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BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Hello, welcome to this week's 5 Live Science. I'm Chris Smith from the Naked Scientists. Coming up, the US record their first human death from bird flu, so should we be concerned? Also, a new drug to treat drug-resistant prostate cancer, and what have the Romans ever done for us?

Well, apparently, widespread lead pollution. Plus, a bit later on... The things that I always liked the best were when there was something that I didn't understand. I felt really stupid. I don't understand what this thing is. And then somebody would describe it in a different way or I would come at it from a different direction and very suddenly...

There was something that was kind of crazy about it and funny, and I understood it. Master of making science funny Mark Abrahams joins us for the latest instalment of Titans of Science. The Naked Scientists on 5 Live.

Up first this week, the United States have recorded their first human death from bird flu. The patient, who did have underlying health conditions, was taken to a hospital in Louisiana after contracting the H5N1 virus, but they deteriorated. The infection is now spreading in cows and it's even killing domestic and wild cats. So what's the risk for us? To find out more, we put in a call to Ed Hutchinson at the MRC University of Glasgow Centre for Virus Research.

We've been concerned about H5N1 bird flu for about 25 years now. It's a virus which is capable of causing severe disease in humans as well as spreading in birds. But it's become a real issue in recent years where

a new strain of H5N1 has started spreading really aggressively around the world through birds starting in Asia and then through into Europe, Africa, North America, South America, Antarctica. So it's everywhere now. It's caused enormous problems for wild birds, but it's also been very good at jumping from those birds into other species, particularly into mammals.

And the most surprising case of that so far has been in the United States, where it's not only infected dairy cows, but it's become a dairy cow virus. It's fully adapted to spreading among cattle, and there's now this big outbreak of H5N1 in cattle in the US. And when it gets into a cow, does it behave like it does in the bird? Or does it behave more like mammalian flu, the kind of flu that you and I get, a runny nose, sore eyes, and high temperature?

So this was a real surprise to virologists. The first surprise was that cows got infected at all, because up to this point we would have said that cattle, for whatever reason, didn't tend to get influenza A infections.

But the second surprise was the way it spread. The main thing it's doing in these dairy cows is it's infecting the udders and it's being shed in the milk. And it's being shed in the milk at incredibly high levels. Now, if you pasteurise milk, that kills the virus, so that's good news. But if you don't, the milk remains infectious and that seems to be a good part of how it's spreading among these cattle now. And what are the implications for...

people then? Are we worried that the cows might act as an interface enabling the infection to jump more efficiently to us? Yeah, so...

Against the backdrop of the fact that the virus is still circulating in birds, within cattle these are animals which are obviously farmed in large numbers, so you have two points of contact. You have people who are working with the cattle, you have dairy workers, and if you can imagine a big dairy there's lots of opportunities for coming into contact with milk from these cattle there. The other is consumption of unpasteurised dairy products. There's a subculture of drinking what's called raw milk, so unpasteurised milk,

We pasteurise milk for good reasons, for killing all sorts of pathogens, and this adds another one to the mix. So we are concerned that both humans and domesticated animals like pets could be exposed to the virus that way.

And have there been many human cases via those routes? It's unclear at the moment whether there have been human cases from the consumption of raw milk, but there have definitely been cases from occupational exposure in dairies. So these have generally been conjunctivitis, so people getting pink eye, probably from the milk coming into their eyes, some also respiratory infections. And there have been cases where farm cats have died, almost certainly because they've been lapping up milk.

around the dairy. What we've also seen in the US and Canada have been two really severe cases of human infection, both of which put people in hospital, one of which sadly recently resulted in the patient dying. But these cases did not come from cattle. These came directly

from viruses in birds. And we can tell that because the viruses they got are much more closely related to the viruses still in birds than to the viruses which are in cows. So this highlights the fact that we've now got two different places to look when we're thinking about risks of H5N1 infection of humans. Does this not nevertheless put us on alert that this particular virus, this particular form of H5, appears to be quite good at getting into a range of mammals?

of which we're obviously a member of that group of animals, and this might be the first steps towards a full incursion of this becoming a human flu. It absolutely does. And there are plenty of reasons to be worried about the animals themselves from an ecological perspective, an animal welfare perspective. But if we're just going to look at humans for now, adapting to new species is a really difficult thing for a virus to do.

But flu is unusually good at it. It's good for two reasons. One is that it can mutate really quickly. And we could see signs of that in those two really severe human cases. But the other thing to be concerned about is that influenza viruses can breed with each other. They can swap genes back and forth between them if two different viruses infect one at the same time.

We're currently in the middle of a winter flu season in the US. There are loads of people being infected with influenza viruses, which are already very good at infecting humans. And there is this risk that you could have an H5N1 virus swapping genes with a virus, which is already good at growing humans and getting a head start to becoming a human virus that way. So you end up with a kind of hybrid virus that looks like H5N1, something we don't recognise as a human population. We've never seen that.

before, but it's got the inner workings of a human flu that knows really well how to grow in our cells and to grow really efficiently and spread really well. That's absolutely right. And most of the influenza pandemics we've seen over the last century have occurred that way. Most recently, the 2009 swine flu outbreak occurred by different influenza viruses breeding with each other. What then should public health officials, doctors, etc. be doing to A, keep an eye on that and B, minimise the risk?

The most important thing you can do is to keep an eye on it because at the moment there is not any evidence for human-to-human transmission, so we're not talking about a human outbreak right now. What we're talking about is the need to minimise the risk of the virus figuring out how to do that. So that involves minimising the chances

of the virus learning its way around humans. So what does that involve? It involves biosecurity measures, so if you have farmed animals, trying to reduce the risk of them getting infected. If you're working with animals which could be infected, both monitoring and wearing appropriate PPE. And this is legitimately quite a challenging thing to do in big complex farms, but it's important that this is considered.

I'm also very concerned, as lots of people are, by raw milk consumption in areas where H5N1 is spreading. What about vaccines? They're our mainstay for preventing seasonal flu. Have we got vaccines that will combat this form of H5? And have we got them at the sort of scale it would take if this suddenly does start to take off?

So this is a kind of partial good news story. We obviously we know how to make influenza vaccines and we also already have produced H5N1 vaccines. Indeed the UK government has recently purchased an initial batch of vaccines for exactly that reason.

What's also good news is that you don't have to have a precisely matched H5 vaccine to get some protection against the virus. Even if it doesn't give you complete protection, it might reduce the risk of severe symptoms or reduce the risk of you spreading it to other people. And this is very similar to what happens with seasonal influenza vaccines and why it's always worth getting them, even if they're not going to completely protect you against every risk of infection.

Ed Hutchinson there from the MRC University of Glasgow Centre for Virus Research. New model predictions suggest that Earth's subsurface might hold billions of tonnes of natural hydrogen.

Hydrogen is one of the most abundant elements in the universe and it can be a source of carbon-free energy too. Burning it releases mostly water after all. But teasing it apart from natural compounds that contain it, like water or natural gas, can be both expensive and carry a carbon cost, which has been a deterrent to the wide-scale adoption of hydrogen previously.

But geoscientists think that there might be vast reservoirs of the gas trapped literally beneath our feet, and a lot of it within relatively easy reach. If they're right, their findings suggest that geologic hydrogen could produce twice as much energy as all of the proven natural gas reserves we still have on Earth. I've been speaking to Geoff Ellis at the US Geological Survey.

So we had generally assumed that natural accumulations of hydrogen just couldn't form because it's a very small molecule and it's very diffusive. It leaks out through rocks in the subsurface and it's also readily consumed by microorganisms. But there was an accidental discovery of an accumulation of almost pure hydrogen gas in

about a dozen years ago in the country of Mali in West Africa. And as I learned about this discovery, I started to question this notion that maybe we could form accumulation of natural hydrogen. And presumably, if we were to go burrowing after hydrogen like that, that...

It's not got the same implications as to dig up fossil fuels, petroleum, coal, gas, because there isn't a carbon footprint, apart from the extraction process, associated with it. So it would be a clean form of...

I suppose, fossil fuel. That's exactly right. And today, the hydrogen that we get is actually predominantly made from fossil fuels. In the process of making a kilogram of hydrogen, we actually release about 10 kilograms of CO2 into the atmosphere. I suppose we should point out that there are, of course, ways of making hydrogen in a non-carbon releasing way. That is, if you use a sustainable energy source to do it. But that is the drop in the ocean compared to where most comes from, isn't it?

That's right. Today, very little of this clean hydrogen is being made. The technologies that we have do exist, but they're quite expensive. It's not really clear how we're going to get all this low-carbon hydrogen that we think we're going to need. How have you turned this into a tractable question slash problem then?

We looked at what we do know about natural occurrence of hydrogen on Earth. This is something that has been studied for many, many decades, mostly by biologists that are interested in the deep biosphere and life on other planets. And we know that there are microorganisms that are living on hydrogen in the subsurface.

then there were some knowledge gaps that we had to fill in. And so we used analogs from other things that have been well studied, things like petroleum systems. So through strategies of petroleum, we know how gases migrate and trap and get accumulated in the subsurface. And so we were able to then borrow knowledge from those fields to fill in gaps, to put together a global model of just how much hydrogen might actually be trapped in accumulations in the entire Earth's crust.

Before we come to how much, just tell us where then we would anticipate this hydrogen might be.

The processes that are thought to be capable of generating the largest amounts of hydrogen tend to be associated with crystalline rock settings. Iron-rich rocks that are associated with the mantle underneath the Earth's crust that have been brought up near the surface, and also radioactive rocks. The radioactive decay of radiogenic minerals can actually split water and generate hydrogen.

Actually, at the mid-ocean ridges today, we see seawater being reduced and forming hydrogen. And also in many hydrothermal systems, hot springs and so forth, we find hydrogen gases there. And these are, by the way, very different places from where we explore for oil and gas. So this can explain why we don't find hydrogen associated with petroleum.

And they're also, by the sound of it, within reach, some of these sources, potentially. Yes, absolutely. And in fact, this accidental discovery in Mali was only 100 metres below the surface. So in fact, it's very possible that it could be very accessible. Now, notwithstanding the fact this is a model, therefore it's got strengths and weaknesses. There are going to be knowns, there are going to be unknowns. How much hydrogen might there therefore be lurking within reach beneath the Earth's surface?

The units that we refer to are million metric tons or megatons. And so we estimate that there could be anywhere from maybe just a few thousand megatons to potentially billions of megatons in the Earth's crust. And the median or most likely value is on the order of around 5 million megatons. On the order of millions of megatons seems to be probably most likely.

Sometimes we just don't realise what is literally underfoot, do we? That was Geoff Ellis and that study detailing the discovery was just published in Science Advances.

This is 5 Live Science with me, Chris Smith. And still to come, what have the Romans ever done for us? Well, they could quite possibly have knocked a few points off our IQ levels. You can hear how a bit later on. And Titans of Science is back with Mark Abrahams, the man behind the Ig Nobel Prizes. We'll hear how he's carved a career from science that makes us laugh and then think.

But first, researchers in London have found that prostate cancer that's become resistant to existing hormone therapies could be treated with an experimental new drug. It's called NXP800 at the moment and it's currently in clinical trials for other cancers including ovarian and bile duct tumours. It works by stressing out cancer cells to the point of killing them.

Here's Adam Sharp, who's a co-author on the study and leader of the Translational Therapeutics Group at the Institute of Cancer Research in London. Over the past 10 to 15 years, we've developed many treatments that can help control prostate cancer and allow men that have advanced disease, so that's disease that has spread beyond the prostate, live for longer. But the biggest challenge we have is that after time,

Sadly, those treatments stop working because the cancer becomes resistant to them. What it does is it learns ways to overcome the treatments that we're giving to our patients and it stops working and therefore the cancer continues to grow. So in this work, we were really trying to develop new treatments that work through new ways that could maybe help patients that other treatments had stopped working for. I suppose it's a bit like when bacteria become resistant to antibiotics, isn't it?

It's that they have evolved ways to surmount whatever the blockade imposed by the drug is. So how have you attacked this then? How have you gone after flushing out new avenues that will clog the works up and stop these cancers, even though existing treatments can't?

The cancer cells are very stressed and they're stressed because they do grow uncontrollably. So what that means is the cancer cell needs to protect itself and one way that it does that is it uses a particular family of proteins, the chaperones. They just really protect the cell from that induced stress that the cell is undergoing so that it survives rather than dies.

And what we did in this study was we actually looked at a drug that had been discovered and developed here that really tries to stop the chaperones from working and increases the stress that the prostate cancer cell is under. And what we wanted to do was to actually decide if we were to give this drug to our cancer cells.

would they be under so much stress that they no longer could survive? And actually, they would either reduce their growth or even die. And that's what we really wanted to look at in this study. How did you do it?

My colleague, Professor De Bono, has a huge number of patient samples. So we first wanted to ask the question, are these chaperones, so these molecules in the cancer cell, do they make the cancer cell more happy? So we actually identified that patients that have more of these chaperones in their cancer cells sadly did worse to current treatments.

And then we wanted to take this drug to see whether or not it worked. It's meant to increase the stress or reduce those chaperone proteins that the cell likes to increase the stress. So we treated prostate cancer cells in our labs. And we also treated mini tumors that have come from prostate cancer patient samples.

And these specific cancer cell samples were resistant to our current treatments. And what was exciting to see was that with this drug, these actual cancer cells started to die. Then what we did following that was we then tested it in animal models as well to show similar effects to what we were seeing in the lab cancer cells.

Effectively, you're robbing the cancer cells of a defence they rely on, so they become stressed to the point of toxicity. They just die. But what's to stop them just evolving a defence against the drug so they can switch those defences back on, as it were, and just do what they've already done for the other treatments, and we're just kicking the can down the road a bit here?

Yeah, and I think that's a really, really important statement. The challenge, as you've said, is the cancer will evolve ways to overcome resistance to the new drugs that we're also developing. So alongside developing those drugs in themselves, we also now following from this work is start to look about what drugs could we put the new drug with, you know, to maybe overcome the mechanisms of resistance that occur.

How selective is the drug for prostate cancer cells? Because obviously these proteins that you're robbing the cancer cells of play a really important role in protecting healthy cells as well. So are there not potentially really serious side effects from doing this? Yes, I think, again, that's a really important question. The way that we would describe it is actually cancer cells themselves can become...

more sensitive to these treatments because they have more reliance on those chaperones. A normal cell that isn't as stressed doesn't actually require them as much as a cancer cell and what we hope is that that's what can deliver us the therapeutic window. Could this treatment also become a way to make other treatments even more effective? Because when you're treating prostate cancer with, for example, radiation,

That's really stressing cells. So if you give a drug at the same time that makes them even more vulnerable, does that make the power of the radiation, the killing effect, even more potent? And therefore you could get away with, say, lower doses or get an even better response in the cancer so the person has a better outcome? Fantastic question. And I think that's what I actually hope more about this paper is not so much

our work, but also bringing interest to the field. And there has been some great work from other labs that have already showed that targeting, you know, increasing the stress response can sensitize to radiotherapy.

At the moment, you've done this in a dish and you've done it in these experimental animals. How close are we now to being able to do clinical trials? Do you foresee this being a relatively easy route into the clinic? This work is done in preclinical models in the lab and is exciting. But of course, that's still a long way from complete.

showing that it works in prostate cancer patients in the clinic. What's exciting is the drug itself has been developed and it's now being

given to patients with advanced ovarian cancer and cancer of the upper GI tract, and therefore the clinical trials are already running. What I hope is also exciting enough about this work is that it will make our collaborators in biotech and industry start to think about prostate cancer as a potential another indication for this drug.

Great news. That was Adam Sharp, and that study has just been published in the journal Clinical Cancer Research. Now, if Monty Python's life of Brian has taught us anything, it's that we have the Romans to thank for pretty much everything. But...

It seems it might not all have been entirely beneficial. Indeed, new research suggests that intense lead mining and processing at the height of the Roman Empire may have engulfed Europe in widespread pollution, which in turn contributed to the cognitive decline of the population, although not to the same extent as lead in petrol in the 1970s. Joe McConnell at the Desert Research Institute in Reno has been telling me all about his study.

I study ice cores. In this study, we used three ice cores, two from Greenland, from the Greenland ice sheet, and one from the Russian Arctic. And these were collected a long time ago, over the last 20 years, by many of my European colleagues. And we analyzed these in my laboratory at extremely low levels, but we can use those variations in those very, very low levels to look at changes in emissions of pollutants.

And how do you know when they relate to in time, these ice cores? Yeah, it's a great question. We count annual layers in the chemistry. It turns out in my lab, we measure about 30 different chemical species all at the same time, depth resolution. And so we can count, just like tree rings, we can count those annual layers starting at the top

and just count them backwards thousands of years. And then we use things like known volcanic eruptions, and there happened to have been one in Alaska in the year 43 BCE that we can tie directly to the tree ring series and to all these different ice cores. And what the ice captures a snapshot of what the air was doing when that bit of ice got made at that particular point in time. Is that the rationale for doing this? Absolutely. So there are these little things called aerosols, or little particles and droplets in the air around us all the time.

And they come from things like forest fires or pollution or volcanic eruptions, desert dust, sea spray, things like that. And those impurities are captured by falling snowflakes or by raindrops.

and deposited in the snow or in this case on the ice sheet. And what does the lead footprint look like? Is it significant? It's easily detectable. And one of the reasons that we focus on lead besides the health implications is that humans in their early mining and smelting created a lot or emitted a lot of lead. And so the background of lead in the natural environment is quite low.

But humans, because of our mining and smelting, really put out a lot of it. And so the signature of human impact is quite clear in these ice cores in terms of lead. And was it chiefly the Romans 2,000 years ago that were playing with lead? So you can say, well, it was them that have made the signature that you can see in these ice cores mapping onto that time point. Or were other humans around the place, other races, were they also using lead?

Historians and archaeologists tell us that the primary sources would have been the Roman Empire, and then there was quite a bit of activity in China. Using atmospheric models and then lead isotopes, the isotopes of the lead itself, we can evaluate where the lead must have been coming from.

In this case, where these ice cores are located, the sensitivity of the ice, meaning how sensitive the ice core record is to emissions, is about 10 times greater for Europe than it is for China. So it's not impossible that we're seeing some lead from China. It's just that the emissions would have to be at least 10 times greater to equal the same amount of emissions from Europe. And then finally, we can use these isotopes.

And what we find is the lead deposited in Greenland has a similar isotopic characteristic as the ore bodies in Southern Europe.

And how do you then relate what the ice is saying was there to what the concentration for where the people were must have been in the air? So in other words, if you were a Roman, either living in a town or working in one of these settlements that was producing this, how much lead would you have been exposed to, do you think, based on what the ice is telling you?

Somewhat surprising for me, at least, was how widespread the pollution was. The atmospheric modelling suggests that it was basically extended over the entire Roman Empire. And that goes all the way from North Africa to what is now Germany and all the way over to the Black Sea. How would that relate to if we wound the clock back just, say, 100 years? Because we were using a lot of petrol that was all leaded until into the 80s. We were all using leaded fuel because it was better for engines.

So how would our lead pollution in that era compare with what the Romans were doing? Were we worse than them effectively or not as bad? No, we were definitely worse. The blood lead levels that would have resulted from this air pollution were about three times higher during the late 1970s, at least in the US, than they were during the Roman period.

As you mentioned, lead has really been cleaned up in the last 20, 30 years, 40 years maybe, since passage of things like the Clean Air Act in the US and similar legislation around the world. And the Romans were experiencing about three times the exposure that children today are experiencing. But of course, children when I was a child were probably getting a much higher dose than a Roman child would. Absolutely. And there was cognitive decline and other health impacts as a result. And

And so we know that there are studies tying lead pollution to human exposure in the more modern era. So you can presumably back extrapolate that to what was going on in ancient Rome.

and try and make some kind of guesstimates as to what kind of impact it might have had on general health and cognition. Maybe about two and a half to three points. Keep in mind that the average IQ is 100, so that means you're dropping about two to three percent of your IQ. It might sound like a small number, but when it's applied to the entire population, I would think it's pretty significant. Absolutely fascinating. That was Joe McConnell, and that study has just been published in the journal PNAS.

Welcome back to 5 Live Science with me, Chris Smith. And today, Titans of Science continues with the man who's given a voice to strange science that makes us laugh and then think. He's Mark Abrahams. The Naked Scientists on 5 Live.

Mark Abrahams was born on the 17th of January 1956. He grew up in Swampscott, Massachusetts and developed a passion for science at a very early age. He attended Swampscott High School and then read Applied Mathematics. Music

How do you make an Airbnb a Vrbo? Picture a vacation rental with a host. The host is dragging your family on a tour of the kitchen, the bathroom, the upstairs bathroom, the downstairs bedroom, and the TV room, which, surprise, is where you can watch TV. Now imagine there's no host giving you a tour because there's never any hosts at all. Ever. Voila. You've got yourself a Vrbo. Want a vacation that's completely and totally host-free? Make it a Vrbo.

I'm Zing Singh. And I'm Simon Jack. And together we host Good Bad Billionaire. The podcast exploring the lives of some of the world's richest people. In the new season, we're setting our sights on some big names. Yep, LeBron James and Martha Stewart, to name just a few. And as always, Simon and I are trying to decide whether we think they're good, bad or just another billionaire. That's Good Bad Billionaire from the BBC World Service. Listen now wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

Harvard. So what was the early day science? People are notorious in your position for blowing things up or kitchen table chemistry, that kind of thing. Were you one of those? I never fell in love with blowing things up. Never had anything against it, but never really did a whole lot myself. And in school, I had a few teachers who were both really good teachers and

and really loved science. And one of them was also very, very funny. And she would play records of songs by a guy named Tom Lehrer. He was a mathematician who wrote and performed funny songs. And some of them were about science, some of them were about politics, they were about all kinds of things. And they were also kind of grimly funny, sharply grimly funny in a lot of ways.

And growing up around that, I think just encouraged whatever was within me. Well, it's clearly served you well because you're now the editor and co-founder of Annals of Improbable Research. You're also the originator and the master of ceremonies of the annual Ig Nobel Prize celebration. That's how you and I first got to know each other. I mean, it had been going for a while before I got involved for the first time, but I've just been a huge fan ever since.

And for those not in the know, and Mark will tell us more later, it's a satirical take on the Nobel Prize, isn't it, Mark? But that gala is broadcast on public radio every single year. And throughout your career, your motto has been laugh, then think. It's making people think about things, having made them laugh first. It's something we've shamelessly stolen here on The Naked Scientist, I'll hasten to add. Yes.

You started the Ig Nobel's in 1991, I think. I was 16. I was doing my GCSEs at the time. So I was about to go down the scientific career track. But that was unusual for that period. People weren't communicating science very much at all at that period in the 90s. It was in a bit of a low point, wasn't it? And so for you to come out the blocks and do something that was both funny and

but also shone the spotlight on important bits of science that did make people think but then engage with the subject that was very forward thinking you can look at it that way um

That's kind of the way I grew up. And looking back, that's the way my favorite teacher and also my father and just people I liked were about, especially with science, the things that I really liked about science as a kid and then later in college studying it, you know, sort of for real and later doing it sort of for real. The things that I always liked the best were when there was something that I didn't understand. I felt really stupid. I don't understand what this thing is.

And then somebody would describe it in a different way or I would come at it from a different direction and very suddenly there was something that was kind of crazy about it and funny and I understood it. And part of what made it funny was I didn't understand this a minute ago and now it's really simple. I was looking at it like it was some horribly complicated thing and it's so simple and it's

And so these surprises were things that I came to crave and I still do. And I hope that lots of other people do too, that when you're learning anything, a lot of the time, I think for pretty much anybody, a lot of the times when you suddenly make sense of something, it's at a moment when

you just see it in a different way or you see something that seems completely crazy and it makes you laugh and you relax and suddenly you're seeing the thing in a much clearer way. You understand it.

So that's what the Ig Nobel's are really about. I mean, it started in 1991 was the first ceremony. I just sort of by accident become the editor of a science magazine. Before that, I was doing software stuff, various kinds of things. A typical mathematician then, because I was going to say, how does a Harvard mathematician turn into the person who conceives of launches and hyperspeed?

hosts the Nobel prizes. You'd gone via software development. So what were you doing? Since I was a little kid, I liked writing stories and writing about anything and writing about science. And just, I like writing stuff, trying to explain stuff to myself or to anybody else and trying to make it funny because I just like that. And I had a whole bunch of stuff that I had shown only to friends. So about 1990, I started to wonder what would happen if

some of this if I took something that I wrote some of this stuff piling up what would happen if I tried to get it published somewhere because I've never tried so I sent it off to a magazine I didn't even know where to send it but so I asked around somebody pointed me toward a magazine that they said was probably long dead thing called the Journal of irreproducible results which I'd never seen I found an address so I mailed off a

some stuff I wrote. And a few weeks later, I got a phone call from a man who said, "Hello, I'm the publisher of the journal. I got your articles. Would you be the editor of the journal?" So that was how I started being in the world of writing about science and learning more about science so I could try to explain it to other people and try to make it funny.

And during the first few months of that, I was suddenly meeting lots of scientists, lots of people who had invented things, lots of people who'd done odd things that were hard to describe. And I kept thinking, you know, some of these people should really be famous. The world should come to appreciate them for some because they did great things, some because they did really horrible things, but they're all kind of funny and thought provoking.

And most of these people are going to live their whole lives

and they'll die and almost nobody will know what they did and that's wrong. Somebody should do something and then I thought well hey, you know, I'm the editor of a magazine. It's a little magazine, but we can do something and so we started the prizes. Did you go after the possible sources? Did you use your instincts and say right I'm gonna go and find some things that would work? By then these were the kinds of things that I was already collecting and other people were sending to me for the magazine.

So I had a big source of this stuff already and that was starting to become kind of popular so lots of people were sending things in. Just for the avoidance of doubt, these are real scientific studies. Oh yeah, when we started that very first year, you know, we didn't quite know what we were doing, mostly did. We gave 10 prizes, that seemed like a good number, and two or three of them were fictional because I kind of thought a mix-up would be very interesting.

But it became immediately clear at the ceremony that first year that a real thing that's funny next to an invented thing that's also really funny, the invented thing is going to die of shame. It cannot compete. The reality is what makes the thing really funny and really gets you to think about it. And we're trying to describe each of these things we give a prize to

in a way that anybody in the world could hear a one-sentence description about this, and they will immediately understand the story and start laughing. Not because we twisted it, just because we told the story really clearly. Gordon, share with me some of the gems.

I've got some in mind that I've heard you talk about. In fact, the first time I ever heard about your work was you were in Cambridge at the Science Festival. That's Cambridge, UK, not Massachusetts. So I know some of them. But tell us what your favourite ones are that you've covered over the years. Oh, I have two. I'd rather do this the other way. Tell me some of them that caught your eye. I can hear your voice in my head from 2007, which is when you came to the Cambridge University Science Festival. And you said...

about digital rectal massage as a treatment for intractable hiccups. And everyone laughed. And then you said, does anyone have hiccups? And again, the place erupted. But that was when you captured me.

Did you have hiccups? No, no, not from that moment on. I've never had hiccups again. The thought of that, Mark, no. And here we see the power of science or something. Yeah, this was a medical report. In fact, two medical reports done in different parts of the world by unrelated people. I think the second report may have been people who saw the first one. The first one was a doctor named Francis Fesmeyer.

He published a short report in a medical journal. He was describing the malady of a patient he was trying to treat who had hiccups that went on and on and on for days and wouldn't stop. This kind of horrible hiccups that go on for days, you know, it's funny to other people, but it's a horror to the person who has it.

There didn't seem to be any reliable treatment for that. There were a lot of guesses. So he went with one of the guesses and he tried digital rectal massage and he said it worked. And so he wrote it up and he came to the ceremony and he quite proudly put on a rubber glove and raised one finger and the crowd cheered him wildly. And no, not a hiccup in the house, presumably? Not that I'm aware of, no.

I think I've interviewed some of the people who you've conferred awards on. Was there one, a young doctor who was studying speed bumps and appendicitis? Did she not end up in the running at some point for one? Yeah, she and I think three colleagues were.

interviewed people who were brought to a hospital because they had a pain that might be appendicitis. And what they found out was that when the ambulance would go over a bump in the road, the response of that person, of that

potential patient, whether they screamed or not, would seem to be a pretty good, pretty reliable indicator of how serious their condition was. She actually published that in the Christmas British Medical Journal, which again, I think, did they follow you or was it sort of convergent evolution? Because they also around Christmas time will publish studies that are serious bits of science, but they're done

tongue-in-cheek and with a bit of a laugh in mind, aren't they? Best to remember, they have a long tradition of doing that at Christmas time. Several of those things have won Ig Nobel Prizes later.

And one of the editors of the BMJ told me that one of the articles that BMJ published and that we gave an Ig Nobel Prize to, I can remember the big grin on her face when she was telling me, it was sort of a mark, sit down because I need to explain this to you because you have no way of knowing this.

This was a report done by four people in the Netherlands. It was the first time that anyone had arranged for a man and a woman to have sexual intercourse inside an MRI tube.

And to take images of that. I think they reported, I read that paper, I think they said that it was thanks to Viagra that it would just not have been possible in the unromantic setting of an MRI scanner to have sex until the era of Viagra.

Yes, there were a lot of details in that report and there were some images. Anyway, this editor told me that that got a lot of attention when the BMJ published it. But she said a few months or a year later, whenever it was when an Ig Nobel Prize went, things went through the roof there. She said that ever since the day that Ig Nobel Prize was awarded, that article beginning that day has been the most read article

in the entire history of the BMJ. She said, "And that has continued week after week, month after month, year after year." She said the difference in numbers of people reading that article online

compared to any other article in the history of the BMJ was so large that the people who run the BMJ had had to teach themselves whenever they met to plan anything based on what's the history of the website and what do we want to happen in the future. They would have to teach themselves to ignore any numbers connected with that article.

Have you, though, had any contact with the proper Nobel Prize people? Because I know they're quite sensitive about the names. Before the beginning, we wanted to make sure that we never caused trouble for people. And so we, at the very beginning, we tried very hard to make sure we would never, ever, ever do anything that would cause any kind of worry or problem for them.

From the very beginning, we had a bunch of people involved with organizing the first Ig Nobel Prize ceremony who themselves had Nobel Prizes. They had many discussions with us about this and they all were saying that this shouldn't cause any problem. Probably they will ignore it over in Sweden and if not, they'll be amused by it.

But they and we were always very, very careful from the start to just do anything we can to not cause problems. And part of the Ig Nobel ceremony every year from the beginning has been that the prizes at the ceremony, at our ceremony, are handed out to the Ig Nobel Prize winners by Nobel Prize winners.

The idea of that now almost seems normal, but when we started this, that seemed beyond crazy, which was why we did it. It seemed so completely absurd that nobody could possibly, we hoped, think that this is trying to steal the thunder of the Nobel Prizes or anything. This is just absurdity times a million.

And as time went on, those people handing out the prizes would go back to Stockholm to be in meetings or be part of future Nobel Prize ceremonies. And they would come back and call me up and say, "You know, I had a discussion with some of the people who run the Nobel Foundation about this." And they seemed to be more or less amused. So we all took this as good news. Good, we're not causing any problems for them.

And then they started to be helpful, the Nobel people, in bits and pieces over the years. We weren't ever asking them for anything, but when we started getting invited to do Ig Nobel events in Sweden,

the events were like the ones you saw in Cambridge where we would have a bunch of people who won Ig Nobel prizes and me and we all talk and show pictures and take questions that some of the Nobel people would come to those and clearly were amused and kind of happy to be there and one year even I got an email or phone, I forget which

from the assistant to the head of the Nobel Foundation. He said he's going to be visiting Cambridge, Massachusetts where you live in a couple of weeks and thought it would be interesting to get together. So we got together. I took him and the assistant out to ice cream, the best ice cream place in town, and we had a very fun talk. Not about anything serious.

So ever since then, we've continued to try to do our basic thing, which is just not cause any trouble for anybody. That is good to hear. I think one of the other things we probably should mention is because people who are not familiar with the approach you take...

Where, in many sort of science discourses and things, people are given enormous amounts of time to expand and expound on a subject, you right from the get-go are saying, no, this is all about brevity and making sure people get stuff across really, really quickly. I think that was very farsighted because...

we now recognise in this era that people's attention span has telescoped into about three minutes. And you've been saying for a long time, we need to make sure things are conveyed very, very word efficiently with very, very little time. But you had a crafty trick for doing it. You had a mistweetie pie or whatever it was on the stage. You would say, shut up, I'm bored.

I think more conferences need that. We have lots of tricks, yeah. The thing that you mentioned is probably our best invention. We call it Miss Sweetie Poo. In the early years of the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony, we didn't really have any firm limits on the winners giving their acceptance speech or on most of the other things.

And one year, the ceremony was really long. The audience didn't seem to mind, but I can remember standing at the back of the stage with some of the other organizers toward the end of this feeling, at any moment they're going to turn on us. They're going to realize how long this has gone. We've got to do something for next year. So the problem here is,

If you've invited somebody to go to a lot of trouble to come to your event and make a speech, how do you get them to stop? How do you do it without appearing impolite, without offending them, without looking like you're an ogre of some kind?

And in talking it over, we somehow came up with the idea that, you know, a little kid has a power that an adult does not have. And that led with some refinements to Miss Sweetie Poo, the eight-year-old child who tells people after about one minute to please stop, I'm bored. And that works. I'm absolutely sure, Mark, no one is saying that right now, though.

This has won you quite a lot of attention around the world over these. I was having a look into your kind of CV, and I didn't realise Le Monde, the famous French newspaper, have described you as the Pope of improbable science. I mean, that's quite an acronym, isn't it? Washington Post says you're the nation's guru of academic grunge, and...

It says here that Harvard Business School have run a case study on you called Mark Abraham's Annals of an Improbable Entrepreneur. So you're famous on many levels. Do you have a favorite nickname? Mark. You've gone into podcasting, haven't you? You very much brought this into the next era of broadcast and, I suppose, information dissemination. So is that basically doing the same thing as the Ig Nobel ceremony, or are you talking about different things? You're not doing it at the moment. We shut it down for a while.

because it was a huge amount of work on top of the huge amount of work. That started about 10 years ago when one of the big radio networks here, CBS Radio, called up one day and said they wanted to get into the business of podcasting. And so they were looking for a bunch of people who did unusual things to start up a podcast. So the first couple of years we were doing it as part of CBS Radio. And then CBS Radio in a

classic modern business story suddenly decided to blow itself up. So that disappeared. I'll tell you a story about something else because it grew out of another thing we'd already started doing as live events. The other thing is something we call dramatic improbable readings or improbable dramatic readings. I can never quite remember which title we use.

That was and is to take some of the scientific reports that are piled up here, the things people send us, some of which have gone on to win Ig Nobel Prizes, many of which we've written about in my magazine, in the Annals of Improbable Research.

And most scientific reports in the world are written in language that almost nobody would want to understand or could understand. They're written for tiny, tiny, very specialized audiences and they're written in language that's sometimes intentionally difficult to understand but should be impressive.

However, amidst all the thousands of those, there are some reports that are written very differently. And there are even some reports that are written in a difficult way that have passages in the middle of them that are just beautiful, that if you only saw this chunk of words,

You could easily believe that this was written by a great playwright to be done on the stage, or somebody who writes movie scripts, or somebody who writes for TV, or somebody who writes novels. One day, as an experiment, I invited a bunch of people to come to the public library here in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The head of the library offered to let me use their auditorium.

And I brought a pile of these scientific reports and we had a whole bunch of different people here from many different backgrounds who all seemed to like to perform one way or another. So I asked each of them to just look through this pile of reports, just pick one of them that interests you a little bit and pick out exactly two minutes worth of words and you will be an actor. Pretend these words were written as a script.

And it was working really well. And then I learned something. Often you learn really valuable things because you were very wrong. And this is a case of that. I had one rule for all the performers and for the audience, which is that no matter how interesting you in the audience find this, we're not going to allow any questions because

Each of the people reading one of these reports to you, they don't know any more about what they're saying than you do. They only saw this 15 minutes ago. So it would be crazy to ask them questions. You're not allowed to ask questions. But everybody wanted to ask questions. After each performer would do their two-minute dramatic reading, the hands would fly up. People wanted questions. So

I bowed to public demand here and said, okay, you can ask questions of each of the readers, but here's the rule. In the audience, ask any question you want. Dramatic reader, answer however you want with this one rule. No bullshitting. It's okay to say you don't know something.

And it's okay to speculate as long as you make it clear that you're speculating. Thanks very much to Mark Abrahams there, the man who's devoted his career to science that can make us laugh and then think.

Well, now I'm afraid to a little bit of a bombshell because this is the very last episode of 5 Live Science because this programme is being discontinued. But we are going to continue making programmes for ourselves. And so if you've enjoyed the ride and you'd like to continue to listen, including to our next Titan of Science, then you need to search us out under The Naked Scientist podcast, which is on most podcasting platforms. And you can also find it on our website, thenakedscientist.com.

do please join us there. You can also catch me elsewhere on Five Live via our Science of feature, which happens on Tuesdays at one with Nega Manchetti on her programme.

But otherwise, from me, Chris Smith, thank you at home very much indeed for listening over the last decade or so. And a special thanks to the Naked Scientist team who are behind this show every week, including Chris Barrow, who's been with us on the production side almost since we started. To you guys, thank you so much. And to everyone, goodbye.

BBC Radio 5 Live. Weekdays from 9. Nicky Campbell takes your calls on the day's biggest news. You're very welcome to the nation's phone-in. The health suffers, the family life suffers. That's the only solution, really. The tech companies know what these algorithms do. They have an ability to stop them today. Such passionate opinions on both sides of this argument. There's just a huge worry for me. I don't think people understand how serious this is. Nicky Campbell. Weekdays from 9.

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