- Some truisms in life
you can't change the past,
you can't cheat death,
and you can't unboil an egg.
Oh wait, yeah, you actually
sort of can unboil an egg.
(electronic music)
- Boiling an egg seems like an
irreversible transformation,
like death,
but before we go into the
dark arts of unboiling eggs,
let's shed some light on who came up with
the crazy idea in the first place.
Molecular chemist Gregory
Weiss and Colin Raston
boiled many an egg.
All because they were on a quest
to better study protein folding.
A quick note on proteins.
They're the workhorse of cells
involved in almost all the processes
going on in your body.
Incorrectly folded chains of proteins
are thought to be the cause of diseases
like Alzheimer's and cancer.
So the idea is that
correcting the folding pattern
can stop the disease.
The egg it turns out is a clever stand in
for cancer associated proteins
that when studied in the lab
can gunk up in test tubes
and take days to weeks to unravel.
That's a problem since researchers
are specifically studying the
proteins folding patterns.
That is what led Weiss and Raston
to boil and egg for 20
minutes until it hardened.
The proteins were still intact
but had changed shape
which is similar to cancer
associated proteins.
So now the task was to unboil the egg
and return the proteins
to their original shape.
To do this, the egg white
was placed in a solution
of water and urea
which helps it coat and
lubricate the proteins.
Then the egg whites took a wild
five minute ride on a vortex fluid device.
Which spun it around at
5,000 rotations per minute.
The force of which was enough
to separate and stretch out
the proteins until they
returned to their original shape
and voila the egg white was unboiled.
Now if only chemist could
work on unscrambling an egg,
portals to other worlds would open.
And we'd finally find out which came first
the chicken or the egg.
Actually the answer is the egg.
Or rather the chicken egg.
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