Staph Retreat

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 in this episode, originally released in 2015, we follow an odd couple, of a sort, to a storied land of elves and dragons. There, they uncover a 1,000-year-old secret that makes us reconsider our most basic assumptions about human progress and wonder: what if the only way forward is backward? 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. Can’t get enough of that sweet, sweet antibiotic resistance content? Then you’ll be over the moon about next week’s release. It’s the podcast cut of our most recent installment of our live show series called Viscera. This one features executive editor Soren Wheeler and Avir Mitra, and it’s all about how our millenia's-long war against bacteria came to a tipping point in this modern age. Subscribe or follow our show on your favorite streaming platform and you’ll be the first to know when it drops. EPISODE CREDITS: Reported by - Latif NasserProduced by - Matt Kielty and Soren Wheeler EPISODE CITATIONS:Articles - Uncovering the multifaceted mechanism of action of a historical antimicrobial (https://zpr.io/mucw6Td6LBxT) by Harrison, F et al, 2026 bioRxv (PREPRINT). In this article Freya and her team describe the mechanisms under which Bald’s Remedy actually works. Signup for our newsletter!! It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)! Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today. Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing [email protected]. Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  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.

• 0:29Speaker 01

  Yep, you're listening. Wait, you're listening. Okay. All right.

• 0:33Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 0:34Speaker 01

  All right.

• 0:36Speaker 02

  You're listening to Radiolab.

• 0:39Speaker 01

  Radiolab.

• 0:39Speaker 02

  From...

• 0:40Speaker 01

  WNYC.

• 0:44Speaker 00

  Rewind.

• 0:48Speaker 03

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

• 0:53Speaker 04

  1928, Alexander Fleming, the story goes, who knows if it's apocryphal or not, is growing Staph, Staphylococcus, in his lab.

• 1:02Speaker 03

  That's Maren McKenna, she's a science writer. And Staph is a bacterium.

• 1:07Speaker 04

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

• 1:14Speaker 03

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

• 1:16Speaker 04

  On our genitals, or in our armpits, places like that.

• 1:19Speaker 03

  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...

• 1:28Speaker 04

  Staph goes from being this benign companion to being potentially deadly.

• 1:36Speaker 03

  Anyway, London, 1928.

• 1:38Speaker 04

  Fleming is growing Staph in his lab.

• 1:41Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:56Speaker 04

  And... Something blows across his lab plates.

• 1:59Speaker 03

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

• 2:06Speaker 04

  And so, a few weeks later.

• 2:07Speaker 03

  Fleming, finally, back from vacation.

• 2:09Speaker 04

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

• 2:14Speaker 03

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

• 2:28Speaker 04

  But on one of the plates that they pick up, they realize that...

• 2:33Speaker 04

  It's almost polka dot. It's got little dead zones all over it.

• 2:37Speaker 03

  Little patches where the staff is dead.

• 2:42Speaker 05

  Dead patches. So something blew through the window, landed in the dish, and starts killing the bacteria.

• 2:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, and so when Fleming looks down at his plate, he sees that at the center of these, you know, staff dead zones, there's a-

• 2:58Speaker 04

  Tiny speck of natural mold.

• 3:00Speaker 05

  Ooh, mold.

• 3:01Speaker 04

  And they realize that that mold is expressing a compound that is killing the staff around it.

• 3:06Speaker 03

  It's like emanating rays of death. What was the compound? That compound was called-

• 3:13Speaker 04

  Penicillin.

• 3:14Speaker 03

  The first true antibiotic.

• 3:17Speaker 04

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

• 3:23Speaker 03

  And it just blew in through the window?

• 3:24Speaker 04

  That is the, that is the story that's always been told.

• 3:27Speaker 03

  However it got there, it was, it was amazing. It was a miracle.

• 3:31Speaker 05

  It was called a miracle drug, right?

• 3:33Speaker 04

  I mean, it was just, it was, it really was a moment when the world changed, when Fleming was put on the cover of Time magazine.

• 3:39Speaker 03

  This is 1944, height of World War II.

• 3:42Speaker 04

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

• 3:58Speaker 03

  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.

• 4:23Speaker 04

  And it's the first sign that staff has responded to the penicillin in the world by developing resistance.

• 4:31Speaker 01

  It's almost like, uh...

• 4:33Speaker 03

  Sepharis or Soren Wheeler?

• 4:34Speaker 01

  The era of penicillin was over before it began.

• 4:37Speaker 04

  Almost before it began.

• 4:38Speaker 03

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

• 4:42Speaker 04

  And that penicillin-resistant staff moves across the globe.

• 4:47Speaker 03

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

• 4:51Speaker 04

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

• 4:57Speaker 03

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

• 5:01Speaker 04

  The next amazing thing.

• 5:03Speaker 03

  And in 1960, they get it.

• 5:04Speaker 04

  Methicillin.

• 5:07Speaker 03

  And it works!

• 5:08Speaker 04

  For about 11 months.

• 5:11Speaker 01

  11 months?

• 5:12Speaker 03

  Wow. And so, we started this arms race.

• 5:16Speaker 04

  There was a bug, and then there was a drug that took care of it, and then there was a better bug.

• 5:20Speaker 01

  Drug bug, drug bug.

• 5:21Speaker 04

  Right, exactly.

• 5:22Speaker 03

  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.

• 5:37Speaker 04

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

• 5:41Speaker 03

  Ampicillin, 1961, then 1973. So that's a little... Carbenicillin, released 1964, resistance 1974. They're getting better, they're getting better.

• 5:51Speaker 04

  There were always more drugs. Drug development was doing really well for a really long time.

• 5:56Speaker 03

  Hypericillin, introduced 1980, resistance 1981.

• 6:00Speaker 04

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

• 6:07Speaker 03

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

• 6:17Speaker 04

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

• 6:22Speaker 01

  Why?

• 6:23Speaker 04

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

• 6:27Speaker 03

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

• 6:29Speaker 04

  The resistance clock is running.

• 6:31Speaker 03

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

• 6:38Speaker 06

  Well, frightening new warning from the Centers for Disease Control about the spread of a string of germs-

• 6:42Speaker 04

  Where literally nothing works.

• 6:44Speaker 06

  So-called superbugs are now turning up in hospitals in 42 states.

• 6:48Speaker 04

  And the patient dies.

• 6:50Speaker 03

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

• 6:53Speaker 04

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

• 7:02Speaker 01

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

• 7:19Speaker 04

  But we could wait a long time, right? I mean, we had, staff had been around-

• 7:22Speaker 03

  Right.

• 7:23Speaker 04

  -for millennia before 1928.

• 7:27Speaker 03

  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.

• 7:37Speaker 01

  Not a window next to some Petri dishes?

• 7:39Speaker 03

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

• 7:44Speaker 01

  What kind of window is it?

• 7:46Speaker 03

  Well, I'm about to tell you that.

• 7:47Speaker 01

  Is something blowing into the window?

• 7:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, but it's not mold. It's way more fun than mold. It carries an axe, how about that?

• 7:55Speaker 01

  So it's a person?

• 7:56Speaker 03

  Maybe. I don't even know what I'm referring to anymore.

• 8:04Speaker 00

  Radiolab is supported by Capital One. With no fees or minimums on checking accounts, it's no wonder the Capital One Bank guy is so passionate about banking with Capital One. If he were here, he wouldn't just tell you about no fees or minimums. He'd also talk about how Capital One cafes are open seven days a week to assist with your banking needs, even on weekends. It's pretty much all he talks about, in a good way. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See CapitalOne.com/BankGuy. Capital One, N.A., member FDIC.

• 8:29Speaker 07

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• 8:48Speaker 08

  This week on The New Yorker Radio Hour, will House Democrats try once again for impeachment?

• 8:52Speaker 09

  Let's not make a fetish out of impeachment. Let's not make a taboo out of impeachment. We understand it's not a panacea, but it is an essential tool in the constitutional toolbox that's always there.

• 9:04Speaker 08

  Congressman Jamie Raskin joins us next time on The New Yorker Radio Hour from WNYC. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

• 9:18Speaker 03

  Part two?

• 9:19Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 9:19Speaker 03

  Okay. Hey, I'm Jadha Bumrah.

• 9:21Speaker 05

  I'm Robert Krowich.

• 9:22Speaker 03

  This is Radiolab.

• 9:23Speaker 05

  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.

• 9:30Speaker 03

  We know it's not mold.

• 9:31Speaker 05

  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 Nassar.

• 9:38Speaker 03

  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. Hey, everybody.

• 9:57Speaker 10

  Hello again.

• 9:58Speaker 11

  Hello again.

• 9:59Speaker 03

  It's a buddy film. It's a buddy, yeah, it's a buddy movie. Okay, so yeah, maybe just walk us through it. Right, so, okay, so you have...

• 10:06Speaker 10

  Hello, I'm Dr. Christina Lee.

• 10:08Speaker 03

  Christina.

• 10:08Speaker 10

  And I'm an associate professor in Viking Studies at the School of English at the University of Nottingham.

• 10:15Speaker 03

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

• 10:18Speaker 11

  Hi, I'm Freya Harrison.

• 10:19Speaker 03

  Freya.

• 10:20Speaker 11

  I'm a research fellow in the Center for Biomolecular Sciences at the University of Nottingham.

• 10:25Speaker 03

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

• 10:30Speaker 11

  Okay, so most of my work is about sort of looking at how bacteria evolved during very, very long-lived infections, but...

• 10:39Speaker 11

  My big hobby is Anglo-Saxon and Viking reenactment. So I had purely amateur interest in the history and mainly in dressing up as a warrior and going to Fight Club every Wednesday night and learning to use the weapons.

• 10:55Speaker 03

  Really?

• 10:56Speaker 11

  Yep.

• 10:57Speaker 03

  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 some field with some dulled weapons.

• 11:07Speaker 11

  Everything from swords, spears, axes, and we give each other a jolly good bashing and have a good time.

• 11:17Speaker 03

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

• 11:20Speaker 11

  Well, it was a really nice sort of coincidence, really.

• 11:24Speaker 03

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

• 11:29Speaker 11

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

• 11:37Speaker 03

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

• 11:43Speaker 11

  With her, it's Woolfield, it's Abudissa. I'd studied some Old English to a level where I could read and speak a little bit. That's standard Nich Nichter.

• 11:54Speaker 03

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

• 12:01Speaker 11

  So I rather cheekily emailed the School of English's Old English Reading Group.

• 12:05Speaker 03

  That's where she met Christina.

• 12:06Speaker 11

  Yes!

• 12:07Speaker 03

  The historian. 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.

• 12:22Speaker 11

  I just kind of thought, I've found my kindred spirit here.

• 12:26Speaker 03

  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.

• 12:33Speaker 11

  I've been interested in infectious disease for quite a long time, which...

• 12:38Speaker 10

  I don't, I don't find any kind of friends in my department.

• 12:41Speaker 03

  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, they find themselves both interested in this one particular book.

• 13:16Speaker 11

  It's known as Bald's Leech Book. So this is about 1,100 years old.

• 13:20Speaker 03

  What's it called? Bald, Bald's what?

• 13:22Speaker 10

  Bald's Leech Book. It's nothing to do with no hair.

• 13:25Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 13:26Speaker 10

  Even though it is.

• 13:27Speaker 03

  Bald, is it B A L D?

• 13:30Speaker 10

  It is, indeed.

• 13:31Speaker 03

  And leech, like leech, like a, like a leech, like a little worm that grabs on to your, and sucks your blood?

• 13:35Speaker 10

  No, no, it comes from the old English word leecher, which is actually a healer or a doctor.

• 13:40Speaker 11

  So that the, the little squiggly animals are called leeches because they're medicinal, not the other way around.

• 13:45Speaker 03

  Oh. So the doctor wasn't named for the leech, the leech was named for the doctor.

• 13:49Speaker 11

  Exactly, yeah.

• 13:50Speaker 03

  And Bald is the, is a man, the guy who wrote the book?

• 13:53Speaker 11

  We think it's a guy, we think it's a guy's name.

• 13:55Speaker 03

  And what is this book? So it's kind of like this old healer's handbook. It's filled with these potions and cures.

• 14:01Speaker 10

  The original manuscript is in the British Library.

• 14:03Speaker 03

  Locked away.

• 14:03Speaker 11

  But 21st century, very kind people have digitized the original old English text and, and put it online.

• 14:10Speaker 03

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

• 14:14Speaker 10

  And, you know, as it describes to you, remedies for stuff that is a little bit different, you know, things like.

• 14:21Speaker 03

  Von deval, von manana.

• 14:24Speaker 11

  Possession by the devil.

• 14:25Speaker 03

  Which according to this leech book, the remedy for someone who is possessed by the devil is you. Spew a drink, elutre. Make this kind of like foul brew, you make them drink it and it'll make them vomit out the devil. And, and then there's another remedy for warts. Bishayob wirt, eknuat osomne. And all I'm going to say about that one is that it involves hound's urine and mouse blood.

• 14:48Speaker 11

  And then things like.

• 14:50Speaker 03

  If man se atorana.

• 14:52Speaker 11

  How shall we say, make your husband more physically attentive? Or less physically attentive, whichever you, whichever direction you need to moderate it.

• 15:01Speaker 05

  Pig's blood, I hope, or toad blood.

• 15:03Speaker 12

  Drink on neact nestia.

• 15:05Speaker 03

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

• 15:09Speaker 05

  Oh.

• 15:09Speaker 03

  Yeah. Anyway. So Frey and Christina are going through this leech book, looking for some kind of wound.

• 15:16Speaker 11

  Something that was clearly an infection.

• 15:18Speaker 03

  Some pussy, uh, something.

• 15:20Speaker 11

  Something we could clearly say that's, that's bacterial.

• 15:23Speaker 03

  And eventually they, they find an entry.

• 15:26Speaker 11

  Where at the end of the recipe, it says in old English.

• 15:29Speaker 12

  Se besta lachdom.

• 15:31Speaker 11

  Se besta lachdom. The best medicine.

• 15:35Speaker 03

  The best medicine.

• 15:36Speaker 13

  Hmm.

• 15:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, move over laughter.

• 15:38Speaker 11

  Yeah, and we thought, how can we not try this one?

• 15:42Speaker 03

  What was the best medicine for?

• 15:44Speaker 11

  So it said it was for a lump in the eye.

• 15:47Speaker 10

  It's actually called when in old English.

• 15:49Speaker 11

  These days, if you get a, of course, that, that could be something like a wart, right?

• 15:53Speaker 10

  But there is a suggestion by archaeologists that eye infection was, was rife amongst the Anglo Saxons.

• 15:59Speaker 03

  Really?

• 16:00Speaker 10

  Because you lived in buildings where you, you had smoke going on, you lived cramped together.

• 16:06Speaker 11

  So it could also be a sty.

• 16:08Speaker 03

  What is a sty?

• 16:09Speaker 11

  It, it's an infection of an eyelash follicle.

• 16:11Speaker 05

  You rub it and it itches and then it gets swollen.

• 16:14Speaker 11

  And it causes quite a nasty red lump.

• 16:16Speaker 05

  It's a sty in your eye.

• 16:17Speaker 03

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

• 16:22Speaker 11

  Staphylococcus aureus.

• 16:24Speaker 03

  Staph.

• 16:24Speaker 13

  Oh, the same stuff as the Mr. Window Man, Penicillin Man.

• 16:28Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 16:29Speaker 11

  And we just thought, wouldn't it be nice to have a bit of spare time and earn 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, why the hell not?

• 16:40Speaker 03

  And matter of fact. Look at this place! We thought that too. Studio.

• 16:45Speaker 13

  Not bad at all.

• 16:46Speaker 03

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

• 16:51Speaker 13

  All right.

• 16:51Speaker 03

  We tried to cook it up too.

• 16:53Speaker 13

  Are you ready to cook?

• 16:54Speaker 03

  Oh, I'm ready to cook.

• 16:55Speaker 11

  I've got this recipe here.

• 16:57Speaker 03

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

• 16:59Speaker 11

  OK, it goes like this.

• 17:06Speaker 03

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

• 17:11Speaker 11

  The word kropliach.

• 17:12Speaker 10

  Kropliach.

• 17:13Speaker 03

  Kropliach.

• 17:14Speaker 11

  Christina said it was quite difficult to translate. Nobody quite knows, you know, what it is. But luckily.

• 17:18Speaker 03

  Just a couple of words over was a clue. And garlic. The second ingredient.

• 17:23Speaker 11

  Garlic, which is an allium species. And kropliach. We know this was another allium. That's what the Dictionary of Old English tells us.

• 17:31Speaker 03

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

• 17:34Speaker 11

  But we didn't know which one. So we thought, OK, we'll try one that has onion and one that has leek.

• 17:41Speaker 03

  Now, the recipe doesn't call for this, but we did it anyway. Peel the onion, chop it up. The same for the garlic.

• 17:49Speaker 10

  And the recipe, it doesn't tell you how much. It does tell you equal amounts of.

• 17:54Speaker 03

  So you take out the measuring cups. You measure out equal amounts. Yeah, equal amounts. And there's a pestle. And then after that. OK, it says.

• 18:06Speaker 03

  Pounded well together. OK.

• 18:08Speaker 10

  But you have to be really pounded. And pounded, Freya did.

• 18:12Speaker 11

  Yeah, yeah. So lots of time with the mortar and pestle. Muscles built up from wielding a sword if they're pounding the ingredients.

• 18:20Speaker 03

  Look, it's starting to be more of a mush. Third ingredient.

• 18:23Speaker 11

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

• 18:29Speaker 11

  Ox gall.

• 18:30Speaker 03

  Ox gall.

• 18:31Speaker 11

  Bovine bile from a cow's gall bladder.

• 18:33Speaker 05

  What, do you have to kill the cow and then go reach it?

• 18:35Speaker 11

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

• 18:39Speaker 03

  Ox bile. 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.

• 18:46Speaker 11

  And then the fourth ingredient.

• 18:48Speaker 03

  Ye neem ween.

• 18:49Speaker 11

  Wine.

• 18:50Speaker 03

  It's wine time. Red wine, white wine? What like, what kind of wine are we talking about here?

• 18:53Speaker 11

  This is the thing. So we, 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.

• 19:04Speaker 03

  And she figured out that the monastery where this leech book was written, well, they, she figured out where their vineyard was.

• 19:10Speaker 11

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

• 19:13Speaker 03

  So they used that wine. Gavioli. Gavioli and figli. And figli. I just want to point out how difficult it is to find English wine. We had to use Italian, but. E men with su laccio, thone on our fat. Once you get all that stuff together, you're under the final ingredient.

• 19:28Speaker 11

  The, 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. Um, I don't have one. Um, so we had to sort of add pieces of, you know, of copper that would have been available to people at the time.

• 19:43Speaker 03

  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.

• 19:50Speaker 11

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

• 19:54Speaker 03

  Dropped a few pennies in there. We actually use pennies. Do I stir it? I think I stir it. It's like a world's worst cooking show.

• 20:00Speaker 11

  Um, it, it looks and smells like quite a nice, uh, quite a nice summer soup.

• 20:06Speaker 03

  Oh. Oh, that looks awful. Oh, that's so gross. Clearly we botched this whole thing. La standa neonic, onam arfata. And, uh, finally. Alright, so we're gonna cover it. Okay, we're covering it. The directions say we have to let the whole thing sit for a while.

• 20:21Speaker 11

  It has to be stored for nine days and nights.

• 20:25Speaker 03

  Okay. That's it.

• 20:28Speaker 05

  One day goes by, two days, three, four, five.

• 20:31Speaker 03

  Six, seven, eight, nine. Alright. Nine days later. Uh, alright, here we go. You ready? Mm-hmm. Alright, here we go.

• 20:42Speaker 11

  And

• 20:46Speaker 11

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

• 20:52Speaker 03

  Oh, the liquid?

• 20:55Speaker 11

  With a feather. With a feather.

• 21:00Speaker 03

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

• 21:06Speaker 11

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

• 21:10Speaker 03

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

• 21:14Speaker 11

  And we infect these wounds with bacteria with the staff.

• 21:17Speaker 03

  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.

• 21:24Speaker 11

  We'd obviously, we didn't think this was going to work. No. 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.

• 21:35Speaker 03

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

• 21:41Speaker 11

  And it was a staff massacre.

• 21:42Speaker 03

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

• 21:47Speaker 11

  It was killing, you know, 99.99999% of these bacterial cells.

• 21:53Speaker 03

  What?

• 21:54Speaker 11

  Yeah. First, we thought we'd made some sort of mistake, and this was some kind of fluke. You know, we'd accidentally mixed up our plates or mislabeled something.

• 22:02Speaker 03

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

• 22:10Speaker 11

  Just absolutely wiped out the bacteria in these fake wounds.

• 22:14Speaker 03

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

• 22:17Speaker 11

  And this is just something you really don't see in your career as a microbiologist.

• 22:24Speaker 03

  And eventually, they escalated from just regular staff to MRSA,

• 22:31Speaker 03

  to the methicillin-resistant staff. And this is one of the bad ones.

• 22:34Speaker 14

  The superbug. New government data estimate that about 2,000 people are dying of community-based MRSA every year. This one is very dangerous.

• 22:43Speaker 03

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

• 22:50Speaker 11

  Our collaborator Kendra Rumbow in Lubbock in Texas.

• 22:53Speaker 03

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

• 23:00Speaker 11

  And I think it was actually a three-word response. I think she just simply said, What the fuck? What the [bleep]?

• 23:08Speaker 03

  Bald's Best Medicine had just wreaked havoc on the Mersa. It killed 90% of them.

• 23:14Speaker 10

  This is beyond our wildest dreams.

• 23:16Speaker 03

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

• 23:24Speaker 10

  So absolutely do not do this at home.

• 23:28Speaker 03

  They don't even know if this is safe.

• 23:30Speaker 11

  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.

• 23:36Speaker 03

  So, uh... We should not have done this. Matt and I, we...

• 23:45Speaker 03

  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 1,000 years ago, like a bullet forged 1,000 years ago, we could, we could use it now and then it could work. That, that, the time travel dimension of that is so weird to me.

• 24:18Speaker 03

  It kind of makes you think differently about,

• 24:22Speaker 03

  I don't know, progress.

• 24:23Speaker 15

  So, without much further ado, Dr. Cristina Lee and Dr. Freya Harrison, and they're going to talk to us about some ancient biotics.

• 24:33Speaker 03

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

• 24:41Speaker 10

  Thank you very much, and it is an absolute pleasure to be here.

• 24:45Speaker 03

  Large hotel conference room, 100 or so people. Freya actually got up on stage dressed as a nun.

• 24:52Speaker 10

  Okay, so this is one interpretation of what an Anglo-Saxon scientist may have looked like.

• 24:57Speaker 03

  And they presented their results.

• 24:59Speaker 10

  Next ingredient.

• 25:01Speaker 11

  It is particularly unpleasant.

• 25:02Speaker 03

  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?

• 25:17Speaker 10

  There are remedies which ask you, sing for Ave Marias.

• 25:22Speaker 03

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

• 25:25Speaker 10

  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 that's got the watch. Everybody knows the Ave Maria. Everybody knows the length of an Ave Maria.

• 25:38Speaker 03

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

• 25:44Speaker 10

  Three Ave Marias, four Ave Marias may actually-

• 25:47Speaker 03

  So, so- That's fascinating. It may appear one way, and it's, in fact, could be a totally different way.

• 25:53Speaker 13

  It suggests that the, 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.

• 26:02Speaker 03

  There's a, there's a phrase, the, the past is a foreign country.

• 26:08Speaker 10

  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.

• 26:23Speaker 03

  But here's the reason why this is so confusing to me. So 1,100 years is a crazy long time for humans. And for bacteria, that's like an exponentially crazy long time.

• 26:38Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 26:39Speaker 03

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

• 26:49Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 26:50Speaker 03

  How could that even work?

• 26:52Speaker 11

  That, that's, that's an awesome question. So, 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.

• 27:04Speaker 11

  But now, a thousand years later, when these medicines have not been used, you would expect that resistance to be lost.

• 27:11Speaker 01

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

• 27:18Speaker 04

  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.

• 27:32Speaker 05

  So there's an interesting discovery there, like that what worked once and then was resisted, you give it a rest, and 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 paths, did you go to China, where they now got all these people studying Chinese cures and Arab cures? You could come up with a rich historical cocktail of armamentariums that will work if you bring them in, take them out, bring them in, take them out. And the whole world, the whole world of the past then becomes the fruit of your future, sort of.

• 28:12Speaker 01

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

• 28:16Speaker 13

  This is Soren Wheeler, by the way, in conversation with Maren McKenna and Latif.

• 28:19Speaker 01

  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.

• 28:32Speaker 04

  He got their Nobel Prize.

• 28:33Speaker 01

  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, then 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.

• 29:01Speaker 01

  Did I lose you on that, Maren?

• 29:02Speaker 04

  No, no, I'm still with you. I'm just, I don't know. It just seems like, it seems like such a great hypothetical construction. I just didn't really know what I could add to it.

• 29:11Speaker 01

  Sorry, I took over.

• 29:20Speaker 00

  Hey, Lulu again with a quick update. It has been almost a decade since we first aired this episode. And since then, Christina and Freya have published several papers to show how this concoction works and why. Now, Bald's Eye Salve is not quite ready to hit the drugstore shelves yet, but in 2022, it made it over a big hurdle for new drugs: phase one safety trials. It was tested on healthy humans, so not already sick folks, and not in open wounds. And the results were overall successful. And Freya and her colleagues have a pretty good idea now of which chemicals in the medicine are the important ones so they can distill it down to its bacteria-fighting essence. Potentially great news for all of us staying a little healthier using very old things.

• 30:04Speaker 00

  But all this, you know, did leave me with one very important question for Christina, the Viking expert. If we get further in clinical trials, and this actually becomes, you know, a drug, who owns the patent? Is it Mr. Bald or whoever from like 1,000 years ago? So we asked Christina, the Viking expert.

• 30:27Speaker 10

  I don't know. I've not, you know, I really don't know. But, you know, technically, Mr. Bald is having this manuscript written for him. It's in his possession, but that doesn't mean it's his work. So it becomes a really interesting question, you know, of who owns the IP on this.

• 30:51Speaker 00

  Anyway, Radiolab here for you, the hard-hitting medical questions, the hard-hitting patent questions. Thanks so much for listening. We'll be back next week.

• 31:03Speaker 13

  Special thanks this hour to Steve Diggle.

• 31:05Speaker 05

  And to Alexandra Ryder and Justin Park, who came down from Yale to be our old English readers.

• 31:10Speaker 13

  To Gene Murrow from the Gotham early music scene.

• 31:12Speaker 05

  And to Marcia Young on the medieval harp.

• 31:14Speaker 13

  Colin Monroe of Tadcaster.

• 31:16Speaker 05

  And the rest of the Barony of Iron Bach.

• 31:18Speaker 13

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

• 31:22Speaker 05

  Yes, very quickly.

• 31:23Speaker 13

  Of the door or through the window. I'm Jad Almiron.

• 31:25Speaker 05

  I'm Robert Kulwich.

• 31:27Speaker 13

  Thanks for listening.

• 31:40Speaker 02

  Hi, I'm Gabby. I'm from the Bay Area, California. And here are the staff credits. Radiolab is hosted by Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser. Sauron Wheeler is our executive editor. Sarah Sandback is our executive director. Our managing editor is Pat Walters. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Jeremy Blum, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gabel, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhu Naina Sambhandan, Matt Kielty, Mona Murgawker, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Sarah Kari, Natalia Ramirez, Rebecca Rand, Anissa Vitza, Arianne Whack, Molly Webster, and Jessica Young, with help from Gabby Santas. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly,

• 32:25Speaker 02

  Emily Krieger, Natalie Middleton, Angelina Mercado, and Sophie Semai.

• 32:35Speaker 02

  Leadership support for Radiolab's science programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.