How a Chemist Accidentally Destroyed a Scientific Myth

[00:00:00]It's February 1828. Three things are happening across Europe at the exact same moment. In London, the industrial revolution is conquering the physical world. Humanity has successfully mastered iron, coal, and steam to build an empire of machines. In Stockholm, the scientific elite are drawing a hard line in the sand. They claim that humanity can build steam engines, but it can never build life itself. They believe a mystical vital force separates living biology from dead matter. And finally, in Berlin, a young, quiet chemist named Friedrich Verer is shivering in a poorly heated laboratory. He has absolutely no idea that he's about to make a discovery that will spark the downfall of that vital force using a chemical that is found in human urine. This is how a chemist accidentally destroyed a scientific myth.

[00:00:50]In the early 19th century, science was governed by a dominant theory known as vitalism. The core of vitalism hung on the fact that the universe was split into two completely separate realms. On one side was the inorganic world, the realm of rocks, minerals, and dead matter. On this side, human beings had free reign. Chemists could take acids and salts, break them down, and rebuild them in a laboratory. But on the other side was the organic world, the realm of plants, animals, and ultimately human beings. Here, the scientific elite had built a massive impassible wall. organic compounds could never be synthesized in a laboratory from inorganic starting materials. They claimed that living matter possessed a mystical metaphysical force called the vital force or visatalis.

[00:01:36]This force was believed to be a unique law of nature that operated exclusively inside living tissue. Vitalism started with ancient philosophers like Aristotle who argued that living things weren't just a collection of physical parts.

[00:01:49]Rather, they were animated by a literal soul or anima. For centuries, this remained a vague philosophical concept.

[00:01:56]But in the late 1600s and 1700s, it exploded into popularity for a very practical reason. Doctors were trying to figure out why a living body behaves so differently from a dead corpse. A German physician named Gayorg Ernstal took Aristotle's old ideas and modernized them. He looked at a human body and realized that the moment a person dies, their flesh immediately begins to rot and decompose. While obviously not a new observation, argued from this that the physical chemicals in our bodies naturally want to fall apart. Therefore, something active, intelligent, and non-physical must be constantly fighting off that decay while we are alive. He called this force the sensitive soul. By the late 1700s, Stal's philosophy known as animism became incredibly popular. But as science progressed, other theorists found the idea of a literal soul directing biology a bit too spiritual.

[00:02:52]They evolved's ideas into a new, more scientific sounding movement, vitalism.

[00:02:57]Instead of a conscious soul, they argued for a more natural biological vital force. This movement, which was started in rebellion to animism, became incredibly popular because medical science had come to a crossroads.

[00:03:10]Mechanistic scientists were trying to argue that the human body was just a fancy clockwork machine made of pumps and pipes. But doctors and theorists pushed back violently against this idea.

[00:03:21]It became the ultimate safety net for science. If you couldn't explain how a biological process worked, you just attributed it to the mysterious unmeasurable laws of the vital force.

[00:03:31]The chief architect who finally took this popular medical theory and formalized it into mainstream chemistry by the 19th century was a Swedish chemist named Jans Jacob Brazilius. To call Brazilius just a scientist understates both his genius and his influence. He was the undisputed king of chemistry of his time. He was the mind behind the popular textbooks. He defined many laws of the chemical universe, discovered multiple elements, and even coined the very terms organic chemistry and catalysis. When Brazilius proposed that a unique force organized living tissue, he wasn't offering a tentative placeholder for what 19th century instruments simply couldn't yet measure.

[00:04:12]He believed it as a real and substantive claim. And because Brazilius said it, the rest of the chemical world treated it as absolute. Brazilius was the chemistry establishment. And so therefore, so was chemical vitalism. But why was vitalism also so strongly defended outside of Brazilius's influence? Well, partly because at the time the evidence seemed to support it.

[00:04:35]Organic compounds were strikingly different from inorganic ones. Far more complex, often unstable, and resistant to the kind of clean proportion and affinity rules that Brazilius had built his entire career on. No one yet had the tools to explain why living matter behaved so differently without invoking something extra. So vitalism filled a real gap in science. And because the man who endorsed it ran the most read annual survey of the entire field, challenging it wasn't just risky science. It was extremely risky science. But after a century of vitalism's dominance, the first cracks in the theory started to appear. And that came in the form of a chemical found in quite a peculiar place, human urine.

[00:05:18]If you wanted to study the mysterious chemistry of life in the 18th century, you inevitably ended up looking at urine. For centuries, this wasn't just a biological waste product. It was the ultimate playground for eccentric science. The obsession started with the alchemists. In 1669, a German alchemist named Henik Brand became convinced that human urine held the secret to the philosopher's stone. His logic was simple. Urine was golden, so it must contain the raw ingredients to manufacture literal gold. Brand collected thousands of lers of urine from German soldiers, boiled it down into a thick glowing sludge, and baked it in a furnace. He didn't find gold, but funnily enough, he did accidentally discover elemental phosphorus, a substance that spontaneously burst into white flames when exposed to air. By the mid700s, chemists abandoned the hunt for gold and started trying to isolate the actual organic molecules hidden within this liquid. In 1727, a Dutch physician named Herman Borhova evaporated urine and discovered a strange crystalline solid left behind. But because he extracted it directly from a living biological source, it didn't challenge vitalism. The man who finally isolated this molecule in its pure form was an eccentric French chemist named Elair Mar Ruel. In 1773, Ruel boiled urine down into a thick syrup, treated it with alcohol, and successfully crystallized the same pure organic compound. 26 years later during the chaos of the French Revolution, two other French chemists, Antoine Francois Deorqua and Luie Nicolola Vocalon perfected Ruel's process and officially gave the compound its modern name, ura. By 1800, ura was recognized as one of the definitive mystery molecules of the organic world.

[00:07:07]It was a primary component of mamalian life and according to scientific consensus, it was entirely impossible to create inside a laboratory without a living liver. Except someone did do just that in 1812. But the man who did it also fell victim to the dominance of vitalism. An English chemist named John Davyy, the younger brother of Sir Humphrey Davyy, was experimenting with highly toxic inanimate gases. He mixed carbon monoxide and chlorine, exposed the mixture to sunlight, and created a terrifying new substance called phosgene gas. Davey then took this inorganic phosgene and reacted it with ammonia gas. Without realizing it, Davy's test tube executed a perfect organic synthesis. The atoms rearranged, producing a mixture of what historians later realized contained synthetic ura.

[00:07:54]He had manufactured a piece of living biology out of inorganic industrial gases. But John Davyy wasn't looking for ura. The notion that a substance from inside a living body and a substance cooked up from chlorine gas and ammonia might be one and the same wasn't really a question anyone was asking yet. The conceptual wall between organic and inorganic chemistry hadn't yet been tested because nobody had any reason to suspect it was breakable. And so therefore, the scientific community, Davey included, completely filtered it out. His breakthrough was buried in an obscure journal and forgotten for many years. The stars were starting to align and the dominoes were beginning to fall.

[00:08:33]But it would take a fierce explosive rivalry between two completely different young chemists to finally start cracking the foundation.

[00:08:42]The road to accidentally destroying vitalism didn't start with a desire to study life. It started with a fierce explosive argument between two young men who absolutely hated each other's data.

[00:08:54]Friedrich Verler was a quiet, meticulous German who had studied under Leopold Galin, a brilliant professor who was obsessed with the strange chemistry of cyanates. Galan recognized Ferller's genius and pushed him out of standard medicine and into raw chemistry, eventually sending him to Sweden to study directly under the master of chemistry himself, Jans Jacob Roselius.

[00:09:16]Filler was trained to be precise, careful, and deeply respectful of authority. Justice von Liebig was the exact opposite. He was a fiery, arrogant and aggressively ambitious young chemist who had studied in Paris under Joseph Louie Gayus. While Verer was in Sweden studying calm, stable chemical structures, Lee was in France studying things that blew up, specifically silver fulminate, a highly volatile, dangerous explosive. In 1824, these two parallel paths collided in the pages of Europe's top scientific journals. Verler published a paper analyzing a completely stable, harmless compound called silver cyanate. He carefully broke down its elemental ingredients and listed its exact chemical formula. Across Europe, Liebig read Ferller's paper and scoffed.

[00:10:03]Liebig had just analyzed his highly explosive silver fulminate, and he noticed something impossible. Verer's formula for the calm, stable silver cyanate was exactly identical to his own chemical formula for the violent explosive silver fulminate. Liebig publicly accused Ferller of being a terrible analytical chemist who couldn't obtain pure samples or accurately count atoms and molecules. Furler insulted, defended his data and told Liebig to rerun his own experiments. For 2 years, they locked themselves in their respective laboratories, aggressively trying to prove the other wrong in a non-stop back and forth. The scientific community, Brazilius included, watched this journal warfare unfold with pure fascination. Finally, realization set in. Neither of them was wrong. They were getting the exact same numbers because the two substances really did share the exact same elemental ingredients. The two of them had stumbled into a fundamental flaw in how humanity understood the universe. Brazilius, watching these two brilliant young minds argue across Europe, stepped in and realized the truth, a phenomenon he would later officially name isomeism in 1830. This dispute proved that matter isn't just about the ingredients you use. Rather, it is about how those ingredients are structurally arranged.

[00:11:22]This realization changed everything.

[00:11:24]When Verer and Liebik finally met face to face a few years later, the former rivals hit it off instantly, turning into lifelong best friends and scientific partners. But more importantly, it left Verer deeply obsessed with the structural behavior of cyanate compounds. By 1828, Verler was working in a new trade school in Berlin.

[00:11:44]He wasn't looking for a biological breakthrough. He was just trying to create a pure textbook example of an inorganic salt called ammonium cyanate to see how its structure behaved. He had no idea that his obsession with rearranging atoms was about to trigger the ultimate chemical accident.

[00:12:02]In February 1828, Friedrich Verer was manipulating his glass test tubes in the newly founded Berlin Gerbashula.

[00:12:10]His goal at the time was to mix two inorganic minerals to create a pure specimen of ammonium cyanate. To do this, he dissolved cyanic acid gas into a solution of ammonia dissolved in water. In a secondary experiment, he mixed silver cyanate with ammonium chloride. Both methods yielded the exact same result, a clear, colorless liquid containing dissolved inorganic ions.

[00:12:34]Furler's next step was to evaporate the liquid water so he could collect the dry, crystallized inorganic salt left behind. To speed up the evaporation, Ferller lit a small burner and gently boiled the solution. He left the beaker on his workbench and walked away, allowing it to cool. When he returned hours later, he looked into the glass and realized something was terribly wrong. The glass was filled with a dense forest of beautiful white needle-like crystals that gleamed in the dim laboratory light. This was nothing like what Verller expected from a simple inorganic salt, and he was deeply confused. He began treating the mysterious white needles with various chemical reagents to figure out what they were. He poured a strong base over them, expecting them to evolve ammonia gas. However, they remained completely inert. He then added nitric acid and the crystals instantly precipitated into a distinct highdensity nitrate salt.

[00:13:29]Briller froze. He had seen these exact chemical properties years ago during his time under Brazilius when he had combined cyanic acid with ammonia and got a substance that behaved, in his words, neither like cyanide nor like ammonia. He ran to a shelf, pulled down a pure sample of natural ura that had been painstakingly extracted from human urine, dissolved some of it in water, added nitric acid to the solution, and then finally compared the two solutions.

[00:13:57]Upon examination, they were completely identical. Further realized that by simply heating his clear inorganic liquid, he had caused a spontaneous atomic rearrangement. Overwhelmed with excitement, Verer grabbed a pen and paper to write to his mentor, Yans Jacob Brazilius. Channeling a bit of his natural wit, Verler wrote, "In a manner of speaking, I can no longer hold my chemical water. I must tell you that I can make ura without the use of kidneys or indeed of any animal, be it man or dog."

[00:14:29]When Brazilius received Viller's letter in Stockholm, the world of chemistry did not stop spinning. Brazilius actually praised his star pupil but not because Verer seemingly disproved vitalism. The support from Brazilius mainly came from Verer providing further evidence towards his budding isomeism. In his later years, Brazilius had concluded that treating the vital force as a mystical separate chemical power was actually an absurdity. That form of vitalism called chemical vitalism was ultimately abandoned by Brazilius. In his final 1847 textbook, Brazilius even edited his text, saying that viewing the vital force as a specific chemical power was a mistake. Brazilius did not drop vitalism in its entirety. Though he hung onto a less aggressive physiological vitalism, which postulated that some biological regulator was present in living things that allowed them to make compounds like ura easily and efficiently as compared to scientists having to build extreme conditions and essentially move mountains to make the same substances from scratch. But Brazilius's nuance didn't really need to be ignored for vitalism to survive. Vitalism was never just his theory to begin with. It had deep roots in physiology and medicine going back over a century, and those fields had their own reasons to hold on to some version of it that had little to do with one chemist's textbook edits. On top of that, the evidence genuinely was incomplete. URA was merely one success story compared to 17 years of no one else synthesizing any organic compounds.

[00:16:00]So the door stayed open for the idea to live on, propped up by real unresolved chemistry and the ordinary inertia of how slowly textbooks and institutions catch up to a moving truth. Friller himself chose not to spend his life fighting this slow institutional inertia. He never had any interest in fighting vitalism from the beginning anyways, and so he quietly moved on, packing up his glasswware and redirecting his genius toward inorganic metallurgy. In these pursuits, he became the first chemist to isolate elemental aluminum in a pure enough state to study its properties. Further left the debate behind, but the crack he had smashed into the armor of vitalism was permanent. The next executioner of vitalism arrived in 1845 in the form of Adolf Wilhelm Kulba, a fiercely stubborn German chemist who had studied under Verer and also served as Robert Bunson's own assistant. Kula conducted a brilliant multi-step synthesis of acetic acid. the primary compound in vinegar.

[00:16:58]Unlike Verller, who had synthesized an animal waste product, Kula built a complex organic acid from the ground up, starting with carbon dulfide and chlorine. And finally, throughout the 1850s, a French chemist named Marcelin Berto systematically drove the final stakes through the heart of vitalism in chemistry. Bertolo used basic laboratory minerals to mass synthesize alcohols, fats, and hydrocarbons. But the old guard didn't just fade away quietly.

[00:17:27]Bertolo found himself in a prolonged, very public fight with one of the most famous scientists of the era, Louis Pesture, over whether fermentation required the vital force. That clash on its own deserves its own video. But for now, I'll just say that by the time the dust settled, the mystery of the vital force in chemistry was officially gone for good. But as the decades rolled on, history left us with one final brilliant irony. In 1932, a German physician named Hans Krebs and his assistant Cortanzelite set out to discover exactly how the human liver manufactures ura inside a living cell. Furller had forced the reaction using raw heat in a glass tube, but the human body operates at a steady mild temperature. Krebs and Hanzolite discovered a beautiful, highly complex loop of biochemical reactions now known as the ura cycle. The real biological process relies on an intricate, highly organized sequence of specific enzymes to build the molecule. It looks absolutely nothing like Verler's boiling beaker. In a strange way, the 19th century vitalists were technically right about one aspect. The human body does use a completely unique, highly organized biological system to arrange its matter. This is essentially what Brazilius was trying to postulate when he defended physiological vitalism in his later years. Today, Friedrich Fuler's accidental breakthrough shapes the room you are sitting in right now.

[00:18:50]By proving that organic chemistry could be manipulated by human hands, he shattered a psychological barrier, leading to the birth of the modern pharmaceutical industry, synthetic plastics, and advanced textiles. But his greatest impact lies in agriculture.

[00:19:05]Over 90% of all industrial ura manufactured today is used as high nitrogen fertilizer. Before organic chemistry, global agriculture relied on collecting bird droppings in human waste. Today, massive industrial complexes synthesized millions of tons of pure ura. Later inventors figured out how to extract the raw ingredients straight from atmospheric nitrogen and natural gas. And it was Verer who proved the synthesis of the compound could be done at all. By forcing the atoms of an inorganic material to collapse and rearrange, Verler hadn't just manufactured a piece of biology. He had started a chain reaction that permanently erased the invisible border between the living and the dead and that eventually overthrew a scientific myth.

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