This TED Talk features science educator Anna Rothschild recorded live at TEDx Mid-Atlantic

2016.

Did you know that one of the first fertility drugs was made from the pee of Catholic nuns and that

even the Pope got involved?

So this is totally true. Back in the 1950s,

scientists knew that when women enter menopause, they start releasing high levels of fertility

hormones in their urine. But there was this doctor named Bruno Lunenfeld who wondered if he

could actually isolate those hormones from the urine

and use it to help women who are having trouble getting pregnant.

Obviously, the problem with this was that in order to test this idea,

he needed a lot of pee from older women.

And that is not an easy thing to find.

So he and his colleagues got special permission from the Pope to collect gallons and gallons of urine from hundreds of older Catholic nuns.

And in doing so, he actually isolated hormones that are still used to help women get pregnant

today, though now they can be synthesized in a lab and gallons of pee aren't necessary.

So why am I standing up here telling this wonderfully intellectual audience about Nun P?

Well, I'm a science journalist and multimedia producer

who has always been fascinated by gross stuff.

So fascinated, in fact, that I started a weekly YouTube series

called Gross Science, all about the slimy, smelly, creepy

underbelly of nature, medicine, and technology. Now, I think most of us would agree that there's

something little gross about pee. You know, it's something that we don't really like to talk about,

...