Staph Retreat

unexpected place to find a brand new drug to treat a very tricky bug. The bug is Marsa,

“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. Wait, wait, you're listening to radio lad. So the way the story goes, it starts in 1928. 1928, Alexander Fleming, the story goes who knows if it's a parkour full or not, is growing staff, staff LaCoccus, in his lab.

That's Marin McKenna, 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 in our genitals, in our armpits, places like that.

“And generally, it's no big deal. It doesn't really do us any harm, but if it gets into”

a scratch or a cut and makes its way inside our body's 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 goes on

a vacation, leaves his Petri dishes, covered in 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 arrest on one of those Petri dishes. And so a few weeks later. Fleming, 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 see some real lush, 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 poked on. It's got little dead zones all over it. Little patches where the staff is dead. Dead patches. So something blew through the window, landed in the dish, and starts killing the bacteria.

Yeah, and so when Fleming looks down at his plate, he sees that at the center of these, you know, staff dead zones. Uh, there's a tiny speck of natural mold. Oh, mold. And they realize that that mold is expressing a compound that is killing the staff around it. It's like emanating rays of death. What was the compound? That compound was called penicillin. The first true anti-biotic 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 was 1944, height of World War II. 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, um, 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, um, this Stanford researcher

publishes 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, uh, separatists are so in Wheeler. The era of penicillin was over before it began. Almost before it began. Before it's even released to the general public. Wow. And that penicillin resistance staff moves across the globe. And in 1957, in Cleveland, some scientists gathered 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

11 months. 11 months. And so we started this arms race. There was a bug. And then there was a drug.

“The took care of it. And then there was a better bug. Drug bug, drug bug. Right exactly.”

Actually found this list. Do you want to hear it? Yeah. Okay. So strapped to my sin. 1943 resistance 1948. methicillin 1960 resistance 1961. Flynn to my sin. 1969 resistance 1970. You can think of it as leap frog or you can think of it as a game of whack a mole. Ampacillin 1961 then 1973. So that's a little carbonicillin. Release 1964 resistance 1970.

They're getting better. They're getting better. There were always more drugs. You know,

the drug development was doing really well for a really long time. Hypericillin introduced 1980 resistance 1981. But after the year 2000, drug companies begin to realize it's not really in their best interest to make antibiotics. And the end I have on this list is Lina Zolid, which is introduced 2000 resistance 2002. Wow. There are a few more, but you get the idea.

“Antibiotic proofels. The entry of new drugs to the market. Just kind of fell off a cliff.”

Why? Well, it takes 10 years and 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 have these

situations. Well, frightening you warning from the centers for disease control about the spread of a string of germs. We're literally nothing works. So called super bugs are now turning up in hospitals in the patient dies. There are nail bugs that can resist all of our drugs. I have seen physicians break down weeping over this. It's not the way that medicine is supposed to fail anymore, but it does. I mean, I know that possibly the origin story of penicillin is

apocryphal. So this is all a little suspect, but you know, just doing joy imagining for a moment.

“Like it just seems like if that happened, let's just open up a bunch more windows, just something”

not a blow in. And we could wait a long time. 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 window, though. Not the not a window, next to some petri dishes. Not a window, next to some petri dishes. Kind of a window, next to some petri dishes. But a totally different kind of window. What kind of window is it? Wow, I'm a but to tell you that. Is something blowing into the window? Yeah, but it's not mold.

It's way more fun than mold. It, it, it, it carries an axe. How about that? So it's a person, maybe. I don't know what I'm, I don't even want to be referring to anymore. Hey, Lulu here and this episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. It is March in like a lion, out like a lamb and somewhere in the middle, it's international women's day. And BetterHelp wants us all to just take a moment to consider the women in our lives, our personal lives, our

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That's betterhelp.com/radialab. On Big Lives, we take a single cultural icon. People like Jane found a George Michael little Richard. And we pull apart the story behind the image. And we do this by digging through the BBC's vast archives. Discovering for gone interviews that change exactly how we see these giants of our culture. We're here for the besty, the brilliant, the human version of our heroes. I'm your mental geochie.

I'm Kai Wright, and this is Big Lives. Listen to Big Lives wherever you get your podcasts. Part two? Yeah. Okay, hey, I'm Jed, I'm Ron. I'm Robert Crowwich. This is Radio Lab. We're ready now for part two. Remember when part one ended, there was a window open and something

so whatever it is, whatever it was, whatever it will be. We will hear about it now from our reporter,

“a lot of master. Well, actually, there is this story about these two women who did open a window”

to an alien and distant land. And actually, in a way, it's a story about reimagining the past, but to me, it's a, it's a, it's a story about a friendship. Hey, everybody. Hello again. Hello again. It's a body film. It's a body, yeah. It's a body movie. Okay. So, yeah, tell it. Maybe just walk us through. Right. So, okay. So, you have, um, hello. I'm Dr. Kristina Lee. Kristina. And I'm an associate professor in Viking 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 Biomelectcular Sciences at the University of Nottingham. And Freya, Freya's a microbiologist. She studies bacteria. We'll 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 my, my big hobby is, is Anglo-Saxon Viking Reenactment. So, I hope you're

“interested in the history and mainly in dressing up as a warrior and going to fight club”

everyone's day night and learning to use the weapons. Yeah. 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. Everything from swords, spears, axes. And we give each other a, a jolly good bashing and have a good time. I only mentioned this because it, it actually plays into the story. Well, it was really nice sort of coincidence, really exciting. 2012. A few years after finishing her doctorate, Freya goes off to work at the University of Nottingham. Nottingham is one of the places in the UK, not only for microbiology,

but for Anglo-Saxon and Viking history. And she goes there to study microbes, but she figures, hey, why not? Well, I'm here, brush up on my old English. With her, it will feel, it's a, I would say. I'd studied some old English to a level where I could

sort of read and speak a little bit. Let's stand on Niche Niste. But she figured, hey, she could

she could be better. And if she did, she would get deeper into the whole reenactment thing. So, I rather cheekily emailed the School of English's old English reading group. That's where she met Christina. Yes. The historian. 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. And Christina said the moment she heard that.

I 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 a microbiology nerd. I've been interested in infectious disease quite a long time, which I don't, I don't find any kind of friends and 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 heels people. But anyway, so they're talking back and forth and then to cut a long story short, they, they find themselves both interested in this one particular book. It's known as bald-seach book. So, this is about 1100 years old.

What's it called? Bulls, what? Bulls, what? Bulls, leech book. It's nothing to do with no hair. Oh, even though it's a speck. Bulls, it's B-A-L-D. It is indeed. And leech, like, leech, like a leech, like a little worm that grabs onto your blood. No, no, it comes from the old English, which is actually a healer or a doctor. So, the little squiggly animals are called leeches because they're medicinal,

not the other way around. Oh, so the doctor wasn't named for the leech, leech was named for the doctor. Exactly, yeah. And bald is the, is a man, the guy wrote a book.

“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 healer's 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 text 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... Phone a devil, phone a monono. A possession by the devil. What you're recording this leech book, the remedy for someone who is possessed by the devil is you pure the rank and loot the rank.

And, and then there's another remedy for warts.

Be sure, we are Noah, Tosone, and all I'm going to say about that one is that it involves hewns urine and mouthblood. And then things like, "You're a monster at all, Rana." How should we say make your husband more physically attentive, or less physically attentive,

“whichever you whichever direction you need to moderate it?”

Pigs, blood, I hope, or toad, blood, drink on nearched, nestia. 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 wounds.

Something that was clearly an infection. Some posse something. And we could clearly say that's that's bacterial. And eventually, they find an entry. Where at the end of the recipe, it says an old English.

Say, "Bets the laptop." "Subets the luchdom." "The best medicine." "The best medicine." Yeah, move over laughter.

Yeah, 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 anti-cult when in the holding piece. Yeah, these days, if you get a course that could be something like a wart, right?

But there is a suggestion by archaeologists that i infection was rife amongst the angular sacksens because you're lived in buildings where you have smoke going on. You live crammed together. So, it could also be a stye. What is a stye?

It's an infection of an eyelash follicle. You rub it and it chises and then it gets growling. Yeah, it causes quite an nasty red lump. The stye in your eye. Stye in your eye.

Now, it just so happens that the bacteria that causes the stye in your eye is... Stuff like Aquacazoria, 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 a couple hundred

quid to buy the ingredients and just give this a go?" Yes, let's give it a try. You know, why the hell not? And matter of fact, "Look at this place!" We thought that, too.

Studio. Not bad. Recently, producer Matt Kilti and I went to my tiny apartment in the city. And we tried to cook it up, too. Are you ready to cook?

Oh, I'm ready to cook. I've got this recipe here. Oh, awesome, yeah. Yeah, yeah, please, read it. Go for it. Okay, it goes like this.

We're ready to cook. I see all of us with one in their name, Kroblier.

That's the first line of the recipe and right off the bat

for Christina and Fred, there's a problem. That first ingredient. The word "Kroblierch", "Kroblierch". Probably. Christina said it was quite difficult to translate.

Nobody quite knows what it is, but luckily. Just a couple words over. Was a clip. And Galiak, it made second ingredient. Galiak, which is an aliam species and Kroblierch.

We know this was another aliam.

“That's what the dictionary of old English tells us.”

So they figured probably what they were dealing with. There's an onion or a leek. But we didn't know which one. So we thought, "Okay, we'll try one that has onion and one that has leek." But yeah, yeah, I'm fair enough.

Now, you can do what? The recipe doesn't cover this, but we did it anyway. Peel the onion, chop it up, this seems to the garlic. And the recipe doesn't tell you how much. It doesn't tell you the mind's off.

So you take out the measuring cup, so you measure it. Equal amounts. Yeah, equal amounts. And there's a pestle. And then after that, it says.

It can do, wow, wow. So we took the salt in. And pound it for a day. Yeah, yeah, so lots of time with the moisture and pestle. And muscles built up from wielding a sword if they're pounding the ingredients.

So 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 the fair, yes, yeah, I'm fair enough. Ox-gall. Ox-gall. Bovine-bile from a cow's-gall bladder.

“What do you do to kill the cow and then go reach out?”

So it's actually a very standard ingredient in microbiology labs. Ox-gall. Today in 2015, you can, but should not just bite on the internet. Here we go. Here we go.

And so you take the Ox-gall, add it to the onion and garlic. And then the fourth ingredient. Yeah, name, a wean. Wine. And wine, time.

Red wine, white wine, white wine, white wine. Well, wine, I was talking about here. 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. And she figured out that the monastery where this leech book was written. Well, they, she figured out where their vineyard was. And just down the road, that's this modern organic vineyard. So they used that wine.

Go, go, go, go. Gave, you're all in, indeed. I just want to point out how difficult it is to find a wine. We had to use Italian, but in Ming with Ful, La Chador, Fonne, on Art of Fatt. 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

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.”

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. So after a few pennies in there, we actually use pennies. Do I stir it? I think I stir it.

It's like a real worth cooking challenge. And it looks and smells like quite a nice, quite a nice sum of soup. Oh, that's awful. Oh, that's so gross. Clearly, we botched this whole thing.

That just stunned the neonic, on them, Art of Fatt.

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. It has to be stored for nine days and nights. Okay, that's it. One day goes by two days three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine.

Oh, that's nine days later. Uh, all right, here we go. You ready? Mm-hmm. All right, here we go.

And on them Art of Fatt, our ring 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 oom, nikt, do midfair, right? Yeah, with the puffer down. Say, bet's the luck to know. Now, clearly, we didn't have any staff to try this out on,

but Fraier in her lab, she made these mock wounds. So if these little plugs of collagen, 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 thousand-year-old recipe that had been standing there for nine days, they put it on the bacteria that was in the fake wound. Which, obviously, we didn't think this was going to work.

No, we thought, you know, we'll give in 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 it'd kill 10%, 20% of the bacteria, but then 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, 99.99, 99% 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 this label, something. So, they run the entire experiment again. They grab the ingredients, mash 'em up, put 'em on some bacteria. And it happens again. Just absolutely wiped out the bacteria in the fake wound.

And they tried a third time and a fourth and a fifth.

And it worked every time. And this is just something you really don't see in your career's microbiologist. And eventually, they escalated from just regular staff to immersive. To the methicillin resistance staff.

And this is one of the bad ones. A super bug. New government data estimated that about 2,000 people are dying of community-based immersive every year. This one is very dangerous.

So, Christina and Freya, they sent some of Bald's Brew to one of their collaborators in the States. Our collaborator, Kendra Rambau in Lubbock in Texas. Kendra took the stuff, put it on some immersive bacteria. And then a week later sent Freya and Christina an email.

“And I think it was actually a three-word response.”

I said, I think she just simply said, "What the fuck? What the fuck?" Bald's best medicine had just reaped havoc on the MRSA. It killed 90% of them. This is beyond our wildest dreams.

Now, Freya and Christina made very clear that this is not yet a miracle drug. I mean, it's not even being 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, give you a worse infection. So, we should not have done this. Imagine I, we dumped our stomach, right? 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 use it now and then it could work. That, that, the time travel dimension of that is so weird to me. It kind of makes you think differently about,

I don't know, progress. So, without which further ado, Dr. Christina Lee and Dr. Freya Harrison and they're going to talk to us about some ancient biotics. For example, just a few weeks ago,

Thank you very much and it is an absolute pleasure to be here.

Ward Hotel Conference Room, 100 or so people, uh, Freya actually got up on stage dressed as a nun. Okay, so this is one interpretation of what an Anglo-Saxon scientist may have looked like. And they presented the results.

Next ingredient is particularly 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. There are remedies which ask you sing for Avama Reyes. 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 nose, you know, so that's got the watch. Everybody knows the Avama Reyes. Everybody knows the length of an Avama Reyes. So maybe it's maybe it's take this medicine and wait 20 minutes.

Uh, and I know how to standardize 20 minutes, which is. Three Avama Reyes, four Avama Reyes may act. Uh, so it may appear one way and it's, in fact, could be a totally different way. It suggests that the in order to time travel.

“You have to somehow, God, it's like, we don't even have the language people”

understand what they were doing. They're effective. There's a phrase that the past is a foreign country. Likewise, 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, so from them, I learned a bit of humility this way. 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 a exponentially crazy, long time. Yeah. So how is it that something that this man bald was doing to these bacteria?

Then, like, it's not even the same bacteria. Yeah, how could that even work? That's an awesome question. So one thing we've got to think about is, well, why did these medicine drop out of use? And maybe it's because when they were used, the bacteria are of all resistance. But now, a thousand years later, when these medicines have not been used, you would expect that resistance to be lost.

This is something that Marin McKenna mentioned to Sorn 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 resisted, you'd 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, if you could go to different places in the different paths,

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 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 food of your future sort of. So it's also, like, now I have a suddenly an image that is possible that this is still

in Wheeler, by the way, in conversation with Mary, and we can't have a lot of that a thousand years ago, these folks went through what we went through with Penicillin. And that they describe 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 it got put away. And then here we are, and we discover it, and it's been put away long enough that, like, then 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 we, did I lose you on that, Mary?”

No, no, I'm still with you. I'm just, I don't know. It just seems like it seems like such a great hypothetical construction, I just didn't really know what I can add to it. I'm sorry, I have to go.

Hey, Lulu again with a quick update. It has been almost a decade since we first

heard this episode. And since then, Christina and Freya have published several papers to show how this concoction works and why. Now, Ball's Isolv is not quite ready to hit the drugstore

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 of fighting”

essence potentially great news for all of us staying a little healthier, using very old things. But all this did leave me with one very important question for Christina, the Viking expert.

If we get further in 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. I don't know. I've no, you know, I really don't know, but you know, 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's a really interesting question, you know, of who owns the IP on this?”

Anyway, radio lab here for you, the hard hitting, medical questions, the hard hitting,

patent questions. Thanks so much for listening. We'll be back next week. Special thanks to Sarah to Steve Diggle and to Alexandra Ryder and Justin Park who came down from Yale to be our old English readers to Gene Murrow from the Gotham early music scene. And to Marsha Young on the medieval harp, Colmenro of Tadcaster and the rest of the

“Barrony of Ironbox. Not totally sure what that is, but I know they helped us out. And I guess we should”

help ourselves out. Yes, very quickly. Through the window. I'm Jedi Murrow. I'm Robert Croitch. Thanks, Justin. Hi, I'm Gabby. I'm from the Bay Area, California and here are the staff credits. Radio lab is hosted by Lulu Miller and Lots of Nasser. Soren Wheeler is our executive editor. Sarah Sandbach is our executive director, our managing editors, Pat Walters.

Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Jeremy Bloom, W Harry Fortuna, David Gabel, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindu Nina Sambandon, Matt Kielty, Mona Margauker, Annie McEwen, Alex Niesen, Sarah Carrey, Natalia Ramirez, Rebecca Rand, Anisa Vizza, Aryan Wack, Molly Webster and Jessica Young, with help from Gabby Santas.

Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, Natalie Middleton, Angelie Mercado and Sophie Semi. Leadership support for Radio Lab Science Programming is provided by the Simon's Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radio Lab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Every day, WNYC Studios is working to get closer to New York and to New

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