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Staph Retreat

What happens when you combine an axe-wielding microbiologist and a disease-obsessed historian? A strange brew that's hard to resist, even for a modern day microbe. In the war on devilish microbes, our weapons are starting to fail us.  The antibiotics we once wielded like miraculous flaming swords seem more like lukewarm butter knives. But today we follow an odd couple to a storied land of elves and dragons. There, they uncover a 1000-year-old secret that makes us reconsider our most basic assumptions about human progress and wonder: What if the only way forward is backward? Reported by Latif Nasser. Produced by Matt Kielty and Soren Wheeler. Special thanks to Steve Diggle, Professor Roberta Frank, Alexandra Reider and Justin Park (our Old English readers), Gene Murrow from Gotham Early Music Scene, Marcia Young for her performance on the medieval harp and Collin Monro of Tadcaster and the rest of the Barony of Iron Bog.    
Duration
32m
Broadcast on
02 Nov 2015
Audio Format
other

What happens when you combine an axe-wielding microbiologist and a disease-obsessed historian? A strange brew that's hard to resist, even for a modern day microbe.

In the war on devilish microbes, our weapons are starting to fail us.  The antibiotics we once wielded like miraculous flaming swords seem more like lukewarm butter knives.

But today we follow an odd couple to a storied land of elves and dragons. There, they uncover a 1000-year-old secret that makes us reconsider our most basic assumptions about human progress and wonder: What if the only way forward is backward?

Reported by Latif Nasser. Produced by Matt Kielty and Soren Wheeler.

Special thanks to Steve Diggle, Professor Roberta Frank, Alexandra Reider and Justin Park (our Old English readers), Gene Murrow from Gotham Early Music Scene, Marcia Young for her performance on the medieval harp and Collin Monro of Tadcaster and the rest of the Barony of Iron Bog.

 

 


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No wait, you're listening to Radio Lab from WNYC. Okay, I'm Chad Abenrod. I'm Robert Kroger. This is Radio Lab. And today. Well, today. Yes. 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 comes- Does that make any sense? I don't know. Well, I will. Okay, we will. 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 1928. 1928. Alexander Fleming. The story goes, who knows if it's apocryphal or not, is growing staph. Staphylococcus. In his lab. It's Marin 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. So it likes to be just up our noses or in our genitals or in our armpits, places like that. And generally, it's no big deal. It doesn't really do us any harm, but if it gets into a scratch or a cut and makes its way inside our bodies, Staph goes from being this benign companion to being potentially deadly. Anyway, London, 1928. Fleming is growing staph 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 arrest on one of those Petri dishes. And so a few weeks later, Fleming, finally back from vacation, 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 staph just overflowing right out of the plate because it's been sitting there for so long. It's been a staph party. But on one of the plates that they pick up, they realize that it's almost polka dot. It's got little dead zones all over it. Little patches where the staph is dead. Dead patches. 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,

Transcription truncated.

What happens when you combine an axe-wielding microbiologist and a disease-obsessed historian? A strange brew that's hard to resist, even for a modern day microbe. In the war on devilish microbes, our weapons are starting to fail us.  The antibiotics we once wielded like miraculous flaming swords seem more like lukewarm butter knives. But today we follow an odd couple to a storied land of elves and dragons. There, they uncover a 1000-year-old secret that makes us reconsider our most basic assumptions about human progress and wonder: What if the only way forward is backward? Reported by Latif Nasser. Produced by Matt Kielty and Soren Wheeler. Special thanks to Steve Diggle, Professor Roberta Frank, Alexandra Reider and Justin Park (our Old English readers), Gene Murrow from Gotham Early Music Scene, Marcia Young for her performance on the medieval harp and Collin Monro of Tadcaster and the rest of the Barony of Iron Bog.