American History Tellers - History Through Innovation | Interview with Steven Johnson | 7

Episode Date: May 10, 2018

The phone in your hand is more powerful than all of the computers that put a man on the moon, combined. In the age of supercomputers, driverless cars, and mail-order DNA testing it’s easy to forget that the journey to these incredible innovations was a lot of surprising moments. We’re fascinated with the scientists, engineers and innovators who changed the world for the better… and sometimes worse. These are the leaps of mankind, as they happened.Introducing American Innovations from Wondery. Hosted by Steven Johnson, listen and subscribe to our first arc, The Dynamo of DNA, wherever you’re listening to this right now.Support this show by supporting our sponsors!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can binge new seasons of American History Tellers early and ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. From Wondery, this is American History Tellers. Our history. Your story. I'm Lindsey Graham. Next week, we're heading back to the 20th century with the first episode in a special four-part series on the space race. We touched on the topic a few times in our earlier series on the Cold War, the launch of Sputnik, Russian cosmonauts riding roller

coasters at Disney World, but the contest for dominance in space went much further than just scoring points for national pride. Today, though, I'll be talking with Stephen Johnson, best-selling author of 10 books on science, technology, and the history of innovation. He is the host and co-creator of the Emmy Award-winning PBS series, How We Got to Now. He writes often for the New York Times Magazine and Wired. And you may be one of the 7 million people who have watched one of his TED Talks, too. All of this makes Stephen the perfect host for Wondery's newest podcast, American Innovation. The show tells the stories of the biggest ideas of the last century, and the people whose work in pursuit of those ideas changed the world. Who discovered DNA? What's the history and future of nuclear power? Where will artificial

intelligence take us? But before we get into my discussion with Stephen, I did want to take a moment to thank you again for listening. We've received hundreds of great reviews, and if you haven't left us a review yet, please do on Apple Podcasts or contact us on Facebook or Twitter. It's highly rewarding to know that this show is not only being listened to and enjoyed, but is bringing new insight into our shared history, and it's become something you, our listeners, share with your family and friends. I recently received this note. My best friend and I always share new books, movies, and TV shows. If I liked it, so would he, and vice versa. About three weeks ago, he shared your podcast with me as we were walking, even stopped so I could listen to some of it. Three days later, he died unexpectedly of a

heart attack. We only shared things we really loved with each other, and so I'm grateful he shared your podcast with me. I've really enjoyed listening to it, partly because he did, and also because it's so good. Thank you for making a hard time a little easier. So we dedicate this episode to Dent, an Arkansas boy who lived in Texas, but is now laid to rest back home,

and to his good friend Mike, with whom he shared the world. So now, let's get into my conversation with Stephen Johnson. We discuss his new podcast, American Innovations, its first season on the history of DNA, and how innovation isn't always the eureka moment we're led to believe it is. Stephen, join me from a studio in New York. Here's our conversation. Stephen Johnson, thank you for coming on this show.

I'm excited to be here. I'm a fan of your show, too. Well, thank you. I had an opportunity to listen to an early edition of your podcast, and it seems really interesting. I wonder if you could just tell us a little about it, how it came about, and where you think you're taking it. Well, the theme of innovation and the history of innovation is something that I've been researching and writing about for 20 years now. I've written a number of books, including Where Good Ideas Come From and How We Got to Now, about this really fascinating question

of technologies or scientific breakthroughs that change the world, kind of trying to dive in and figure out how they happen, right? Who are the people involved? What were the environments that made those ideas possible? And so American Innovations

is an attempt to continue that storytelling, really. It's a look at a series of ideas and technologies that have transformed the modern world, some of which we kind of take for granted now, and attempt to go back into the history and figure out where these things came from because they're just some incredibly fascinating stories. And so we're doing six episode sections. The initial one is about the history of DNA and the human genome project.

And we have future ones about artificial intelligence and space flight. So it's going to be a lot of fun. Yeah, the first series on DNA is fascinating. You start really actually fairly far back in history in the 18th century. I was really interested to learn how much molecular science they were doing. And it really points to the, I think, probably a theme of your show, that these innovations are hardly overnight successes, aha, eureka moments, that there's a long history of incremental movement towards some greater understanding. Yeah, this is this process that I've called over the years the slow hunch,

as opposed to the aha moment or the eureka moment. Like, you know, it's always nice to tell the story where, you know, the apple falls from the tree and hits Newton on the head and, oh, suddenly he has a theory of gravity. But that's not really how breakthrough ideas come into the world. It's much messier and it's much slower. And what often happens is with a really complicated idea, like understanding genetic code, DNA, they're pieces of the puzzle. And so someone has a little bit of it, you know, in one country and some of it, and someone has another bit of the puzzle in some other place. And over time, over decades, some cases over a century or more, the final

kind of solution to the problem becomes visible, but it's much more incremental. And actually, I think, you know, if you tell the story right, that is actually a much more interesting story because there are lots of different kind of twists and turns rather than just one moment of sudden inspiration. So that's one of the major things we're trying to tease out in this show is to really explore the processes and the, you know, fascinating lives of some of these people. Yeah. I think also what's illustrated, at least in the episode that I was able to listen to, is how much information sharing is important. You know, we probably in the internet age take some of that for granted. But for most of human history, it took some real effort to get good ideas out into

the world and dispersed. Exactly. These two main figures in the first episode on DNA, Mendel and Mishur, and they're really amazingly close to each other. And they're both working on kind of related parts of the mystery of genetics and inheritance. And, you know, in the modern age, they would be very much aware of each other's work. You know, they would be publishing online and they would see each other and they would go meet up at conferences and all the mechanisms we have for sharing ideas. But at that point, those networks were just starting to be formed. And so, in fact, they were entirely ignorant of each other's work, even though they were only about 200 miles apart. They were also in different industries or professions.

One was a monk and one was a teaching professor. And that probably is still a problem in which certain advances or knowledge gets sequestered or siloed into medical science or information science or technology and doesn't really crossbreed. How much does innovation arise out of just having a conversation with a peer from a different industry? You know, it's a huge part of the process. And I think people don't quite understand this enough. And this is something I've always tried to kind of celebrate in the work that I've done, which are those cross-disciplinary kind of connectors. Because so often what happens is, you know, expertise in a single field,

focus in a single field is important. There's a lot to learn, particularly now. And so you need to be able to concentrate in something. But often what happens is there's that conversation or somebody stumbles across a paper of somebody working in a seemingly unrelated field. And yet there's some idea or principle or just a metaphor, really, for thinking about the problem that lights up a new, you know, potential solution that wasn't visible before. My favorite story about this from the history of innovation is Gutenberg. When he was inventing

the printing press, he had developed all this stuff with, you know, metallurgy and the inks, which were very complicated. Getting the inks to set properly on the page was very complicated. But he didn't have a pressing mechanism. He didn't have, you know, something crucial to a printing press. He didn't have a way of pressing the type onto the page. And so he was kind of stuck. And he went off. It was grape harvesting season in Germany. And so he went off to drink some wine and saw this screw press up there, which was used to press grapes. And he said, wait a second, I could adapt that technology for my printing press. And so he basically borrowed technology designed to make wine and turned it into technology to print Bibles, and it changed the world.

Now, both of our shows have American in the title, and I'm glad, actually, American Innovations exists because there's so much of American identity tied to innovation and leadership and technology and advancement. But what is it about American innovation that might be special or explored in detail in your show? Well, it's a good question. You know, the irony of it is that in the first few episodes, we do not actually have any scenes set in America. It's a lot of Europe at the beginning of the DNA arc. Later episodes are more focused on American. I think we had that framing precisely because of what you said, which is there is so much – ethos of the startup culture, the kind of the inventor, the tinker in his or her garage.

That's such a big part of our kind of national identity. It turns out that there are many innovators in other countries around the world, and they will appear in the show. In fact, there are quite a number of them right at the beginning. Okay. So, you've been in this space and thinking about innovation for 20 years, written books on it. Along the way, you must have come across some favorite anecdotes or favorite inventions or innovations. Name two. Well, here, I mean, I have so many. It's like asking, what's your favorite child? But there are two that kind of come to mind. They're slightly different. One of them is not thought of as an innovation, but maybe it's one of the most important ones of the last or 20 million people living together until the kind of latter half of the 19th century. But they were incredibly dangerous places. They were incredibly deadly places. They had epidemic disease problems. They had terrible public health issues and waste removal and, most importantly, in medical science,

changed those places from being some of the most dangerous places in the world to being actually some of the most safest places in the world, the places with the longest life expectancy. And the invention of the modern city, the modern metropolis, I think is one of the great achievements of human society. But it's, you know, made up of lots of kind of underlying achievements. The other one I love, which is a slightly different thing, which is I'm obsessed with innovations that came too late, that seemingly should have been discovered before,

but somehow took a longer period of time for people to kind of imagine. And one example of that is the typewriter. So the typewriter really wasn't invented in a recognizable form until the 1860s or the 1870s. And we had all the technology we would have needed to create a kind of mechanical keyboard that could, you know, create little printed letters on a page, it could have been invented in the 1600s. And in fact, Gutenberg had shown that creating machines that, you know, produce nice typed pages could be a lucrative invention. But somehow, nobody was able to do it. And it's a wonderful example, when the typewriter was finally invented, of that cross-disciplinary innovation, because it actually came from music.

It came from musical keyboards. So we'd had musical keyboards like organs and pianos and harpsichords and so on for almost a thousand years, maybe even a little bit longer before the typewriter was invented. And eventually people said, wait, if we can use press keys with the pads of our fingers to create musical notes, what if we could do the same thing and create letters on a page? And so the first typewriter was actually called the writing harpsichord, which I liked. And now just think about how important keyboards are, you know, to life in the digital age, right? You know, without keyboards, we would not have modern computers. Yeah, I think that's fascinating as a musician in particular. the digital age, right? You know, without keyboards, we would not have modern computers.

Yeah, I think that's fascinating as a musician in particular, but it often occurs to me after writing, I don't know, a half page of notes that I just never have a pen in my hand anymore. It's always the keyboard. I don't even recognize my own handwriting anymore. Right. It's very strange. So something about the innovation of cities is really interesting to me because it seems like an altogether different innovation than what most people would think is an innovation. This seems to be like an aggregate innovation. It required all sorts of disciplines, and you couldn't say that Thomas Edison invented the city. That's right. But, you know, nor could you say that Thomas Edison invented the light bulb. I mean, that's one of the key principles, and that's something we're going to explore a lot in American Innovations. There were actually, you know, a dozen different people inventing light bulbs around the time that Edison was working on his

version of the light bulb. And they all contributed different pieces to the puzzle of electric light. And Edison was a very good, as he kind of called himself at one point, he was kind of a sponge, and he would take up other people's ideas and he would refine them. But it was very much a network of inventors. And we've collapsed that down, condensed it down into this story of this guy named Thomas Edison invented the light bulb. But in fact, the story is more complicated and much more collaborative than we realize. Now, a city is an even more collaborative enterprise with all sorts of different breakthroughs. But even a single thing like a light bulb is often much more complex than we realize. So, on American History Tellers, the next series will be kind of going back to the Cold War era,

but focusing on the space race. You have an upcoming innovations series on aircraft and spaceships as well. Yes. So, it's going to be great. We'll have to just compare notes as we tell these different stories. You know, there's, I mean, the problem with space and flight is, you know, how do you condense it down just to five or six episodes? There's just so many incredible stories in there. So I'm looking forward to that one as a listener almost as well as someone who's producing it. Yeah. Okay. And speaking of new things, you have a new book, Farsighted, coming out in the fall. Can you tell us about that? Yeah. And it's actually going to dovetail with a season or a story arc that we're doing this fall on American innovation.

So Farsighted is a book about decision making, complex decision making, long-term decision making. And it has a chapter about our own kind of collective social decisions of what we're going to do with artificial intelligence. There's this new emerging fear that perhaps we're going to eventually create these machines that are so much smarter than we are, machines we sometimes call super intelligent machines, that it could pose a serious threat to us as a species because we won't understand these machines. They'll be so intelligent that they'll be able to do things kind of beyond our comprehension. And a lot of people, a lot of very smart people are very worried about this, Elon Musk, the late Stephen Hawking, and so on. And so in Farsighted, I talk about how we make decisions as a community about what kind of technology should we build, how do we predict the future of technology and how it could be used or used or

abused? How do we get better at making those kinds of forecasts? And so we're going to have some nice overlap in, in that, in that arc on American innovations, when we're talking about the history of artificial intelligence. Well, I'm really looking forward to hearing that. Stephen Johnson, thank you so much for talking with me today. I appreciate it very much. Thanks a lot. Thanks for having me.

I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Stephen Johnson, author and host of the new Wondery podcast, American Innovations. You can find it on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Wondery.com, or wherever you get your podcasts. But right now, here's a preview of the first episode of American Innovations. For more than two centuries, the White House has been the stage for some of the most dramatic scenes in American history. Inspired by the hit podcast American History Tellers, Wondery and William Morrow present the new book, The Hidden History of the White House. Each chapter will bring you inside the fierce power struggles, the world-altering decisions, and shocking scandals that have shaped

our nation. You'll be there when the very foundations of the White House are laid in 1792, and you'll watch as the British burn it down in 1814. Then you'll hear the intimate conversations between FDR and Winston Churchill as they make plans to defeat Nazi forces in 1941. And you'll be in the Situation Room when President Barack Obama approves the raid to bring down the most infamous terrorist in American history. Order The Hidden History of the White House now in hardcover or digital edition wherever you get your books. How did Birkenstocks go from a German cobbler's passion project 250 years ago to the Barbie movie today? Who created that bottle of red Sriracha with a green top that's permanently living in

your fridge? Did you know that the Air Jordans were initially banned by the NBA? We'll explore all that and more in The Best Idea Yet, a brand new podcast from Wondery and T-Boy. This is Nick. This is Jack. And we've covered over a thousand episodes of pop business news stories on our daily podcast. We've identified the most viral products of all time. And they're wild origin stories that you had no idea about. From the Levi's 501 jeans to Legos. Come for the products you're obsessed with. Stay for the business insights that are going to blow up your group chat. Jack, Nintendo, Super Mario Brothers, best-selling video game of all time. How'd they do it? Nintendo never fires anyone, ever. Follow

the best idea yet on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to the best idea yet early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus. A milestone for humanity. That's the title on the TV monitors at the White House press conference. It's the summer of 2000, and the room is full of people. Journalists, ambassadors, scientists. This isn't a typical presidential press conference. This is a celebration.

Finally, President Bill Clinton arrives and steps up to the microphone. Good morning. He starts off thanking everyone for coming. There are a lot of high-profile guests present. Prime Minister Tony Blair is not here, but he is joining by videoconference from the other side of the Atlantic.

Then Clinton begins to speak about the reason they are all gathered here, the reason for that dramatic title on the TV monitors. We are here to celebrate the completion of the first survey of the entire human genome. Without a doubt, this is the most important, most wondrous map ever produced by humankind. The human genome, a complete record of the DNA inside us. Clinton, though, goes further. He calls it

the language in which God created life. We are gaining ever more awe for the complexity, the beauty, the wonder of God's most divine and sacred gift. With this profound new knowledge, humankind is on the verge of gaining immense new power to heal. Genome science will have a real impact

on all our lives and even more on the lives of our children. The scientists and diplomats gathered from all over the world that day hoped that by translating that book we'd finally be able to read the stories written in its pages. Decoding our genome and learning how our DNA works will help answer some of the most enduring questions in human history. Clinton does point out the dangers of this new technology, the ethical challenges humanity now faces. He suggests that challenge will require as much cooperation and hard work as the mapping of the genome itself. Still, he ends on an optimistic

note. I suppose in closing, when we get this all worked out, we're all living to be 150. Young people will still fall in love. Old people will still fight about things that should have been resolved 50 years ago. We will all on occasion do stupid things, and we will all see the unbelievable capacity of humanity to be noble. From Wondery, this is American Innovations. I'm Stephen Johnson. In this series, we're going to look at some of the most important innovations of the last hundred years. From the personal computer to nuclear power, these innovations have totally transformed our world, sometimes for good and sometimes for bad. And we're going to hear about the people behind those innovations. I've always been

fascinated by these innovators, scientists, engineers, mathematicians, and sometimes just ordinary people. And a question I always find myself asking is, what was it about that time or place that made the idea possible? That was a theme in my book, Where Good Ideas Come From. And one thing I've learned from some of these great innovators is that even when they seem to be lone geniuses, no one comes up with an idea all by themselves. And they usually don't do it all in one eureka-type moment. Just take Isaac Newton, the English scientist and mathematician,

who, among other things, is credited with the discovery of gravity. You might know the story about how the idea hit him, literally, while sitting under a tree. Now, that might just be a myth, but what is true is that Newton himself knew that none of his discoveries would have been possible without the work of others. He once said, Throughout history, without the work of others. He once said, if I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants. Throughout history, that's what innovators have done, stood on their shoulders to see just a little further or a little differently. That's certainly true in this

six-part series, The Dynamo of DNA. This series is all about the stuff buried deep inside our cells that make us who we are. Figuring out that genetic code has changed the world and helped us explain age-old mysteries. In fact, DNA would prove to be such an important molecule that it would quickly jump the boundaries of biology and revolutionize other areas of society too, creating whole new fields of research and business. From healthcare to crime, DNA has completely transformed our world. In this episode, we're going to go back about 150 years, long before Bill Clinton announced the Human Genome Project in the White House, to meet two scientists who, in their own way, laid the groundwork for the discovery of DNA.

It's a story that stars cloned sheep, a room of fruit flies, and salmon sperm. But before we get to the salmon sperm, it's the winter of 1860, and in a little greenhouse on the grounds of a monastery in Brno, a monk is bent over looking for green shoots in a row of pea plants. The St. Thomas Monastery is in what's now the Czech Republic, but was then part of the Austrian Empire. The monks here are known for being inquisitive types, always doing some experiment or another. And this young monk is no exception. His name is Gregor Mendel,

and he can often be found here in the greenhouse or in one of the outdoor courtyards. In one of the pots, he spots a tiny green shoot just beginning to push up through the soil, the first sign of life from the peas he planted only a couple of weeks earlier. It's still cold outside, but here in the warmth

of the greenhouse, things grow a lot quicker. Mendel pushes his round spectacles up his nose, shuts the greenhouse, and heads over for prayers. Like many of the other monks, Mendel had joined the order precisely because it was the only way he could continue his studies. Gregor wasn't actually his original name. It's a name he was given when he became a monk. When he was a young child, a local priest had recognized something in young Johann Mendel. The priest went to Mendel's parents. Young Johan should go to school. But for Mendel's family, that was easier said than done. We can't afford to send him to school.

But what about your daughter? You think my daughter should study? No. That wasn't likely in those days. But have you saved a dowry for her? In the end, Mendel's family gave up most of their daughter's dowry, the money intended for her marriage, just so Johann could go to high school. Soon after joining the monastery, Mendel became seriously depressed. Maybe it was the work of

tending to the sick and the surrounding communities, or maybe he was just having difficulty adjusting to life as a monk. Either way, his mood only lifted when he was sent away to the University of Vienna. He loved university, especially his statistics classes. While in Vienna, he spent his free time charting sunspots with a telescope and tracking tornadoes. In one of his classes, he learned to use a microscope and used it to look at pieces of plants laid out on glass slides, examining the green cells packed together like rows of boxes, each with a single black spot in the middle, the cell's nucleus.

But he always seemed happiest outdoors, tending his bees and gardening. He returned to the monastery with renewed energy, determined to do his own research. At first, he has the idea that he will study the science of plant breeding, maybe with the goal of creating new hybrids for farmers. After all, his family are farmers themselves. And farmers have been coming up with new kinds of plants and animals for hundreds of years, always trying to get something that's bigger or stronger or tastier than old varieties. Mendel decides to try and figure out how characteristics from one generation are passed to the next. For instance, why do offspring resemble

their parents? What causes that? And why are some traits more common than others? Mendel wasn't the first to ask these kinds of questions. In fact, they had preoccupied philosophers and scientists for thousands of years. 2,000 years earlier, the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle had come up with his own theory. He decided that sperm must provide what he called the form of a new animal, the information about what shape the animal would take or how many arms or legs it might have. And the egg provided the matter,

kind of like the clay that's used to shape the creature. Both males and females had a role, but the female role was to supply the raw material while the male's contribution sculpted the offspring. Nowadays, we know that's wrong. Males and females contribute equally to their offspring's traits. But Aristotle's theory is important because he was one of the first to suggest that there might be a biological explanation for what everyone knew. Living things that are related look alike. But he was still in a minority of people who thought like this. Mystical forces and superstitions were very much the order of the day,

and it would remain that way for hundreds of years. One of the more unscientific theories was known as maternal impressions. This was the belief that children were shaped by their mother's experiences while pregnant. If something frightened a pregnant woman or made any kind of strong impression on her, then it would imprint itself on the child. This inspired a whole bunch of different folk stories. A woman who ate too many strawberries while pregnant gave birth to a child who was completely covered with splotchy red birthmarks. A woman who was apparently startled by sea monsters gave birth to a son whose skin resembled

scales and who smelled like fish. The church actually played a role in spreading some of these stories. Bishops would tell the story of the sinful wife of an actor who seduced her husband backstage at a theater performance. The story goes that he was playing the part of Satan and was dressed in full costume at the time. The result? A child born with hooves and horns. In Gregor Mendel's day, another popular belief about heredity was called blending theory. Basically, this was the idea that a child's characteristics, hair color, height, skin color, were literally a blend of its parents' characteristics.

It made a lot of sense at the time. You can imagine each parent's set of characteristics like a paint color being mixed together on a palette. But there were some problems with this theory. Some things just couldn't be explained by blending. A characteristic that seemed to have completely disappeared in one generation would pop up a few generations later. Children with red hair were sometimes born to parents with black or brown hair.

Tall parents sometimes had short children, and so on. Mendel set out to study how these characteristics were passed down through generations. He couldn't know it when he started, but his work would eventually lead to a whole new branch of science. Genetics. Mendel goes to his superior at the monastery. Abbot Cyril Knapp is fond of Mendel, but more than that, he's a true believer in the value of science. So when Mendel stops by his study one day with a research proposal, he listens. I want to better understand how traits are passed down from parent to child.

Interesting. How do you intend to do that? By studying mice. I'd like to breed the mice with one another until I have enough to see patterns in them. I see. And how many mice would you need? I'd hope for hundreds, maybe even thousands. Maybe the monks decide they don't want to risk thousands of mice getting loose in the monastery. Or maybe the idea of a monk closely watching the breeding habits of rodents just doesn't seem right.

Either way, it's a no-go on the mice experiment. So Mendel, the son of a farmer, shifts his focus to plants, in particular, pea plants. Now, this may be the part you remember from your high school biology class, but Gregor Mendel studied peas for a few different reasons. First, bees can't pollinate pea plants very easily, so he had more control over which plants mate with which. Second, peas grow quickly, especially in the monastery's greenhouses, which meant he could observe several generations of peas in the span of a single year. And third, pea plants have several distinct, easy-to-observe traits. These traits are easy to categorize.

They're usually one thing or another. The stalks are either tall or short, never medium. Flowers are either white or purple. Peas are either wrinkled or smooth, yellow or green. There's no in-between. It just made everything a lot simpler, a lot tidier. Mendel decides to study seven traits in peas, and he begins cross-pollinating plants with opposite traits just to see what happens.

He fills notebook after notebook with observations about his findings. The monk in the greenhouse has become obsessed with figuring out the answer to how traits are inherited. Little does he know that just 350 miles away, another scientist is holding the answer in his hands. American History Tellers is sponsored by Bombas. So what comes to mind when you think of American innovations? There's been so many throughout history. The cotton gin, the light bulb, the telephone, the assembly line, the airplane, television, lasers. I'd be very surprised, though, if anyone thought socks. And it's true. Athletic shoes have advanced

tremendously in the last 20 years, but socks have not. Until now. Bombas is a company on a mission. They've spent two years of research and development to create a significantly more comfortable, quality-made, and better-fitting sock. Bombas socks are made with honeycomb arch supports, cushioned footbeds, tiny ankle cushions to prevent rubbing and chafing, seamless toes, and super soft cotton. But Bombas isn't content to innovate just with their socks. The idea for the company came when the founders heard that socks are the number one requested item in homeless shelters across the U.S. That's why for every pair of socks Bombas sells, they also donate one to someone in need.

So find out what I already know. Bombas makes really good socks. I'm actually wearing a pair right now, navy ones with little gray stripes. You can save 20% by visiting bombas.com slash tellers. That's B-O-M-B-A-S dot com slash tellers. And enter the offer code tellers at checkout. It's January 1868.

It's early morning, and in a hospital in Tübingen in Germany, a bearded man wearing a thick coat makes his way quickly along one of the corridors. He's come to the hospital laundry room. Inside, it's damp and warm. He looks around impatiently. Where is it? Where is it? Just then, the door opens and in walks a nurse carrying a basket. Ermesha, you startled me. I came to pick up the bandages myself this morning, but the basket wasn't here. Let me see those. To the nurse's obvious shock, he pulls the basket out of her hands and begins picking through the soiled bandages. It's a veterans' hospital, so many of the soldiers have old wounds that leak pus and blood,

and they need clean cloth bandages daily. Sometimes they can be washed and reused, but other times they're too filthy and are thrown onto a trash heap out back. The nurse doesn't understand what he's looking for. What was wrong with the last set? What did you say? What was the problem with the last bandages we sent? Not fresh enough. The man has collected a bundle of bandages and is about to leave. Is it true you're studying pus? No, not strictly true. It's white blood cells I'm interested in. What are you going to do with the blood cells? He's halfway out the door now, but he turns. I'm going to figure out what's inside them. And like that, he's gone. The scientist's name is Friedrich Miescher, and those bandages are going to help him discover the chemical building block of life.

If Gregor Mendel had entered the clergy in part to continue doing scientific research, then Friedrich Miescher was the mirror image. Miescher had wanted to become a priest, but his father pushed him to study medicine instead. In 1868, at age 24, Miescher starts working in Tübingen in southwest Germany in a new natural science institute located inside of an old castle. Miescher's lab is in the basement in what had been the castle kitchen. The lab is roomy with vaulted ceilings but with tiny windows that don't let in much light. Mishra once said the gloom

reminded him of a medieval alchemist's lair. In this lair, he works long hours at a large wooden bench surrounded by glassware. He's disheveled, and his equipment is usually dirty. But he works hard. In fact, he works a little too hard for his own good sometimes. A colleague once described him as driven by a demon, and another commented that the impression he gave was of a person completely taken up by his inner mental activity, without contact with the outer world. A few years later, Mishra would almost miss his own wedding because he started a new experiment that morning and got distracted. Those pus-covered bandages from the hospital are for one of Mishra's first projects. He's interested in white blood cells, and he needs the bandages because pus contains

white blood cells. He's especially interested in a structure inside the cells called the nucleus, that dot that Mendel had seen through his microscope. The key are the blood cells on those dirty bandages. Each morning, Miescher washes the bandages in a sodium solution to get the white blood cells off them. Then he goes about isolating the nucleus from the rest of the cell, like it's a peach and the nucleus is the stone at the center. First, he uses warm alcohol to dissolve the fats and lipids, including the cell's outer layer. Then he uses extract from a pig's stomach to digest most other parts of the cell.

In the end, he's left with a glob of white mucus. In fact, lots of small nuclei stuck together. Now he has his nucleuses, but he still doesn't know what they're made of, so he sets about putting the glob through a series of tests. First, he drops it in chemicals that would break it down and dissolve it if it were a protein. But the glob of white mucus is unfazed. Then he tries boiling it in salt water. Nothing happens.

Then he tries boiling it in vinegar, a stronger solution. Still nothing. Then he really goes for it and drops the glob into a solution of boiling hydrochloric acid. Nope. The white glob remains stubbornly intact. In a last-ditch effort, Mishra sets it on fire. This actually works, because he can analyze the gas and ash to see what was in the goo. For the most part, the results don't surprise him.

Oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, all common elements and proteins, which is what he assumes the goo is. But then one element stops him in his tracks. Phosphorus. No known protein contains phosphorus. It just doesn't make sense. Mishir starts to get excited. He gets more dirty bandages, does more experiments, and pretty soon he starts to believe he's discovered a whole new type of substance inside cells.

Because it was the substance he'd extracted from inside the nucleus, he names it nucleon. Miescher doesn't realize it, but he's just discovered the basic building block of life. What he called nucleon is what scientists today call deoxyribonucleic acid, DNA. If you like American History Tellers, you can binge all episodes early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. And before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at wondery.com slash survey.