was a substance that was acidic. | 0:07:39 | 0:07:43 | |
He tried it on dogs and absolutely nothing happened. | 0:07:45 | 0:07:49 | |
Instead of giving up, Serturner tried doing something | 0:07:51 | 0:07:54 | |
no-one else had previously attempted. | 0:07:54 | 0:07:56 | |
The received wisdom was the only really important | 0:07:56 | 0:08:00 | |
chemicals in plants were sharp-tasting acids. | 0:08:00 | 0:08:03 | |
But Serturner decided to see if he could extract an alkaline chemical, | 0:08:03 | 0:08:07 | |
the opposite of an acid, from opium. | 0:08:07 | 0:08:10 | |
He was exploring the unknown. | 0:08:10 | 0:08:13 | |
When you actually try and do it with modern equipment, | 0:08:13 | 0:08:15 | |
it gives you a huge respect for what they were doing back then. | 0:08:15 | 0:08:19 | |
Because every stage would last weeks | 0:08:19 | 0:08:21 | |
and he obviously had no real idea what he was doing. | 0:08:21 | 0:08:25 | |
Finally, around 1803, he got this sludgy precipitate. | 0:08:29 | 0:08:34 | |
From this very unpromising substance, | 0:08:37 | 0:08:40 | |
Serturner managed to extract some white crystals. | 0:08:40 | 0:08:43 | |
When he gave these to a dog, | 0:08:43 | 0:08:44 | |
the dog became sleepy, trembled and then died. | 0:08:44 | 0:08:49 | |
Serturner was absolutely thrilled. | 0:08:50 | 0:08:52 | |
He published and sat back, waiting for the applause. | 0:08:52 | 0:08:56 | |
Which never came. | 0:08:56 | 0:08:58 | |
It seems people just weren't that interested | 0:08:58 | 0:09:00 | |
in the workings of a young man doing his bit in a small back room. | 0:09:00 | 0:09:05 | |
It was not until 10 years later, | 0:09:07 | 0:09:09 | |
when Serturner purified and took the morphium himself, | 0:09:09 | 0:09:13 | |
with his three assistants, | 0:09:13 | 0:09:15 | |
that his dramatic discovery | 0:09:15 | 0:09:17 | |
finally caught the attention of early chemists. | 0:09:17 | 0:09:20 | |
Gay-Lussac, who was a doyenne of chemistry in Paris, | 0:09:24 | 0:09:27 | |
probably the greatest chemist in the world of his day, | 0:09:27 | 0:09:30 | |
he decided that this paper that had been brought to his attention | 0:09:30 | 0:09:34 | |
should be translated into French and published. | 0:09:34 | 0:09:38 | |
And, therefore, it went around the world. | 0:09:38 | 0:09:40 | |
And the world knew about this isolation. That was so important. | 0:09:40 | 0:09:44 | |
In extracting the active ingredient of opium, | 0:09:44 | 0:09:48 | |
Serturner had launched a new age of discovery. | 0:09:48 | 0:09:51 | |
He had shown that the powers of herbal remedies | 0:09:53 | 0:09:55 | |
could be captured in a chemical form, | 0:09:55 | 0:09:58 | |
measured out and quantified as a dose. | 0:09:58 | 0:10:01 | |
He had also revealed a whole new world | 0:10:02 | 0:10:05 | |
of previously-unsuspected chemicals hiding in plants. | 0:10:05 | 0:10:09 | |
They were to become our first real medicines. | 0:10:09 | 0:10:13 | |
They decided to call these new chemicals | 0:10:13 | 0:10:16 | |
they were getting out of plants the alkaloids. | 0:10:16 | 0:10:19 | |
They also decided to give them the name "-ine" at the end. | 0:10:19 | 0:10:23 | |
And, so, Serturner's white powder | 0:10:23 | 0:10:26 | |
became not "morphium", but "morphine". | 0:10:26 | 0:10:30 | |
The isolation of morphine was the single most important event | 0:10:35 | 0:10:41 | |
that has ever occurred in drug discovery. | 0:10:41 | 0:10:43 | |
Far more important than the introduction of penicillin | 0:10:43 | 0:10:46 | |
in terms of advancing the science. | 0:10:46 | 0:10:50 | |
The extraction of morphine | 0:10:54 | 0:10:55 | |
was such a big moment in the history of medicine | 0:10:55 | 0:10:58 | |
because once you had the pure chemical, | 0:10:58 | 0:11:00 | |
you could give it in a controlled and measured dose. | 0:11:00 | 0:11:03 | |
You were no longer dependent on the vagaries | 0:11:03 | 0:11:05 | |
of whatever plant you happened to be eating. | 0:11:05 | 0:11:07 | |
It also meant they could extract dozens of different alkaloids. | 0:11:07 | 0:11:12 | |
Nature's medicine cabinet was flung wide open. | 0:11:13 | 0:11:17 | |
It turned out that alkaloids are the reason | 0:11:17 | 0:11:19 | |
why many herbal remedies are effective. | 0:11:19 | 0:11:22 | |
Being the plant's own defence against herbivores, | 0:11:23 | 0:11:26 | |
a lot were bitter-tasting and poisonous. | 0:11:26 | 0:11:29 | |
But once isolated, we could start to use them. | 0:11:29 | 0:11:31 | |
And not just as painkillers. | 0:11:31 | 0:11:33 | |
Now, I have here my favourite drug of abuse. Caffeine. | 0:11:35 | 0:11:40 | |
Other famous alkaloids include nicotine | 0:11:40 | 0:11:44 | |
and the malaria drug, quinine. | 0:11:44 | 0:11:47 | |
And here's another I take from time to time. | 0:11:47 | 0:11:49 | |
Codeine was another powerful painkiller | 0:11:50 | 0:11:53 | |
which was extracted from the poppy. | 0:11:53 | 0:11:55 | |
Codeine, like morphine, | 0:11:55 | 0:11:56 | |
works by modulating the way that the brain perceives pain. | 0:11:56 | 0:12:01 | |
Surprisingly, we are only now beginning to understand | 0:12:01 | 0:12:05 | |
how these so-called opiate drugs work. | 0:12:05 | 0:12:08 | |
Normally, raw nerve endings trigger an electrical signal | 0:12:08 | 0:12:11 | |
which travels to the spine. | 0:12:11 | 0:12:13 | |
There, it's converted into a chemical signal | 0:12:13 | 0:12:16 | |
which crosses into other nerves | 0:12:16 | 0:12:17 | |
which then transmit the message to the brain. | 0:12:17 | 0:12:20 | |
Once your brain has received that pain message, | 0:12:22 | 0:12:25 | |
it can decide to tone it down or, indeed, switch it off entirely. | 0:12:25 | 0:12:30 | |
It does that via another set of nerves | 0:12:30 | 0:12:33 | |
that send a signal down the spine. | 0:12:33 | 0:12:35 | |
And that interrupts the incoming pain message. | 0:12:35 | 0:12:38 | |
Our brains typically activate this pain-relieving pathway | 0:12:40 | 0:12:43 | |
in times of extreme stress. | 0:12:43 | 0:12:45 | |
There are a number of different points along the pain pathway | 0:12:46 | 0:12:49 | |
where you can turn the pain response down. | 0:12:49 | 0:12:53 | |
And the opiates interact with quite a few of them. | 0:12:53 | 0:12:56 | |
For example, they make the brain switch on | 0:12:57 | 0:13:00 | |
the pain-blocking pathways I've just described. | 0:13:00 | 0:13:03 | |
They also act in the brain | 0:13:03 | 0:13:05 | |
to reduce the impact of any pain messages that get through. | 0:13:05 | 0:13:08 | |
There's even recent evidence | 0:13:08 | 0:13:10 | |
they can dull the raw nerve endings at the site of pain. | 0:13:10 | 0:13:15 | |
It's no wonder they're so effective. | 0:13:15 | 0:13:17 | |
The opiates are wonderful painkillers, | 0:13:20 | 0:13:22 | |
but they do have significant side effects. | 0:13:22 | 0:13:25 | |
Constipation, vomiting, | 0:13:25 | 0:13:28 | |
addiction, and if they depress your breathing, death. | 0:13:28 | 0:13:32 | |
Plants from all over the world were soon being examined | 0:13:36 | 0:13:40 | |
for alkaloids that might rival the opiates. | 0:13:40 | 0:13:43 | |
One plant from South America did indeed contain a substance | 0:13:43 | 0:13:47 | |
with extraordinary pain-killing properties. | 0:13:47 | 0:13:50 | |
But, like morphine, it came with a heavy price. | 0:13:50 | 0:13:53 | |
This white powder is an alkaloid extracted from these leaves. | 0:13:56 | 0:14:01 | |
And these are the coca leaves. | 0:14:01 | 0:14:04 | |
They're a well-known stimulant in South America. | 0:14:04 | 0:14:07 | |
Which means that this is coca-ine. | 0:14:07 | 0:14:12 | |
Better known as cocaine. | 0:14:12 | 0:14:14 | |
Cocaine was added to wines, which were promoted by the Pope. | 0:14:15 | 0:14:20 | |
Soft drinks, for those who disapproved of alcohol, | 0:14:20 | 0:14:24 | |
and soothing drops and lozenges. | 0:14:24 | 0:14:26 | |
But it was cocaine's reputation for combating hunger and fatigue | 0:14:26 | 0:14:31 | |
that led a curious Austrian doctor called Sigmund Freud | 0:14:31 | 0:14:35 | |
to investigate its effects further. | 0:14:35 | 0:14:38 | |
Sigmund Freud was then a neurologist in Vienna. | 0:14:38 | 0:14:41 | |
This was well before he developed psychoanalysis. | 0:14:41 | 0:14:44 | |
And he got extremely interested in cocaine, | 0:14:44 | 0:14:47 | |
which he called a magical drug, | 0:14:47 | 0:14:49 | |
which he prescribed to his patients for a whole range of ailments, | 0:14:49 | 0:14:53 | |
including, ironically enough, morphine addiction. | 0:14:53 | 0:14:56 | |
He sent samples of cocaine to a number of his colleagues, | 0:14:56 | 0:15:00 | |
including a trainee eye surgeon called Karl Koller. | 0:15:00 | 0:15:04 | |
Koller had been using morphine and other substances | 0:15:07 | 0:15:09 | |
to try and alleviate the searing agony of eye surgery. | 0:15:09 | 0:15:14 | |
But nothing had worked. | 0:15:14 | 0:15:15 | |
Koller tasted some cocaine | 0:15:17 | 0:15:19 | |
and he noticed that the tip of his tongue went numb. | 0:15:19 | 0:15:23 | |
And he thought to himself, "That's interesting. | 0:15:23 | 0:15:25 | |
"What would happen if I put cocaine into my eye?" | 0:15:25 | 0:15:28 | |
Well, he tried it out on a frog and a dog | 0:15:28 | 0:15:31 | |
and they seemed to be fine, | 0:15:31 | 0:15:32 | |
so he then decided to try it out on himself. | 0:15:32 | 0:15:36 | |
What he did, he and a colleague, | 0:15:36 | 0:15:38 | |
is they got cocaine dissolved in water | 0:15:38 | 0:15:41 | |
and they dripped some into their eyes... | 0:15:41 | 0:15:44 | |
Oh, that stings a bit. | 0:15:46 | 0:15:48 | |
And then they got a nice sharp pin | 0:15:48 | 0:15:53 | |
and they sort of stabbed their own eyes. | 0:15:53 | 0:15:57 | |
Now, I'm not going to do that, it sounds insanely dangerous. | 0:15:57 | 0:16:00 | |
I'm going to use this instead. | 0:16:00 | 0:16:01 | |
Oh, that's weird. I could just about see it bend then. | 0:16:05 | 0:16:08 | |
Totally numb. | 0:16:10 | 0:16:11 | |
This was extraordinary. | 0:16:13 | 0:16:15 | |
Whereas the opiates numbed pain, | 0:16:15 | 0:16:17 | |
cocaine is what we now call an anaesthetic, | 0:16:17 | 0:16:20 | |
which literally means, without sensation. | 0:16:20 | 0:16:22 | |
Cocaine stops nerves from firing, from sending signals. | 0:16:24 | 0:16:27 | |
And affects not just the pain-detecting nerves, | 0:16:27 | 0:16:30 | |
but all of them. | 0:16:30 | 0:16:31 | |
Which is why it makes the eye or tongue feel completely numb. | 0:16:31 | 0:16:35 | |
Cocaine made complicated eye surgery possible. | 0:16:36 | 0:16:39 | |
This stomach-churning footage from 1917 | 0:16:41 | 0:16:43 | |
shows a cataract operation | 0:16:43 | 0:16:45 | |
performed after putting in a few drops of cocaine. | 0:16:45 | 0:16:48 | |
It would once have been attempted without pain relief. | 0:16:49 | 0:16:52 | |
When cocaine gets to the blood and to the brain, | 0:16:53 | 0:16:56 | |
there it acts very like the opiates. | 0:16:56 | 0:16:58 | |
And that means it can be a drug of abuse. | 0:16:58 | 0:17:01 | |
It's not very much used these days, but its derivates certainly are. | 0:17:01 | 0:17:05 | |
They form the basis of many local anaesthetics. | 0:17:05 | 0:17:07 | |
And as somebody who's had their teeth drilled | 0:17:07 | 0:17:10 | |
more times than I care to remember, | 0:17:10 | 0:17:12 | |
I'm hugely grateful to Dr Koller. | 0:17:12 | 0:17:15 | |
Or Coca Koller, as he was sometimes called. | 0:17:15 | 0:17:18 | |
But plants could not provide the level of general anaesthesia | 0:17:21 | 0:17:25 | |
required to make extensive pain-free surgery possible. | 0:17:25 | 0:17:28 | |
In the good old days, patients weren't even allowed opium | 0:17:29 | 0:17:33 | |
because pain was thought to be good for you. | 0:17:33 | 0:17:35 | |
Pain was understood as an essential component in terms of surgery. | 0:17:37 | 0:17:43 | |
So although surgeons were concerned about the effects of pain | 0:17:43 | 0:17:47 | |
on patients in terms of bearability, | 0:17:47 | 0:17:50 | |
in terms of keeping a patient alive during an operation, | 0:17:50 | 0:17:55 | |
it was regarded as part of the package. | 0:17:55 | 0:17:59 | |
The world where surgeons in frockcoats | 0:17:59 | 0:18:01 | |
committed acts of unspeakable horror | 0:18:01 | 0:18:04 | |
would be changed by a dentist's chance discovery. | 0:18:04 | 0:18:07 | |
But it was a breakthrough that was a long time coming. | 0:18:08 | 0:18:11 | |
Throughout the 18th century, chemists had been experimenting | 0:18:11 | 0:18:14 | |
with everything they could lay their hands on, from plants to rocks. | 0:18:14 | 0:18:19 | |
They were particularly interested in creating gasses. | 0:18:19 | 0:18:21 | |
One of the gasses they produced, | 0:18:22 | 0:18:24 | |
they did by heating up ammonium nitrate. | 0:18:24 | 0:18:27 | |
Now, this gas was said to be incredibly poisonous. | 0:18:27 | 0:18:31 | |
So, surprising that a young chemist called Humphry Davy | 0:18:32 | 0:18:35 | |
was so keen not just to collect it, but also inhale it. | 0:18:35 | 0:18:39 | |
It's very hard, I think, | 0:18:43 | 0:18:44 | |
to get back into the heads of an 18th or 19th-century chemist. | 0:18:44 | 0:18:49 | |
And that's partly because | 0:18:49 | 0:18:51 | |
there was so much self-experimentation that went on. | 0:18:51 | 0:18:54 | |
Now, gasses, you inhaled them, | 0:18:54 | 0:18:58 | |
and these "airs", as they're called, | 0:18:58 | 0:19:00 | |
were at one point regarded as possibly panaceas, | 0:19:00 | 0:19:05 | |
solutions for big medical problems. | 0:19:05 | 0:19:08 | |
And the way in which they tested them was on themselves. | 0:19:08 | 0:19:11 | |
The young Humphry Davy was desperate to make his name, | 0:19:12 | 0:19:15 | |
which is probably why, despite the risks, | 0:19:15 | 0:19:17 | |
he experimented with this new, potentially-lethal gas. | 0:19:17 | 0:19:20 | |
It was a foolhardy thing to do. | 0:19:22 | 0:19:25 | |
I'm doing it under carefully-controlled conditions. | 0:19:25 | 0:19:28 | |
Ooo! | 0:19:28 | 0:19:29 | |
Nothing yet. Ho! Huh! OK. | 0:19:29 | 0:19:32 | |
Now, he records...in his diaries | 0:19:32 | 0:19:36 | |
that he started off feeling | 0:19:36 | 0:19:38 | |
sort of sleepy and splenic. | 0:19:38 | 0:19:41 | |
But after a couple of... Oooh! ..blasts of it, | 0:19:41 | 0:19:44 | |
he started to want to dance around the room. | 0:19:44 | 0:19:47 | |
Ooo, yes, I'm feeling it now. Yes. | 0:19:47 | 0:19:48 | |
Huh! Light-headed. | 0:19:48 | 0:19:50 | |
HE LAUGHS | 0:19:56 | 0:19:57 | |
Yep, I can see why they call it laughing gas. | 0:19:57 | 0:19:59 | |
He also wrote other things... | 0:20:00 | 0:20:03 | |
which I've entirely forgotten now. | 0:20:03 | 0:20:05 | |
Er...his notebooks. | 0:20:05 | 0:20:07 | |
Yes, he was writing something about... Oooh, yeah! So it goes... | 0:20:07 | 0:20:10 | |
Now, one of the things he noticed and wrote about, | 0:20:10 | 0:20:13 | |
not in his notebooks, later, | 0:20:13 | 0:20:15 | |
is its effects on pain, that apparently it reduced it. | 0:20:15 | 0:20:19 | |
Ooo! Yeah. That's actually all right. | 0:20:19 | 0:20:22 | |
HE LAUGHS | 0:20:22 | 0:20:24 | |
Davy published his discovery that nitrous oxide relieved pain | 0:20:27 | 0:20:31 | |
and even stated its potential in surgery. | 0:20:31 | 0:20:34 | |
And yet, tragically, he did nothing more about it. | 0:20:35 | 0:20:38 | |
For the next few decades, | 0:20:40 | 0:20:41 | |
surgeons went on operating on fully-conscious patients | 0:20:41 | 0:20:44 | |
and nitrous oxide was used mainly as a recreational drug | 0:20:44 | 0:20:47 | |
for laughing gas parties. | 0:20:47 | 0:20:50 | |
It was at one of these in America | 0:20:54 | 0:20:55 | |
that a young dentist called Horace Wells came across the gas | 0:20:55 | 0:21:00 | |
and saw how effective it was at dulling pain. | 0:21:00 | 0:21:03 | |
Because his days were spent yanking out teeth, | 0:21:03 | 0:21:06 | |
it made a deep impression. | 0:21:06 | 0:21:08 | |
He was horrified by pain. And there was nothing new about that. | 0:21:09 | 0:21:13 | |
That surgeons, often the most brilliant surgeons, | 0:21:13 | 0:21:16 | |
were repulsed by what they had to do. | 0:21:16 | 0:21:20 | |
If you had to operate on someone, | 0:21:20 | 0:21:21 | |
if you had to cut into them without anaesthetics, | 0:21:21 | 0:21:24 | |
it was an awful thing. | 0:21:24 | 0:21:26 | |
They would vomit with fear | 0:21:26 | 0:21:28 | |
and revulsion prior to doing an operation. | 0:21:28 | 0:21:31 | |
After experimenting first on himself and then on some patients, | 0:21:34 | 0:21:39 | |
Wells realised he had stumbled across something truly miraculous. | 0:21:39 | 0:21:42 | |
A gas that could open the way to pain-free surgery. | 0:21:42 | 0:21:46 | |
So, he headed to Harvard Medical School in Boston | 0:21:46 | 0:21:50 | |
to tell the elite surgeons what he had found. | 0:21:50 | 0:21:53 | |
He invited a former partner of his, William Morton, | 0:21:54 | 0:21:58 | |
who was also studying at the medical school, | 0:21:58 | 0:22:01 | |
to accompany him and share his triumph. | 0:22:01 | 0:22:03 | |
On a cold winter's night in 1845, | 0:22:07 | 0:22:09 | |
Wells and Morton appeared before a packed audience | 0:22:09 | 0:22:13 | |
of doctors and medical students. | 0:22:13 | 0:22:16 | |
One of the medical students had a problem with his teeth, | 0:22:16 | 0:22:19 | |
so he was summoned forward, | 0:22:19 | 0:22:20 | |
he was given a good old blast of nitrous oxide | 0:22:20 | 0:22:24 | |
from a bag that Wells had brought with him | 0:22:24 | 0:22:26 | |
and then Wells attempted to extract | 0:22:26 | 0:22:29 | |
his painful tooth with a pair of pliers. | 0:22:29 | 0:22:31 | |
No-one's entirely clear what happened next, | 0:22:31 | 0:22:34 | |
but the student made a noise, | 0:22:34 | 0:22:36 | |
the audience interpreted that as a cry of pain | 0:22:36 | 0:22:39 | |
and soon, there were hisses and cries of, "Humbug! Humbug!" | 0:22:39 | 0:22:44 | |
Which was a deadly medical insult. | 0:22:44 | 0:22:47 | |
Utterly humiliated, Morton and Wells packed their bags and they left. | 0:22:47 | 0:22:53 | |
No-one had imagined anaesthesia could exist. | 0:23:02 | 0:23:05 | |
And I think that's why Wells failed | 0:23:05 | 0:23:07 | |
in his demonstration of nitrous oxide. | 0:23:07 | 0:23:10 | |
Because they found the very idea that pain was optional, | 0:23:10 | 0:23:13 | |
that pain could be deleted, erased from the world, | 0:23:13 | 0:23:16 | |
so intrinsically fraudulent | 0:23:16 | 0:23:18 | |
that they were predisposed to reach that conclusion. | 0:23:18 | 0:23:21 | |
Wells was broken by this failure and would later commit suicide. | 0:23:23 | 0:23:27 | |
But Morton had seen the commercial potential. | 0:23:27 | 0:23:31 | |
His real motivation for trying to find | 0:23:31 | 0:23:34 | |
a decent method of pain relief for dental work | 0:23:34 | 0:23:36 | |
was actually to find a way of expanding his business. | 0:23:36 | 0:23:40 | |
Because by that stage, | 0:23:40 | 0:23:42 | |
new technology produced sets of artificial teeth. | 0:23:42 | 0:23:46 | |
So, rather than just individual teeth, | 0:23:46 | 0:23:49 | |
a patient could have a whole set fitted. | 0:23:49 | 0:23:52 | |
But obviously, to have rotten stumps and roots extracted | 0:23:52 | 0:23:55 | |
without pain relief was extremely painful | 0:23:55 | 0:23:59 | |
and a lot of patients did not stick it. | 0:23:59 | 0:24:02 | |
Morton turned his attention to another substance | 0:24:05 | 0:24:08 | |
doing the rounds at student parties. | 0:24:08 | 0:24:10 | |
By adding alcohol to sulphuric acid, | 0:24:11 | 0:24:14 | |
the students produced a volatile liquid | 0:24:14 | 0:24:16 | |
known as, sweet oil of vitriol. | 0:24:16 | 0:24:19 | |
When inhaled, it resulted in a very decent high. | 0:24:19 | 0:24:22 | |
Whoo! This is strong stuff. | 0:24:24 | 0:24:25 | |
What is coming out of this | 0:24:25 | 0:24:27 | |
is a vapour or a liquid that we now know as ether. | 0:24:27 | 0:24:31 | |
Ether was a popular alternative to alcohol for teetotallers. | 0:24:35 | 0:24:39 | |
It was sometimes used in pain-relieving medicines. | 0:24:39 | 0:24:42 | |
And it was this pain-killing effect that got Morton interested. | 0:24:42 | 0:24:46 | |
Morton started out by using a few drops of ether to numb the mouth. | 0:24:50 | 0:24:55 | |
Then he used quite a lot to knock out a spaniel. | 0:24:55 | 0:24:59 | |
But what he really needed to do to prove it was safe and effective | 0:24:59 | 0:25:02 | |
was try it on a human. | 0:25:02 | 0:25:04 | |
With no other human volunteers to hand, | 0:25:06 | 0:25:08 | |
Morton decided to try it out on himself. | 0:25:08 | 0:25:11 | |
He got a handkerchief, | 0:25:11 | 0:25:13 | |
and applied some ether. | 0:25:13 | 0:25:15 | |
He looked at his watch. | 0:25:17 | 0:25:19 | |
And then stuck the handkerchief over his face. | 0:25:19 | 0:25:22 | |
A few minutes later, he woke up. | 0:25:27 | 0:25:29 | |
But he was unable to move. | 0:25:29 | 0:25:31 | |
As he later wrote, "I was terrified that I would die in that position. | 0:25:31 | 0:25:36 | |
"And the world would laugh at my folly." | 0:25:36 | 0:25:38 | |
But the world never got a chance because he made a full recovery, | 0:25:38 | 0:25:42 | |
and he was now very, very keen to try this out on someone else. | 0:25:42 | 0:25:46 | |
After successful trials on unsuspecting patients, | 0:25:52 | 0:25:56 | |
Morton returned to Harvard Medical School. | 0:25:56 | 0:25:58 | |
They agreed that Morton should have a second chance | 0:26:00 | 0:26:03 | |
to demonstrate pain relief, in the daunting domed surgical theatre | 0:26:03 | 0:26:07 | |
at Massachusetts General Hospital. | 0:26:07 | 0:26:11 | |
The date was set for October 16th, 1846 - | 0:26:11 | 0:26:15 | |
just 16 days' time. | 0:26:15 | 0:26:17 | |
On that Friday, this room would have been absolutely packed | 0:26:20 | 0:26:23 | |
with medical folk, | 0:26:23 | 0:26:25 | |
many of them expecting, and some of them hoping, | 0:26:25 | 0:26:27 | |
that the uppity dentist would fail. Again. | 0:26:27 | 0:26:31 | |
An eminent and extremely sceptical surgeon had been | 0:26:33 | 0:26:36 | |
booked for the operation. | 0:26:36 | 0:26:37 | |
At 10am, the appointed hour, there was no sign of Morton, | 0:26:39 | 0:26:43 | |
so the surgeon prepared to operate. | 0:26:43 | 0:26:45 | |
His patient was a young man with an enormous tumour on his neck. | 0:26:45 | 0:26:48 | |
He would have been strapped down because he was going to be awake | 0:26:48 | 0:26:52 | |
and screaming throughout. | 0:26:52 | 0:26:54 | |
But before the surgeon could apply his scalpel to the quivering flesh, | 0:26:54 | 0:26:59 | |
Morton came bursting into the room. | 0:26:59 | 0:27:02 | |
He was carrying this. | 0:27:02 | 0:27:04 | |
It's an ether inhaler and he'd had it built overnight. | 0:27:04 | 0:27:08 | |
No time at all to test it so he must have been feeling almost | 0:27:08 | 0:27:11 | |
as anxious as the patient because he had no idea if it was going to work. | 0:27:11 | 0:27:15 | |
Filling the inhaler with ether, Morton handed it to the patient. | 0:27:17 | 0:27:22 | |
He was relying on a complicated and untested system of valves | 0:27:22 | 0:27:26 | |
to give the right dose. | 0:27:26 | 0:27:27 | |
His future depended on this test succeeding - | 0:27:28 | 0:27:32 | |
the Boston surgeons would not give him another chance. | 0:27:32 | 0:27:35 | |
When the patient reported feeling a little bit groggy, | 0:27:37 | 0:27:40 | |
Morton took it back, and then he turned to the surgeon and said, | 0:27:40 | 0:27:45 | |
"Sir, your patient is ready." | 0:27:45 | 0:27:48 | |
They were used to operating on people who were screaming | 0:27:51 | 0:27:54 | |
and trying to get off the table. | 0:27:54 | 0:27:57 | |
So, anything that held you on the table, even if | 0:27:57 | 0:27:59 | |
you waved your arms and legs around a bit while it was going on, | 0:27:59 | 0:28:03 | |
that was preferable to you being wide awake. | 0:28:03 | 0:28:07 | |
So, the surgeon picked up his scalpel and he started to cut. | 0:28:07 | 0:28:11 | |
From the patient there came not a sound. | 0:28:11 | 0:28:14 | |
The operation was long and complicated, but also successful. | 0:28:14 | 0:28:18 | |
At the end, the patient reported that he had felt no more than a scratch. | 0:28:18 | 0:28:23 | |
This was an extraordinary moment in the history of surgery - | 0:28:23 | 0:28:26 | |
an operation performed without pain. | 0:28:26 | 0:28:29 | |
At the end, the surgeon turned to the audience and he said, | 0:28:29 | 0:28:33 | |
"Gentlemen, THIS is no humbug." | 0:28:33 | 0:28:35 | |
There's a wonderful letter from a professor at Harvard to Morton | 0:28:39 | 0:28:43 | |
saying, "Everyone will want a share of your great discovery. | 0:28:43 | 0:28:47 | |
"I'm not trying to take a share but we do need to give it a name. | 0:28:47 | 0:28:50 | |
"I would suggest the name 'anaesthesia'. | 0:28:50 | 0:28:53 | |
"And we need to give it a name | 0:28:53 | 0:28:54 | |
"because everyone throughout the world, for the rest of human history, | 0:28:54 | 0:28:59 | |
"will need to talk about what's just happened and what this is." | 0:28:59 | 0:29:01 | |
News spread about ether around the world within six months, | 0:29:06 | 0:29:10 | |
which, given the communications network at the time, I think, | 0:29:10 | 0:29:14 | |
was highly significant. | 0:29:14 | 0:29:17 | |
What anaesthesia does is act as a bit of a watershed | 0:29:17 | 0:29:20 | |
and the ripples sort of permeate out through society. | 0:29:20 | 0:29:24 | |
And there are lots of wider humanitarian movements | 0:29:24 | 0:29:27 | |
like the anti-slavery movement, the reform of prisons. | 0:29:27 | 0:29:32 | |
You just get the general sense that patients' | 0:29:32 | 0:29:34 | |
and social tolerance of pain is decreasing. | 0:29:34 | 0:29:39 | |
Pain was no longer an expected and tolerated part of everyday life. | 0:29:43 | 0:29:48 | |
It was now something that could - and should - be minimised. | 0:29:48 | 0:29:51 | |
In the 50 years since Serturner's isolation of morphine, | 0:29:54 | 0:29:58 | |
the rush of scientific discoveries had replaced old superstitions | 0:29:58 | 0:30:02 | |
and beliefs with new knowledge. | 0:30:02 | 0:30:04 | |
This would set researchers off hunting for pain-killing drugs | 0:30:06 | 0:30:09 | |
in some very unlikely places. | 0:30:09 | 0:30:12 | |
By the middle of the 19th century, the mysterious world of herbs | 0:30:16 | 0:30:20 | |
and tinctures was being replaced by white powders. | 0:30:20 | 0:30:25 | |
And these, thanks to this invention, | 0:30:25 | 0:30:28 | |
were in turn being replaced by... | 0:30:28 | 0:30:32 | |
..tablets. | 0:30:37 | 0:30:38 | |
We're about to enter the era where chemists could mass-produce | 0:30:38 | 0:30:41 | |
the sort of painkillers that we now routinely use every day. | 0:30:41 | 0:30:45 | |
They were also about to create one of the most addictive | 0:30:47 | 0:30:50 | |
substances known to man. | 0:30:50 | 0:30:52 | |
And it all began with this stuff. | 0:30:52 | 0:30:56 | |
Coal tar. | 0:30:56 | 0:30:57 | |
Coal tar was a waste product of the burgeoning coal/gas industry. | 0:30:59 | 0:31:03 | |
And, naturally, chemists tried to find profitable uses for it. | 0:31:03 | 0:31:06 | |
The availability of coal tar suddenly gives you an enormous new | 0:31:08 | 0:31:12 | |
library of starting materials. | 0:31:12 | 0:31:16 | |
And by then chemistry was really taking off - the connectivity, | 0:31:16 | 0:31:20 | |
the structures, were known. | 0:31:20 | 0:31:21 | |
And it was suddenly realised that you might be able to made | 0:31:21 | 0:31:25 | |
either the natural parts themselves or things which mimic them. | 0:31:25 | 0:31:29 | |
That was a tremendous... A real sea change in chemistry. | 0:31:29 | 0:31:33 | |
This sea change in chemistry started as it was to proceed - | 0:31:36 | 0:31:39 | |
with a series of mistakes. | 0:31:39 | 0:31:42 | |
In 1845, an 18-year-old British chemist tried using coal tar | 0:31:42 | 0:31:46 | |
to make quinine, a malaria drug. | 0:31:46 | 0:31:49 | |
Instead, he created the first artificial dye, mauve, | 0:31:49 | 0:31:53 | |
and made a fortune. | 0:31:53 | 0:31:55 | |
Coal tar was clearly worth studying, | 0:31:55 | 0:31:57 | |
yet it would take another accident | 0:31:57 | 0:32:00 | |
to unlock it's pain-killing potential. | 0:32:00 | 0:32:02 | |
In this case, a giant cock up involving two French doctors, | 0:32:02 | 0:32:06 | |
Arnold Cahn and Paul Hepp, | 0:32:06 | 0:32:08 | |
who were working here at the University of Strasbourg. | 0:32:08 | 0:32:12 | |
They were testing chemicals derived from coal tar, | 0:32:12 | 0:32:16 | |
which they were testing on patients with intestinal worms. | 0:32:16 | 0:32:19 | |
Coal tar had been shown to have antiseptic properties | 0:32:21 | 0:32:24 | |
when used on skin. | 0:32:24 | 0:32:26 | |
So, naturally enough, they wanted to see what effects | 0:32:26 | 0:32:29 | |
some of its derivatives had inside the body. | 0:32:29 | 0:32:32 | |
Fortunately, they had ready supply of patients. | 0:32:32 | 0:32:36 | |
These were the days when doctors were quite happy to try out | 0:32:36 | 0:32:38 | |
almost anything on anybody. | 0:32:38 | 0:32:40 | |
But even, so I'm amazed they managed to get patients to eat this stuff. | 0:32:40 | 0:32:45 | |
It is incredibly pungent. | 0:32:45 | 0:32:47 | |
It is naphthalene, the stuff they use these days in mothballs. | 0:32:47 | 0:32:52 | |
It did no harm to worms. | 0:32:52 | 0:32:54 | |
But it did seem to have an effect. | 0:32:54 | 0:32:57 | |
Amazingly enough, one of their patients who had a fever, | 0:32:57 | 0:33:00 | |
reported that his fever went down after he'd eaten this stuff. | 0:33:00 | 0:33:04 | |
That was great news. | 0:33:04 | 0:33:05 | |
Followed soon afterwards by really bad news - there had been a mix up. | 0:33:05 | 0:33:09 | |
Whatever the patient had been eating, it wasn't naphthalene. | 0:33:09 | 0:33:12 | |
The pharmacy here had made a terrible mistake with the labelling. | 0:33:14 | 0:33:17 | |
The patient had actually been a completely unknown chemical. | 0:33:18 | 0:33:22 | |
It turned out that the chemical that the pharmacist had been | 0:33:25 | 0:33:27 | |
accidentally dispensing was this one. Acetanilide. | 0:33:27 | 0:33:32 | |
Now, who knows how it got here, | 0:33:32 | 0:33:34 | |
but it's actually used in the dye industry. | 0:33:34 | 0:33:36 | |
But it was a most fortuitous accident. | 0:33:36 | 0:33:39 | |
They could have killed the man, but instead acid aniline, | 0:33:41 | 0:33:44 | |
yet another chemical derived from coal tar, | 0:33:44 | 0:33:47 | |
was quickly marketed as a profitable fever-reducing drug. | 0:33:47 | 0:33:51 | |
And not surprising Cahn and Hepp went on to make a fortune. | 0:33:53 | 0:33:58 | |
But the really significant thing about this discovery | 0:33:58 | 0:34:01 | |
is what happened next, in Germany. | 0:34:01 | 0:34:03 | |
There was huge demand for the new headache powders, | 0:34:11 | 0:34:14 | |
and, clearly, a fortune to be made by anyone who could come up with | 0:34:14 | 0:34:18 | |
an even better drug. | 0:34:18 | 0:34:20 | |
Well, here at the Bayer Dye Works there was a young | 0:34:20 | 0:34:23 | |
and ambitious chemist called Carl Duisberg, | 0:34:23 | 0:34:26 | |
who decided he would give it a go. | 0:34:26 | 0:34:28 | |
Bayer's cellars were full of coal tar chemicals like acetanilide. | 0:34:30 | 0:34:35 | |
And Duisberg set out to see which he could convert into drugs. | 0:34:35 | 0:34:38 | |
His first discovery, called phenacetin, was very successful. | 0:34:40 | 0:34:44 | |
We now know that, like acetanilide, | 0:34:44 | 0:34:47 | |
it's converted in the body to paracetamol. | 0:34:47 | 0:34:50 | |
Bayer's factory here grew rapidly on the profits. | 0:34:52 | 0:34:55 | |
And so did their ambitions. | 0:34:55 | 0:34:57 | |
Another substance they got really interested in was salicylic acid. | 0:34:58 | 0:35:03 | |
Now, because it's derived from coal tar, | 0:35:03 | 0:35:05 | |
they thought originally maybe it's an antiseptic. | 0:35:05 | 0:35:08 | |
They rubbed it on the skin and swallowed it. | 0:35:08 | 0:35:11 | |
Unfortunately, it didn't kill bugs like typhoid. | 0:35:11 | 0:35:15 | |
But what it did do, if you had a fever, is it brought it down. | 0:35:15 | 0:35:18 | |
And it certainly made you feel better. | 0:35:18 | 0:35:21 | |
Salicylic acid was effective. | 0:35:22 | 0:35:24 | |
But it was harsh on the stomach. | 0:35:24 | 0:35:27 | |
We use it now to burn off warts. | 0:35:27 | 0:35:31 | |
At Bayer's new drug department, a research chemist, Arthur Eichengrun | 0:35:31 | 0:35:36 | |
thought he could see a way of changing the molecules, | 0:35:36 | 0:35:38 | |
to make it more palatable. | 0:35:38 | 0:35:40 | |
Eichengrun suggested a simple chemical modification, | 0:35:41 | 0:35:44 | |
which would, in time, | 0:35:44 | 0:35:45 | |
lead to the production of two incredibly iconic drugs. | 0:35:45 | 0:35:49 | |
One of them, the world's bestselling painkiller. | 0:35:50 | 0:35:53 | |
The other, the world's most notorious drug. | 0:35:54 | 0:35:57 | |
It started innocently enough. | 0:36:01 | 0:36:03 | |
A young chemist in Eichengrun's team set about modifying salicylic acid, | 0:36:03 | 0:36:08 | |
using an approach that Eichengrun had suggested. | 0:36:08 | 0:36:12 | |
The result was crystals of acetylsalicylic acid. | 0:36:12 | 0:36:17 | |
Just as predicted, it no longer upset the stomach quite so much. | 0:36:17 | 0:36:21 | |
Eichengrun would eventually name this drug "aspirin". | 0:36:21 | 0:36:24 | |
Simple chemical modifications could clearly make better drugs. | 0:36:26 | 0:36:30 | |
Inspired by the this, a chemist in the Bayer team took morphine, | 0:36:30 | 0:36:34 | |
that powerful painkiller from poppies, | 0:36:34 | 0:36:37 | |
and tried the same reaction, to see what would happen. | 0:36:37 | 0:36:40 | |
The result was a chemical called diamorphine. | 0:36:41 | 0:36:44 | |
Better known to us as "heroin". | 0:36:44 | 0:36:47 | |
Thank you very much. | 0:36:52 | 0:36:54 | |
Both of these drugs, aspirin and heroin, | 0:36:54 | 0:36:58 | |
arrived in front of the chief tester, Heinrich Dreser. | 0:36:58 | 0:37:02 | |
And he promptly rejected one of them on the grounds it was dangerous. | 0:37:02 | 0:37:06 | |
Ironically enough, the one he rejected was the aspirin, | 0:37:06 | 0:37:09 | |
because he said it was bad for the heart. | 0:37:09 | 0:37:12 | |
But he loved heroin. | 0:37:12 | 0:37:14 | |
In fact, he named it because of the associations with heroic, powerful. | 0:37:14 | 0:37:18 | |
And with his ringing endorsement behind it, | 0:37:18 | 0:37:20 | |
heroin was soon being marketed to the world by Bayer. | 0:37:20 | 0:37:24 | |
The team at Bayer had accidentally made a far more addictive | 0:37:26 | 0:37:29 | |
version of morphine. | 0:37:29 | 0:37:31 | |
And, naturally, it sold fabulously. | 0:37:31 | 0:37:34 | |
Meanwhile, Eichengrun, irritated that his drug, aspirin, | 0:37:34 | 0:37:38 | |
was being overlooked, began secretly to carry out tests. | 0:37:38 | 0:37:42 | |
Eichengrun was convinced the new drug was safe | 0:37:42 | 0:37:44 | |
so he got a hold of a sample, and he tried it. | 0:37:44 | 0:37:47 | |
Nothing untoward happened. | 0:37:47 | 0:37:49 | |
So, next, secretly, he got hold of some Berlin doctors | 0:37:49 | 0:37:52 | |
and persuaded them to try it on their patients. | 0:37:52 | 0:37:55 | |
It was given to a small number of doctors and a dentist. | 0:37:58 | 0:38:01 | |
And a report came back from the dentist. | 0:38:02 | 0:38:06 | |
He said... | 0:38:06 | 0:38:07 | |
"I gave it to one of my patients who had a fever. | 0:38:09 | 0:38:13 | |
"But, to my astonishment, he said his toothache had been | 0:38:14 | 0:38:17 | |
"eased by taking the acetylsalicylic acid. It relieved pain." | 0:38:17 | 0:38:22 | |
This was completely unexpected. | 0:38:24 | 0:38:27 | |
The original salicylic acid brought down fevers, | 0:38:27 | 0:38:30 | |
but it didn't have any effect on toothache. | 0:38:30 | 0:38:34 | |
Eichengrun had clearly created something new and powerful. | 0:38:34 | 0:38:38 | |
So, Eichengrun decided to bypass Dreser | 0:38:40 | 0:38:43 | |
and went to the Head Of Research at Bayer. | 0:38:43 | 0:38:47 | |
He authorised more tests and in 1899, | 0:38:47 | 0:38:50 | |
a year after Bayer had introduced heroin to a grateful nation, | 0:38:50 | 0:38:54 | |
they started marketing this new drug. | 0:38:54 | 0:38:56 | |
Aspirin became one of the world's most successful drugs. | 0:38:58 | 0:39:02 | |
40 billion tablets are eaten every year. | 0:39:02 | 0:39:06 | |
And it was all thanks to chemists | 0:39:06 | 0:39:08 | |
tinkering with an industrial waste product - coal tar. | 0:39:08 | 0:39:12 | |
There was an early illustration of how a simple chemical | 0:39:13 | 0:39:17 | |
modification to an existing molecule, | 0:39:17 | 0:39:19 | |
could make a far superior drug, which had additional properties. | 0:39:19 | 0:39:23 | |
The additional properties of aspirin are due entirely to the acetyl group. | 0:39:23 | 0:39:27 | |
Without the acetyl group it wouldn't work. | 0:39:27 | 0:39:30 | |
And, rather amusingly, I keep reading reports of how, | 0:39:30 | 0:39:33 | |
in ancient times, plants containing salicylates were used as painkillers. | 0:39:33 | 0:39:39 | |
It's nonsense. | 0:39:39 | 0:39:41 | |
They might have been used as painkillers - they didn't work. | 0:39:41 | 0:39:44 | |
The acetyl group of aspirin, which was a synthetic drug, | 0:39:44 | 0:39:47 | |
had to be present in order to kill pain. | 0:39:47 | 0:39:50 | |
Despite its universal appeal, it took people more than 70 years | 0:39:52 | 0:39:56 | |
to understand how aspirin actually works. | 0:39:56 | 0:39:59 | |
Turns out, nothing like the opiates such as morphine. | 0:39:59 | 0:40:03 | |
Aspirin acts locally | 0:40:03 | 0:40:05 | |
and blocks pain long before it gets to the spinal column. | 0:40:05 | 0:40:09 | |
I'm going to demonstrate using my least favourite plant - | 0:40:09 | 0:40:13 | |
stinging nettles. | 0:40:13 | 0:40:15 | |
Ah! | 0:40:15 | 0:40:17 | |
Ah, yeah! | 0:40:17 | 0:40:18 | |
That hurts. | 0:40:18 | 0:40:20 | |
Damaged or irritated tissue releases a lot of chemicals which can | 0:40:23 | 0:40:27 | |
help healing but which also tend to simulate the pain nerves. | 0:40:27 | 0:40:32 | |
You could see the results as great swollen marks, inflammation. | 0:40:32 | 0:40:36 | |
And the same process is often the cause of headache and muscle ache. | 0:40:36 | 0:40:40 | |
Aspirin and the other anti-inflammatories | 0:40:43 | 0:40:45 | |
all work in the same way, | 0:40:45 | 0:40:47 | |
and they block a range of pains. | 0:40:47 | 0:40:49 | |
Anti-inflammatories stop your body producing the chemicals | 0:40:49 | 0:40:54 | |
it normally does when tissue has been damaged. | 0:40:54 | 0:40:57 | |
This not only prevents swelling | 0:40:57 | 0:40:59 | |
but also the release of chemicals that set off the pain nerves. | 0:40:59 | 0:41:02 | |
As well as blocking pain, | 0:41:05 | 0:41:07 | |
aspirin also blocks the hormones that led to platelet production. | 0:41:07 | 0:41:11 | |
Which means that middle-aged men like me | 0:41:11 | 0:41:13 | |
take small amounts of it to reduce our risk of getting heart attack. | 0:41:13 | 0:41:17 | |
Which is pretty ironic when you consider that aspirin | 0:41:17 | 0:41:20 | |
was originally rejected on the grounds it is bad for the heart. | 0:41:20 | 0:41:25 | |
Chemists had found ways to ensure that we were no longer | 0:41:25 | 0:41:28 | |
reliant on plants for our medicines. | 0:41:28 | 0:41:31 | |
Modifying simple molecules extracted from coal tar had given us | 0:41:31 | 0:41:34 | |
more powerful drugs than the natural world could provide. | 0:41:34 | 0:41:38 | |
With misplaced confidence, chemists now decided | 0:41:41 | 0:41:44 | |
they were going to try and design drugs from scratch. | 0:41:44 | 0:41:47 | |
The hope was they could produce something lucrative, | 0:41:47 | 0:41:50 | |
with few side-effects. | 0:41:50 | 0:41:52 | |
The reality was, they now unleashed onto a wholly unsuspecting world | 0:41:52 | 0:41:57 | |
a whole new Pandora's box of powerful potions. | 0:41:57 | 0:42:02 | |
This new phase, trying to make entirely synthetic drugs, | 0:42:05 | 0:42:09 | |
started as an attempt to correct the limitations of surgical aesthesia. | 0:42:09 | 0:42:13 | |
Ether was an irritant and made people sick. | 0:42:16 | 0:42:20 | |
chloroform, discovered soon after, | 0:42:20 | 0:42:22 | |
caused unacceptably high death rates. | 0:42:22 | 0:42:24 | |
Perhaps what was needed was a different way of delivering | 0:42:26 | 0:42:30 | |
antiseptic chemicals into the body. | 0:42:30 | 0:42:32 | |
The hypodermic needle had been invented in the 1840s. | 0:42:34 | 0:42:38 | |
And injecting anaesthetic via veins seemed promising. | 0:42:38 | 0:42:41 | |
When you breathe in a drug, | 0:42:43 | 0:42:45 | |
what you're trying to do is get a level of the drug into the brain. | 0:42:45 | 0:42:49 | |
And so if you put it in intravenously it goes to the brain faster. | 0:42:49 | 0:42:55 | |
So, in 1869, German chemist Oscar Liebreich | 0:42:55 | 0:42:59 | |
naively started to experiment with a substance called chloral hydrate, | 0:42:59 | 0:43:03 | |
which had been created many years before. | 0:43:03 | 0:43:07 | |
The chemical was known to produce chloroform | 0:43:07 | 0:43:09 | |
when you added an alkali to it. | 0:43:09 | 0:43:11 | |
So Liebreich thought to himself, | 0:43:12 | 0:43:14 | |
"If I inject this into the blood, which is mildly alkali, | 0:43:14 | 0:43:17 | |
"then perhaps I will produce chloroform inside the body." | 0:43:17 | 0:43:21 | |
So, it's worth doing. | 0:43:21 | 0:43:22 | |
It's certainly a bold thing to do because instead of trial and error | 0:43:22 | 0:43:26 | |
he was relying on chemical theory. | 0:43:26 | 0:43:29 | |
Well, it all seemed to go splendidly at first. | 0:43:29 | 0:43:32 | |
He injected it into patients and they did indeed...fall asleep. | 0:43:32 | 0:43:35 | |
His reasoning was flawless, but also completely wrong. | 0:43:37 | 0:43:40 | |
Chloral hydrate did not produce chloroform when injected into blood, | 0:43:42 | 0:43:46 | |
but a form of alcohol, | 0:43:46 | 0:43:47 | |
which did not numb the feeling or pain. | 0:43:47 | 0:43:51 | |
What Liebreich had stumbled upon was not a painkiller | 0:43:51 | 0:43:54 | |
but a drug that put people to sleep. | 0:43:54 | 0:43:56 | |
Chloral hydrate was used in some operations. | 0:43:57 | 0:44:00 | |
And if a few patients woke up screaming in the middle of it, | 0:44:00 | 0:44:03 | |
well, they had no memory of doing so afterwards. | 0:44:03 | 0:44:06 | |
A way of people to sleep safely and quickly | 0:44:07 | 0:44:10 | |
would be a real boon for surgery. | 0:44:10 | 0:44:12 | |
But chloral hydrate had its drawbacks. | 0:44:12 | 0:44:14 | |
It upset the veins, it caused inflammitis - | 0:44:16 | 0:44:18 | |
irritation in the veins. | 0:44:18 | 0:44:20 | |
And the duration of action was very long, so patients were very, | 0:44:20 | 0:44:25 | |
very sleepy for a long time. | 0:44:25 | 0:44:27 | |
They didn't wake up clear headed and bounce back to work or anything. | 0:44:27 | 0:44:32 | |
But for those who wanted a long sleep it was great. | 0:44:33 | 0:44:37 | |
Chemists produced a form that could be taken as a pill, | 0:44:37 | 0:44:40 | |
the world's first sleeping tablet. | 0:44:40 | 0:44:43 | |
And within ten years, Britons were taking a tonne of it every day. | 0:44:43 | 0:44:47 | |
Chloral hydrate soon entered popular culture. | 0:44:52 | 0:44:54 | |
In 1903, a Chicago newspaper reported that a saloon manager | 0:44:54 | 0:44:59 | |
had persuaded his employees to put chloral hydrate | 0:44:59 | 0:45:02 | |
into the drinks of customers suspected of having money. | 0:45:02 | 0:45:06 | |
And then afterwards they would rob them. | 0:45:07 | 0:45:10 | |
His name, Mickey Finn, became slang for any spiked drink. | 0:45:10 | 0:45:14 | |
Now, the importance of chloral hydrate was not just it was | 0:45:14 | 0:45:17 | |
incredibly popular, but was really one of the first drugs | 0:45:17 | 0:45:20 | |
to have been designed from scratch with a specific purpose. | 0:45:20 | 0:45:24 | |
The floodgates were open for any imaginative chemist to make | 0:45:24 | 0:45:28 | |
a lot of money. | 0:45:28 | 0:45:30 | |
It was a huge incentive and with their increasing knowledge | 0:45:31 | 0:45:34 | |
of which molecules had this sedative effect, | 0:45:34 | 0:45:38 | |
they turned out hundreds of new compounds. | 0:45:38 | 0:45:41 | |
One of them was to prove a worthy, | 0:45:43 | 0:45:45 | |
albeit infamous successor to chloral hydrate. | 0:45:45 | 0:45:48 | |
Because of its use by criminals, | 0:45:49 | 0:45:51 | |
chloral hydrate gained a somewhat notorious reputation. | 0:45:51 | 0:45:55 | |
But it would in turn spawn a more notorious anaesthetic. | 0:45:55 | 0:46:00 | |
Sodium thiopental. | 0:46:00 | 0:46:02 | |
Otherwise known as the "truth drug". | 0:46:02 | 0:46:04 | |
And I'm about to try it. | 0:46:08 | 0:46:09 | |
Sodium thiopental is part of a group of drugs called the "barbiturates", | 0:46:15 | 0:46:19 | |
and barbiturates were particular popular in the 1950s | 0:46:19 | 0:46:23 | |
and '60s as a form of sleeping pill. | 0:46:23 | 0:46:26 | |
They were also very dangerous. | 0:46:26 | 0:46:28 | |
Famously, Marilyn Monroe died from a barbiturate overdose. | 0:46:28 | 0:46:32 | |
Sodium thiopental was much faster acting than most barbiturates | 0:46:32 | 0:46:36 | |
and that made it a great anaesthetic. | 0:46:36 | 0:46:39 | |
But, oddly enough, it doesn't actually affect pain. | 0:46:39 | 0:46:43 | |
What Barbiturates do is slow down all the messages | 0:46:44 | 0:46:47 | |
being sent between nerves in the brain and the spinal column. | 0:46:47 | 0:46:52 | |
The more barbiturate there is, | 0:46:52 | 0:46:54 | |
the harder it is for chemical messages to cross the gaps | 0:46:54 | 0:46:57 | |
between one neuron and the next. | 0:46:57 | 0:47:00 | |
So, essential, your whole thinking process slows down | 0:47:00 | 0:47:03 | |
until you fall asleep. | 0:47:03 | 0:47:06 | |
With thiopental, that happened very quickly indeed. | 0:47:06 | 0:47:09 | |
And that was just what the anaesthetist in the 1930s wanted. | 0:47:09 | 0:47:13 | |
Thiopental was developed specifically for getting people to sleep quickly. | 0:47:14 | 0:47:20 | |
They knew how to keep people asleep once they got them there | 0:47:20 | 0:47:23 | |
with drugs like ether and chloroform, | 0:47:23 | 0:47:25 | |
which was still used widely. | 0:47:25 | 0:47:28 | |
As thiopental starts to act it affects your brain bit by bit. | 0:47:28 | 0:47:33 | |
And this is the key to one of its more controversial uses. | 0:47:33 | 0:47:35 | |
The Americans noticed that when patients were in that twilight zone | 0:47:39 | 0:47:43 | |
halfway between consciousness and unconsciousness, | 0:47:43 | 0:47:46 | |
they became more chatty, disinhibited | 0:47:46 | 0:47:49 | |
and also forgot what they'd been talking about afterwards. | 0:47:49 | 0:47:52 | |
They decided this might form the basis for a truth drug, | 0:47:52 | 0:47:55 | |
an interrogation drug. | 0:47:55 | 0:47:57 | |
Now, I'm going to have a go at trying to maintain the fiction | 0:47:57 | 0:48:01 | |
that I am Dr Michael Mosley, the famous heart surgeon. | 0:48:01 | 0:48:04 | |
OK, so I'm actually feeling quite anxious at the moment. | 0:48:10 | 0:48:13 | |
Sodium thiopental has a reputation, not just as a truth drug but also | 0:48:13 | 0:48:17 | |
because it's used in lethal injections. | 0:48:17 | 0:48:21 | |
Anaesthetist Austin Leach | 0:48:21 | 0:48:23 | |
will be monitoring my vital signs throughout. | 0:48:23 | 0:48:25 | |
These will indicate if my body is feeling pain. | 0:48:25 | 0:48:29 | |
Before I take the drug, he wants to see how my heart responds | 0:48:29 | 0:48:32 | |
when he crunches his knuckles against my chest. | 0:48:32 | 0:48:36 | |
That's quite uncomfortable, yeah. | 0:48:36 | 0:48:38 | |
Oh... | 0:48:41 | 0:48:42 | |
My heart rate jumped from 54 to 64 in response to pain. | 0:48:43 | 0:48:47 | |
Now, it's time to experience the effects of a light dose | 0:48:49 | 0:48:52 | |
of sodium thiopental. | 0:48:52 | 0:48:53 | |
I'll just give you a small dose but quite rapidly. | 0:48:57 | 0:49:00 | |
It's in now. | 0:49:01 | 0:49:03 | |
Doesn't feel like anything. | 0:49:08 | 0:49:10 | |
It hasn't got there yet. | 0:49:10 | 0:49:11 | |
That's probably why I'm not feeling... | 0:49:11 | 0:49:13 | |
Am I feeling just a bit...? Oh, yes, there it goes. | 0:49:13 | 0:49:16 | |
Yup, there it is. Blimey! Wow! | 0:49:18 | 0:49:20 | |
Oh, jeez! Yeah. | 0:49:22 | 0:49:24 | |
That is like... Oh, that's like drinking a bottle of champagne. | 0:49:26 | 0:49:29 | |
'So, under the influence of thiopental, | 0:49:29 | 0:49:32 | |
'can I still lie about my job?' | 0:49:32 | 0:49:34 | |
I am a cardiac... | 0:49:34 | 0:49:37 | |
HE LAUGHS | 0:49:37 | 0:49:39 | |
I'm a cardiac surgeon. | 0:49:39 | 0:49:41 | |
I'm a world famous cardiac surgeon. | 0:49:41 | 0:49:43 | |
Would you like to tell me what the last operation you carried out was? | 0:49:43 | 0:49:47 | |
It was a bypass. They survived. | 0:49:47 | 0:49:50 | |
But...uh, yeah. I was awesome. | 0:49:51 | 0:49:55 | |
Now, I'm just going to repeat the pain test... | 0:49:57 | 0:50:00 | |
-Yeah, OK. -..in your sternum. | 0:50:00 | 0:50:02 | |
And tell me how uncomfortable this is. | 0:50:02 | 0:50:06 | |
Uh, that hurts, but it doesn't really hurt. | 0:50:06 | 0:50:09 | |
I'm kind of aware of it but I don't care. | 0:50:09 | 0:50:12 | |
It's actually quite painful. | 0:50:12 | 0:50:14 | |
'My heart rate jumps right up. | 0:50:14 | 0:50:17 | |
'My body is still responding to pain but, bizarrely, my brain isn't. | 0:50:17 | 0:50:21 | |
'It's all very odd.' | 0:50:21 | 0:50:22 | |
That is so strange. | 0:50:22 | 0:50:27 | |
'I had just about managed to lie about my job, | 0:50:27 | 0:50:30 | |
'however unconvincingly. | 0:50:30 | 0:50:32 | |
'But what would happen if he upped the dose?' | 0:50:32 | 0:50:35 | |
Oh, yes. | 0:50:35 | 0:50:37 | |
'The drugs effects aren't predictable, | 0:50:37 | 0:50:39 | |
'so I don't know what will happen.' | 0:50:39 | 0:50:42 | |
-Ask me any questions. -So, what is your name? | 0:50:42 | 0:50:45 | |
-My name is Michael Mosley. -And what is your profession? | 0:50:45 | 0:50:48 | |
I'm a television producer. | 0:50:48 | 0:50:50 | |
Well, executive producer. Well, presenter. | 0:50:50 | 0:50:53 | |
It's a mix of the three of them. | 0:50:53 | 0:50:56 | |
So, you don't have any history of performing cardiac surgery? | 0:50:56 | 0:50:59 | |
None whatsoever. | 0:50:59 | 0:51:01 | |
None whatsoever. | 0:51:01 | 0:51:02 | |
I am without... | 0:51:06 | 0:51:09 | |
doubt... | 0:51:09 | 0:51:11 | |
a good television presenter and not a lousy cardiac surgeon. | 0:51:11 | 0:51:15 | |
'Part of the reason I caved in so quickly | 0:51:15 | 0:51:17 | |
'is I had this overwhelming urge to tell the truth.' | 0:51:17 | 0:51:21 | |
'It's an odd feeling. Quite cathartic.' | 0:51:21 | 0:51:24 | |
The weird thing is I don't want to lie. I'm feeling so... | 0:51:24 | 0:51:27 | |
It's not just that I can't. | 0:51:27 | 0:51:30 | |
It's just I feel so benign towards the world, I don't want to do it. | 0:51:30 | 0:51:34 | |
I don't want to say I'm Michael Mosley, | 0:51:34 | 0:51:37 | |
a cardiac surgeon cos I'm not. So... | 0:51:37 | 0:51:39 | |
'What else I admitted to under the drug's influence must | 0:51:42 | 0:51:45 | |
'remain for ever secret, from me as well. | 0:51:45 | 0:51:48 | |
'Afterwards I realised I had forgotten everything | 0:51:48 | 0:51:50 | |
'that had happened.' | 0:51:50 | 0:51:52 | |
Did I confess to the fact I'm not a cardiac surgeon? | 0:51:52 | 0:51:55 | |
So, you can't remember? | 0:51:55 | 0:51:56 | |
You can't remember what it was you said about your professional status? | 0:51:56 | 0:52:00 | |
No. I don't know what I was talking about. | 0:52:00 | 0:52:04 | |
Yeah. | 0:52:04 | 0:52:05 | |
I feel quite... | 0:52:05 | 0:52:07 | |
snoozy. | 0:52:07 | 0:52:08 | |
I feel like I could probably go to sleep now. | 0:52:08 | 0:52:11 | |
And that's the reason thiopental | 0:52:13 | 0:52:15 | |
became such a popular anaesthetic drug. | 0:52:15 | 0:52:18 | |
It puts you to sleep quickly and with just a simple injection. | 0:52:18 | 0:52:21 | |
A typical anaesthetic of the 1940s would be getting people off | 0:52:24 | 0:52:28 | |
to sleep with an injection of thiopental. | 0:52:28 | 0:52:30 | |
And then keeping them asleep with some ether. | 0:52:30 | 0:52:32 | |
It was a triumph for the chemists. | 0:52:34 | 0:52:37 | |
A drug that did exactly what it was designed to do. | 0:52:37 | 0:52:40 | |
But it was only designed to make people unconscious during surgery, | 0:52:40 | 0:52:44 | |
not to stop them feeling pain. | 0:52:44 | 0:52:46 | |
What we're aiming to do is to induce unconsciousness, | 0:52:48 | 0:52:52 | |
so that the patient has no awareness of what would otherwise be | 0:52:52 | 0:52:54 | |
an extremely unpleasant experience for them. | 0:52:54 | 0:52:58 | |
To deal with the other aspects, such as pain, | 0:52:58 | 0:53:00 | |
we need to give supplementary drugs, which are specific painkillers. | 0:53:00 | 0:53:03 | |
So, chemists nowadays are concentrating their attentions | 0:53:09 | 0:53:12 | |
not on new anaesthetic drugs, but new painkillers. | 0:53:12 | 0:53:15 | |
Because we can build pretty well any molecule of any shape | 0:53:17 | 0:53:21 | |
we want now, by design, | 0:53:21 | 0:53:24 | |
that's the way in which pharmaceutical companies | 0:53:24 | 0:53:26 | |
are increasingly orientated. | 0:53:26 | 0:53:29 | |
It sounds simple. It's actually very, very hard. | 0:53:29 | 0:53:33 | |
The way chemists create new drugs is essentially the same way | 0:53:35 | 0:53:38 | |
they did 100 years ago, when they started experimenting with coal tar. | 0:53:38 | 0:53:43 | |
They take simple molecules and build them up into complex ones. | 0:53:43 | 0:53:47 | |
These days you'll not be astonished to hear | 0:53:49 | 0:53:51 | |
things are much more hi-tech. | 0:53:51 | 0:53:54 | |
Most new drugs start out in a so-called compound library, | 0:53:54 | 0:53:58 | |
like this one. | 0:53:58 | 0:53:59 | |
There are over three million different molecules here. | 0:53:59 | 0:54:03 | |
With this vast repository of molecules to start from, | 0:54:07 | 0:54:10 | |
chemists can put together almost any compound. | 0:54:10 | 0:54:13 | |
But there is still the problem of knowing which compounds | 0:54:13 | 0:54:16 | |
will be useful. | 0:54:16 | 0:54:17 | |
And in the search for the perfect painkiller, | 0:54:19 | 0:54:22 | |
a clue to that has come from a most unusual place, | 0:54:22 | 0:54:26 | |
a few very rare people born without the ability to feel pain. | 0:54:26 | 0:54:31 | |
In the past, they might have ended up in freak shows. | 0:54:32 | 0:54:36 | |
But today, some doctors see them as the key to finding a new | 0:54:36 | 0:54:39 | |
class of painkilling drugs. | 0:54:39 | 0:54:41 | |
We knew long before we even started thinking about drug development | 0:54:43 | 0:54:46 | |
that whatever we found in these patients would be a great target for | 0:54:46 | 0:54:51 | |
a drug because this would reproduce the pain-free existence they have. | 0:54:51 | 0:54:56 | |
Researchers started by exploring just what people with this | 0:54:56 | 0:54:59 | |
condition can or cannot feel. | 0:54:59 | 0:55:01 | |
They could feel when you touch them, they could feel cold. | 0:55:03 | 0:55:06 | |
So, it so it also told you from this | 0:55:06 | 0:55:09 | |
that the sensation of pain was different to touch, | 0:55:09 | 0:55:12 | |
temperature, vibration - you put a vibration on them, they felt it. | 0:55:12 | 0:55:16 | |
This was encouraging because it suggested | 0:55:17 | 0:55:21 | |
that pain could be switched off without affecting other nerves. | 0:55:21 | 0:55:24 | |
The question was, how? | 0:55:24 | 0:55:26 | |
It turns out these people have inherited a faulty gene, | 0:55:26 | 0:55:30 | |
which means that their nerves cannot transmit pain signals. | 0:55:30 | 0:55:34 | |
While all their other nerves are normal, | 0:55:36 | 0:55:38 | |
their pain nerves are unable to send electrical messages. | 0:55:38 | 0:55:41 | |
Identifying the problem gene pointed to a particular protein. | 0:55:43 | 0:55:47 | |
A protein that is necessary for us to feel pain. | 0:55:47 | 0:55:50 | |
Once they'd found the protein, the next thing that had to do | 0:55:53 | 0:55:56 | |
was see if they could block its action in normal people, | 0:55:56 | 0:56:01 | |
see if you could temporarily switch pain off. | 0:56:01 | 0:56:04 | |
So, you can imagine the idea that what we really know about | 0:56:04 | 0:56:08 | |
is the shape of the lock. | 0:56:08 | 0:56:11 | |
And what you're trying to do is to design a molecular key | 0:56:11 | 0:56:16 | |
which will slot in. | 0:56:16 | 0:56:17 | |
The problem with building a molecular key is you may not | 0:56:17 | 0:56:20 | |
be selective enough. | 0:56:20 | 0:56:22 | |
It's no good switching off pain | 0:56:22 | 0:56:23 | |
if you also switch off other essential protein production. | 0:56:23 | 0:56:28 | |
You want to make sure that it is very selective, | 0:56:28 | 0:56:31 | |
that it doesn't have major effect on other enzymes | 0:56:31 | 0:56:34 | |
in other crucial pathways in the body. | 0:56:34 | 0:56:36 | |
Now, you have a real lead. | 0:56:36 | 0:56:38 | |
Then you have to show that this is really nontoxic. | 0:56:38 | 0:56:41 | |
Drugs that appear to block just that crucial protein | 0:56:42 | 0:56:46 | |
are now undergoing a long process of testing. | 0:56:46 | 0:56:49 | |
And so far they are showing great promise. | 0:56:49 | 0:56:52 | |
The hope is that they will usher in a new era of pain relief. | 0:56:53 | 0:56:59 | |
Now you can see that there is an opportunity to think about | 0:56:59 | 0:57:03 | |
a new approach to treatment of pain that offers hope for millions. | 0:57:03 | 0:57:09 | |
The journey from herbal medicines to synthetic drugs designed | 0:57:15 | 0:57:20 | |
and made from scratch has taken a mere 200 years. | 0:57:20 | 0:57:24 | |
It has been driven by obsession, need, | 0:57:26 | 0:57:29 | |
happy and sometimes less happy accident. | 0:57:29 | 0:57:34 | |
And yet, some things have not changed. | 0:57:35 | 0:57:38 | |
Over the last couple of centuries, | 0:57:38 | 0:57:40 | |
we have developed a huge range of painkilling drugs, | 0:57:40 | 0:57:43 | |
from anaesthetics to aspirin. | 0:57:43 | 0:57:46 | |
But, if I was in terrible pain, | 0:57:46 | 0:57:49 | |
then the substance I would still use is this - morphine. | 0:57:49 | 0:57:53 | |
It's very strange to think that in the 200 years | 0:57:54 | 0:57:57 | |
since it was first isolated by Friedrich Serturner, | 0:57:57 | 0:58:01 | |
we have developed nothing which is as effective for treating | 0:58:01 | 0:58:06 | |
excruciating pain as this extraordinary substance. | 0:58:06 | 0:58:10 | |
Painkillers, wonderful though they are, are only treating symptoms. | 0:58:20 | 0:58:25 | |
In the next programme, I'll be looking at the remarkable stories | 0:58:25 | 0:58:29 | |
of those who develop drugs that cure. | 0:58:29 | 0:58:31 | |
Including the successful attempts to capture and contain | 0:58:31 | 0:58:34 | |
the greatest mass murderer in history. | 0:58:34 | 0:58:37 | |
If you'd like to take part in the Open University's quiz on pain, | 0:58:38 | 0:58:42 | |
or perhaps find out something more about pus and poison, | 0:58:42 | 0:58:46 | |
then go to the website below and follow the links | 0:58:46 | 0:58:49 | |
to the Open University. | 0:58:49 | 0:58:51 | |
Subtitles By Red Bee Media Ltd | 0:58:54 | 0:58:57 |