Naked at Edinburgh Science Festival!

We’ve also asked each of our guests to bring something with them to the Edinburgh Science Festival. Microbiologist Luke McNally shows Chris Smith his very potent ancient potion... Be glad you can't smell this podcast!

Luke - This is a medieval antibiotic.

Chris - It's a milky fluid. I presume the jam jar's not medieval?

Luke - No, no. That's modern. I think possibly a Sainsbury's “Taste the difference” raspberry conserve, I think!

Chris - Are you going to take the lid off?

Luke - I will if you if you want a whiff of this. I'll tell the story first of what's in it. We all know antimicrobial resistance; bacteria evolving resistance to the drugs we use to kill them, is a big problem. We're looking all the time for new ways to discover new antibiotics. We need new weapons as bacteria find ways to overcome them. And a group of British scientists, led by Freya Harrison, decided to look in the history books. This is from an Anglo-Saxon medieval medical text called “Bald’s Leechbook”, and it's an eye salve, so it’s used to treat eye styes, which are infections of the follicle of your eyelash. The recipe for this is to mix equal parts either onion or leek, they're not sure from the translation of the medieval text which it was, garlic, wine and Ox gal which is the bile from an ox, and to leave it for nine days to brew in a brass vessel, and then afterwards strain it. And then you have this eye salve, which is meant to be applied with a feather to the eye to cure your stye.

Chris - Have you tried it?

Luke - I haven't tried it, no. Unfortunately this is only half strength, and this is what's really interesting about this: I couldn't get hold of any ox bile, so it's only about half strength. We always think that, you know there's all these ancient approaches to medicine, and often we think of them as very non-sophisticated. We know garlic is anti-microbial, but in this recipe they actually showed that it's the combination of the ingredients. Any of the ingredients on their own doesn't give you the full effect. It's really this unique combination that does it.

Chris - If you put that on a petri dish with some Staph aureus that causes sort of eye and stye infections and things, will it kill it?

Luke - Yes it will. It kills MRSA really, really well, which most people have probably heard of - a hospital superbug. They did mouse infections and it's able to kill the MRSA in those as well. At the moment there’s a lot of people trying to figure out exactly how it works, because it could help guide our discovery of new antibiotics.

Chris - Just a general question: if you actually put that on your eye, would I have an eye left afterwards? Cure my MRSA infection but it would also render me blind, possibly, or would it be okay?

Luke - Possibly, the smell might give you the answer, go on.

Chris - Oh my goodness. Actually, hang on, it's growing on me. That’s okay, actually.

Luke - It's not too bad. Garlic is the is the dominant smell.

Chris S - Give this a whiff, Beth, do you like this?

Beth - I will concur. Garlic is the very dominant smell.

Chris - A lot of garlic in there. Have you got any of that in your museum then, Sophie.

Sophie - Possibly in the brasserie.

Chris - You could have after the show. We might donate it. I mean how much of a problem is superbug infections now? Because we are increasingly being told, our own chief medical officer said, that the threat from bacterial infections we can't treat is rivalling terrorism in terms of the threat to humanity. Is that hyperbole or actually is that true?

Luke - I don't think that is hyperbole. There's arguments over the estimates. One prominent report said by 2050 this will be causing on the orders of millions of deaths, and costing millions and millions of pounds. And we probably are looking at something on that scale, if we don't act to stop the problem now. But there’s some happy stories as well where things have continued to work. Penicillin has been used to treat syphilis since the 1940s. And that still works to this day. There's never been any resistance to it. And so there’s causes for hope as well.

Chris - Just as just as well it still works, isn't it? Well, I can't speak personally in this case. I've got a question here from Steph who says: what do you think we're gonna be eating in the future, and how well prepared are we in terms of our microbiomes for this. Because one of the other things that’s your interest is the microbiome: literally we are what we eat, isn't it? What we put into our mouths affects the spectrum of bacteria that live on us and in us. How will foods of the future be considered in the light of what goes on in our intestines?

Luke - Oh, that's a very interesting question. I think in terms of our microbiome being able to deal with it there is a slight worry here. There's a new initiative, The Microbiome Conservancy, which is going to sample microbiomes from hunter gatherer tribes, and things like this, to make sure we have samples of all these microbes that could potentially be lost because of our diets changing. But generally it is a very flexible organ, in essence, in our body, and will pretty much adapt to most diets. That doesn't necessarily mean it'll be healthy. A lot of the time if you eat certain diets it can increase the amount of bacteria that can be harmful in the microbiome. But I would expect it to be flexible enough to deal with most of what we'd throw at it.

Chris Smith asks computer scientist Chris Johnson, from the University of Glasgow, to reminisce about the bizarre early years of mobile phones.

Chris J - As a kind of first step to a mobile phone. Well I mean probably the most important thing about modern mobile phones is that they’re cellular. So every 20 miles typically today you have at least one base station and your mobile phone is transmitting from your pocket or whatever to that base station. But obviously it took a long time for those base stations and that network to be fully built.

So then companies like this company Rabbit in the UK had the idea that they would they would enable you to make telephone calls but only in a very small number of locations where they'd done a deal with the shop owners to put in a very small base station. So it'd be like you know having the base station for your phone in your house but then having another one in local shops and these weren't like the current phone masts that we have, because the current ones do 20 miles approximately radius. These ones were 100 meters right. So I work in the University of Glasgow and our local base station for this phone network was in the Iceland frozen food shop. So today when you're on the train or whatever people home say “on the train, I'm on the train” the only conversation that you could have had with the first generation mobile phone would be “frozen peas. I'm moving on to the chicken section.”

Chris S - Chris did that lead to a lot of cold calling then?

Chris J - To me then the important point is this is like so much of technology that it becomes so ingrained within your life that even having a conversation about technology like that is a weird place that people sort of think” you're making this up aren’t you” but believe me there were hundreds of people, thousands of people in the UK carrying around the phone about the size of a small vehicle to the local Iceland shop so they could make a phone call.

Sometimes a bizarre idea quickly becomes the best idea and one experiment in particular rocked the world of genetics. On 22nd February 1997, in a world first, researchers at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh announced that they had taken the DNA from a skin cell of an adult sheep and inserted it into a sheep's egg cell from which the DNA had first been removed. The egg was placed into the uterus of a surrogate sheep where it developed and the result was a lamb they called "Dolly". She was so-named because the adult cell used to clone her came from an udder, so naming her after singer Dolly Parton seemed apt. Chris Smith was pleased to be joined by the scientist who led that work, Sir Ian Wilmut…

Ian - It’s a point which is very very important to make. You need a crew of something like 12 or 15 people to do this sort of experiment. So to say I did it would be seriously misleading.

Chris - Why did you start with sheep though?

Ian - The Roslin Institute has always been concerned with farm animals. And if you are thinking of using cloning in a farm animal species, either to improve their performance or to increase numbers, the species with the greatest commercial interest would be the cow. But cattle are extremely expensive to buy, to maintain and they have a very long gestation, so that if you're doing an experiment where you transfer embryos as you said into a foster mother, you've got to wait 10 months or whatever it is before you know the answer to the experiment. By comparison the sheep are much easier to look after. They’re are a lot smaller for one thing, they're cheaper, and their gestation is less than half that of cattle. So it was really thinking that sheep are small, cheap cows was the reason why we chose them.

Chris - How did Dolly go down? Were you sort of celebrated and did you get a good reception to what you announced you've done or did you face quite a bit of controversy?

Ian - We've got an enormous amount of publicity of course and a lot of skepticism. Some people doubted whether Dolly was really a clone. If you explain to people the reason why you're doing this sort of thing the majority would become supportive but a small proportion would be hostile to experiments with animals.

Chris - And some people expressed concern that perhaps there would be accelerated aging and that kind of thing on the part of Dolly. Was that borne out by experimentation?

Ian - It's actually very difficult to do the experiments in sheep. It's much easier to do them in mice. You really do have a shorter generation interval and lifespan. I don't think that there is any evidence of this but it's quite a difficult and expensive experiment to do.

If you have to produce another generation and wait another generation and wait, to see if your changing lifespan or not.

Chris - Because there's a recent paper in one of the Nature journals, where they actually got the skeleton of Dolly and C.T. scanned, because one of the criticisms had been that there was premature arthritis and did they not find from these studies that actually there was no evidence really that there was an accelerated rate of arthritis. She didn't really show any signs of that compared with say a sheep born the normal way?

Ian - I think that's right. Accelerated aging was just a very slick journalistic expression to indicate that things were not quite right but I don't think there's ever been really good clear data about the aging of cloned animals.

Chris - What would you like to see the long term outcome be? If you could now wave a magic wand and we'd be in a certain position or know a certain thing, what is the final big question that you would like to see answered now?

Ian - The general understanding before Dolly was that once a cell had formed a particular type it couldn't change or be changed artificially by us. What Dolly showed was that it is possible to change cells and we had mammary cells which became equivalent to embryo cells and we got viable normal offspring. And this has created important new opportunities in medicine. What it means is that if we have somebody who let's say has motor neurone disease which reflects damage to nerves that run down the spine. If we take skin cells from them we can treat them so that they become equivalent to embryo stem cells, the cells which have the ability to form any different tissue, and then change them into the cells which are damaged in the disease and for the first time we have cells which are equivalent to those in early stages of motor neurone disease.

So if you have got a disease of the central nervous system you can't have samples from a patient like that until they've passed away. And by then there may be many secondary effects of the disease. Now in this new situation you can use them to test drugs which may be effective in slowing down or even preventing motor neurone disease. I personally have Parkinson's disease so there is a chance of the same thing happening for that disease and I think that unexpectedly the Dolly experiment has revolutionized the approach to these inherited diseases. I really do genuinely believe that treatments will come along but it may very well be 50 years before the treatment becomes routinely available. So people like me will probably have died of Parkinson's disease before the new treatments become available which is a frustrating thing to think.

How dangerous can a trip to your local shoe shop be? Sophie Goggins, Curator of Biomedical Science at National Museums Scotland, takes Chris Smith through the machine that used X-rays scans to measure your shoes. 

Sophie - I'd like to volunteer the pedoscope. Has anyone heard of a pedoscope before?

Chris - One or two people nodding knowingly.

Sophie - One or two people nodding. A pedoscope is also known as an X-ray fluoroscope. So they were found in shoe shops across the U.S.. the U.K.. South Africa. If you're of a certain age they were in shops from around the late 1920s to 1970s and they offered people in shoe shops trying on your shoes a live X-ray view of your toes inside your shoes to see if they fit properly.

Chris - Could you see the bones and stuff in your foot?

Sophie - Yes. What would happen is it's about four feet tall. It's clad in wood and you would step up onto a little ledge and put your feet in and you would then look down a gaze hole at the top and the operator would look down another one on the side and your mum or dad or whoever’s with you would look down one on the other side and you all look down and they'd press the big button and you get a live X-ray of your toes in your shoes. Apparently you could also see the stitching around your shoes and you're meant to wiggle your toes to see if there is enough room.

Chris - Is this not sort of, the cynic in me saying, this is some kind of dodgy sales ploy because they'll sell more shoes because you'll come back three weeks later for an extra pair of shoes for the two new legs you've grown because of the x ray exposure.

Sophie - Yes I think my favorite one is, I'm actually gonna get the year, so it was 1957 before the UK actually said that you shouldn't do this more than 12 times a year.

Chris - That's a lot of pairs of shoes isn't it.

Sophie - Yes. Obviously some people who are very into their shoes, but I think the greater concern was of the people that were operating these machines in shoe shops day in and day out.

Chris - Because they were getting a reasonable dose of X-rays then weren’t they. When did we finally get these things removed from shops?

Sophie - So they were never actually banned in the UK. They were banned in the US in 1953. But as I said it wasn't till 1957 that the UK actually put out a warning about them. And then they were found in shoe shops up through the 1970s.

Chris - I think I even remember, because I am of a sufficient vintage to have had probably my early pairs of shoes, I think I remember this. So you've got one in your museum - does it work? Have you had to go with it?

Sophie - I think this is another good example of don't try this at home.

Chris - We did ask you to bring it in but you said it's rather large because it's a huge great thing isn't it. You said it's four feet but you weren't referring to feet on your leg. It's a tall thing.

Sophie - No it's quite a tall machine. It was made in St Albans down in England and they're quite pretty, actually, to look at. So it's on the top floor of our museum if you want to go have a nosy. But it’s clad in wood, it looks very very nice. I mean obviously made a shoe shop experience quite an important exciting one for even more so for small children.

Could you spot a firefly next to a lighthouse? That's a similar issue astronomers face when trying to see planets outside our solar system (exoplanets). Astronomer Beth Biller from the University of Edinbrugh explains to Chris Smith how they get around that issue as the best thing in Astronomy. 

Beth - I'm going to go with detecting and characterizing exoplanets. So again, exoplanets are planets orbiting stars other than our sun. And I want to talk a little bit about how we know what they're like. So as we saw earlier for planets in our own solar system, our initial attempts at characterizing them went kinda disastrously wrong. There are no canals on Mars as we know.

Most of the planets we've detected around other stars today, we've done so indirectly because of their slight tug on their star or because they pass in front of the star and dim it just a little bit. If we want to understand what planets are actually like, we need light from the planets themselves. If we have light from the planet itself we can get a sense for how warm it is, how cold it is. We can get a sense of what it's made out of, at least what its atmosphere is made out of.

So one technique to do this, the one that I work on in particular and hence the one that's nearest and dearest to my heart, is direct imaging of exoplanets which is when we just try to take a picture of an exoplanet next to a star. Obviously this is really challenging, right, cause stars are really bright and planets are not so bright so it's kind of like trying to take a picture of a firefly next to a lighthouse. If the lighthouse and the firefly were in Dublin and we're here in Edinburgh.

Chris - That's quite some way. So is there a way of potentially masking the sun or the star so that that light can't bleach out the fireflies. You can still turn really sensitive equipment on your firefly and therefore see it.

Beth - Exactly. That's what you need to do to get the contrast necessary to actually image your firefly next to your lighthouse. So first of all you have to do something about the atmosphere. One solution to this is to put your telescope in space. Once you've done that, well, the next obvious step is let's block out the light from the star, right. The instrument to do this is something called a chronograph.

Chris - How does it work?

Beth - The same way as if you see the sun is very in the sky you block, put your hand in front of it and block it out.

Chris - So you can put something in the field of view of the telescope which just covers the star but doesn't cover the tiny speck of light that you hope is there. There's the planet you want to see.

Beth -  Exactly. So we've used this already to detect a number of planets. These are planets very unlike our own. They're what I like to refer to as baby Jupiter so they're like Jupiter but much younger. There are maybe 10 to 100 million years old. And yes I realize that's only young in the world of astronomy, but because they're young, they're a lot warmer than they are at later ages and hence brighter. So that's what we've done so far. The hope is eventually to push these technologies down to lower mass planets and cooler planets, eventually imaging planets like our own.

Chris - Can we also not, by looking at the light coming through the would-be atmosphere of the planet, learn something about what's in that atmosphere, because you can assume that if the lights go to go through the atmosphere and there are chemicals in there that might soak up some of the light, and different chemicals soak up different colors of light, if you look at different colors you could tell what's in the atmosphere and therefore you could spot and you can learn quite a bit about the weather and the climate and what sort of environment of that particular planet may be without actually ever having to go there.

Beth - Yeah exactly. So this is the power of spectroscopy, right. Looking for the fingerprints of different atoms and in particular when you're talking about cool planetary atmospheres, molecules in your atmosphere. So for instance there's already been detections of water and methane in exoplanet atmospheres, by looking at their spectra from the light of the star passing through the atmosphere. So that's one technique that's used. Also by actually getting your directly image spectra of the planet itself.

Chris - Thanks Beth.

Do the lumps and bumps on your head mean anything? Sophie Goggins brough a special guest with her and helped Chris Smith bust the myths of Phrenology.

Sophie - This is a lovely phrenology head. It's a cream ceramic skull that seems to be split into different types of areas. And this was a pseudo science that was pioneered, if you can use that word, by Franz Joseph Gall who believed that the brain was split into different faculties and that it was like a muscle. You had bigger bits of your personality like, for instance, I'm looking at here “the hope for your future” or your “sublimity” or your “consciousness” or, I quite like that there's the ones in the back, but “amorousness”, could be seen from the lumps and bumps of your head. He believed that your brain actually formed the different peaks and troughs of your skull and you could tell bits about your personality. It is of course a pseudo science but one that was believed pretty widely from 1810 to 1840 and Edinburgh was the european home of phrenology.

Chris - So basically, looking at this head you've got here, there's a map drawn on the surface with words corresponding. If I fondled your head and I felt a bump in that particular area, you say “oh, that's your dignity centre”, you must be very enriched for dignity. I see at the back here, this is obviously the love centre because we've got “conjugal values”, you've got “marriage” there at the back. Because that bit at the back there is actually where your External occipital protuberance is, the bulge on the back of the head… And didn't they say that if you've got a big one of those, you've got a big something else, wasn’t that the claim? 

Adam - Well there’s a lot of people in the audience fondling their own head.

Sophie - So that was indeed the claim. And for instance there was actually a group of phrenologists in Dumfries who dug up Robert Burns’ bones to get a cast of his skull to see whether or not his poetic centre was particularly large. But they actually found that his love of children and his ability to make children was especially large portion of his skull which if you know his story of course is true.

Chris - There was something about pickpockets. Wasn’t it round the side here, above the ear. There's something here…

Sophie - Yes, we've got a bit of an audience participation. If you have a little feel above your ears, you might feel a little bump. You can feel whoever you're with if you ask them nicely. Apparently this actually came about because Franz Joseph Gall went and surveyed all of the pickpockets, just pickpockets, to see what area of their skull made them more prone to pickpocketing. Apparently there's that little bump just above your ear and the bigger it is the more likely you are to steal.

Chris - When did this fall out of favour, when did people discover that this is just bunkum? The shape of your brain, whilst it is divided into different bits, the brain doing different jobs has no bearing really on the shape of your skull?

Sophie - Around the eighteen forties because, quite embarrassingly, the Phrenological museum is actually here in Edinburgh, it was right across the street from Chamber Street and you can see above all the windows there's casts of the skulls of the great men of phrenology. Now the problem was that when these men passed away and casts were taken of their own skulls, the kind of traits that they were actually showing weren't what they maybe would have wished them to be. A lot of them actually showed up to be they'd be murderers or pickpockets but were the great men of phrenology.

Chris - It suddenly fell from favour and was withdrawn quietly and disappeared, is that what you’re saying?

Sophie -  I think it was actually quite a lot of drama and debate in Edinburgh society about phrenology and a lot of great very Victorian arguments through correspondence. But it did indeed fall out of favour, thankfully!