00:00In 1999, one man absorbed more radiation than any living human in recorded history.
00:05What doctors did next is the part no one talks about.
00:08His name was Hisashi Ochi.
00:10He was a technician at a nuclear fuel plant in Tokaimura, Japan.
00:14A criticality accident exposed him to 17 sieverts of radiation.
00:18The limit considered lethal is around 4 to 5.
00:21Within days, his white blood cell count collapsed to almost zero.
00:25His skin began to separate from his body in sheets.
00:27His chromosomes were so completely destroyed they could no longer copy themselves.
00:32Every cell that died could not be replaced.
00:34There was no coming back from that.
00:36Biologically, it was impossible, but doctors kept him alive for 83 days.
00:41His heart stopped three times.
00:43Each time they brought him back, he reportedly begged them to stop.
00:46His organs failed one by one while machines took over each function.
00:50At some point, the question stopped being, can we save him and became something much harder?
00:55At what point does medicine become something else entirely?
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