Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hey, it's Molly Webster. I have a surprise for you. Next month, myself and producer Mona Medgalker are going to do an AMA about our snail sex tape episode. You can ask us anything about snails and the behind the scenes of making an episode work. How long did it take us to make? How did we come up with the sound effects? Why are snails and slugs related? The AMA will be on April 16th.
And in order to come, you have to be a member of the lab. So go to radiolab.org slash join right now. Sign up. Use the code word snail to get a discount on your membership. And also, if you sign up now, you get a snail enamel pin. If you're already a member of the lab, come to the AMA. Thank you for listening. Can't wait to see you there April 16th.
Hey, it's Lulu. This week, I want to bring back an episode about scientists who look in the most unexpected place to find a brand new drug to treat a very tricky bug. The bug is MRSA, 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, you're listening? Okay.
Alright. Okay. Alright. You're listening to Radiolab.
Radiolab. From WNYC.
Rewind.
So 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 staph, Staphylococcus, in his lab. That's Maren McKenna. She's a science writer. And staph is a bacterium. It lives on our skin, and it especially likes parts of the body that are warm and damp.
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Chapter 2: How did Alexander Fleming discover penicillin?
For about 11 months. Eleven months? And so we started this arms race.
There was a bug, and then there was a drug that took care of it, and then there was a better bug.
Drug bug, drug bug.
Right, exactly.
I actually found this list. Do you want to hear it? Yeah. Okay, so streptomycin, 1943, resistance 1948. Methicillin, 1960, resistance 1961. Clindamycin, 1969, resistance 1970.
Wow.
You can think of it as leapfrog, or you can think of it as a game of whack-a-mole. Ampicillin, 1961, then 1973, so that's a little. Carbenicillin, released 1964, resistance 1974. They're getting better, they're getting better. There were always more drugs. Drug development was doing really well for a really long time. Hypericillin, introduced 1980, resistance 1981. Easy.
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 linazolid, 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.
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Chapter 3: What was the initial response to penicillin's effectiveness?
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 itches and then it gets swollen. Yeah, and 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, look at this place. We thought that too.
Chapter 4: How did antibiotic resistance begin to emerge?
Not bad at all. Recently, producer Matt Kielty 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 if you'd like it. 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 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 cropliach. 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 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 of.
So you take out the measuring cups, you measure out equal amounts. Yeah, equal amounts. Into the pestle. And then after that... Okay, it says... Pounded well together. Okay. But you have to be really pounded. And pounded Freya did. Yeah, yeah, so... Lots of time with the mortar and pestle. Mussels built up from wielding a sword for pounding the ingredients.
Look, it's starting to be more of a mush. Third ingredient? The next one was definitely something you wouldn't have knocking around in your kitchen. Ox gall. 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. Today in 2015, you can but should not just buy it on the internet.
Here we go. Here we go. And so you take the ox bile, add it to the onion and garlic. And then the fourth ingredient. Wine. It's 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?
But I did a bit of detective work. 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. I just want to point out how difficult it is to find English wine. We had to use Italian.
Once you get all that stuff together, you're onto 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. 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. This is like the world's worst cooking show. It looks and smells like quite a nice summer soup.
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