Staph Retreat
Nov 2, 2015
What happens when you combine an axe-wielding microbiologist and a disease-obsessed historian? A strange brew that's hard to resist, even for a modern day microbe.
In the war on devilish microbes, our weapons are starting to fail us. The antibiotics we once wielded like miraculous flaming swords seem more like lukewarm butter knives.
But today we follow an odd couple to a storied land of elves and dragons. There, they uncover a 1000-year-old secret that makes us reconsider our most basic assumptions about human progress and wonder: What if the only way forward is backward?
Reported by Latif Nasser. Produced by Matt Kielty and Soren Wheeler.
Special thanks to Steve Diggle, Professor Roberta Frank, Alexandra Reider and Justin Park (our Old English readers), Gene Murrow from Gotham Early Music Scene, Marcia Young for her performance on the medieval harp and Collin Monro of Tadcaster and the rest of the Barony of Iron Bog.
wait you're listening you're listening to Radio Lab radio from WNYC
► 00:00:19okay I'm Jed I'm Rod I'm Robert Crowe which is Radiolab and today well today yes the story of an axe-wielding none coming through a window to smack some staphylococcus and take you back to the future exactly The Story Goes that make any sense I don't know will okay well the story comes in two parts both from our producer lot of Nasser and here is part one
► 00:00:42so the way the story goes it starts in 1928 1928 Alexander Fleming The Story Goes who knows if it's apocryphal or not is growing staff staphylococcus in his lab that's me and McKenna is she's a science writer and staff is a bacterium it lives on our skin and it especially likes parts of the body that are warm and damp so it likes to be just up our noses or on our genitals or in our
► 00:01:12it's places like that and generally it's no big deal doesn't really do us any harm but if it gets into a scratch or a cut and makes its way inside our bodies staff goes from being this benign companion to being potentially deadly anyway London 1928 Fleming is growing staff in his lab in these little Petri dishes and he was a slob basically and he
► 00:01:42he goes on a vacation leaves his petri dishes covering bacteria just around leaves his window open and something blows across his lab plates some tiny little speck of a thing just floats in through the window and comes to a rest on one of those petri dishes and so a few weeks later climbing finally back from vacation he needs to use those lab plates again and he and his assistant go to clean them off I mean you'd imagine that he would cede some real
► 00:02:12Lush nice furry lawn of Staff just overflowing right out of the plate because it's been sitting there for so long it's been a staff party 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 little patches where the staff is dead did you know there's something blew through the window landed in the dish and starts killing
► 00:02:42the bacteria yeah and so when Fleming looks down at his plate he sees that at the center of these you know staff dead zones there's a tiny Speck of natural mold and they realized that that mold is expressing a compound that is killing the staff around it it's like emanating rays of death was the compound that compound was called
► 00:03:08the first true antibiotic infectious diseases that had been killing people for as long as we had been people suddenly could be stopped and it just blew in through the window that is the that is the story that's always been told however it got there it was it was amazing it was a miracle it was called a miracle drug right I mean it was just it was it really was a moment when the world changed when Fleming was put on the cover of Time Magazine this is 1944 height of World War
► 00:03:35R2 it was a picture of his face and the banner on the cover said his penicillin will save more lives than War can spend 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 published
► 00:04:05is that he has found five different strains of staff that do not respond to penicillin really yeah this is happening while he's on the cover virtually the exact same moment and it's the first sign that staff has responded to the penicillin in the world by developing resistance to almost like a separate he's restoring wheeler the era of penicillin was over before it began almost before it began before it's even released to the general public wow
► 00:04:35and that penicillin resistant staph moves across the globe and in 1957 in Cleveland some scientists gather together and they are in a panic they have no idea why they've lost the antibiotic Miracle so quickly so scientists across the globe put their brains together and try to come up with a new drug next amazing thing and in 1960 they get methicillin
► 00:05:01and it works for about 11 months 11 months and so we started this arms race there was a bug and then there was a drunk that took care of it and then there was a better bug bug bug bug bug right exactly actually found this list do you want to hear it yeah okay so streptomycin 1943 resistance 1948 methicillin 1960 resistance 1961 clindamycin 1969 resistance
► 00:05:301870 you can think of it as LeapFrog or you can think of it as a game of whack-a-mole ampicillin 1961 the 1973 so that's a little car Benes cylinder release 1964 resistance 1974 it getting better or getting better there were always more drunks you know that drug development was doing really well for a really long time I / sellin introduce 1980 resistance 1981 but after the year 2000 drug companies begin to realize it's not really in their best interest to make
► 00:06:00antibiotics anymore and the end I have on this list is Lena Zola did which is introduced mm resistance 2002 well there are a few more but you get the idea antibiotic approvals the entry of new drugs to the market just kind of fell off a cliff why well to it takes 10 years in a billion dollars to get to the point where the drug is marketable 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
► 00:06:30have these situations frightening new warning from the Centers for Disease Control about the spread of a string of germs we are literally nothing works so-called superbugs are now turning up in hospitals and the patient dies there are now bugs that can resist all of our drugs I've seen Physicians breakdown weeping over this it's not the the way that medicine is supposed to fail anymore but it does I mean I know that that possibly the
► 00:07:00origin 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 not to blow in and we could wait a long time right I mean we had staff had been around for Millennia before 1928 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 way
► 00:07:30window though that's not a window next to some petri dishes not a window next to some petri dishes kind of a window next to somebody's religious but a totally different kind of window what kind of window is it well I'm about to tell you that is something blowing to the window yeah but it's not mold it's way more fun than Walt it it it it carries an ax how about that so it's a person may be referring to any more hello this is Isabelle and the birds calling all the way from
► 00:08:00Montevideo Uruguay ready lab is supported in part by the Alfred P Sloan Foundation enhancing public understanding of Science and Technology in the modern world more information about Sloane at www.samsung.com org all right guys ciao
► 00:08:22part two yeah okay hey I'm Jedi boom Rod I'm Robert krulwich this is Radiolab we're ready now for part 2 now remember when part one ended there was a window open in something was going to come through we don't know what we know it's not mold yeah we know it's not mold so whatever it is whatever it was whatever will be we will hear about it now from our reporter lot of Nasir well actually there is this story about these two women who did open a window
► 00:08:48to an alien and distant land and actually in a way to story about reimagining the past but to me it's a it's a it's a it's a story about a friendship hey everybody hello again and again that's a story about an unlikely friendship it's the bloody film it's a buddy yeah it's a buddy movie okay so yeah tell it maybe just walk us through its right so okay so you have hello I'm dr. Christine Ellie Christina and I'm an associate professor in
► 00:09:17Viking studies at the school of English at the University of Nottingham she's a historian and then you also have hi I'm Freya Harrison Freya I'm a research fellow in the center for biomolecular Sciences at the University of Nottingham and free up free has a microbiologist she's studies bacteria will start with her okay so most of my work is about sort of looking at how bacteria evolve during very very long-lived infections but
► 00:09:46my big hobby is Anglo-Saxon Viking reenactment so I hope you'll use it amateur interesting in the history and buying the in dressing up as a warrior and going to fight club every Wednesday night and learning to use the weapons yeah so this is actually not phrase group this is a group in New Jersey but basically they do the same thing hundreds of people go out into it you know some filled with some dulled weapons everything from so
► 00:10:15Lord Spears axes and we give each other a jolly good bashing and have a good time I only mention this because it it actually plays into the story what was it was really nice to coincidence really exciting 2012 few years after finishing her doctorate Freya goes off to work at the University of Nottingham Nottingham's one of the places in the UK not only for microbiology but for Anglo-Saxon and Viking history and she goes there to study
► 00:10:45microbes but she figured hey why not while I'm here brush up on my old English with her each and will feel each am a booty sir I studied some old English to a level where I could sort of read and and speak a little bit let's stand on Nick Nikita but she figured hey she could she could be better and if she did she would get deeper into the whole reenactment thing so a rather cheekily emailed the school of English is Old English reading group that's where she met Christina yes the historian and I thought
► 00:11:15at frame one point Christina the historian asks free I 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 and Christina said the moment you heard that I'm just kind of thought I found my kindred spirit here because she was like wow I'm like your mirror image because I'm a historian by day but by night I'm on microbiology nerd I've been interested in infectious disease for quite a long time which some
► 00:11:45I don't I don't find any kind of friends in my department she told me she's the kind of person who would you know watch Ebola coverage on the news and not be able to stop watching So eventually they start talking about historical diseases so like how would people back then have treated something like you know Ebola Freya is especially interested in this because she for her historical reenactment is developing this none character who goes off in heals people but anyway so there
► 00:12:15talking back and forth and then to cut a long story short they find themselves both interested in this one particular book this known as bold speech book this is about 1100 years old what's it called balls what bald's leech book it's nothing to do with no hair oh even though it's just bad boy is this be ald it is indeed and leech-like leech like a like a leech like a little worm that grabs on to your stub your blood no no it comes from the old English what letter which
► 00:12:45actually a Healer or a doctor so that the little squiggly animals are called leeches because they're medicinal not the other way around oh so the doctor was named for the lead to Leach was named for the doctor exactly yeah and bald is the as a man the guy wrote we think it's a guy we think it's a guy's name and what is this book so it's kind of like this old healers handbook it's filled with these potions and cures the original manuscript is in the British Library locked away but 21st century very kind people have digitized the original Old English
► 00:13:15text and put it online so Christina and Freya bring it up and they start going through all the remedies and you know as it describes to you remedies for stuff that is a little bit different you know things like bone Adele vowel phoneme on on her possession by the devil which according this leech book the remedy for someone who is possessed by the devil is you buta the rank and loutre makes this kind of like foul Brew you make him drink it and it'll make them vomit Out the Devil and and then there's another
► 00:13:45remedy for warts Vishay help we had our new Tow somne and all I'm going to say about that one is that it involves hounds urine and mouse blood then things like you've mansae I pour honor how should we say make your husband more physically attentive or less physically attentive whichever you whichever direction you need to moderate it Pig's blood I hope or toad blood drink on a acht nastya actually it's just you boiler plant in some water and
► 00:14:15and give it to the guy yeah anyway so free and Christina are going through this leech book looking for some kind of wound sitting it was clearly an infection some Posse something we can clearly say that's that's bacterial and eventually they find an entry where with the end of the recipe it says an Old English say bets the latch at all so bets to latch them the best medicine the best medicine hmm yeah move over laughter
► 00:14:45yeah and we thought how can we not try this one what was the best medicine for so it said it was for a lump in the eye it's antique old when in the holding yeah these days if you get a course that could be something like a wart right but there is a suggestion by archaeologists that eye infection was Rife among the Anglo-Saxons because your lived in buildings where you you had smoked going on you'll have crammed together so it could also be a sty what is
► 00:15:15this time it's an infection of an eyelash follicle you rabbit and it itches and then it gets swollen course is quite a nasty red lump stay in your eyes Diner I now it just so happens that the bacteria that causes the signer I is staphylococcus aureus staff oh the same stuff is the mr. Window Man penicillin man exactly and we just thought wouldn't it be nice to have a bit of spare time and I had a couple of hundred quid to buy the ingredients and just give this a go yes let's give it a try you know
► 00:15:45why the hell not and matter of fact look at this place we thought that to video not bad recently producer Matt kielty and I went to my tiny apartment in the city and all right we tried to cook it up to are you ready to cook oh I'm ready to cook I've got this recipe here I saw ya please read it go for it okay it goes like this weird I see Oliver with one a your name cropland that's the first line of the recipe and right off the bat for
► 00:16:15Tina and pray that there's a problem that first ingredient would crop uh crop Leah probably yeah Christine is it was quite difficult to translate nobody quite knows a know what it is but luckily just a couple words over was a clue and garlic it may second ingredient garlic which is an allium species and crop lien which we know this was another Alliant that's what the dictionary of Old English tells us so they figured probably what they were dealing with an onion or leeks we didn't know which one so we thought okay we'll try one that has onion
► 00:16:45on that has a leak yeah am Fair life now you knew the recipe doesn't call for this but we did it anyway peel the onions chop it up the same for the garlic and the recipe it doesn't tell you how much it does tell to equal amount of so you take out the measuring cup so you measure it equal amounts yeah equal amounts into the pestle and then after that okay says it canoe wow well so so many counted well together okay
► 00:17:15he really pounded and pounded Friday yeah yeah so lots of lots of time with a mortar and pestle and muscles built up from wielding a sword if they're pounding the ingredients look it's starting to be more of a third ingredient the next one was definitely something you wouldn't have knocking around in your kitchen and they are s yeah Island Bay I am fairly Ox Gall Ox Gall bovine bile from Earth from a cow's gallbladder what do you give to kill the cow and go region so it's actually a very standard ingredient in microbial
► 00:17:45Labs Ox bile today in 2015 you can but should not just buy it on the internet here we go here we go until you take the ox bile added to the onion and garlic and then the fourth ingredient they named a ween wine and Wine Time red wine white wine we're like well I know we're talking about 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 that they have white wine what was the alcohol content but I did a bit of bit of detective work and she figured out that the monastery where this leech book was written well
► 00:18:15they she figured out where their Vineyard was just down the road this is modern organic Vineyard so they used that wine we killed Jake Yoli and Piggly Wiggly I just want to point out how difficult it is to find English fine we had to use Italian but it mainly through lunch at all thorny on our fat once you get all that stuff together you're under the final ingredient 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
► 00:18:45um so we had to sort of add pieces of of copper that would have been available to people at the time 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 caught trench brass which is what's used to standard in plumbing fittings after few pennies in there we actually use pennies oyster it I think I started world's worst cooking show it looks and smells like quite a nice quite a nice summer soup that's awful
► 00:19:15that's so gross clearly we botched this whole thing not to stun the neon nicked on them are fatter and finally we're going to cover it okay we're covering it the directions say we have to let the whole thing sit for a while that has to be stored for nine days and nights okay that's it one knee goes my two days three four five six seven eight nine nine days later all right here we go you ready mmm
► 00:19:45all right here we go and on them are fighter Arena through class then you have to strain it through a cloth the liquid that comes off you apply to the person's eye or the liquid and umm Nick Toma de Faria yeah say bets that luck Trudeau now clearly we didn't have any staff to try this out on but Freya in her lab she made these mock wounds with these little plugs of
► 00:20:15collagen so it's a bit like jelly basically it's like a like a goopy substance made to be kind of like a flesh wound and we infect these wounds with bacteria with the staff then they put this down and year old recipe that had been standing there for nine days they put it on the bacteria that was in the fake wound we'd obviously where we didn't think this was going to work no we thought you know what given the ingredients we might see some small killing effect on the bacteria but it won't be anything to write home about they thought maybe you'd killed 10% 20% of the bacteria
► 00:20:45them when they came back the next day and it was a staff Massacre it went on a rampage it went on a staff Rampage it was killing you know 99.99999% of of these bacterial cells 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 so they run the entire experiment again they grabbed ingredients mash them up put them on some back
► 00:21:15Syria and it happens again just absolutely wiped out the bacteria and help them dead and he tried a third time and a fourth and a fifth and it works every time and this is this this is just something you really don't see in your careers microbiologist and eventually they escalated from just regular staff to the Mersa to the methicillin-resistant staph and this is one of the bad one the superbug new government data estimate that about
► 00:21:45when people are dying of community-based Mirza every year this one is very dangerous it's so Christina and Freya they sent some of bald Brew to one of their collaborators in the state's a collaborator Kendra Rambo in in Lubbock in Texas Kendra took the stuff put it on some MRSA bacteria and then a week later sent for and Christina an email and I think it was actually three word response I said I think she just simply said what the fuck
► 00:22:12what the fuck bald's best medicine had just wreaked havoc on the Mersa it killed 90% of this is it beyond our wildest dreams now friend Christina made very clear that this is not yet a miracle drug I mean it's not even been tested in humans so absolutely do not do this at home they don't even know if this is safe it might be that if you don't do it in exactly the way we did nasty fungus could grow in it
► 00:22:41give you a worse infection so we should not have done this last night we
► 00:22:51dumped 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 like it's like the idea that something a thousand years ago like a bullet forged a thousand years ago we could we could use it now and then it could work that that the time-travel dimension of that is so weird to me
► 00:23:25it kind of makes you think differently about
► 00:23:28I don't know progress so without much further Ado dr. Christina Lee and dr. Frey Harrison and they're going to talk to us about some ancient biotics for example just a few weeks ago Freer and Christina got up in front of the Royal Society of chemistry thank you very much and it is an absolute pleasure to be here large hotel conference room a hundred or so people free actually got up on stage dressed as a nun
► 00:23:58okay so this is one interpretation of water an Anglo-Saxon scientist may have looked like and they presented the results next ingredient is particularly a 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 there are remedies which I asked you sing for Ava Marie
► 00:24:28he has and we would say oh that's so superstitious this is all in their heads 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 other Maria everybody knows the length of an Ava Maria so maybe it's maybe it's take this medicine and wait 20 minutes and I know how to standardize 20 minutes which is we have a Maria's for Ava Marie has made so if that's fast it may appear one way and it's it in fact
► 00:24:58be a totally different way it's suggest that the in order to time travel you have to some out God it's like we don't even have to work the language to be able to understand what they were doing there's effective there's a phrase that the past is a foreign country
► 00:25:15we 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 stuff from them I learned a bit of humility that's why we here is 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 a exponentially
► 00:25:44you see long time yeah so how is it that something that this man bald was doing to these bacteria then like like it's not even the same bacteria yeah how could that even work that's it that's an awesome question so 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 evolve resistance but now thousand years later
► 00:26:14when these medicines have not been used you would expect that resistance to be lost this is something that me and McKenna mentioned to Sauron and I that sometimes when you take a drug out of circulation 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 thousand years then maybe it wouldn't work so there's an interesting Discovery there like that what worked once and then was
► 00:26:44listed you give it a rest they 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 and the different path did you go to China where they now got all these people studying Chinese cures and Arab cures you could come up with a with a rich historical cocktail of armamentarium 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
► 00:27:14that then becomes the fruit of your future sort of
► 00:27:18so it's also part is like a now I have a suddenly an image that is possible that this is soon we learn by the way in conversation with me and McKenna Lot F the thousand years ago these folks went through what we went through with Penicillin and that they 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 he got their Nobel Prize and everybody celebrated and then years later sties were coming back in the garlic wine didn't work anymore and they stopped using it and
► 00:27:48got put away and then here we are and we discover it and it's been put away long enough that like the now I'm thinking about future some future civilization digs up an old medical textbook that was in some dusty whatever and discovered penicillin and it works we did I lose you on that mirror no no I'm still with you I'm just I don't know how it just seems like since it seems like such a great hypothetical construction I just didn't really know what I can do with this sorry
► 00:28:25producer lots of Nasser with helping Soren wheeler and produced by Matthew kielty special thanks to Saint are to Steve diggle and to Alexandra Rider and Justin Park who came down from Yale to be our old English readers to Jeanne Moreau from the Gotham early music scene and to Marshall Young on the medieval harp column and row of tadcaster and the rest of the Barony of iron bog not totally sure what that is but I know they helped us out and I guess
► 00:28:48we should help ourselves out yes of the door quickly go through the window I'm Jed I'm Robert krulwich thanks for listening message five new this is Marin McKenna hi this is Justin parked in the English Department at Yale okay sonny Fox and I'm reading the appointed message Radiolab is produced by Jad album Raja
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