LATIF NASSER: Hey, I'm Latif Nasser. Today I'm gonna play you 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 Matt Kielty and I. And what I really love about this episode is how it makes you see progress not as a straight line, sometimes not even as a line at all. Sometimes it's actually a circle. I swear it'll make sense at the end of the episode. I now present to you "Staph Retreat."

[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD ABUMRAD: Hey. I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab. And today ...

ROBERT: Well, today it's the story of an ax-wielding nun coming through a window to smack some staphylococcus, and take you back to the future.

JAD: [laughs] Exactly. This story comes ...

ROBERT: Does that make any sense? I don't know.

JAD: Well, it will.

ROBERT: Okay.

JAD: It will. This story comes in two parts, both from our producer Latif Nasser. And here's part one.

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

MARYN MCKENNA: 1928. Alexander Fleming, the story goes—who knows if it's apocryphal or not—is growing staph, staphylococcus, in his lab.

LATIF: That's Maryn McKenna. She's a science writer. And staph is a bacterium.

MARYN MCKENNA: It lives on our skin, and it especially likes parts of the body that are warm and damp.

LATIF: So it likes to be just up our noses, or ...

MARYN MCKENNA: On our genitals, or in our armpits. Places like that.

LATIF: 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 bodies ...

MARYN MCKENNA: Staph goes from being this benign companion to being potentially deadly.

LATIF: Anyway, London, 1928.

MARYN MCKENNA: Fleming is growing staph in his lab.

LATIF: In these little Petri dishes. And he was a slob, basically.

ROBERT: [laughs]

LATIF: And he goes on a vacation, leaves his Petri dishes covered in bacteria just around. Leaves his window open.

MARYN MCKENNA: And something blows across his lab plates.

LATIF: Some tiny little speck of a thing just floats in through the window and comes to a rest on one of those Petri dishes.

MARYN MCKENNA: And so a few weeks later ...

LATIF: Fleming, finally back from vacation ...

MARYN MCKENNA: He needs to use those lab plates again, and he and his assistant go to clean them off.

LATIF: I mean, you'd imagine that he would see some real lush, nice furry ...

ROBERT: [laughs]

LATIF: ... lawn of staph just overflowing.

JAD: Yeah!

LATIF: Right out of the plate.

JAD: Because it's been sitting there for so long.

LATIF: It's been a staph party.

MARYN MCKENNA: 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.

LATIF: Little patches where the staph is dead.

ROBERT: Dead patches.

JAD: Dead zones.

ROBERT: So something blew through the window, landed in the dish, and starts killing the bacteria?

LATIF: Yeah. And so when Fleming looks down at his plate, he sees that at the center of these, you know, staph dead zones, there's a ...

MARYN MCKENNA: Tiny speck of natural mold.

JAD: Ooh.

ROBERT: Of mold.

MARYN MCKENNA: And they realize that that mold is expressing a compound that is killing the staph around it.

LATIF: It's, like, emanating rays of death.

JAD: What was the compound?

LATIF: That compound was called ...

MARYN MCKENNA: Penicillin.

LATIF: The first true antibiotic.

MARYN MCKENNA: Infectious diseases that had been killing people for as long as we had been people suddenly could be stopped.

JAD: And it just blew in through the window?

MARYN MCKENNA: That is the—that is the story that's always been told.

LATIF: However it got there, it was—it was amazing. It was a miracle.

ROBERT: It was called a miracle drug, right?

MARYN MCKENNA: I mean, it was just—it really was a moment when the world changed, when Fleming was put on the cover of TIME Magazine.

LATIF: This is 1944, height of World War II.

MARYN MCKENNA: It was a picture of his face, and the banner on the cover said, "His penicillin will save more lives than war can spend."

LATIF: 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 staph that do not respond to penicillin.

JAD: Really?

LATIF: Yeah.

JAD: This is happening while he's on the cover?

LATIF: Virtually the exact same moment.

MARYN MCKENNA: And it's the first sign that staph has responded to the penicillin in the world by developing resistance.

SOREN WHEELER: It's almost like ...

JAD: That's our producer, Soren Wheeler.

SOREN: ... the era of penicillin was over before it began.

MARYN MCKENNA: Almost before it began.

LATIF: Before it's even released to the general public.

JAD: Wow!

MARYN MCKENNA: And that penicillin-resistant staph moves across the globe.

LATIF: And in 1957 in Cleveland, some scientists gather together ...

MARYN MCKENNA: And they are in a panic. They have no idea why they've lost the antibiotic miracle so quickly.

LATIF: So scientists across the globe put their brains together and try to come up with a new drug.

MARYN MCKENNA: The next amazing thing.

LATIF: And in 1960 they get it.

MARYN MCKENNA: Methicillin.

LATIF: And it works!

MARYN MCKENNA: For about 11 months.

SOREN: 11 months?

JAD: Whoa!

LATIF: And so we started this arms race.

MARYN MCKENNA: There was a bug, and then there was a drug that took care of it.

LATIF: [laughs]

MARYN MCKENNA: And then there was a better bug.

SOREN: Drug, bug, drug, bug.

MARYN MCKENNA: Right, exactly.

LATIF: I actually found this list. Do you wanna hear it?

JAD: Yeah.

LATIF: Okay. So streptomycin, 1943, resistance 1948. Methicillin, 1960, resistance 1961. Clindamycin, 1969, resistance 1970.

JAD: Wow!

MARYN MCKENNA: You can think of it as leapfrog, or you can think of it as a game of whack-a-mole.

LATIF: Ampicillin, 1961, then 1973. So that's a little—carbenicillin, released 1964, resistance 1974.

JAD: They're getting better. They're getting better.

MARYN MCKENNA: There were always more drugs. You know, the drug development was doing really well for a really long time.

LATIF: Piperacillin, introduced 1980, resistance 1981.

MARYN MCKENNA: But after the year 2000, drug companies begin to realize it's not really in their best interest to make antibiotics anymore.

LATIF: And the end I have on this list is linezolid, which is introduced 2000, resistance 2002.

JAD: Wow.

LATIF: And there are a few more, but you get the idea.

MARYN MCKENNA: Antibiotic approvals, the entry of new drugs to the market, just kind of fell off a cliff.

SOREN: Why?

MARYN MCKENNA: Well, it takes 10 years and a billion dollars to get to the point where the drug is marketable.

LATIF: But as soon as you get the drug on the market ...

MARYN MCKENNA: The resistance clock is running.

LATIF: So you probably won't make your money back. And as you've probably heard, we now have these situations ...

[NEWS CLIP: A frightening new warning from the Centers for Disease Control about the spread of a string of germs that are ...]

MARYN MCKENNA: Where literally nothing works.

[NEWS CLIP: ... so-called superbugs are now turning up in hospitals in 40 different states.]

MARYN MCKENNA: And the patient dies.

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

MARYN MCKENNA: I've seen physicians break down weeping over this. It's not the way that medicine is supposed to fail anymore, but it does.

SOREN: I mean, I know that—that possibly the origin story of penicillin is apocryphal, so this is all a little suspect but, you know, just to enjoy imagining for a moment, like, it just seems like if that happened, let's just open up a bunch more windows. Just something oughta blow in.

MARYN MCKENNA: But we could wait a long time, right? I mean, we had—staph had been around ..

LATIF: Right.

MARYN MCKENNA: ... for millennia before 1928.

LATIF: 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 kinda window though. It's ...

JAD: Not a—not a window next to some Petri dishes?

LATIF: Not a window next to some Petri dishes. Kind of a window next to some Petri dishes, but a totally different kind of window.

JAD: [laughs] What kind of window is it?

LATIF: Well, I'm about to tell you that.

JAD: Does something blow into the window?

LATIF: Yeah. But it's not mold. It's way more fun than mold. It—it carries an ax, how about that?

JAD: So it's a person.

LATIF: Maybe. [laughs]

JAD: [laughs]

LATIF: I don't know why—I don't even know what I'm referring to anymore.

JAD: Uh, part two?

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: Okay. Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab.

ROBERT: We're ready now for part two. Now remember when part one ended, there was a window open and something was going to come through. We don't know what.

JAD: But we know it's not mold.

ROBERT: Yeah, we know it's not mold. So whatever it is, whatever it was, whatever it will be, we will hear about it now from our reporter Latif Nasser.

LATIF: 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—it's a story about a friendship.

LATIF: Hey everybody!

CHRISTINA LEE: Hello again.

FREYA HARRISON: Hi!

LATIF: It's a story about an unlikely friendship. Um, it's ...

JAD: It's a buddy film.

LATIF: It's a buddy—yeah, it's a buddy movie.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: Okay, so yeah, tell—maybe just walk us through it. So ...

LATIF: Right. So okay, so you have ...

CHRISTINA LEE: Hello, I'm Dr. Christina Lee.

LATIF: ... Christina.

CHRISTINA LEE: And I'm an associate professor in Viking studies at the School of English at the University of Nottingham.

LATIF: She's a historian. And then you also have ...

FREYA HARRISON: Hi, I'm Freya Harrison.

LATIF: ... Freya.

FREYA HARRISON: I'm a research fellow in the Centre for Biomolecular Sciences at the University of Nottingham.

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

FREYA HARRISON: Okay. So most of my work is about sort of looking at how bacteria evolved during very, very long-lived infections. But ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Viking re-enactment: Argh!]

FREYA HARRISON: My—my big hobby is Anglo Saxon and Viking reenactment.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Viking re-enactment: Hold!]

FREYA HARRISON: So I have purely a sort of amateur interest in history, and mainly in dressing up as a warrior, and going to fight club every Wednesday night and learning to use the weapons.

ROBERT: Really? [laughs]

FREYA HARRISON: Yep.

LATIF: So this is actually not Freya's 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.

FREYA HARRISON: Everything from swords to spears, axes. And we give each other a jolly good bashing and have a good time! [laughs]

LATIF: I only mention this because it—it actually plays into the story.

FREYA HARRISON: Well it was—it was really a nice sort of coincidence, really.

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

FREYA HARRISON: Nottingham's one of the places in the UK not only for microbiology, but for sort of Anglo-Saxon and Viking history.

LATIF: And she goes there to study microbes, but she figures, "Hey, why not while I'm here, brush up on my Old English?"

FREYA HARRISON: [speaking Old English] I'd studied some Old English to a level where I could sort of read and speak a little bit. [speaking Old English]

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

FREYA HARRISON: So I rather cheekily emailed the School of English's Old English reading group.

LATIF: That's where she met Christina.

CHRISTINA LEE: Yes!

LATIF: The historian.

CHRISTINA LEE: And I thought Freya was ...

LATIF: At one point, Christina the historian asks Freya, like, "What do you do?" And Freya said, you know, "My day job is that I'm a microbiologist, but on evenings and weekends I'm a history nerd." And Christina said the moment she heard that ...

CHRISTINA LEE: I just kind of thought I've found my kindred spirit here.

LATIF: Because she was like, "Wow, I'm like your mirror image because I'm a historian by day, but by night I'm a microbiology nerd."

CHRISTINA LEE: I've been interested in infectious disease for quite a long time, which I don't—I don't find any kind of friends in my department.

LATIF: 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 nun character who goes off and heals people. But anyway, so they're talking back and forth, and then to cut a long story short, they find themselves both interested in this one particular book.

CHRISTINA LEE: It's known as Bald's Leechbook. So this is probably 1,100 years old.

ROBERT: What's it called? Ball—balls what?

CHRISTINA LEE: Bald's Leechbook.

ROBERT: Bald's.

CHRISTINA LEE: It's nothing to do with no hair.

ROBERT: Oh!

CHRISTINA LEE: [laughs] Even though it is spelled ...

ROBERT: Bal—is it B-A-L-D?

CHRISTINA LEE: It is, indeed.

ROBERT: And leech, like leech, like a—like a leech, like a little worm that grabs onto your—and sucks your blood?

CHRISTINA LEE: [laughs] No. No, it comes from the Old English word "lǣċe," which is actually a healer or a doctor.

FREYA HARRISON: So the little squiggly animals are called leeches because they're medicinal, not the other way around. [laughs]

ROBERT: Oh!

LATIF: So the doctor wasn't named for the leech, the leech was named for the doctor? [laughs]

FREYA HARRISON: Exactly, yeah.

JAD: And Bald is the—is a man? The guy who wrote the book?

FREYA HARRISON: We think it's a guy. We think it's a guy's name.

JAD: And what is this book?

LATIF: So it's kinda like this old healer's handbook. It's filled with these potions and cures.

CHRISTINA LEE: The original manuscript is in the British Library.

LATIF: Locked away.

FREYA HARRISON: But 21st century very kind people have digitized the original Old English text and—and put it online.

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

CHRISTINA LEE: And, you know, it describes to you remedies for stuff that is a little bit different.

FREYA HARRISON: You know, things like possession by the devil.

LATIF: Which, according to this Leechbook, the remedy for someone who is possessed by the devil is you make 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 gonna say about that one is that it involves hound's urine and mouse blood.

CHRISTINA LEE: And then things like, how shall we say, make your husband more physically attentive?

LATIF: [laughs]

CHRISTINA LEE: Or less physically attentive? Whichever you—whichever direction you need to moderate it.

ROBERT: Pig's blood, I hope. Or toad blood.

LATIF: Actually, it's just you boil a plant in some water and give it to the guy.

ROBERT: Oh.

LATIF: Yeah. Anyway, so Freya and Christina are going through this Leechbook looking for some kind of wound.

FREYA HARRISON: Something that was clearly an infection.

LATIF: Some pus-y something?

FREYA HARRISON: We could clearly say that's bacterial.

LATIF: And eventually, they find an entry ...

FREYA HARRISON: Where at the end of the recipe, it says in Old English ...

FREYA HARRISON: "Sé betst lǣċedōm." The best medicine.

LATIF: The best medicine.

ROBERT: Hmm.

LATIF: Yeah, move over laughter.

FREYA HARRISON: Yeah. And we thought, how can we not try this one? [laughs]

LATIF: What was the best medicine for?

FREYA HARRISON: So it said it was for a lump in the eye.

CHRISTINA LEE: It's actually called "wén" in Old English.

FREYA HARRISON: Yeah. These days if you get a—of course, that could be something like a wart, right?

LATIF: Hmm.

FREYA HARRISON: But there is a suggestion by archaeologists that eye infection was—was rife amongst the Anglo Saxons.

LATIF: Really?

FREYA HARRISON: Because you lived in buildings where you—you have smoke going on. You lived cramped together. So it could also be a sty.

LATIF: What is a sty?

FREYA HARRISON: It's an infection of an eyelash follicle.

ROBERT: You rub it and it itches, and then it gets swollen.

FREYA HARRISON: Yeah, and it causes quite a nasty red lump.

ROBERT: It's a sty in your eye.

LATIF: Sty in your eye. Now it just so happens that the bacteria that causes the sty in your eye is ...

FREYA HARRISON: Staphylococcus aureus.

LATIF: Staph.

JAD: Oh, the same stuff as the Mr. Window Man. Penicillin man.

LATIF: Exactly.

FREYA HARRISON: And we just thought, wouldn't it be nice to have a bit of spare time and had a couple of hundred quid to buy the ingredients and just give this a go?

CHRISTINA LEE: Yes, let's give it a try.

FREYA HARRISON: You know, why the hell not?

LATIF: And a matter of fact ...

LATIF: Look at this place!

LATIF: ... we thought that too.

MATT KIELTY: Studio.

LATIF: Not bad at all.

LATIF: Recently, producer Matt Kielty and I went to my tiny apartment in the city, and ...

MATT: All right.

LATIF: ... we tried to cook it up too.

MATT: Are you ready to cook?

LATIF: Oh, I'm ready to cook. [laughs]

FREYA HARRISON: I've got this recipe here if you'd like it.

LATIF: Oh, awesome. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Please read it. Go for it.

FREYA HARRISON: Okay. It goes like this ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, speaking Old English]

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

FREYA HARRISON: The word, "cropléac."

CHRISTINA LEE: "Cropléac."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, [Cropléac.]]

FREYA HARRISON: Christina said was quite difficult to translate.

CHRISTINA LEE: Nobody quite knows, you know, what it is. But luckily ...

LATIF: Just a couple words over was a clue.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, [Gārlēac.]]

LATIF: A second ingredient.

FREYA HARRISON: Garlic, which is an allium species. And cropléac, we know this was another allium. That's what the dictionary of Old English tells us.

LATIF: So they figured probably what they were dealing with was an onion or a leek.

FREYA HARRISON: But we didn't know which one. So we thought okay, we'll try one that has onion and one that has leek.

LATIF: Now the recipe doesn't call for this, but we did it anyway.

LATIF: Peel the onion. Chop it up. The same with the garlic.

CHRISTINA LEE: And the recipe, it doesn't tell you how much. It just tells you equal amounts of.

LATIF: So you take out the measuring cups, you measure out equal amounts.

LATIF: Yeah, equal amounts into the pestle.

LATIF: And then after that ...

MATT: Okay.

LATIF: It says ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: [speaking Old English]]

LATIF: ... "Pounded well together."

MATT: Okay.

CHRISTINA LEE: You have to really pound it, and pound it Freya did.

FREYA HARRISON: Yeah. Yeah, so lots of time with a mortar and pestle, muscles built up from wielding a sword for pounding the ingredients.

LATIF: Look, it's starting to be more of a mush.

LATIF: Third ingredient?

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

[ARCHIVE CLIP: [speaking Old English]]

FREYA HARRISON: Ox gall.

LATIF: Ox gall.

FREYA HARRISON: Bovine bile from a—from a cow's gallbladder.

ROBERT: [laughs] What, do you have to kill the cow and then go reach ...

FREYA HARRISON: No, it's actually a very standard ingredient in microbiology labs.

MATT: Ox bile.

LATIF: Today in 2015, you can but should not just buy it on the internet.

MATT: Here we go, here we go.

LATIF: And so you take the ox bile, add it to the onion and garlic ...

FREYA HARRISON: And then the fourth ingredient ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: [speaking Old English]]

FREYA HARRISON: ... wine.

LATIF: It's wine time. Red wine? White wine? Like, what kind of wine are we talking about here?

FREYA HARRISON: Well, 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—bit of detective work.

LATIF: And she figured out that the monastery where this Leechbook was written, well, they—she figured out where their vineyard was.

FREYA HARRISON: And just down the road, there's this modern organic vineyard.

LATIF: So they used that wine.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: [speaking Old English]]

LATIF: I just want to point out how difficult it is to find English wine. We had to use Italian. But ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: [speaking Old English]]

LATIF: ... once you get all that stuff together, you're onto the final ingredient.

FREYA HARRISON: The fifth ingredient was actually the—you're specifically told that you have to mix these ingredients together in a brass or a bronze pot. I don't have one. [laughs] So we had to sort of add pieces of—you know, of copper that would've been available to people at the time.

LATIF: So they had to do some research, but they figured that the copper of today that is most like the copper of a millennium ago was actually ...

FREYA HARRISON: Cartridge brass, which is what's used as standard in plumbing fittings.

LATIF: Dropped a few pennies in there.

LATIF: We actually used pennies.

MATT: Do I stir it? I think I stir it.

LATIF: This is like the world's worst cooking show.

MATT: [laughs]

FREYA HARRISON: And it looks and smells like quite a nice—quite a nice summer soup. [laughs]

LATIF: Oh!

MATT: Oh, it looks awful.

LATIF: Oh, that's so gross! Clearly, we botched this whole thing.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: [speaking Old English]]

LATIF: And finally ...

MATT: All right, so we're gonna cover it.

LATIF: Okay, we're covering it.

LATIF: ... the directions say we have to let the whole thing sit for a while.

FREYA HARRISON: It has to be stored for nine days and nights.

MATT: Okay. That's it.

ROBERT: One day goes by. Two days, three, four, five.

LATIF: Six, seven, eight, nine.

MATT: All right. Nine days later.

LATIF: All right. Here we go. You ready?

MATT: Mm-hmm.

LATIF: All right, here we go.

FREYA HARRISON: And ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: [speaking Old English]]

FREYA HARRISON: Then you have to strain it through a cloth. The liquid that comes off, you apply to the person's eye.

MATT: Oh, the liquid!

[ARCHIVE CLIP: [speaking Old English]]

CHRISTINA LEE: Yeah, with a feather.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: [speaking Old English]]

FREYA HARRISON: With a feather.

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

FREYA HARRISON: With these little plugs of—of collagen, so it's a bit like jelly.

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

FREYA HARRISON: And we infect these wounds with bacteria, with the staph.

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

FREYA HARRISON: We'd—obviously, we didn't think this was going to work.

CHRISTINA LEE: No.

FREYA HARRISON: We thought, you know, well given the ingredients, we might see some small killing effect on the bacteria, but it won't be anything to write home about.

LATIF: They thought maybe it'd kill 10 percent, 20 percent of the bacteria. But then when they came back the next day ...

FREYA HARRISON: It was a staph massacre.

LATIF: It went on a rampage! It went on a staph rampage.

FREYA HARRISON: It was killing, you know, 99.99999 percent of these bacterial cells.

LATIF: What?!

FREYA HARRISON: Yeah. First we thought we made some sort of mistake and this was some kind of fluke, you know? We'd accidentally mixed up our plates or mislabeled something.

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

FREYA HARRISON: Just absolutely wiped out the bacteria in these fake wounds.

CHRISTINA LEE: Killed them dead.

LATIF: Then they tried a third time, and a fourth, and a fifth, and it worked every time!

FREYA HARRISON: And this is—this is just something you really don't see in your career as a microbiologist. [laughs]

LATIF: And eventually, they escalated from just regular staph to MRSA. To the methicillin-resistant staph. And this is one of the bad ones.

[NEWS CLIP: A superbug. New government data estimate that about 2,000 people are dying of community-based MRSA every year.]

[NEWS CLIP: This one is very dangerous.]

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

FREYA HARRISON: Our collaborator Kendra Rumbaugh in Lubbock, in Texas.

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

FREYA HARRISON: And I think it was actually a three-word response. I think she just simply said ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: [speaking Old English]]

FREYA HARRISON: What the [bleep]. [laughs]

LATIF: Bald's best medicine had just wreaked havoc on the MRSA. It killed 90 percent of them.

FREYA HARRISON: It's just—it's beyond our wildest dreams.

LATIF: Now Freya and Christina made very clear that this is not yet a miracle drug. I mean, it's not even being tested in humans.

CHRISTINA LEE: So absolutely do not do this at home.

LATIF: They don't even know if this is safe.

FREYA HARRISON: It might be that if you don't do it in exactly the way we did, nasty fungus could grow in it, give you a worse infection.

LATIF: So ...

LATIF: We should not have done this.

MATT: [laughs]

LATIF: Matt and I, we dumped ours down 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. Like, it's like, the idea that something a thousand years ago, like a bullet forged a thousand years ago, we could—we could use it now and that it could work. That—the time travel dimension of that is so weird to me. It kind of makes you think differently about, I don't know, progress.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, presenter: So without much further ado, Dr. Christina Lee and Dr. Freya Harrison, and they're going to talk to us about some ancient biotics.]

[applause]

LATIF: For example, just a few weeks ago, Freya and Christina got up in front of the Royal Society of Chemists.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Christina Lee: Thank you very much, and it is an absolute pleasure to be here.]

LATIF: Large hotel conference room, hundred or so people. Freya actually got up on stage dressed as a nun.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Freya Harrison: Okay, so this is one interpretation of what an Anglo Saxon scientist may have looked like.]

LATIF: And they presented the results.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Freya Harrison: Next ingredient is particularly ...]

LATIF: They did the cooking demo. 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 ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Christina Lee: There are remedies which ask you, "Sing four Ava Marias."]

LATIF: And we would say, "Oh, that's so superstitious. This is all in their heads."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Christina Lee: But there again, we should also remember this is a period when people do not have watches. You do not have your nurse, you know, so they've got the watch. Everybody knows the Ava Maria. Everybody knows the length of an Ava Maria.]

LATIF: So maybe it's—maybe it's, take this medicine and wait 20 minutes. And I know how to standardize 20 minutes, which is ...

[00:25:02.11]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Christina Lee: Three Ava Marias, four Ava Marias, may actually be time periods.]

LATIF: So it ...

ROBERT: Oh, that's fascinating.

LATIF: It may appear one way, and it's—it in fact could be a totally different way.

JAD: It suggests that in order to time travel, you have to somehow—God, it's like we don't even have the language to be able to understand what they were doing.

LATIF: There's a ...

JAD: And how effective it was.

LATIF: There's a phrase. "The past is a foreign country."

CHRISTINA LEE: We need to learn the language of the doctors of that time. We need to kind of be a little bit less dismissive, and learn a little bit more, you know, stuff from them. I learned a bit of humility this way.

LATIF: But here's the reason why this is so confusing to me.

FREYA HARRISON: Hmm.

LATIF: So 1,100 years is a crazy long time for humans, and for bacteria that's like a exponentially crazy long time.

FREYA HARRISON: Yeah.

LATIF: So how is it that something that this man Bald was doing to these bacteria then—like, it's not even the same bacteria.

FREYA HARRISON: Yeah.

LATIF: How could that even work?

FREYA HARRISON: That—that's an awesome question. So one thing we've got to think about is well, why did these medicines drop out of use? And maybe it's because when they were used, the bacteria evolved resistance. But now, a thousand years later, when these medicines have not been used, you would expect that resistance to be lost.

LATIF: This is something that Maryn McKenna mentioned to Soren and I, that sometimes when you take a drug out of circulation ...

MARYN MCKENNA: Sometimes resistance will decline. That doesn't always work, but sometimes resistance does decline. So if we had been using this compound through the ensuing thousand years, then maybe it wouldn't work.

ROBERT: So there's an interesting discovery there. Like, that what worked once, and then was resisted, you give it a rest, it can work again. And then it will be resisted, and you put it to rest. And if you had enough different—if you could go to different places and the different path you could go to China, where they now got all these people studying Chinese cures and Arab cures, you could come up with a—with a rich historical cocktail of armamentarium that will work if you bring 'em in, take 'em out. Bring 'em in, take 'em out. And the whole world—the whole world of the past then becomes the fruit of your future, sort of.

SOREN: So it's also poss—like, now I have suddenly an image that it's possible that ...

JAD: This is Soren Wheeler, by the way, in conversation with Maryn McKenna and Latif.

SOREN: That a thousand years ago, these folks went through what we went through with penicillin, in that they—this guy wrote something in the book, and it's actually called the best medicine. He probably got on the cover of whatever their version of TIME was.

MARYN MCKENNA: He got their Nobel Prize. [laughs]

SOREN: And everybody celebrated. And then years later styes were coming back and the garlic wine didn't work anymore, and they stopped using it. And it got put away, and then here we are and we discover it, and it's been put away long enough that—like, and now I'm thinking about future—some future civilization digs up an old medical textbook that was in some dusty whatever and discovers penicillin. And it works. Did we—did I lose you on that, Maryn?

MARYN MCKENNA: No, no. I'm still with you. I'm just—I don't know how—it just seems like such a great hypothetical construction, I just didn't really know what I could add to it. Sorry. [laughs]

SOREN: [laughs] Sorry I took over.

LATIF: 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 salve. 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 1,000 years pass by.

JAD: Producer Latif Nasser with help from Soren Wheeler, and produced by Matthew Kielty.

Special thanks this hour to Steve Diggle ...

ROBERT: And to Alexandra Reider and Justin Park, who came down from Yale to be our Old English readers.

JAD: To Gene Murrow from the Gotham Early Music Scene...

ROBERT: ... and to Marcia Young on the medieval harp.

JAD: Collin Monro of Tadcaster.

ROBERT: And the rest of the Barony of Iron Bog.

JAD: Not totally sure what that is, but I know they helped us out. And I guess we should help ourselves out.

ROBERT: Yes, very quickly. [laughs]

JAD: Of the door. Or through the window. I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: Thanks for listening.

[LISTENER: Hi, I'm Alanna and I'm from Queens, New York. Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes: Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, Ekedi Fausther-Keeys, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gebel, Maria Paz Gutiérrez, Sindhu Gnanasambandan, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neason, Sarah Qari, Sarah Sandbach, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters and Molly Webster. Our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger and Natalie Middleton.]

[LISTENER: Hi, this is Ellie from Cleveland, Ohio. Leadership support for Radiolab's science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.]

 

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