transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:01] Hey, it's Lulu. This week, I want to bring back an episode about scientists who look in the most unexpected place to find a brand new drug to treat a very tricky bug. The bug is MRSA, that really nasty infection people sometimes get in hospitals, and I don't want to give away the drug because that's sort of all the fun. So I'm going to just pass you off to Jad, Robert, and little baby Latif from about a decade ago. Here we go.

Speaker 2:
[00:29] Wait, wait, you're listening. Okay. Radiolab.

Speaker 3:
[00:39] From?

Speaker 2:
[00:40] WNYC.

Speaker 4:
[00:44] Rewind.

Speaker 2:
[00:48] So, the way the story goes, it starts in 1928.

Speaker 5:
[00:53] 1928, Alexander Fleming, the story goes, who knows if it's apocryphal or not, is growing Staph, Staphylococcus, in his lab.

Speaker 2:
[01:02] That's Mary McKenna, she's a science writer, and Staph is a bacterium.

Speaker 5:
[01:07] It lives on our skin, and it especially likes parts of the body that are warm and damp.

Speaker 2:
[01:14] So it likes to be just up our noses or......on our genitals or in our armpits, places like that. And generally, it's no big deal. Doesn't really do us any harm.

Speaker 5:
[01:22] But if it gets into a scratch or a cut and makes its way inside our bodies, Staph goes from being this benign companion to being potentially deadly.

Speaker 2:
[01:36] Anyway, London, 1928.

Speaker 5:
[01:38] Fleming is growing Staph in his lab.

Speaker 2:
[01:41] In these little Petri dishes. And he was a slob basically. And he goes on a vacation, leaves his Petri dishes covered in bacteria just around, leaves his window open.

Speaker 5:
[01:56] And something blows across his lab plates.

Speaker 2:
[01:59] Some tiny little speck of a thing just floats in through the window and comes to a rest on one of those Petri dishes.

Speaker 5:
[02:06] And so a few weeks later.

Speaker 2:
[02:07] Fleming, finally back from vacation.

Speaker 5:
[02:09] He needs to use those lab plates again. And he and his assistant go to clean them off.

Speaker 2:
[02:14] I mean, you'd imagine that he would see some real lush, nice furry lawn of Staph just overflowing right out of the plate.

Speaker 6:
[02:26] Because it's been sitting there for so long.

Speaker 2:
[02:27] It's been a Staph party.

Speaker 5:
[02:28] But on one of the plates that they pick up, they realize that... It's almost polka dot. It's got little dead zones all over it.

Speaker 2:
[02:37] Little patches where the Staph is dead.

Speaker 7:
[02:42] Dead patches. So something blue through the window landed in the dish and starts killing the bacteria.

Speaker 2:
[02:49] Yeah, and so when Fleming looks down at his plate, he sees that at the center of these, you know, Staph dead zones, there's a tiny speck of natural mold. Oh, mold.

Speaker 5:
[03:01] And they realize that that mold is expressing a compound that is killing the Staph around it.

Speaker 2:
[03:06] It's like emanating rays of death.

Speaker 6:
[03:09] What was the compound?

Speaker 2:
[03:09] That compound was called Penicillin. The first true antibiotic.

Speaker 5:
[03:17] Infectious diseases that had been killing people for as long as we had been people suddenly could be stopped.

Speaker 6:
[03:23] And it just blew in through the window?

Speaker 5:
[03:25] That is the story that's always been told.

Speaker 2:
[03:27] However it got there, it was amazing. It was a miracle.

Speaker 7:
[03:31] It was called a miracle drug, right?

Speaker 5:
[03:33] I mean, it was just, it really was a moment when the world changed. When Fleming was put on the cover of Time magazine.

Speaker 2:
[03:39] This is 1944, height of World War II.

Speaker 5:
[03:42] It was a picture of his face and the banner on the cover said, His Penicillin will save more lives than war can spend.

Speaker 2:
[03:58] But, and this is, I had no idea about this, virtually at the exact same time when Fleming's face is on the cover of Time Magazine, like two months later, this Stanford researcher publishes that he has found five different strains of staff that do not respond to penicillin.

Speaker 6:
[04:18] Really?

Speaker 2:
[04:19] Yeah.

Speaker 6:
[04:19] This is happening while he's on the cover?

Speaker 2:
[04:22] Virtually the exact same moment.

Speaker 5:
[04:23] And it's the first sign that staff has responded to the penicillin in the world by developing resistance.

Speaker 8:
[04:31] It's almost like a separate Easter-Storm Wheeler. The era of penicillin was over before it began.

Speaker 5:
[04:37] Almost before it began.

Speaker 2:
[04:38] Before it's even released to the general public.

Speaker 5:
[04:41] Wow. And that penicillin-resistant staff moves across the globe.

Speaker 2:
[04:47] And in 1957, in Cleveland, some scientists gather together.

Speaker 5:
[04:51] And they are in a panic. They have no idea why they've lost the antibiotic miracle so quickly.

Speaker 2:
[04:57] So scientists across the globe put their brains together and try to come up with a new drug.

Speaker 5:
[05:01] The next amazing thing.

Speaker 2:
[05:03] And in 1960, they get it.

Speaker 5:
[05:05] Methicillin.

Speaker 2:
[05:07] And it works.

Speaker 5:
[05:08] For about 11 months.

Speaker 8:
[05:11] 11 months?

Speaker 2:
[05:13] And so we started this arms race.

Speaker 5:
[05:16] There was a bug, and then there was a drug that took care of it, and then there was a better bug.

Speaker 8:
[05:20] Drug bug, drug bug.

Speaker 5:
[05:21] Right, exactly.

Speaker 2:
[05:22] I actually found this list. Do you want to hear it?

Speaker 8:
[05:24] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[05:25] Okay, so Streptomycin, 1943, Resistance, 1948. Methicillin, 1960, Resistance, 1961. Clindamycin, 1969, Resistance, 1970.

Speaker 5:
[05:37] You can think of it as leapfrog, or you can think of it as a game of whack-a-mole.

Speaker 2:
[05:41] Ampocylin, 1961, then 1973. So that's a little. Carbonicillin, released 1964, Resistance, 1974.

Speaker 6:
[05:49] They're getting better. They're getting better.

Speaker 5:
[05:51] There were always more drugs. Drug development was doing really well for a really long time.

Speaker 2:
[05:56] Hypericillin, introduced 1980, Resistance, 1981.

Speaker 5:
[06:00] But after the year 2000, drug companies begin to realize it's not really in their best interest to make antibiotics anymore.

Speaker 2:
[06:07] And the end I have on this list is Linozolid, which is introduced 2000, Resistance, 2002.

Speaker 5:
[06:15] Wow.

Speaker 2:
[06:15] There are a few more, but you get the idea.

Speaker 5:
[06:17] Antibiotic approvals, the entry of new drugs to the market, just kind of fell off a cliff.

Speaker 9:
[06:22] Why?

Speaker 5:
[06:23] Well, it takes 10 years and a billion dollars to get to the point where the drug is marketable.

Speaker 2:
[06:27] But as soon as you get the drug on the market, the Resistance clock is running. So you probably won't make your money back. And as you've probably heard, we now have these situations.

Speaker 9:
[06:38] Well, frightening new warning from the Centers for Disease Control about the spread of a string of germs.

Speaker 5:
[06:42] Where literally nothing works.

Speaker 9:
[06:44] So-called superbugs are now turning up in hospitals in 42 states.

Speaker 5:
[06:47] And the patient dies.

Speaker 2:
[06:50] There are now bugs that can resist all of our drugs.

Speaker 5:
[06:53] I have seen physicians break down weeping over this. It's not the way that medicine is supposed to fail anymore, but it does.

Speaker 8:
[07:02] I mean, I know that possibly the origin story of penicillin is apocryphal. So this is all a little suspect. But, you know, just to enjoy imaginings for a moment, like it just seems like if that happened, let's just open up a bunch more windows. Something ought to blow in.

Speaker 5:
[07:19] But we could wait a long time, right? I mean, we had, staff had been around for millennia before 1928.

Speaker 2:
[07:27] But, you know, the whole reason that I wanted to do this story is because kind of there is a new window. It's a different kind of window, though.

Speaker 6:
[07:37] Not a window next to some petri dishes?

Speaker 2:
[07:39] Not a window next to some petri dishes, kind of a window next to some petri dishes, but a totally different kind of window.

Speaker 10:
[07:44] What kind of window is it? Well, I'm about to tell you that.

Speaker 6:
[07:47] Is something blowing into the window?

Speaker 2:
[07:49] Yeah, but it's not mold. It's way more fun than mold. It carries an axe.

Speaker 10:
[07:54] How about that?

Speaker 6:
[07:55] So it's a person?

Speaker 2:
[07:56] Maybe. I don't even know what I'm referring to anymore.

Speaker 6:
[08:05] Part two?

Speaker 7:
[08:06] Yep.

Speaker 6:
[08:06] Okay. Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

Speaker 7:
[08:08] I'm Robert Krulwich.

Speaker 6:
[08:09] This is Radiolab.

Speaker 7:
[08:10] We're ready now for part two. Now, remember when part one ended, there was a window open and something was going to come through. We don't know what.

Speaker 6:
[08:17] We know it's not mold.

Speaker 7:
[08:18] Yeah, we know it's not mold. So whatever it is, whatever it was, whatever it will be, we will hear about it now from our reporter, Latif Nasser.

Speaker 2:
[08:25] Well, actually, there is this story about these two women who did open a window to an alien and distant land. Actually, in a way, it's a story about reimagining the past. But to me, it's a story about a friendship.

Speaker 10:
[08:42] Hey, everybody.

Speaker 2:
[08:43] Hello again.

Speaker 11:
[08:44] Hello again.

Speaker 6:
[08:45] It's a buddy film.

Speaker 2:
[08:46] It's a buddy. Yeah, it's a buddy movie.

Speaker 6:
[08:48] OK, so yeah, maybe just walk us through it. Right.

Speaker 2:
[08:51] So OK, so you have...

Speaker 12:
[08:52] Hello, I'm Dr. Christina Lee.

Speaker 2:
[08:54] Christina.

Speaker 12:
[08:55] And I'm an associate professor in Viking Studies at the School of English at the University of Nottingham.

Speaker 2:
[09:01] She's a historian. And then you also have...

Speaker 13:
[09:04] Hi, I'm Freya Harrison.

Speaker 2:
[09:06] Freya.

Speaker 13:
[09:06] I'm a research fellow in the Center for Biomolecular Sciences at the University of Nottingham.

Speaker 2:
[09:11] And Freya, Freya's a microbiologist. She studies bacteria. We'll start with her.

Speaker 13:
[09:16] OK. So most of my work is about sort of looking at how bacteria evolve during very, very long-lived infections. But my big hobby is Anglo-Saxon and Viking reenactment. So I have purely amateur interest in the history and mainly in dressing up as a warrior and going to fight club every Wednesday night and learning to use the weapons.

Speaker 10:
[09:41] Really?

Speaker 13:
[09:43] Yep.

Speaker 2:
[09:43] So this is actually not Freya's group. This is a group in New Jersey. But basically they do the same thing. Hundreds of people go out into, you know, some field with some dulled weapons.

Speaker 13:
[09:53] Everything from swords, spears, axes. And we give each other a jolly good bashing and have a good time.

Speaker 2:
[10:04] I only mention this because it actually plays into the story.

Speaker 13:
[10:07] Well, it was a really nice sort of coincidence, really.

Speaker 2:
[10:10] 2012. A few years after finishing her doctorate, Freya goes off to work at the University of Nottingham.

Speaker 13:
[10:16] Nottingham is one of the places in the UK, not only for microbiology, but for Anglo-Saxon and Viking history.

Speaker 2:
[10:23] And she goes there to study microbes. But she figures, hey, why not, while I'm here, brush up on my old English?

Speaker 13:
[10:30] With her, it's a world field, it's an abode. I'd studied some old English to a level where I could sort of read and speak a little bit.

Speaker 2:
[10:41] But she figured, hey, she could be better. And if she did, she would get deeper into the whole reenactment thing.

Speaker 13:
[10:48] So I rather cheekily emailed the School of English's Old English Reading Group.

Speaker 2:
[10:52] That's where she met Christina, the historian. At one point, Christina, the historian, asks Freya, like, what do you do? And Freya said, you know, my day job is that I'm a microbiologist, but on evenings and weekends, I'm a history nerd.

Speaker 10:
[11:07] And Christina said the moment she heard that, I just kind of thought, I found my kindred spirit here.

Speaker 2:
[11:12] Because she was like, wow, I'm like your mirror image, because I'm a historian by day, but by night, I'm a microbiology nerd.

Speaker 12:
[11:20] I've been interested in infectious disease for quite a long time, which I don't find any kind of friends in my department.

Speaker 2:
[11:28] She told me she's the kind of person who would watch Ebola coverage on the news and not be able to stop watching. So eventually, they start talking about historical diseases. So how would people back then have treated something like Ebola? Freya is especially interested in this, because she, for her historical reenactment, is developing this nun character who goes off and heals people. But anyway, so they're talking back and forth, and then to cut a long story short, they find themselves both interested in this one particular book.

Speaker 13:
[12:03] It's known as Bald's Leech Book. This is about 1,100 years old.

Speaker 7:
[12:06] What's it called? Bald's what?

Speaker 12:
[12:08] Bald's Leech Book. It's nothing to do with no hair.

Speaker 7:
[12:12] Oh.

Speaker 10:
[12:13] Even though it just spits.

Speaker 7:
[12:14] Is it B-A-L-D-L?

Speaker 12:
[12:16] It is, indeed.

Speaker 7:
[12:17] And leech, like a little worm that grabs onto your blood?

Speaker 12:
[12:22] No, no, it comes from the old English word lecher, which is actually a healer or a doctor.

Speaker 13:
[12:27] So the little squiggly animals are called leeches because they're medicinal, not the other way around.

Speaker 7:
[12:32] Oh.

Speaker 2:
[12:32] So the doctor wasn't named for the leech, the leech was named for the doctor.

Speaker 13:
[12:35] Exactly, yeah.

Speaker 6:
[12:37] And bald is the man, the guy who wrote the book?

Speaker 13:
[12:39] We think it's a guy, we think it's a guy's name.

Speaker 6:
[12:41] And what is this book?

Speaker 2:
[12:42] So it's kind of like this old healer's handbook. It's filled with these potions and cures.

Speaker 12:
[12:47] The original manuscript is in the British Library.

Speaker 2:
[12:49] Locked away.

Speaker 13:
[12:50] But 21st century, very kind people have digitized the original old English text and put it online.

Speaker 2:
[12:57] So Christina and Freya bring it up and they start going through all the remedies. And as it describes to you, remedies for stuff that is a little bit different, you know, things like Thone Deoval, Thone Mononon Possession by the Devil, which according to this leech book, the remedy for someone who is possessed by the devil is you spew a drink and loot it, make this kind of like foul brew, you make them drink it and it'll make them vomit out the devil. And then there's another remedy for warts.

Speaker 14:
[13:26] Bishayob wirt ik nua tosomne.

Speaker 2:
[13:30] And all I'm going to say about that one is that it involves hounds urine and mouse blood.

Speaker 13:
[13:35] And then things like...

Speaker 14:
[13:36] If man seh a torana...

Speaker 13:
[13:39] How should we say, make your husband more physically attentive? Or less physically attentive, whichever you... Whichever direction you need to moderate it.

Speaker 7:
[13:47] Pig's blood, I hope. Or toad blood.

Speaker 14:
[13:49] Drink on neacht nestia.

Speaker 2:
[13:52] Actually it's just you boil a plant in some water and give it to the guy. Oh. Yeah. Anyway. So Freya and Christina are going through this leech book. Looking for some kind of wound.

Speaker 13:
[14:03] Something that was clearly an infection.

Speaker 2:
[14:05] Some pussy something.

Speaker 13:
[14:07] Something we could clearly say that's bacterial.

Speaker 2:
[14:10] And eventually they find an entry.

Speaker 13:
[14:12] Where at the end of the recipe it says in Old English, Se besta lacta dom. Se besta lacta dom. The best medicine.

Speaker 2:
[14:21] The best medicine. Hmm. Yeah. Move over laughter.

Speaker 13:
[14:25] Yeah. And we thought, how can we not try this one?

Speaker 2:
[14:28] What was the best medicine for?

Speaker 13:
[14:31] So it said it was for a lump in the eye.

Speaker 12:
[14:34] It's actually called WEN in Old English.

Speaker 13:
[14:35] Yeah. These days if you get a, of course, that could be something like a wart, right?

Speaker 12:
[14:39] But there is a suggestion by archaeologists that eye infection was rife amongst the Anglo-Saxons because you lived in buildings where you had smoke going on, you lived crammed together.

Speaker 13:
[14:52] So it could also be a stye.

Speaker 10:
[14:54] What is a stye?

Speaker 13:
[14:55] It's an infection of an eyelash follicle.

Speaker 7:
[14:57] You rub it and it itches and then it gets swollen.

Speaker 13:
[15:00] And it causes quite a nasty red lump.

Speaker 7:
[15:02] It's a stye in your eye.

Speaker 10:
[15:03] Stye in your eye.

Speaker 2:
[15:04] Now it just so happens that the bacteria that causes the stye in your eye is...

Speaker 13:
[15:09] Staphylococcus aureus.

Speaker 2:
[15:10] Staph.

Speaker 6:
[15:11] Oh, the same stuff as the Mr. Window Man, Penicillin Man.

Speaker 2:
[15:14] Exactly.

Speaker 13:
[15:15] And we just thought, wouldn't it be nice to have a bit of spare time and earn a couple of hundred quid to buy the ingredients and just give this a go?

Speaker 12:
[15:23] Yes, let's give it a try.

Speaker 13:
[15:24] You know, why the hell not?

Speaker 2:
[15:26] And matter of fact, look at this place. We thought that too.

Speaker 8:
[15:32] Not bad.

Speaker 2:
[15:32] Recently, producer Matt Kielty and I went to my tiny apartment in the city and we tried to cook it up too.

Speaker 8:
[15:39] Are you ready to cook?

Speaker 2:
[15:41] Oh, I'm ready to cook.

Speaker 13:
[15:42] I've got this recipe here if you'd like.

Speaker 2:
[15:44] Yeah, yeah, please read it. Go for it.

Speaker 13:
[15:46] Okay. It goes like this.

Speaker 2:
[15:52] That's the first line of the recipe. And right off the bat for Christina and Freya, there's a problem. That first ingredient.

Speaker 13:
[15:57] The word kroplyach, kroplyach. Christina said it was quite difficult to translate.

Speaker 12:
[16:02] Nobody quite knows what it is.

Speaker 2:
[16:04] But luckily, just a couple words over was a clue.

Speaker 14:
[16:07] And garlic, the second ingredient.

Speaker 12:
[16:09] Garlic, which is an allium species, and kroplyach.

Speaker 13:
[16:14] We know this was another allium.

Speaker 12:
[16:15] That's what the dictionary of Old English tells us.

Speaker 2:
[16:18] So they figured probably what they were dealing with was an onion or a leek.

Speaker 13:
[16:21] But we didn't know which one. So we thought, okay, we'll try one that has onion and one that has leek.

Speaker 2:
[16:27] Now, the recipe doesn't call for this, but we did it anyway. Peel the onion, chop it up. This same for the garlic.

Speaker 12:
[16:36] And the recipe doesn't tell you how much. It does tell you equal amounts of.

Speaker 2:
[16:41] So you take out the measuring cups, you measure out equal amounts. Yeah, equal amounts.

Speaker 10:
[16:46] And there's a pestle.

Speaker 2:
[16:47] And then after that, okay, it says.

Speaker 14:
[16:49] It can be pounded well together.

Speaker 8:
[16:54] Okay.

Speaker 12:
[16:55] Do we really pound it? And pound it, Freya did.

Speaker 13:
[16:59] Yeah, yeah. So lots of time with the mortar and pestle. Muscles built up from wielding a sword for pounding the ingredients.

Speaker 2:
[17:07] Look, it's starting to be more of a mush. Third ingredient.

Speaker 13:
[17:09] The next one was definitely something you wouldn't have knocking around in your kitchen.

Speaker 14:
[17:14] Yeah, I learned Bayam fella.

Speaker 13:
[17:16] Ox gall.

Speaker 2:
[17:16] Ox gall.

Speaker 13:
[17:17] Bovine bile from a cow's gallbladder.

Speaker 7:
[17:20] What do you do? Have to kill the cow and then go eat you?

Speaker 13:
[17:22] No. It's actually a very standard ingredient in microbiology labs.

Speaker 2:
[17:26] Ox bile. Today in 2015, you can but should not just buy it on the internet. Here we go. Here we go. And so you take the ox bile, add it to the onion and garlic.

Speaker 13:
[17:33] And then the fourth ingredient.

Speaker 14:
[17:34] Ye neem ween.

Speaker 13:
[17:36] Wine.

Speaker 2:
[17:36] And wine time. Red wine, white wine. What kind of wine are we talking about here?

Speaker 13:
[17:40] This is the thing. So we had quite a discussion about what type of wine should we use, and we don't know really did they have red wine, did they have white wine, what was the alcohol content. But I did a bit of detective work.

Speaker 2:
[17:51] And she figured out that the monastery where this leech book was written, well they, she figured out where their vineyard was.

Speaker 13:
[17:57] And just down the road there's this modern organic vineyard.

Speaker 2:
[17:59] So they used that wine.

Speaker 1:
[18:00] Caviccioli. Caviccioli and figli.

Speaker 14:
[18:03] And figli.

Speaker 2:
[18:03] I just want to point out how difficult it is to find English wine.

Speaker 14:
[18:06] We had to use Italian, but once you get all that stuff together, you're under the final ingredient.

Speaker 13:
[18:15] The fifth ingredient was actually that you're specifically told that you have to mix these ingredients together in a brass or a bronze pot. I don't have one. So we had to sort of add pieces of copper that would have been available to people at the time.

Speaker 2:
[18:30] So they had to do some research, but they figured out that the copper of today that is most like the copper of a millennium ago was actually cartridge brass, which is what's used as standard in plumbing fittings. Dropped a few pennies in there. We actually used pennies. Do we stir it? I think I'd stir it.

Speaker 14:
[18:44] This is like a world's worst cooking show.

Speaker 13:
[18:48] It looks and smells like quite a nice summer soup.

Speaker 11:
[18:53] Oh, that looks awful.

Speaker 2:
[18:55] Oh, that's so gross. Clearly we botched this whole thing. And finally...

Speaker 6:
[19:03] All right, so we're going to cover it.

Speaker 2:
[19:04] Okay, we're covering it. The directions say we have to let the whole thing sit for a while.

Speaker 13:
[19:07] It has to be stored for nine days and nights.

Speaker 6:
[19:12] Okay, that's it.

Speaker 2:
[19:18] Six, seven, eight, nine.

Speaker 6:
[19:21] Nine days later.

Speaker 2:
[19:22] Uh, alright, here we go. You ready?

Speaker 14:
[19:24] Mhm.

Speaker 2:
[19:25] Alright, here we go.

Speaker 13:
[19:31] And then you have to strain it through a cloth. The liquid that comes off, you apply to the person's eye.

Speaker 2:
[19:39] Or the liquid.

Speaker 14:
[19:40] And with a feather. Yeah, with a feather.

Speaker 2:
[19:46] Now, clearly, we didn't have any staff to try this out on, but Freya, in her lab, she made these mock wounds.

Speaker 13:
[19:53] With these little plugs of collagen, so it's a bit like jelly.

Speaker 2:
[19:56] Basically, it's like a goopy substance made to be kind of like a flesh wound.

Speaker 13:
[20:01] And we infect these wounds with bacteria, with the staff.

Speaker 2:
[20:03] Then they put this thousand-year-old recipe that had been standing there for nine days, they put it on the bacteria that was in the fake wound.

Speaker 13:
[20:11] Obviously, we didn't think this was going to work.

Speaker 2:
[20:14] No.

Speaker 13:
[20:14] We thought, you know, well, given the ingredients, we might see some small killing effect on the bacteria, but it won't be anything to write home about.

Speaker 2:
[20:21] They thought maybe it'd kill 10%, 20% of the bacteria. But then, when they came back the next day...

Speaker 13:
[20:28] It was a staff massacre.

Speaker 2:
[20:29] It went on a rampage. It went on a staff rampage.

Speaker 13:
[20:34] It was killing, you know, 99.99999% of these bacterial cells.

Speaker 2:
[20:40] What?

Speaker 13:
[20:40] Yeah. First, we thought we made some sort of mistake, and this was some kind of fluke, you know, we'd accidentally mixed up our plates or mislabeled something.

Speaker 2:
[20:49] So they run the entire experiment again. They grab the ingredients, mash them up, put them on some bacteria, and it happens again.

Speaker 13:
[20:56] Just absolutely wiped out the bacteria in these fake wounds.

Speaker 2:
[21:00] Then they tried a third time, and a fourth, and a fifth, and it works every time.

Speaker 13:
[21:04] And this is just something you really don't see in your career as a microbiologist.

Speaker 2:
[21:10] And eventually, they escalated from just regular staff to to MRSA, to the methicillin-resistant staff. And this is one of the bad ones.

Speaker 15:
[21:21] A super bug. New government data estimate that about 2000 people are dying of community-based MRSA every year.

Speaker 14:
[21:28] This one is very dangerous.

Speaker 2:
[21:30] So Christina and Freya, they sent some of Bald's brew to one of their collaborators in the States.

Speaker 13:
[21:36] Our collaborator Kendra Rumbaugh in Lubbock in Texas.

Speaker 2:
[21:40] Kendra took the stuff, put it on some MRSA bacteria, and then a week later sent Freya and Christina an email.

Speaker 13:
[21:46] And I think it was actually a three-word response. I think she just simply said, What the? What the?

Speaker 2:
[21:54] Bald's best medicine had just wreaked havoc on the MRSA. It killed 90% of them.

Speaker 13:
[22:01] This is beyond our wildest dreams.

Speaker 2:
[22:03] Now, Freya and Christina made very clear that this is not yet a miracle drug. I mean, it's not even been tested in humans.

Speaker 12:
[22:10] So absolutely do not do this at home.

Speaker 2:
[22:15] They don't even know if this is safe.

Speaker 13:
[22:16] It might be that if you don't do it in exactly the way we did, nasty fungus could grow in it, give you a worse infection.

Speaker 2:
[22:23] So we should not have done this. Matt and I, we... dumped ours down the drain. But the thing about this whole story that is so intriguing and so cool to me is this time travel thing, which is so strange. It's like the idea that something a thousand years ago, like a bullet forged a thousand years ago, we could use it now and then it could work. The time travel dimension of that is so weird to me. It kind of makes you think differently about, I don't know, progress.

Speaker 11:
[23:10] So, without much further ado, Dr. Christina Lee and Dr. Freya Harrison, and they're going to talk to us about some ancient biotics.

Speaker 2:
[23:20] For example, just a few weeks ago, Freya and Christina got up in front of the Royal Society of Chemists.

Speaker 12:
[23:28] Thank you very much, and it is an absolute pleasure to be here.

Speaker 2:
[23:32] Large hotel conference room, 100 or so people. Freya actually got up on stage dressed as a nun.

Speaker 13:
[23:38] Okay, so this is one interpretation of what an Anglo-Saxon scientist may have looked like.

Speaker 2:
[23:44] And they presented the results.

Speaker 13:
[23:45] Next ingredient is particularly-

Speaker 2:
[23:48] They did the cooking demo, and then at some point, Christina said something really interesting. She was like, okay, sure, we want to write this off because it has demons and dragons and elves in it, but are we sure that we know what they meant by those words? Like, for example-

Speaker 12:
[24:04] There are remedies which ask you, sing for Ava Maria's.

Speaker 2:
[24:09] And we would say, oh, that's so superstitious, this is all in their heads.

Speaker 12:
[24:12] But there again, we should also remember, this is a period when people do not have watches. You do not have your nurse, you know, so that's got the watch. Everybody knows the Ava Maria. Everybody knows the length of an Ava Maria.

Speaker 2:
[24:24] So maybe it's, maybe it's, take this medicine and wait 20 minutes. And I know how to standardize 20 minutes, which is-

Speaker 12:
[24:31] Three Ava Maria's, four Ava Maria's may actually be time-

Speaker 2:
[24:34] That's fascinating. It may appear one way. And it's, it in fact could be a totally different way.

Speaker 6:
[24:40] It suggests that the, in order to time travel, you have to somehow, God, it's like, we don't even have the language to be able to understand what they were doing, and how effective-

Speaker 2:
[24:50] There's a phrase, the past is a foreign country.

Speaker 12:
[24:55] We need to learn the language of the doctors of that time. We need to kind of be a little bit less dismissive, and learn a little bit more, you know, from them. I learned a bit of humility this way.

Speaker 2:
[25:10] But here's the reason why this is so confusing to me. So, 1100 years is a crazy long time for humans, and for bacteria, that's like an exponentially crazy long time. So, how is it that something that this man Bald was doing to these bacteria then, like, it's not even the same bacteria? How could that even work?

Speaker 13:
[25:39] That's an awesome question. So, one thing we've got to think about is, well, why did these medicines drop out of use? And maybe it's because when they were used, the bacteria evolved resistance. But now, 1,000 years later, when these medicines have not been used, you would expect that resistance to be lost.

Speaker 2:
[25:58] This is something that Maren McKenna mentioned to Soren and I, that sometimes when you take a drug out of circulation...

Speaker 5:
[26:05] Sometimes resistance will decline. That doesn't always work, but sometimes resistance does decline. So, if we had been using this compound through the ensuing 1,000 years, then maybe it wouldn't work.

Speaker 7:
[26:18] So, there's an interesting discovery there, like that what worked once and then was resisted, you give it a rest and it can work again, and it will be resisted, and you put it to rest. And if you had enough different... You could go to different places in the different paths. If you go to China, where they now got all these people studying Chinese cures and Arab cures, you could come up with a rich historical cocktail of armamentariums that will work if you bring them in, take them out, bring them in, take them out. And the whole world, the whole world of the past then becomes the fruit of your future, sort of.

Speaker 8:
[26:58] So it's also... Like now I have suddenly an image that it's possible that...

Speaker 6:
[27:02] This is Soren Wheeler, by the way, in conversation with Maryam McKenna and Latif.

Speaker 8:
[27:05] That a thousand years ago, these folks went through what we went through with penicillin, in that this guy wrote something in the book, and it's actually called The Best Medicine. He probably got on the cover of whatever their version of time was.

Speaker 5:
[27:18] He got their Nobel Prize.

Speaker 8:
[27:19] And everybody celebrated. And then years later, the styes were coming back and the garlic wine didn't work anymore, and they stopped using it, and it got put away. And then here we are, and we discover it, and it's been put away long enough that... Like now I'm thinking about future, some future civilization digs up an old medical textbook that was in some dusty whatever and discovers penicillin. And it works. Did I lose you on that, Mary?

Speaker 5:
[27:49] No, no, I'm still with you. I'm just... I don't know. It just seemed like such a great hypothetical construction. I just didn't really know what I could add to it.

Speaker 11:
[27:56] Sorry.

Speaker 8:
[27:58] Sorry I took over.

Speaker 1:
[28:07] Hey, Lulu again, with a quick update. It has been almost a decade since we first aired this episode, and since then, Christina and Freya have published several papers to show how this concoction works and why. Now, Bald's iSELF is not quite ready to hit the drugstore shelves yet, but in 2022, it made it over a big hurdle for new drugs, phase one safety trials. It was tested on healthy humans, so not already sick folks, and not in open wounds, and the results were overall successful. And Freya and her colleagues have a pretty good idea now of which chemicals in the medicine are the important ones, so they can distill it down to its bacteria-fighting essence. Potentially great news for all of us staying a little healthier using very old things. But all this, you know, did leave me with one very important question for Christina, the Viking expert. If we get further in clinical trials, and this actually becomes, you know, a drug, who owns the patent? Is it Mr. Bald or whoever from like a thousand years ago? So we asked Christina, the Viking expert.

Speaker 12:
[29:17] I really don't know. But technically, Mr. Bald is having this manuscript written for him. It's in his possession. But that doesn't mean it's his work. So it becomes a really interesting question, you know, sort of of who owns the IP on this.

Speaker 1:
[29:38] Anyway, Radiolab, here for you, the hard-hitting medical questions, the hard-hitting patent questions. Thanks so much for listening. We'll be back next week.

Speaker 6:
[29:50] Special thanks this hour to Steve Diggle.

Speaker 7:
[29:52] And to Alexandra Reider and Justin Park, who came down from Yale to be our old English readers.

Speaker 6:
[29:56] To Gene Murrow from the Gotham Early Music Scene.

Speaker 7:
[29:59] And to Marcia Young on the Medieval Harp.

Speaker 6:
[30:01] Collin Monro of Tadcaster.

Speaker 7:
[30:02] And the rest of the Barony of Iron Bog.

Speaker 6:
[30:04] Not totally sure what that is, but I know they helped us out. And I guess we should help ourselves out.

Speaker 7:
[30:09] Yes, very quickly.

Speaker 6:
[30:10] Or through the window. I'm Jad Abumrad.

Speaker 7:
[30:12] I'm Robert Krulwich.

Speaker 6:
[30:13] Thanks for listening.

Speaker 3:
[30:26] Hi, I'm Gabby. I'm from the Bay Area, California, and here are the staff credits. Radiolab is hosted by Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser. Soren Wheeler is our executive editor. Sarah Sandbach is our executive director. Our managing editor is Pat Walters. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Jeremy Bloom, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gabel, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhu Naina Sambandhan, Matt Kielty, Mona Modgaucer, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Sara Khare, Natalia Ramirez, Rebecca Rand, Anisa Vitsa, Arianne Wack, Molly Webster and Jessica Young, with help from Gabby Santis. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, Natalie Middleton, Angelique Mercado and Sophie Samaie. Leadership support for Radiolab's science programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.