Original subtitles

[mysterious music]

Imagine learning, your sibling is something

your father brings home for a science experiment.

- The Kelloggs are treating their two children identically.

- Donald starts taking on the chimp's behaviors,

pant-hooting and barking.

- Or that a medical student drinks and bathes

in something unusual, to prove a point.

- He takes their urine, blood,

and of course, the black vomit.

- And proceeds to smear himself over every inch of his body

like the worst cake you've ever seen in your life.

- How about a countess whose beauty routine is to die for?

- Elizabeth does whatever she can

to get the thing that she wants most.

Virgin blood.

- And she starts experimenting.

- These are stories of experiments so outrageous,

they are truly unbelievable.

[dramatic music]

Everyone knows the stories of "The Jungle Book" and "Tarzan",

boys brought up by wild animals.

But what if you turn the tables

and bring a baby wild animal home to raise it like a human?

- Throughout history, there's been a lot of cases

where children are separated from their families

and raised by wolves or bears or other kinds of animals.

- Records of feral child studies

get the wheels turning of psychologist, Winthrop Kellogg.

He starts to think, what if the situation was reversed?

Could you compel an animal

to behave as a human,

were it raised exclusively in a human atmosphere?

- So Kellogg brings home a seven-month-old chimp named Gua

to raise alongside his 10-month-old son Donald.

- They get the exact same behavior and treatment,

feeding them the same way, diapers the same way,

playing with them the same way, having them be playmates.

The Kelloggs are treating their two children identically.

- [Dan] And how are these unusual siblings measuring up?

- Gua masters a lot of human traits like

walking on two legs, wearing shoes,

sitting in a high chair and eating with a spoon.

She begins to understand and respond to commands like,

"Show me your nose."

"Give Donald a hug."

- After nine months, Gua has excelled at some things,

but she's not made any progress with language.

She's not speaking English.

She can understand things, but she is not moving forward.

- [Dan] But Gua isn't the only one stuck.

- Donald is also slow to speak.

In fact, in some cases,

Donald starts taking on the chimp's behaviors.

For example, when yelling for food or wanting for food,

Donald joins Gua in pant-hooting and barking.

- So this experiment to elevate a chimpanzee to human status

is actually degrading his son's learning capabilities

down to chimpanzee status.

- The Kelloggs are concerned as Donald keeps falling behind.

They decide to end the experiment

and to return Gua to a primate center

to be back with her group,

and to allow Donald to move forward as a normal human child.

- I guess the old adage is true, "Monkey see, monkey do."

Which is the notion behind a noted psychologist's idea

to test out theories on childhood aggression.

[pensive music]

- It's the early 1960s at Stanford University,

and there is a social psychologist

named Albert Bandura who believes the way children learn

is by observing the adults around them.

So he designs an experiment to test his theory

and see if it holds water.

- He and his assistants fill one nursery classroom

with more aggressive toys, darts and mallets.

Another one with less aggressive things like crayons

and paper and paints.

And of course, there is the Bobo doll.

- A Bobo doll is this big blow up doll

with a clown face on it.

It's weighted at the bottom so you can punch it

and it'll kind of fall to the ground

and then bounce back up.

- [Dan] The children are then brought in one at a time

to watch adults play with the different toys.

- [Adam] So there's one group of kids that witness an adult

aggressively beating the Bobo doll.

- For the second group, an adult will come in

and play with the non-aggressive toys,

while essentially ignoring the Bobo doll

at the front of the room.

- [Dan] Then the adults leave the room

as researchers sit behind a one-way mirror

to see what the children do now.

- The children who are subjected to an adult's violence

mimic that violence.

They beat Bobo using the mallets.

They throw him up in the air, they sit on him,

they unload on him verbally,

saying all kinds of caustic, awful things.

- The kids who watch the adult come in

and play with the non-aggressive toys,

they mimic that behavior.

They are actually less aggressive

than even the control group.

- [Dan] Bandura's results are published

and cause an international sensation.

- This is really unprecedented for the time.

It sounds so simple, but no one has been able to show

that kids mimic adult behavior,

especially when it comes to aggression.

So this study becomes a really groundbreaking moment

that has implications for

the field of psychology moving forward.

- The moral, be careful how you act in front of your kids.

But if you think kids can be aggressive,

they've got nothing on a couple of German doctors

hopped up on experimental drugs.

- Surgery in the 1880s is a miserable business.

There isn't proper anesthesia yet.

Chloroform is being used,

but patients frequently die on operating tables,

defeating the purpose of the procedure to begin with.

- [Dan] Then in the 1890s, a new discovery shocks the world.

- Scientists have discovered that

if you inject a special solution

into the spinal cord of the lower back,

you can numb the extremities from the waist down.

- [Dan] And that special solution?

Liquid cocaine.

Yes, that cocaine.

- On August 8th, 1898, a German surgeon, August Bier,

performs the first known spinal tap surgery.

He is able to put a man's lower extremities to sleep

to perform a foot surgery.

- [Dan] Bier's operation gets him worldwide attention,

but there's still a few kinks to work out.

- Bier finds there isn't a total blockage

of pain or sensation.

This can limit the application of the method.

- Also, in the aftermath of the surgery, during recovery,

patients are reporting massive headaches,

and Bier wants to get to the bottom of this as well.

- [Dan] So Bier decides he needs to practice

by experimenting on his friend, Dr. August Hildebrandt.

- Who better to adequately articulate

what is happening to their own body, than a fellow doctor?

They'll be able to communicate in the exact same language.

- Bier injects the 1% cocaine solution

into his fellow physician's spinal fluid,

and he finds that after about 40 minutes,

the subject reports no sensation at all from the waist down.

- But August Bier isn't gonna take

Dr. Hildebrandt's word for it.

He has to ensure he is completely numb.

First, he snuffs out a lit cigar on Hildebrandt's leg.

Nothing, he doesn't feel it.

Next he takes a long needle, plunges it

through Hildebrandt's thigh muscle until it hits his femur.

- Hildebrandt is watching this happen, but he's numb.

He doesn't feel a thing.

- And then Bier plucks some of the subject's pubic hairs.

- He then takes an iron hammer

and chooses to smash the shin of his friend.

Still zero reaction.

- Does Bier have all the data he needs?

He doesn't believe so.

So he forcibly grabs, twists,

and pulls Dr. Hildebrandt's testicles to no effect.

Pretty conclusive.

- After the experiment, the men celebrate its success.

All seems well, but Hildebrandt does describe,

like other patients, severe headaches in the days following.

- It would take years for scientists to discover

that the reason for these hangovers from

cocainization spinal taps is, cocaine is toxic.

- [Dan] Eventually doctors switch to cortisone

and other steroid combinations, and the headaches go away.

- Today, millions of epidurals are conducted the world over,

for aid in childbirth and back and leg surgeries,

all without smashing metal hammers or testicular twisting.

- Note to self.

Be careful who you trust when numbing agents

and iron hammers are involved.

- Throughout history, many people have sought

an elusive goal, eternal youth,

and they're willing to go to some pretty strange

and extreme lengths to achieve it.

- One of the most notorious figures of the 16th century

is a countess named Elizabeth Bathory.

- Her family is one of the most powerful in Hungary,

and as young as age 11,

Elizabeth is thought to be a ravishing beauty.

She has suitors clamoring after her from far and wide.

- Her family finds a suitable husband for her

in Count Ferenc Nadasdy.

- He educates Elizabeth in some of the military arts.

Most notably, torture,

and she loves it.

- [Dan] But after nearly 30 years

of this blissfully dark marriage, her husband dies,

leaving her a widow.

- After her husband dies, she's in her 40s.

Her main concern, of course,

is maintaining her youth and her beauty.

- Elizabeth resolves to do whatever it takes

to make eternal youth happen.

- In a fit of anger one day, she smacks the face

of a housemaid who bleeds from her lip.

Elizabeth gets blood on her hand.

After wiping it away,

she notices that the previously bloodied patch of skin

seems vital, glowing, rejuvenated,

and she hits upon a horrific idea.

- She wants to bathe in the blood of young maidens,

which is creepy and disgusting.

- [Dan] According to legend, she commands her inner circle

to do her dirty work,

rounding up young peasants from far and wide.

- Using what she has learned from her late husband,

Elizabeth takes these young maidens

and cuts off their noses,

sticks pins under their fingernails,

bites their shoulders, and stabs them,

and does whatever she can

to get the thing that she wants most,

virgin blood.

- Elizabeth bathes, sometimes for hours,

in the blood of her victims, washing with it,

luxuriating in it, and sometimes even drinking it.

- [Dan] The killings continue for years

as Elizabeth becomes obsessed with

keeping the experiment going.

But soon, in her lust for youth, the Countess gets careless.

- When she runs out of poor girls that she can murder

for her bloodbaths, she then starts inviting the daughters

of some of the lesser nobles over to use them instead.

- No one seems to kick up much of a fuss

over the disappearance of castle maids

and local peasant girls.

But the tide begins to shift

when the daughters of minor nobility begin to disappear.

- [Dan] Soon after, an investigation is launched

by authorities to search the castle grounds.

- They begin digging up and finding results of

Elizabeth's little beauty experiment

buried all over her grounds.

- Elizabeth's minions are accused of killing

80 daughters of local nobility,

and a total of 600 girls overall.

The servants take the punishment.

They are executed.

- Countess Elizabeth, because of her royal status,

is spared execution, but she is forced into confinement

in her chambers for the remaining years of her life.

- She does attain a kind of immortality.

She is widely remembered as perhaps

one of the worst mass serial killers in history.

[dramatic music]

- Elizabeth is hardly the first or the last to believe

the blood of youth has restorative powers.

- Billionaire Bryan Johnson is a rejuvenation athlete.

Everything in his life, everything he does,

is focused on one goal.

Staying young and prolonging his life.

- He takes 111 supplements every single day.

He goes to sleep at the exact same time every night.

- He sleeps alone in a dark room with blackout curtains.

He wears blue light glasses.

- [Dan] But there's one crucial piece of his routine

he believes will keep him young

forever.

- He's spending his billions on blood transfusions,

to the tune of $2 million per year.

- Every 30 days, he gets a blood transfusion,

not just from anyone, but from someone young, in good shape,

because he believes that young blood is gonna give him

the energy and the power he needs to avoid aging.

- But then he thinks, "Why go to strangers?

I have a ready-made blood supply at home.

My 17-year-old son, Talmage."

- How are you?

Do you want a bite of super veggie?

- [Dan] Every month, the teen donates a liter of blood

to his father.

That's a fifth of the entire human body's blood.

- Johnson wants to be fair about all of this,

so he donates his plasma to his father.

- [Dan] It's the world's first ever

intergenerational blood transfusion experiment.

- It probably sounds a little crazy.

It probably sounds like it couldn't possibly work.

The thing is, it kind of does, at least in mice.

- Researchers at UC San Francisco

transfused blood from young mice into older mice,

and those older mice get some benefits,

they get a little bit more energy.

Actually, some of their muscles are working a little better.

And when you take the blood from those old mice

and give it back to those young mice,

the young mice are a little more sluggish.

So clearly, something is going on here.

- [Dan] Still, this starts to get old, even for Johnson.

- After six treatments,

Johnson decides he's not getting the results that he wants,

so he switches to a new treatment,

shock therapy.

But not to his brain, to his genitals.

- He receives acoustic shockwave therapy on his genitals,

three to five times a month.

He says that the pain is a 9 out of 10,

but it has decreased the age of his penis

by 15 years.

- I'm not sure how Johnson measures these findings,

but that's one treatment I'd pass on.

- Proving a new theory often requires extreme dedication.

One very motivated medical student

is willing to put himself on the line to prove he's right,

or literally die trying.

- University of Pennsylvania medical trainee Stubbins Ffirth

wants to write a thesis on yellow fever,

especially about how it can spread from person to person.

- Ffirth actually believes that yellow fever isn't contagious.

Instead, he's observed that yellow fever

mostly breaks out in summer months or in hot climates.

He thinks that yellow fever is caused by heat.

- He cooks up an experiment to prove that

you can't catch yellow fever from someone else,

and that experiment involves

the most iconic symptom of yellow fever,

black vomit.

- [Dan] Lucky for him, there's no shortage of the stuff,

because Philadelphia is in the middle of

a yellow fever outbreak.

- For the first step in the experiment,

Ffirth makes an incision in his arm

and simply pours the black vomit into it.

There's a little bit of inflammation at the site,

but other than that, he's fine.

- What he does next is he takes some vomit

and he mixes it in with water

and he starts to dribble it in his eyes.

And nothing.

- Now Ffirth starts to get creative.

He builds a vomit sauna.

He sets himself up in a small closet

and fries up some of the vomit, great vomit vapors

that he inhales deeply over the course of two hours.

Still nothing.

- Now if you thought those were nasty, stick with me.

This story gets a whole lot better.

- He then goes as far as taking a patient

with essentially end stage yellow fever,

has them throw up directly into a cup,

and he drinks it straight up.

[tense music]

He doesn't get it.

- [Dan] But Ffirth is not finished.

He decides he can still take the ick factor up.

All the way up.

- He proceeds to take the vomit and mix it with other fluids

that have come from a yellow fever patient.

- [J Mack] He takes their urine, he takes their saliva,

he takes their blood.

- And then proceeds to liberally smear himself from head to toe,

covering himself like the worst cake

you've ever seen in your life,

all over every inch of his body.

Stubbins Ffirth still walks away,

not having succumbed to any yellow fever.

- And he writes up his work in a paper,

a treatise on malignant fever,

with an attempt to prove that it is not contagious.

- [Dan] While Ffirth did clearly prove

you can't catch yellow fever by frolicking in black vomit,

his thesis still has some sticking points.

- So Ffirth was right that yellow fever

is not directly transmitted from person to person.

But he was wrong in thinking that it was caused by

exposure to excessive heat.

We know this because six decades later, in 1881,

Cuban scientist Carlos Finlay proves

that yellow fever is transmitted

from person to person by mosquitoes.

- And so Stubbins Ffirth downed

all that black vomit for nothing.

Our next go-getter doesn't need to worry about

catching anything from his test subjects,

because they're already dead.

- In 1874, Alexander Graham Bell is a 27-year-old

up and coming inventor, studying acoustics at MIT.

As a day job, he is a teacher at the school for the deaf.

- At the time, the deaf are seen and treated as outsiders.

There is no tried and true method yet

to teach the deaf to speak in a way

that softens their sometimes harsh tones

when they try to produce audible speech.

- They're unable to hear the sounds that they're making,

and thus are unable to refine those sounds.

- He starts to think that if he could figure out a way

for his students to visualize sound,

then maybe they'll understand it and figure out a way

to repeat it.

- He's fascinated by the way the human ear works.

Sound enters the ear, it vibrates,

and every different kind of sound

makes it vibrate a little differently.

He wants to somehow capture that vibration visually.

- [Dan] Bell sets out to build a device

that can interpret and draw sound.

- Bell wants to base his invention

off of the anatomy of an actual human ear.

So he talks to his colleague, Dr. Clarence Blake,

who has an interesting idea.

Why not use an actual human ear for this invention?

But humans are kind of attached to their own ears,

so he suggests using a dead person's ear.

- Bell's friend, Dr. Clarence Blake,

works with medical cadavers.

He procures a human ear that has been preserved

so that its innards, including the ear drum,

are still intact.

- [Dan] Now that Bell has his ear,

he can build his prototype and start testing it out.

- Bell fixes the ear to a stalk of hay.

The stalk of hay travels from the eardrum to a plate

that's covered with a thin layer of charcoal.

- [Dan] His theory is that when sound hits the eardrum,

the vibration will cause the hay to draw

a unique pattern into the charcoal.

- Bell begins speaking into this ear trumpet.

And it works.

When the vibrations of sound hit the eardrum,

it ends up moving the hay,

thus drawing waveforms in the charcoal.

And each one of those waveforms is unique

to the letter or the word that he's saying.

- Next, Bell performs the experiment with his students.

He speaks an A into the device,

and the students can see the shape of a proper A.

- Now the students can speak into the device themselves,

create their own shape of sound,

and match it against vowels.

- [Dan] Bell calls the new device

the Dead Ear Phonautograph.

- Not only does this device

dramatically assist deaf people in communicating,

but it forms the germination of Bell's most famous device,

the telephone.

- He begins to theorize that you could use

the sound of your voice to create an electrical current

to send your voice down a telegraph wire.

And voila, two years later, the invention of the telephone.

- Bell has no idea that 150 years later,

his invention will be small enough to fit in your pocket,

and annoy parents at dinner tables all over the world.

- Some of the greatest books and movies

feature tales of the undead,

but you probably wouldn't be surprised to learn that

they take their inspiration from real-life research.

- It's 1803 in Italy.

A 40-year-old researcher named Giovanni Aldini

is on a mission to prove a theory

that the human body runs on its own electrical current.

- And he believes that if there is already

an electrical current within the body,

that by subjecting a dead body to electrical current,

you can very possibly reanimate the dead.

Aldini decides he wants to get a body on the up and up,

and he reaches out to local prisons

to try to acquire the corpse

of a recently executed prisoner.

- Lucky for Aldini, a man named George Foster

has been sentenced to death,

and they're willing to give Aldini Foster's body

fresh from the gallows.

- The execution goes as planned, Aldini acquires the body.

And then, at London's Royal Academy of Surgeons,

he schedules a real event,

invites the press to showcase his theory

with this freshly dead body.

- The theater is packed with

the best and brightest of the day,

and everyone in the oval theater has their eyes on

the wooden slab where Foster's body is lying,

covered by a white sheet.

- [Dan] Aldini rips the sheet from Foster's body

as a hush falls over the room.

- Aldini picks up prods that are connected by wires

to a zinc battery.

The electricity flows forth, he approaches the body,

and the crowd is on the edge of their seats.

He touches the prod to the dead man's face.

The dead man, George Foster, opens one of his eyes.

Then Aldini takes the prod and puts it in his nether regions

and his whole body convulses.

- George Foster's arm then goes up in the air,

his legs are starting to move.

The entire audience thinks that the deceased

is about to stand up.

- [Dan] And then,

Aldini's battery dies and the experiment ends.

But while George Foster doesn't come back to life,

Aldini's legacy does live on.

- The experiments do indicate that electricity

can at least stimulate dead tissue.

That part of the experiment is a success.

- As bizarre as the Aldini experiment is,

he's credited with pioneering electrotherapy as we know it,

as a modality of treatment.

But there's also another thing that he is credited with.

Mary Shelley wrote the book "Frankenstein"

10 years after the Aldini experiment.

Frankenstein, in which a dead body is reanimated

with electrical impulses, sounds very familiar.

- But it doesn't end there.

Fast forward a century later

and these electrifying ideas find a new life

with yet another mad scientist.

- Robert Cornish is born in 1903 in San Francisco.

He graduates from high school at age 15.

By age 21, he is a practicing MD.

- One thing marks him as a little strange.

His fascination with death.

- Although he may have been somewhat influenced

by the work of Aldini or maybe even the writer Shelley,

he devises his own special method

of attempting to reanimate the dead.

- He straps his dead patients to a seesaw

and he injects them with adrenaline to stimulate them,

and heparin to thin their blood.

And then he vigorously teeters the seesaw

to stimulate their circulation.

- Cornish completes his experiment a number of times

with absolutely no luck.

- [Dan] But Dr. Cornish isn't about to let his theory die.

- Dr. Cornish reasons that he needs a freshly dead being.

Well, he starts with animals.

- [Dan] Cornish acquires five fox terriers

and names them each Lazarus,

a cheeky nod toward the biblical character

who rose from the dead.

- Cornish is so convinced that his theory is correct,

he makes a spectacle of this.

He invites the public, he invites the press.

- He then euthanizes these five dogs,

straps them to the seesaws, injects them,

and starts the teetering.

Three of them don't make it.

- But in fact, two of the five dogs come back to life.

One is in a state of paralysis and is not responsive.

- [Cornish] His nervous system was shocked badly,

and even now he is still in a stupor.

- [Dan] The fifth and final Lazarus

not only comes back to life,

but within four days, makes a complete recovery.

- Cornish's experiments are hailed as a success

and he's lauded in the press.

A film called "Life Returns" is even made about him in 1935.

- [Dan] After the success of Lazarus the Fifth,

the modern day Prometheus is ready to try once again

on humans, but he'll need a fresh corpse.

- Cornish gets a volunteer,

a convicted killer named Thomas McGonagall,

who's willing to donate his body to science.

- This is the chance of a lifetime for Cornish.

He approaches

the California Department of Corrections for permission.

- By law, once an inmate is executed for a crime,

they have technically served their sentence.

- Were he to be revived from death,

there would be no choice but to allow

this reanimated murderer to reintegrate

into California society.

That is a price the California Board of Corrections

are unwilling to pay in the name of science.

- McGonagall is put to death,

and Cornish is not allowed to recover his body,

putting an end to Cornish's dream of becoming

the first real Dr. Frankenstein.

- I guess we can rest easy knowing there are no

reanimated convicted murderers out there

walking around like Frankenstein's monster.

- Today, we don't think twice about having a tiny camera

sent down our throats,

but that's hardly the case about a century ago

when some pioneering souls decide to be the first

to boldly go where no one has gone before.

Inside the human body.

- Physician Adolf Kussmaul

is attempting to diagnose stomach ailments,

in particular, tumors of the stomach.

He faces a key barrier,

which is that he has no way of gazing into the organ.

- There is no instrument that's capable of doing this.

And so what does he want to do?

He wants to invent it.

- [Dan] Kussmaul crafts a rigid metal tube

that's a foot and a half long, half inch wide,

and lit by a gas lamp.

- A tube of this length inserted into the esophagus

is going to be uncomfortable.

- Anatomically, there are a bunch of structures in your way.

There's the larynx.

There are all of the muscles associated with swallowing.

And there is the gag reflex.

- A lot can go wrong with this procedure.

In the 1860s, if you pierce the esophagal tube itself,

that is a death sentence.

So this procedure requires exquisite care.

- He racks his brain.

Who could he get to test this procedure on?

And then he has an idea.

- Back in the day in the streets of Germany,

he would see street performers,

but not just any street performers, sword swallowers.

Kussmaul finds the perfect test subject.

A man named The Iron Henry,

who has mastered the art of sword swallowing.

- [Dan] Kussmaul spends months developing his new procedure

with Iron Henry, and by 1868,

he's ready to show it off to the medical world.

- The onlookers are unaware that the subject is

a professional sword swallower.

All they know is that this man is about to have

an oblong, foot and a half long, metal tube

inserted down his throat.

- Kussmaul slowly maneuvers the device into his esophagus,

down into his stomach.

- [Dan] While Kussmaul succeeds in getting the tube

into Iron Henry's stomach without killing him,

he does run into another issue.

- The big problem is it's pitch black inside the human body.

Because of the limitations at the time,

he has this gas flame

that can barely illuminate a portion of the esophagus,

and it is not seen by any means

by the medical community as a slam dunk.

- A dozen years later,

an Austrian team is able to improve upon Kussmaul's design,

and make it something that is now clinically useful.

- And it comes from electricity.

- Today, over 75 million endoscopies are performed

every year in the U.S.,

which were inspired by Kussmaul's original design,

the gastroscope.

- Something to think about the next time your doctor says,

"Open wide and say, ahh."

But if sword swallowers advancing medicine

sounds shocking, wait until you see this next experiment.

[pensive music]

- In 1963, Stanley Milgram

conducts a very famous experiment

to see how far people will go against their conscience,

when instructed by an authority figure.

- He sets up an experiment

in which there is a teacher and a learner, and they're told,

if the learner answers the question incorrectly,

you're to shock the learner.

[electricity buzzing] [participant shouting]

- What the teachers don't know is that

the learners aren't actually participants, they're actors.

And so when they're screaming and crying

and begging for the teachers to stop,

none of that's actually happening.

[electricity buzzing] [participant screaming]

- Almost a decade later, in 1972,

two behavioral researchers,

Charles Sheraton and Richard King,

decide that they want to build on the Milgram experiments.

- Critics of Milgram's original work said

maybe the teachers knew those weren't real shocks,

so they want to use real shocks this time.

Obviously, they're not allowed to administer shocks

to humans, so they decide rather than using actors,

they're going to use puppies.

- For the experiment, they picked 26 volunteers,

half men, half women, and they're brought into the room

in front of the control panel and told

they are meant to help train a puppy discern

between a steady light and a flickering light.

- So the puppy is brought in

and he is shown to stand in front of the light

that is flashing.

The participants are told if the puppy gets it wrong,

they have to administer an electric shock to the puppy.

- The puppy receives a shock,

but it's really only enough to elicit a yelp

or a whimper at first.

And the people are horrified

and want to stop pretty much immediately.

But when told by a figure in a lab coat they must continue,

that's exactly what they do.

When people begin to see these puppies

enduring increasing amounts of pain,

they do everything they can to stop.

Some of them even try to hint to the puppy

which way to go,

and yet when they are told to continue, they do.

[tense music]

- 20 out of 26 subjects

listen to the man in the white coat

and they amp up the electrical shock

all the way to the furthest extent that they are told.

[puppy whimpering]

- [Dan] Sheridan and King had originally predicted

the women would be more averse to shocking the puppies

and would eventually stop.

But what they find is something different.

- Of those subjects who go all the way

in administering the electrical shocks,

100% are female,

54% are male.

It's an odd and unmistakable division.

It could be that our stereotypes of gender roles

are just that, stereotypes.

[tense music]

- Thankfully, none of the puppies are seriously injured

in the making of this experiment.

- How long can a person go without sleep,

and can it kill you to find out?

These are the burning questions

two high schoolers decide to answer in the early 1960s.

- Randy Gardner and Bruce McAllister

are 17-year-old high school buddies,

and they're trying to come up with an idea

for their science fair.

- Randy hears about a DJ in Honolulu

who stayed awake for 11 days, which set the world record,

and they decide, hey, what if we try to break that record?

- Now since it's a science fair,

they have to pose a question that will be solved

by their experiment.

The question they ask,

"What is the effect of sleep deprivation

on cognitive function?"

And because they're two 17-year-old dudes,

they add, "And performance on the basketball court."

- This sounds like a fun idea,

but the thinking is at the time

that long periods of sleep deprivation

can do real psychological harm, potentially even kill you.

- The boys flip a coin to determine

who will not be sleeping.

Randy loses and so Bruce will monitor his progress,

and try to keep him awake, with the help of a third friend,

Joe Marciano.

So between the two of them,

someone will always be up with Randy.

- [Dan] During Christmas break in 1963,

the experiment begins.

- The first day goes by without issue,

but after 24 hours, Houston, we have a problem.

- Randy can already start to feel the effects.

He has difficulty concentrating, reading,

and even watching TV.

- After two days without sleep,

Randy starts having trouble with his hands

and repeating back tongue twisters.

- [Dan] The local papers get wind of their experiment

and soon it goes the 1960s version of viral.

- Believe it or not, at the time, it becomes

the third most written about story in the nation,

only behind The Beatles' trip to America

and the Kennedy assassination.

- [Dan] That's when the experiment catches the attention

of Dr. William Dement,

a sleep science expert who offers to help.

- So by day three, Dr. Dement and his team arrive,

and they begin testing Randy's cognitive function.

They start giving Randy memory tests

and Randy epically fails.

He can't identify what a light bulb is.

- [Dan] As the sleepless days and nights continue,

his condition worsens.

- He becomes nauseous.

He's moody, incredibly temperamental.

Randy starts snapping at reporters

and he's barely able to resist the urge to sleep.

- Interestingly, some of his senses actually get amplified,

like his sense of smell is stronger

and some of those smells agitate him.

- [Dan] There's also another unbelievable upside.

- His performance on the basketball court is elevated.

It's incredible.

- In the end, Randy stays up for 264.4 hours,

which equates to around 11 days and 25 minutes,

beating the record set by that Honolulu DJ

who only made it to 260 hours.

- [Dan] After the experiment ends,

Gardner sleeps for 14 straight hours

and then feels completely fine.

- The experiment wins Randy and his friends first place

at the 10th Annual Greater San Diego Science Fair.

- Fast forward 50 years, Randy is interviewed by NPR

and he says that after doing this,

he suffered from insomnia for the rest of his life

and he's really never quite been the same.

- While not every experiment produces the results

we hope for, they always push us

further down the road of knowledge.

From never sleeping, to hacking your own blood,

to sipping on black bile,

as long as we keep testing the limits,

we'll continue to find the unbelievable.