Transcript for Staph Retreat

Hey, I'm Latte Fnasser. Today, I'm going to play you in an old episode that I reported way back in 2015. It's got science. It's got miracles. It's got Vikings. It's got a potentially hazardous kitchen experiment performed by senior producer MacKill. And what I really love about this episode is how it makes you see progress, not as a straight line. No, sometimes not even as a line at all. Sometimes it's, it's actually a circle. I swear it'll make sense at the end of the episode. I now present to you. Stafford trait. Wait, wait.

So, the way the story goes, it starts in 1928.

That's Marin McKenna, she's a science writer, and staff is a bacterium.

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 body's staff goes from being this benign companion to being potentially deadly. Anyway, London, 1928.

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.

I mean, you'd imagine that he would seed 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.

Little patches where the staff is dead.

Yeah, and so when Fleming looks down at his plate, he sees that at the center of these, you know, staff dead zones.

It's like emanating rays of death. What was the compound? That compound was called. And a cellar. the first true antibiotics.

However it got there, it was amazing. It was a miracle. It was called a miracle drug, right?

This was 1944, height of World War II.

But, 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 staff. that do not respond to penicillin. Really? Yeah. This is happening while he's on the cover virtually the exact same moment.

before it's even released to the general public. Wow.

And in 1957, in Cleveland, some scientists gather together and they are in a panic.

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 methicillin.

11 months. And so we started this arms race.

Right exactly. Actually found this list. Do you want to hear it? Yeah. Okay. So streptomycin, 1943 resistance, 1948, methicillin, 1960, resistance, 1961. Climmedomycin, 1969, resistance, 1970.

Ampacillin, 1961, then 1973. So that's a little carbonicillin, release 1964, resistance 1970. They're getting better. They're getting better.

Hypericillin introduced 1980, resistance 1981.

And the end I have on this list is Lina Zolid, which is introduced 2000 resistance 2002. There are a few more, but you get the idea.

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.

There are now bugs that can resist all of our drugs.

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.

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 bunch of tell you that. Is something blowing into the window? Yeah, but it's not mold. It's way more fun than mold. It carries an axe. How about that? So it's a person maybe. I don't know why.

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 story about a friendship.

It's a story about an unlikely friendship. It's a bloody film. It's a bloody movie.

Right, so okay, so you have... Hello, I'm Dr. Christina Lee.

She's a historian, and then you also have... Hi, I'm Freya Harrison.

And Freya Freya's a microbiologist. She studies bacteria. We'll start with her.

Yeah, so this is actually not fray as 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.

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

2012. A few years after finishing her doctorate, Freya goes off to work at the University of Nottingham.

And she goes there to study microbes, but she figures, hey, why not while I'm here, rush up on my old English?

But she figured, hey, she could be better. And if she did, she would get deeper into the whole reenactment thing.

That's where she met Christina. Yes! The historian. One point, Christina of the historian asks, fraia, like, what do you do? And fraia said, you know, my day job is that I'm a microbiologist, but on evenings and weekends, I'm... 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 on my microbiology nerd I've been interested in um infectious disease for quite a long time which I'm

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 This known as bald's leech book.

Oh, so the doctor wasn't named for the leeches, the leeches name for the doctor. Exactly, yeah.

So it's kind of like this old healer's handbook. It's filled with these potions and cures.

So Christina and Freya bring it up and they start going through all the remedies.

Phone a monono. A possession by the devil. What you're recording this leech book, the remedy for someone who's possessed by the devil is you. You have a drink and a loot tray. Makes 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 all I'm going to say about that one is that it involves hounds urine and mouse 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 Fray and Christina are going through this, which book, looking for some kind of wound. Something that was clearly in infection. Some posse something. We could clearly say that's that's bacterial.

The best medicine. Yeah, move over laughter.

What was the best medicine for?

What is a stye?

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 stuff like Aquacazoria, staff.

Exactly.

And matter of fact. Look at this place! We thought that too. Studio. Not bad. Recently, producer Matt Kielty and I went to my timing apartment in the city. And we tried to cook it up too. Are you ready to cook? Oh, I'm ready to cook.

Oh, awesome. Yeah, yeah, please read it. Go for it.

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

Just a couple words over was a clip. And Galiak, it made second ingredient.

So they figured probably what they were dealing with, wasn't it?

You can do the recipe doesn't cover this, but we did it anyway. Peel the onion, chop it up. This seems to the garlic.

So you take out the measuring cups, you measure equal amounts. Yeah, equal amounts. And then after that, it says, it cano wa wa tosomne, pounded well together.

The next one was definitely something you wouldn't have knocking around in your kitchen.

Oxbile. Today in 2015 you can but should not just bite on the internet. Here we go. Here we go. And so you take the Oxbile, add it to the onion and garlic.

Wine. And wine time. Red wine, white wine. Like, wow.

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 his modern organic vineyard so they used that wine. I just wanted to point out how difficult it is to find English wine we had to use Italian but it made me with food. Once you get all that stuff together you're under the final ingredient.

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,

We actually use pennies.

Ah, that's awful. Ah, that's so gross. Clearly, we botched this whole thing. That just stunned the neon-naked, on them, out of Fata. And finally... Okay, so 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.

Nine days later. All right, here we go. You ready? Mm-hmm. All right, here we go.

Now, clearly we didn't have any staff to try this out on, but Fraya, in her lab, she made these mock wounds.

Basically, it's like a like a goopy substance, made to be kind of like a flesh wound.

Then they put this thousand year old recipe that'd been standing there for nine days, they put it on the bacteria that was in the fake wound.

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

It went on a rampage. It went on a staff rampage.

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

And they tried a third time and a fourth and a fifth, and it worked every time.

And eventually, they escalated from just regular staff to immersive. to the methicillin resistance staff. And this is one of the bad ones.

So Christina and Freya, they sent some of Vald's brew to one of their collaborators in the States.

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

Bald's best medicine had just ripped havoc on the Marseille. It killed 90% of them. This is beyond our wildest dreams. Now, a very interesting amid very clear that this is not yet a miracle drug. I mean, it's not even being tested in humans.

do this at home. They don't even know if this is safe.

So, uh, we should not have done this. That's not how we dumptar stand the drain. 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. 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. The time travel dimension of that is so weird to me. It kind of makes you think differently about, I don't know, progress.

For example, just a few weeks ago, Freya and Christina got up in front of the royal society of chemists.

Ward Chotel Conference Room, 100 or so people, Freya actually got up on stage dressed as a nun.

And they presented the results.

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. And we would say, oh, that's so superstitious, this is all in their heads.

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 of them are yes, four of them are yes, so that's fascinating. It may appear one way and it's, in fact, could be a totally different way.

They're, they're effective. There's a phrase, the past is a foreign country.

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. 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?

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.

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 south. They've also been collaborating with PhD students to create a recipe that can be turned into an actual medicine available to folks like you and me. But science is a slow process and things like logistics and funding just make it even slower. They are pretty hopeful that they will get something to us before the next 1000 years passed by.