Ari Daniel
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
Rana Celebi, a medical historian at Istanbul Metropol University, and her colleagues analyzed the residues of a set of ancient Roman bottles.
Most didn't contain anything that interesting, but one of them...
The use of especially animal fecal matter was once considered a potent treatment for infections and inflammation.
The team also found aromatic compounds, perhaps to mask the odor.
It's worth noting that some modern physicians are using feces for a hard-to-treat bacterial GI infection as a kind of reset of the gut microbiome.
Most didn't contain anything that interesting, but one of them… …ended up revealing something even more surprising and medically significant.
Specifically, we're going to talk about a vaccine to fight HIV.
That is correct.
Right here, Nate.
Inside a lab at the National Institute for Communicable Diseases in Johannesburg, South Africa.
It's arrayed with, if you can picture it, half a dozen large green and white freezers.
This is Penny Moore.
She's a virologist at the University of Wittwatersrand.
So Penny cracks open the lid of Bashful...
and pulls out a tower of frosty tubes.
These, Nate, are all the samples that have been donated to Penny and her team over and over again for two decades by the same group of 117 South African women.