Staph Retreat

Hey, I'm Latif Nasser. today I'm going to play you an old episode that I reported way back in 2015. It's got science, it's got miracles, it's got Vikings.

Wait, you're listening to Radio Lab from WNYC, hey?

The story of an axe wielding nun coming through a window to smack some staphylococcus and take you back to the future, exactly the story does not make any sense. I don't know.

Well, OK, well. The story comes in two parts, both from our producer, Latif Nasser and here.

Is part one. So the way the story goes, it starts in nineteen, twenty eight, nineteen.

Twenty eight Alexander Fleming. The story goes, Who knows if it's apocryphal or not is growing staff staphylococcus in his lab? That's Maren McKenna, she's a science writer, and Staff is a bacterium.

Or in our armpits, 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.

Twenty eight. 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 a rest on one of those petri dishes.

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.

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, there's a tiny speck of natural 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 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.

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 Two. It was a picture of his face, and the banner on the cover said his penicillin will save more lives than war can spend.

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 staph 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 staph has responded to the penicillin in the world by developing resistance.

To almost like a subproducer store 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 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. The next amazing thing. And in 1960, they get it, methicillin.

And then there was a drug that 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?

1970.

1961, then 1973.

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 anymore, and the end I have on this list is linozolid, which is introduced 2000, Resistance 2002. Wow, 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, 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. New warning from the Centers for Disease Control about the spread of a.

String of germs where literally nothing works, so-called super bugs, are now turning up in.

And the patient dies. There are now bugs that can resist all of our drugs I've 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 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, but 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 window, though, 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?

Rights Donald Trump has basically said, Yeah, yeah, yeah, I would like to take credit for.

Getting rid of Roe versus Wade, but also not pay a political price for it. The GOP, abortion and the new battle over IVF. That's the New Yorker Radio Hour from WNYC studios. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

Part two Yeah, okay, hey, I'm Jed Abumrad, I'm Robert Krulwich.

This is Radiolab. 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 we know.

Well, actually, there is this story about these two women who did open a window.

Hello again, hello again.

It's a story about an unlikely friendship. It's a buddy film. it's a buddy. Yeah, it's a buddy movie.

Okay, so yeah, maybe just walk us through it.

Right, okay, so you have....

Hello, I'm Dr. Christina Lee.

Christina.

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 Biomolecular Sciences at the University of Nottingham.

And Freya is 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 big hobby is Anglo-Saxon and Viking reenactment. So I've had purely sort of amateur interest in history. And mainly in dressing up as a warrior and going to fight club every Wednesday night and learning to use the weapons.

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 jolly good bashing and have a good time.

I only mentioned this because it actually plays into the story.

Well, it was a really nice sort of coincidence, really.

2012.

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, while I'm here, rush up on my old English?

I'd studied some old English to a level where I could sort of read and speak a little bit.

But she figured, hey, 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.

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 for quite a long time, which I 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 nun character who goes off and heals people. But anyway, so they're talking back and forth.

It's known as Bald's Leech Book, so this is about 1100 years old.

What's it called? Bald's what?

Bald's Leech Book It's nothing to do with no hair.

Oh, even though it is spelled.

Bald is it b-a-l-d?

It is indeed.

And leech like leech, like a like a leech, like a little worm that grabs onto your blood.

No, no. It comes from the old English word lecher, 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. The Leech was named for the doctor.

Exactly, yeah.

And Bald is a man, the guy who wrote the 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, it describes to you remedies for stuff that is a little bit different.

You know things like.

Fone Devil, Fone Manan.

A possession by the Devil.

Which, according to this Leech book. The remedy for someone who is possessed by the devil is you drink and 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.

And then things like.

Pig's blood, I hope, or toad blood.

Drink on neacht 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 wound.

Something that was clearly an infection.

Some pussy, something.

We could clearly say that's that's bacterial.

And eventually, they find an entry.

Where at the end of the recipe, it says in old English.

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 actually called wen in old English.

These days, if you get it, of course, that could be something like a wart, right?

But there is a suggestion by archaeologists that eye infection was was rife amongst the Anglo-Saxons. Because you lived in buildings where you, you had smoke going on, you lived cramped 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 itches, and then it gets swollen.

It causes quite a nasty red lump.

It's a stye in your eye.

Stye in your eye Now it just so happens that the bacteria that causes the stye in your eye is....

Staphylococcus aureus.

Staph.

Oh, the same stuff as 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 of 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.

I've got this recipe here. Oh, awesome.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, please read it, go for it.

Okay, it goes like this.

That's the first line of the recipe, and right off the bat for Christina and Freya, there's a problem that first ingredient....

The word kropliach.

Kropliach.

Kropliach.

Christina said It was quite difficult to translate.

Nobody quite knows, you know, what it is.

But luckily.

Just a couple words over was a clue.

And garlic.

The second ingredient?

Garlic, which is an allium species, and kropliach.

We know this was another allium.

That's what the Dictionary of Old English tells us.

So they figured probably what they were dealing with was 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.

Now the recipe doesn't cover this, but we did it anyway. Peel the onion, chop it up, the same for the garlic.

And the recipe? It doesn't tell you how much, it just tells you equal amounts off.

So you take out the measuring cups, you measure out equal amounts, yeah, equal amounts into the pestle, and then after that....

It can be pounded well together.

To be really pounded.

And pounded, Freya did.

Yeah, yeah, so lots of time with the mortar and pestle muscles built up from wielding a sword for 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.

Ox Gall.

Bovine bile from a cow's gallbladder.

What do you have to kill the cow and then go reach it?

No, it's actually a very standard ingredient in microbiology labs.

Ox Bile Today in 2015, you can but should not just buy it on the internet, and so you take the Ox Bile. Add it to the onion and garlic.

And then the fourth ingredient.

You name a ween.

Wine?

Wine time Red wine, white wine. what kind of wine are we 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?

And she figured out that the monastery where this Leech book was written, well, she figured out where their vineyard was.

And just down the road, there's this modern organic vineyard.

So they used that wine.

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. And 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.

Dropped a few pennies in there, we actually use pennies. Do I stir it? I think I stir it. It's like a world's worst cooking show.

It looks and smells like quite a nice summer soup.

Oh, that's awful.

Oh, that's so gross. Clearly we botched this whole thing.

It has to be stored for nine days and nights.

OK, that's it.

One day goes by, two days, three, four, five.

Six, seven, eight, nine, all right, nine days later, all right here we go. you ready? all right here we go.

And.

Then you have to strain it through a cloth, the liquid that comes off you apply to the person's eye. oh, the liquid.

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 collagen, so it's a bit like jelly.

Basically, it's 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.

Obviously we didn't think this was going to work. No, 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.

They thought maybe it'd kill 10 20 of the bacteria, but then when they came back the next day.

It was a staff massacre.

It went on a rampage, it went on a staff rampage.

It was killing, you know, 99.

So they run the entire experiment again, they grab the ingredients, mash them up, put them on some bacteria, and it happens again.

Just absolutely wiped out the bacteria in these fake wounds.

Then they tried a third time and a fourth and a fifth, and it works every time.

And this is just something you really don't see in your career as a microbiologist.

And eventually, they escalated from just regular staff to MRSA.

New government data estimate that about 2,000 people are dying of community-based MRSA 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 Rumbow, in Lubbock in Texas.

Kendra took the stuff, put it on some MRSA bacteria, and then, a week later, sent Freya and Christina an email.

And I think it was actually a three-word response, I think, she just simply said.

What the f**k?

What the f**k?

Bald's best medicine had just wreaked 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 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, give you a worse infection.

So, uh?

So, without much 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, Freya and Christina got up in front of the Royal Society of Chemists.

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

Large hotel, conference room, 100 or so people. Freya actually got up on stage, dressed as a nun.

OK, so this is one interpretation of what an Anglo-Saxon scientist may have looked like.

And they presented the results.

Next ingredient is particularly.

They did the cooking demo, and then at some point, Christina said something really interesting. She was like, OK, 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 four ave Marias.

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 Ave Maria, everybody knows the length of an Ave 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....

Three Ave. Marias, Four Ave. Marias.

So that's fascinating. It may appear one way, and it's in fact could be a totally different way.

It suggests that in order to time travel, you have to somehow.

There's a phrase the past is a foreign country.

We need to learn the language of the doctors of our time.

We need to kind of be a little bit less dismissive.

And learn a little bit more, you know, still, 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 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?

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, a thousand years later, when these medicines have not been used, you would expect that resistance to be lost.

This is something that Maren McKenna mentioned to Soren 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 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 a different path. To 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 of the past then becomes the fruit of your future, sort of.

So it's also.

He got their Nobel Prize.

And everybody celebrated. And then, years later, Sties 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.

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.

Sorry, I took over.

Thank you for listening, it's actually, it's been almost a full decade since we aired this episode. And since then, Christina and Freya have published several papers to show how this concoction works and why. Apparently, there's not just one, but multiple key ingredients at work in their ancient salve.

Producer Latif Nasser with help from Soren Wheeler and produced by Matthew Kielty. Special thanks this hour to Steve Diggle.

And to Alexandra Ryder and Justin Park, who came down from Yale to be our old English readers.

To Jean Murrow from the Gotham early music scene.

And to Marcia Young on the medieval harp.

Karl Munro 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 we should help ourselves out. Yes, very quickly through the window. I'm Jad Abumrad.

I'm Robert Krulwich.

Thanks for listening.

Hi, I'm Alana and I'm from Queens, New York. Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keepe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom.

Becca Bressler, Akati Foster-Keyes.

W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhu Gnanusambandam, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Sarah Kari, Sarah Sandback, Ariane Wack, Pat Walters and Molly Webster. Our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger and Natalie Middleton.