Microwaving Hamsters

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19 May 2021 - Bergen

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Scrolling through YouTube at lunchtime today I came across Tom Scott's latest video where he interviews James Lovelock about inventing the microwave. Okay, so he wasn't the first. But it gets more interesting when you learn that Lovelock invented it to reanimate frozen hamsters in the 1950's. Scientists back then where exploring the interesting phenomena that you can freeze small mammals to death (like down to 1 degree celcius) and then heating them back up would sometimes bring them back to life. Unfortunately the hamsters often had their skin burned in the process of reheating before Lovelock hit upon the idea of the microwave. And as an added bonus the frozen dead hamsters came back to life nearly 100% of the time when then used microwaves. Sadly, later research found this didn't scale up to larger animals like us. Also sadly for a very young seven year old me, putting a live hamster in the microwave makes it very dead very quickly. That young scientific mind apparently had something in common with Lovelock though, which makes me feel somewhat better about all these many years later. Watch the video for yourself below: