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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Future Proof with Jonathan McRae. Proudly supported by Research Ireland. On Newstalk.
Hello and welcome to Future Proof, the podcast. This is the show where we take a closer look at the world around us. I'm Jonathan McRae. Thank you for subscribing, downloading, rating, letting people know about the pod. We really appreciate it.
Chapter 2: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Really interesting show for you this week. We're going to be talking about sperm in space and a University of Adelaide researcher who's managed to create zero G to see whether or not sperm would do the job if we were on the moon or in Mars. A really interesting piece, and I learned a lot about sperm. If you want to get in touch with the program, you can email us, scienceatnewstalk.com.
First, though, it's time to look back at some of the more interesting stories from the World of Science this week. We're joined by Dr. Ruth Freeman from Research Ireland and Professor Matthew Campbell of Trinity College Dublin. Our first story, Ruth, has to do with mosquitoes.
I know it sounds like the beginning of a science fiction film. So big tech company is applying to the EPA in the USA to release 64 million modified mosquitoes. So the company in question is Google and they're applying to release 32 million mosquitoes into Texas and 32 million into Florida.
And this is building on a program that they've actually had for a while in their Google X, their alphabet division, which kind of looks at projects for social good. And the thing that they're proposing to do is actually not that new, this idea of sterile insect technique. So it's a way of controlling insects that have been around for about 50 or 60 years.
So the idea is that Google want to release male mosquitoes. But these mosquitoes have been infected with a bacteria called Wolbachia. And that means that when they mate with wild female mosquitoes, the eggs will be unviable. So over time, the population will go down. And they have had some experience of doing this in places like Singapore.
But the reason they want to do this, of course, is because mosquitoes are the biggest killer on the planet when it comes to other animals apart from ourselves. You know, they kill hundreds of thousands of people every year because they're carriers of lots of different kinds of diseases. like dengue fever, yellow fever.
And I guess with climate change, these things are all growing in prevalence in places like the US where they would have been relatively uncommon previously.
Why Google? What's Google got to do with this?
Well, like I said, this project, they call it the debug programme and it began with their kind of life sciences division.
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Chapter 3: How does zero gravity affect sperm function?
access to AI to solve protein structures. So it's this combination of trying to do things that are sort of open science with social good, obviously combined with their company activity as well. But they have done it before. They've done it in Singapore, where they saw a reduction in dengue cases by up to 70% in the whole area surrounding Singapore.
Has this ever been done in the United States before? Are there any risks associated with it? Because like the idea of, you know, releasing any sort of insects or animals into the wild that have been infected with something or had some sort of change is always a bit... Yeah, it does.
And I think that those conversations have definitely been brought up by this. So it was, I mean, back in the 1950s, the US government released, they got rid of a screw fly epidemic, which was another pest, an agricultural pest. And it has been used for things like tsetse flies and other agricultural pests. I mean, in many ways, it's more effective.
I mean, the other alternative is using insecticides and chemical controls for these things, which obviously it's much easier potentially to build up resistance to that because, you know, maybe a single gene mutation, a couple of mutations, you might end up with a resistant strain.
Here, if you wipe out or drastically reduce the species, I mean, the questions to ask are, one, is it a critical part of the food chain for other species? And because the mosquito that they're targeting is an invasive species, it doesn't seem to be. So in many ways, this is a species that shouldn't be there anyway. You know, it hasn't evolved over hundreds of millions of years in these areas.
But look, the concept that we can just go in and potentially wipe out another species probably, you know, has raised some interesting discussions also.
I'd say Trump is all for it. Our second story, Matthew, has to do with cancer. And actually, there's a couple of interesting stories out this week. I was wondering why, but there is a reason.
Yeah, so this week, every year sees that the American Society of Clinical Oncology, the ASCO meeting is held every year. And this year it's all in Chicago. And what we're seeing this week is the announcement of clinical trial data, basically, where scientists and medical doctors have been studying the effect of new drugs for treating a whole range of cancers.
And some of the results are actually incredibly exciting. The first story kind of revolves around this, what they call a smart drug. And it's a combination immunotherapy. So basically, people will have heard of immunotherapy. So basically, drugs that are used in cancer patients to direct the person's immune system to identify the cancer cells and kill them and get rid of them.
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Chapter 4: Have any species been reproduced in space yet?
And what MET basically does, it's the same concept. It's used to silence the cells so the immune system can't detect it. So, the results in this have been really startling. So, the trial involved 102 patients across 11 countries. So, quite a large trial. In 15 patients, they saw their tumours completely disappear altogether. My God. And...
The most amazing thing, what we look for in these trials is, you know, progress-free survival and overall survival. But one of the main things that came through from this announcement from Johnson & Johnson was real-world lived experience of what patients are saying.
Chapter 5: What experimental methods are used to simulate zero gravity?
So just to quote one of the guys who was involved in the study, a man named Carl Walsh, 56-year-old man who had tongue cancer, wasn't responding to therapy, but he was now responding to this therapy. And he said... I now feel able to live a normal life. Before starting the trial, I struggled to speak properly and found eating difficult because of the swelling and pain.
The thing I enjoyed most now was the first big steak. The concept now is that you put life in your years, not years in your life.
Fantastic. Our third story, Ruth, is about an underwater find and quite an exciting one.
It is. And it's a find that comes, it was announced, it's not in a peer-reviewed journal, but it's been announced from the New Providence Pirates Expedition. And it was also published in something called Wreck Watch magazine. And that magazine is edited by the co-director here, Dr. Sean Kingsley. And this is an expedition that happened in the Bahamas, in Nassau, in the Bahamas.
And what's interesting about this is the first real archaeological evidence of the pirates in the Caribbean. So we all know about the Pirates of the Caribbean from the movies. And the Bahamas was seen to be the centre of kind of pirate republic between about 1690 and 1720. But we know all this from written records.
So things like governors from the colonies writing back, talking about all these pirates. And, you know, we're talking about people like Blackbeard, you know, really, really famous pirates. But up until now, there has been no actual archaeological evidence.
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Chapter 6: What were the initial expectations of sperm behavior in zero gravity?
And You might think, well, the Bahamas, that sounds like a lovely place to go and look for things on the bottom of the ocean. But in fact, it's an incredibly challenging place to go and dive. So there's been a huge amount of dredging on the seafloor. So again, anything that's there has been broken up and churned up. There's very dangerous tides, so it can be quite challenging.
And the area where these wrecks were located, there's also an awful lot of bull sharks. So the researchers talked about having to go down using tools that would potentially attract sharks, making vibrations and sort of just going into a zen state as they examine timbers, trying not to think about the bull sharks potentially circling. So it was real Indiana Jones stuff.
But what they found, they found the remains of six different ships that They found cannons, musket balls, tobacco pipes and something called... Any parrots? No parrots, but they found something called a swivel gun. And this is really interesting because a swivel gun is not like the massive cannon that you see that puts a big hole in the boat, which sinks it.
Because, of course, if you're trying to take a boat, you want to keep everything on board and you want to take all the gold and the loot that's on it before it sinks. But these swivel guns were much lighter cannons that enabled, in the records, the pirates would shoot them at the deck. You know, they would obviously injure the people on board, but then they would go on and board the ship.
And the other really interesting thing that they found was one of the ships was burnt, but it was badly burnt to the waterline. And the analogy here is kind of the getaway car, because if a pirate did capture a ship, they would clean it out of all its goods. But if you were sailing around in this ship, you were essentially, you know, advertising that you had taken it. And the sentence was death.
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Chapter 7: What were the results of sperm navigation in zero gravity?
So once everything had been stripped off the ship, they would burn it. And once the burning got to the waterline, the ship would lose its buoyancy and its integrity and it would sink. And in fact, the thing that historians are really excited about is there was a very famous pirate called Henry Avery. They say if Blackbeard was the most famous, Henry Avery was the most successful.
He pulled off one of the biggest heights. He captured an Indian treasure ship, which was worth hundreds and hundreds of millions in today's terms. But the idea was his ship, the Fancy, was eventually burnt and sunk. And the story is that it was somewhere around NASA around this time. So really exciting archaeological evidence bringing a lot of what we have in written history and folklore to life.
Fantastic. Our final story, Matthew, has to do with autism.
Yes. So this study was really interesting, in fact, because it kind of highlights and suggests that maybe there's two types of autism. But before I start, maybe I'll just highlight what doesn't cause autism. So vaccines don't cause autism. Tylenol, or as we more commonly refer to it as paracetamol in Ireland, doesn't cause autism. Parenting style screen time doesn't cause autism.
Believe it or not, autism is one of the most heritable types of conditions that we know of. So there's a very, very strong genetic composition to this. And we know this from twin studies, identical twin studies.
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Chapter 8: How might this research impact IVF technology?
If an identical twin has autism, there's a 90% chance basically that the other identical twin will have it. Because remember, they're genetically identical to each other. Now, what the study did was it used brain scans of over a thousand children and young adults who were diagnosed by psychiatrists as having autism.
And they suggest that maybe there's two different types of autism that are based on the connectivity of brain cells. So, basically, some people who have autism have hyper-connectivity, where the brain cells are communicating with each other way too much. There are other people that they're suggesting have hypo-connectivity, which is the opposite, where the connections are reduced, basically.
So it's a really, really compelling concept that there's maybe at the biological level, there are two different types of autism. What they also did was they cross-referenced it to different species. So as well as doing this very, very large human study, they went and looked at the brains of 20 mice, so mouse models of autism.
the luxury we have pre-clinically is that you can develop animal models of conditions. Of autism?
Of autism, yeah. Having spoken about autism on the programme before, it's not fully genetic. There are environmental factors as well. So how do you know if a mouse has autism?
Believe it or not, there are ways to predict. So there's a thing called the marble burying technique. So basically animals that show signs of autistic and compulsive behaviour, well, you put marbles into the cage and they'll obsessively bury the marbles compulsively.
So that's just one example of loads of different tools that we have at the behavioural level to figure out, are there autistic-like traits in animals?
So we do have animal models of autism-like, what we term phenotypes, but what this group did was they went to 20 different models of disease and they saw the same thing, that in these animal models they were able to stratify them based on hypo- or hyper-connectivity of their brain cells. So in these two subgroups,
was there any sort of correlation with the condition? Because, you know, when we think of the autistic spectrum, it seems to the lay person so wide that you would have someone who is, you know, fully able to function in society, you know, even outperform, you know, neurotypical people on tasks like mathematics and so on and function very well.
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