By Jo Stuart, UNE Discovery

Picture it. A British government lab in the 1950s. A low hum of electricity. Lightbulbs turning on and off at random. A pound note in your pocket catches on fire out of nowhere. And there, on a bench, in a makeshift chicken wire cage, a dead animal picks itself up and starts walking around, reanimated by the power of electromagnetic radiation.

You would be forgiven for assuming I’m describing a scene in a schlocky horror movie from the ‘60s, but if you’d been a fly on the wall of James Lovelock’s lab in the National Institute for Medical Research in London in the 1950s, that’s exactly what you would have seen.

James Lovelock in 2005.  Wikipedia – Bruno Comby

At the time, Audrey Smith, a biologist at the NIMR, was conducting research on cryopreservation – that is, freezing biological matter in such a way that it can be warmed up and still viable. Her work on preserving animal sperm has been of great use to cattle breeding and other animal husbandry. But she was also freezing and thawing out other things: small mammals.

Firstly, why? Well, at that time, it was not yet known whether or not cryopreservation of larger animals and even humans was possible, and scientists wanted to find out. In order to find answers to this and related questions, Smith and others were doing reanimation experiments starting with small rodents, with the hope of scaling up to larger animals. (Spoilers: though ‘cryosleep’ makes for good science fiction, it’s not actually possible as far as we can tell – humans are far too big!)

Initially, the process was to carefully freeze rats and hamsters, then revive them using either concentrated beams of light or heated spatulas applied to the chest area. Amazingly, this actually worked! Some of the rats and hamsters were able to fully revive after being quite literally frozen solid. However, they also sustained nasty burns from the heating elements, and the scientists suspected that this was contributing to the high mortality rate among the rodents.

That was when Lovelock had the brilliant idea to instead use diathermy – transferring heat through electromagnetic radiation.

He ended up procuring a magnetron – a device that uses an electric current to aim and magnify electromagnetic waves – from a different government research facility and rigging up what would later be recognisable as the bare bones of a microwave oven. He fashioned a metal cage out of mesh to contain (most of) the radiation and told Smith to put the hamsters inside to reanimate them.

This worked, but the safety procedures were not exactly what would be expected these days and the magnetron was emitting radiation all over the place as well as into the DIY microwave. The radiation it produced happened to be exactly the right frequency to heat up the strip of metal in UK pound notes, which occasionally set them on fire. Light bulb filaments also heated up at the exact frequency of the waves being produced and would as a consequence turn on seemingly at random.

A Radar Range microwave from 1971.  WikiMedia by Pamperchu

As Lovelock and Smith had hoped, this method of reanimating the hamsters and rats they had frozen was much more likely to successfully revive the dead animals, who were subsequently able to live perfectly normal rodent lives.

I hope I don’t need to say this, but please don’t microwave your pet hamster. The experiments were important at the time, but thankfully science has come a long way since microwaving a hamster was the more humane option!

Aside from having a pretty crazy hook, this story is such a great one because it highlights how creativity, inventiveness and teamwork can make scientific progress possible that would never have happened without them.  We’ve linked to some videos below of interviews with James Lovelock in his later years, including the video from which we learned the incredible story of hamsters in microwaves. If you like stories about scientific inventions, we highly recommend you check them out for yourself!

I promise this story about microwaves is interesting by Tom Scott

James Lovelock on NASA, cyborgs, Inventions, asteroids and Gaia theory from the Science Museum

James Lovelock discusses his greatest epiphany from the Science Museum