The Infinite Monkey Cage - Science Mavericks

Episode Date: June 25, 2012

Brian Cox and Robin Ince take to the stage at this year's Cheltenham Science Festival to discuss science mavericks. They are joined by comedian Marcus Brigstocke, medic and broadcaster Dr Kevin Fong, evolutionary biologist Aoife McLysaght and Nobel Laureate Professor Barry Marshall. Marshall, an Australian physician, famously experimented on himself to prove his theory that a bacterium was responsible for most peptic ulcers. He drank the bacterium he suspected was the cause, and as a result reversed decades of medical doctrine. He and the rest of the panel discuss the role of mavericks in science, how new theories get accepted and whether you have to go to such extreme lengths to truly push the frontiers of our scientific understanding. Presenters: Robin Ince and Brian Cox Producer: Alexandra Feachem.

In our new podcast, Nature Answers, rural stories from a changing planet, we are traveling with you to Uganda and Ghana to meet the people on the front lines of climate change. We will share stories of how they are thriving using lessons learned from nature. And good news, it is working. Learn more by listening to Nature Answers wherever you get your podcasts. This is a download from the BBC. To find out more, visit bbc.co.uk slash radio4. Hello, on my right, a man who by day... In fact, you're on my left, aren't you? We've swapped places, so I'll make that clear. Not that it matters to the radio people, but Cheltenham people are pedantic.

Hello. On my left, a man who by day is an upstanding scientist, but late at night in CERN, he sneaks into the Large Hadron Collider, greases himself up and then slides around, shouting I am the Jamaican bobsleigh team. It's Professor Brian

Cox. And on my right, a man who by night is a lefty touring stand-up comedian, but under cover of day, special advisor to Jeremy Hunt. Robin Ince. Ah, well, you've been reading my emails again. Everyone does. It's ridiculous. Now, for the third year running, we're recording

the show in front of a live audience at the Cheltenham Science Festival, which means that, as usual, Brian will, I imagine, after this show, be approached by a member of the audience who's only about ten years old, and they'll say something like, you know, well, I think science has got some issues, and they'll talk for a while, and then eventually he'll say,

listen, Sonny, we might be having trouble realising quantum theory with general relativity as a consistent theory, but that, over there, is my helicopter. Anyway, today, we're going to look at mavericks in science. Where is the line between maverick science and pseudoscience? At the door of the physics department, I'd say. But anyway. To push the frontiers of science, do you have to break any rules?

And should science have rules anyway? What level of crazy can actually assist in scientific advance, and what level of crazy is just running naked through the streets, screaming I am the future robot that can eat the sky! To offer their advice and enlightenment, we have swelled our panel to four people, which is enough people for a game of just a minute,

but knowing the subject matter, I imagine there will be far too much deviation. So, Brian, who is on the show? Our first guest is a Nobel Prize-winning microbiologist and physician. He's one of the few scientists who truly deserve the title Maverick, having chosen to experiment on himself by drinking bacteria to prove his theory on the cause of peptic ulcers. All the way from Australia is Professor Barry Marshall. And we have another scientist who laughs in the face of fear

as well as giggling at the nose of terror and sneering sometimes at the elbow of horror. He is our favourite expert on space medicine and, if we didn't have someone who self-experimented bacteria, would normally be the most praised panellist for pushing himself to the edge of death, Kevin Fong. A guest director of the Cheltenham Science Festival, he's a comedian, writer and once, apparently, a podium dancer.

As far as we know, the only podium dancer we've ever had on the Infinite Monkey Cage. No, it is true. I was a podium dancer. Which is, you know, because when you mentioned that I was sitting next to a Nobel Prize winner, for a moment I felt inadequate, and then you reminded me of my own past, and I thought, no, we're pretty much on a level here. You've both been on a podium, one receiving the Nobel Prize, you dancing in leather shorts. It's Marcus Brickstock! And finally, an evolutionary geneticist from Trinity College in Dublin,

she is the intelligent design proponent's worst nightmare. If you go up to her and say, oh, if evolution is true, explain the eye, then. She will, whether it's an octopus one, a fly, or even a bonobo. It is Aoife MacLeishat, and that is our panel. APPLAUSE And that is our panel. Barry, we're going to start with you. How you won the Nobel Prize is fascinating.

To prove your theory, you made yourself your own guinea pig and you drank bacteria. First of all, do you consider those to be the actions of a maverick? Yes, they were, because most people wouldn't do medical experiments, even in my hospital, without passing it through the Ethics Committee and giving everybody a chance to put their input into it. But I felt that when you have a disease which is potentially fatal, killing thousands and thousands of people every year, maybe you can't take the chance that somebody would say,

no, you're not allowed to do it. So that was the reason I did go ahead with it, and it paid off. Do you think, if you look across the span of Nobel Prize winners, I mean, these are the most famous names in science, do you think there's a higher proportion of what we might term mavericks? And if so, how would you define define it and are there more of them well i would say that not necessarily a higher proportion of mavericks a lot of them did experiment on themselves and you know chemists apparently whenever a chemist makes a new chemical almost the first thing he does is apparently taste it or i've been told that i don't know whether that's true so there are plenty of

mavericks and people actually i gave a lecture at a statistician's conference, and they promoted me. So Barry Marshall is the only person we know who's had a publication with an N of 1. But since then, I have actually done an experiment with two people in it. So I'm now up to two and getting better each year. Is there any way that you would actually draw the line? I mean, when you first, how much debate did you have before thinking, I'm about to drink something, and if it works, if it's a success,

I'll be both happy that it's a success and also be being sick at the same time? Well, it was a crucial experiment. I think if you're a good scientist, you have to be able to step back and objectively look at your findings and your data, and you have to be your worst enemy and the most critical judge, if you like, to try and say, well, where are the holes in this theory?

What else could it be? And you've got to accept the fact that even if I did not get infected with the bacteria, that was still just one. I would have to do a lot more work to really prove that I was right or wrong. But I had to be prepared that if I did get infected by the bacteria and maybe developed an ulcer, okay, I'd at least proven the bacteria could infect one healthy human, so I'd kind of got that way. But if it didn't infect me, maybe that meant that I was wrong,

I had to possibly accept that, and that would have been a career change for me. I would have been into a lucrative private practice, you see, rather than a penniless research practice. What did it taste like? Everybody always asks me that question, and sadly, I didn't remember what it tasted like, so I always make something up. I always used to say, you know when you've had a chicken, and you buy it on the weekend, and it's really just past its last day of being a fresh chicken,

you take it out of the fridge, and there's a slimy kind of water around the bottom of it. And it's ripe, you mean? Yeah, and maybe it's just chicken smell. Maybe it's gone off. So that's what I think it was tasting like. But in fact, we've given it to other volunteers now, and they say they can't taste it. If you put it in chicken soup, it just tastes like chicken soup.

Marcus, this is your first science festival you've been to. Have you been surprised by some of the kind of extremes that scientists are prepared to go to to get their results? Yes, there was a disco last night. And, I mean, I've never seen anything as extreme as that. Kevin was on rare form, I must say. I mean, actually, Kevin, seeing as you're there, I mean, you're a medic, primarily,

and I know you've studied and written a lot about the history of self-experimentation. So could you give us a brief history of self-experimentation in medicine? Well, I mean, I think there's a lot of examples of what you might call mavericks throughout history. I mean, in anaesthesia, there's some particularly hilarious examples. The guys who did the first spinal anaesthetic, so this is when you infiltrate local anaesthetic around the spinal cord

to make yourself numb from, say, about the waist down, so you can do an operation. First of all, the first people who worked out that that might work were experimenting with cocaine. And they thought they'd try it out on themselves. And then, so this guy called Beer injected his colleague Hildebrandt with this stuff, and then tested out the degree of anaesthesia by booting him in the shins repeatedly, and then asking him to do the

same in reverse, and it worked wonderfully until it wore off and then they couldn't walk for several days. Aoife, you were obviously involved in evolutionary biology. Now that stands, I suppose, really on the shoulders of Charles Darwin, and Charles Darwin was a man who spent a long time before he decided to publish. He had a fear of publishing such a revolutionary tract. Would you consider someone like Charles Darwin to be a maverick? I think so, yeah. And I mean, it's a brilliant book. He presented loads and loads of evidence, but it was really a new theory and it stood the test of time. But I think, I suppose, one thing you could say about the difference between a maverick

and a quack is how a maverick is willing to accept they might be wrong and uses evidence rather than... So even Barry's saying, you know, that if the experiment turned out differently, he would have accepted he was wrong. I think that's an important distinction. But yeah, Darwin was, I think, quite rightly, his book

is brilliant and it really laid the foundation for the field, even though 150 years later we're still having to fight over it a bit. It is packed with top facts, isn't it? In The Origin of Species you've got that blue-eyed cats are deaf and all bald dogs have bad teeth, which is one of my favourite... That was the way that got me into The Origin of Species. I think these kind of dog and cat facts,

and then the next thing you know, it's changing all your opinions on the world. It appears it did take more than six days at least. Yeah, more than six. Yeah, definitely. I mean, have we got a number of days yet for how long it all took? It was definitely more than six. That's our lower... 13.73 plus or minus 0.12 billion. We're still possibly out by quite a lot then. Barry, if we want to drill down a bit,

I suppose the public perception of a maverick is as a loner or someone who stands against the scientific establishment in some sense. So would you characterise yourself in those terms? Yes, I was never particularly worried about what other people thought of what I was doing. I had enough confidence in my own ability to say, well, I think it's right. The whole world must be wrong because I know this is the correct thing to do. So there's a bit of that. But being brought up with scientific method and medical school

and being able to plan an experiment, develop a hypothesis and test it. And the key to hypotheses is a good hypothesis can be tested. So if you sit there and rack your brains, there's no way I can test this theory, well then you're wasting your time. You might as well go and do something else until you figure it out. But with the idea that bacteria caused ulcers, say that stress caused ulcers, it's impossible to test that, or it's very, very difficult. But bacteria caused ulcers, say that stress-caused ulcers, it's impossible to test that or it's very, very difficult. But bacteria-caused ulcers, that's a wonderful hypothesis. It's so easy to test it. And you'll find out in five minutes or relatively quickly whether it is true or not. And give people antibiotics, see if they got better. Drink bacteria, see if you got sick. You've really done most of it at that point.

Marcus, what line do you think you would draw in terms of your own self-experimentation as a younger man? I think perhaps less so. You're asking this question with knowledge that's very unfair. I mean, I never had a strong scientific leaning. I mean, obviously I made my own fireworks with stolen chemicals, but that's no indicator of a scientific bent. It's just I was a fairly thorough and committed vandal.

I was at a very early age. I had worked out, and as near as I've got to any sort of mathematical thing, Brian, is that I disliked football very, very passionately, and so I burned down the goalposts at one end of the football field, aged six and a half. And by that rationale, I thought, well, they're not going to need 22 people then, are they? Because there's only one set of posts. They'll only need one team.

So only 11, and as a fat child, very unlikely to be picked. So, I mean, I did that, and it wasn't really an experiment so much as a very, very dysfunctional way of getting an off-games note. It is correct, though. It's technically correct, although, of course, I now realise that you can't play football at all if you're intelligent, so...

at all if you're intelligent. Aoife, your field, biology, is the one, I suppose, arguably the science that's changing most rapidly at the moment. The discoveries are coming thick and fast. Does that make that ground more fertile for the maverick? I suppose, in a sense, the scientist that makes a prediction or a discovery that's not accepted and then becomes accepted by the community. Well, I think one thing about biology is that it's so full of exceptions, right?

So we are going to, you're not necessarily enormously surprised when somebody comes along with something you've never heard of before because biology is a big collection of odd things you've never heard of before. That's my definition as well. Yeah. But then in evolutionary biology, we have some, and in genetics, we have some interesting examples. So just over 13 years ago, these guys discovered a new kind of gene,

and we didn't even know it existed, even though we already had the human genome sequence for a while. They discovered a completely new kind of gene. Then they got the Nobel Prize a few years later, because it turned out not only was it a new kind of gene, it was a really important kind of gene. And even in basic evolution, like way back when, in terms of the origin of the cell, there's this theory that was initially really, really controversial and not accepted and went against conventional wisdom, which was in the formation of a eukaryotic cell, which is compact cells like we're made out of,

that there was this big event which was one bacteria-like thing swallowed another bacteria-like thing, and instead of completely digesting it, it stayed alive inside the cell and formed this symbiotic relationship, and this gives you some of the parts inside your cell. And this was a theory by a woman called Lynn Margulis, and when she said this, nobody believed her for a very, very long time, but she was sure. And then eventually they did believe her. It took about ten years, and now it's in every biology textbook you find.

It's the origin of the organelles like the mitochondria and the chloroplast. And they have their own DNA, and so we can see they've got completely different origins. The DNA in the mitochondria is completely different origins from the DNA in the mucus. So one bacteria swallowed another bacteria, and that bacteria stayed alive inside them? Yes. That's roughly what's happened to the Liberal Democrats. So it's happened twice on Earth.

That's science. That's amazing. Barry, I think, actually, we have to define what a scientific maverick is. You said yourself, you see yourself as a maverick, but you come from, you have a scientific background, obviously. You were trained, you understand and respect the scientific method, and that's what you apply. Whereas, I suppose, there's also the kind of maverick that people think of, the guy that invents the perpetual motion machine,

the guy that's not in the university, but he just sat there on his own, never went through a formal education, and will revolutionise science. Now, obviously, there's a difference between those two pictures. Yeah, so a lot of people contact me and say, Dr Marshall, I'm just like you. I've got this theory and the establishment thinks it's rubbish and my fuel pills really work. They increase your mileage by 30%

and they're only 5 cents each or whatever. I do continually receive communications from people like that. And my answer is, it's the job of every other scientist in the world to prove you wrong. And eventually, when they can't prove you wrong, then you must be right. That's the scientific method. So be prepared to battle and be prepared to fight for your idea. If you're not prepared to fight for it in an honest way and collect more data, well then it'll fall by the wayside as it should. You might be held up because maybe we don't have the resources or the technology to test your hypothesis right now, so bad luck. It has to just sit there in the literature. But be prepared, especially in medicine, to

fight for it. And if you're not going to fight for it, it'll never rise up above the white noise, if you like, of all the other ones. I mean, that to me is one of the interesting problems. And for you, Marcus, one of the things I think hard for non-scientific people is to be able to work out what is good and bad science. The way the media portray it is often not in a very scientific manner. And also we have, again, I think it's something that might be quite a modern idea, where there's this idea that science is very arrogant for knowing things just because people have spent 20 years studying a subject and looking in and out of it why doesn't that mean that i

can't just have a dream and come up with a cold fusion machine in my barn it seems unfair that just because people have put loads of work in they've come up with an answer yeah no exactly and of course lots of things are open to interpretation you know there are different ways of looking at things that my interest and perhaps how i've ended up being a science festival at all has been to do with climate science but i read something that i don't personally agree with and it said that the ice at the arctic isn't actually melting it's merely hiding in liquid form and it's a very... It's an interesting piece of bollocks. Well, is there an issue... Because sometimes great scientists and great ideas people were laughed at,

the mere act of being laughed at makes people go, ah, I'm laughed at, a bit like Galileo was laughed at. And in the same way that if someone goes, do you know what? 98% of scientists believe I'm laughed at a bit like Galileo was laughed at. And in the same way that if someone goes, do you know what, 98% of scientists believe I'm wrong. I must be on to something. There's a strange bit of cognitive dissonance that seems to kick in to mean that sometimes the more you're argued against, they go, oh, well, I must be right then.

But it's true, isn't it? Because here we're talking across the whole of science and mavericks in science. And, you know, yes, that's necessary for us to move on and move forwards. But when Einstein first mooted special relativity as a theory, it wasn't widely accepted instantly, was it? And more recently, when people were not sure whether it was Big Bang theory or steady-state theory that accounted for the way the universe looked, that's only a few decades ago.

But the world continues to turn pretty much the same way, and by and large, no-one is injured by that disagreement that sort of sells out. Now, when you're talking about medicine, it's a different thing, and people going against the weight of opinion. And a good example of that is heart surgery. We only really started operating on hearts in a planned way after World War II. Just a couple of decades before that, people were saying, you can't do it, if you operate on the heart,

you deserve to lose the respect of all of your colleagues there's a textbook of surgery that says that just at the start of the 20th century and yet in 1948 a couple of surgeons say I think that's wrong our experience of war tells us that's probably wrong and they start to try and do closed heart surgery those guys are called Bailey and Harkin Harkin of his first nine patients he does closed heart surgery on Those guys are called Bailey and Harkin. Harkin, of his first nine patients that he does closed heart surgery on, six of them die. Bailey, the first five out of six that he does die, he was so convinced that he was right and everyone's wrong, even though he had five

failures, he scheduled the fifth and the sixth on the same day in different hospitals, assuming that he'd get stopped after the fifth one, so he'd better do the sixth one before anyone knew the fifth one had died. And that's how heart surgery starts. Now, they're mavericks, they turn out to be right, but they definitely row against the tide, and people probably came to harm in the process. So I think there is an essential difference between the stuff we're talking about in medical innovation and medical mavericks

and the more esoteric stuff. As a patient, it's not really what you want to hear is it uh he's this this is your surgeon now he's a bit of a maverick i think you're gonna like him he's kind of wacky actually i'm very just going back to what you were talking about though i'm interested going further back in thinking and you may have no opinion on this, but with something like germ theory with Semmelweis who was basically rejected even though he, as far as I can see, was offering up

he was saying, honestly, if you wash your hands before delivering children especially if you've just been going through a corpse that's been diseased, it really will be an advantage and fewer people will die. And yet he was constantly rejected by a community even though evidence was being offered. Now at point again what would the reason be conservatism in medicine is a little bit like a

religion and so once people believed that stress caused ulcers they didn't really think or examine that the evidence there was no evidence or hardly any evidence, but it was just a belief they had. And I found that no matter how much evidence I put out there, hypothesis testing, most of those physicians were not going to change their mind. And patients would say they had an ulcer and I'd say, well, why don't you take antibiotics? Well, I spoke to the doctor about your bacteria and my doctor said, in your case, dear, it's caused by stress, not bacteria. So you just have to sit there patiently, and if you're on the right track, remember that science is not a democracy. It doesn't matter how many votes are on the other side. You

just have to sit there with the true discovery or the true point of view, and it's going to be far more efficient than the other non-evidence-based strategies. When you talk about washing your hands, Florence Nightingale is a nice background in that regard because most people know Florence Nightingale as the lady with the lamp and that's kind of enough to know about her, but she was brilliant. She was the first woman elected to the Royal Statistical Society and one of the things she did was provide statistical evidence that doctors should wash their hands before seeing a patient. And this was kind of offensive to the doctors at the time because they were mostly men, and here was a young woman of not from the...

You know, you had to be a man from a good family to have authority back in those days. And she was a woman, and she proved it with statistics. So I think that's quite cool, actually. It's a nice little story that goes along with that. The Nightingale thing is terrible. The idea of going, you know, the nurse who made us wash our hands

and totally changed the number of us who managed to survive the war. Don't know her. The one with the lamp. Oh, the lamp lady, yes. How much of the history of science, do we see the corpses of those who lived and died and were right and only

years later? Is that a large pile or in the end uh i know getting into a pile of corpses why not look we started off by talking about chicken soup bacteria it's still tea time let's get to the corpses beatrix potter is one of my favorite examples she's only known as the writer of peter rabbit and that but she said that lichens are a symbiotic relationship of two organisms an algae and a fungus And she got her uncle to go to the Royal Society and present it for her. Women weren't allowed in. I've got maybe a trend here.

This particular genetic condition caused by having two X chromosomes that can sometimes result in not being taken seriously. But this work was presented to the Royal Society, and it was not believed until perhaps a man showed it. So she was a really good budding scientist. I mean, she was used to draw pictures down the microscope. That was the only way. You couldn't take photographs down a microscope at the time.

So she was really good and she was ignored and then discouraged and went back to writing her books. But it was only about 15 years ago or so that they finally apologised to her officially. She was chased out of the Royal Society by Mr MacGregor with a rake. So, Barry, what should the message be in terms of this celebration of mavericks versus the scientific consensus?

The mavericks still have to go through the scientific process. They have to develop a hypothesis. They have to develop strategies for proving it. And depending on what's on the other side of the equation and what vested interests are campaigning against them in various ways, they have to be prepared to take criticism and put in the hard work to raise their theory and their proof, if they have it,

above the noise of all the other little discoveries that are being given publicity on a daily basis. Right. Well, it's all very well getting the opinion of the experts, but an interest balance. We've decided that we'll ask the audience for their opinion. And the question that we asked was, what is the craziest thing you would do in the name of science?

I've got, what's the craziest thing you'd do in the name of science? Live until 125 to see how science progresses. What's your scam? How are you going to live to 125? Have you got a scheme? Where are you, Jan? They've died, sadly. Yeah.

A true maverick. Very unexpected. Grow an ear on my back. That's actually possible, isn't it? What are those genes called? Huck's genes, are they? What are the genes called? Well, they control the body plan.

But there is an artist, an Australian artist, who's grown an ear on his arm. So that is a weird thing to do. What is the point? In the end, that's not an incredible moment in science, is it? Imagine if my ear was a little bit further away. I would sometimes hear things, I could hear them like this, up and downy. I have to move my head up and down to that, and that's saved my...

No. Well, no, it doesn't even make for much of a superhero, does it? I'll help here. With my arm here. What's the craziest thing you do? The name is science. Expose myself to billions of solar neutrinos every second to see if they interact. That's from Chris. What are you doing?

Yeah, I know, that's what I think they are. He just has to stand there and do nothing. I think that's what he's saying. That's from Chris. What he's doing. Yeah, I know, that's why I think they are... He just has to stand there and do nothing. I think that's what he's saying. That's how far I would go. Stand there and do nothing. There is 60 billion per centimetre squared per second passing through his head. He's doing

it. Well done, Chris. You've won your grant. Great, again, we mentioned earlier about, you know, neutrinos, I think is a good example of the fact that when talking about a closed science community, because overall it wasn't just rejection, was it? That was the thing where they went, well, these Italian scientists, they've come up with this particular idea.

We can't just go, well, that's rubbish. You have to check. It was very controversial. I mean, you know the story that about six months ago, there was an experiment done that suggested neutrinos travel faster than light from Geneva to Rome in an experiment at CERN. And although that would mean that Einstein's theories of special and general relativity, our understanding of physics, 20th century physics, would have to be torn up and rewritten, the finding was taken seriously until it was shown that in the end it turned out there was a problem with the measurement, which everybody suspected.

But the publication of that paper was an entirely legitimate thing to do. And I think it's a very good example, actually, of the openness of science and the way that you proceed. You don't throw out an idea because it seems abhorrent. You test it. One of the great things about having a hypothesis that's wrong is that you get two publications

because you have your first hypothesis publication and then you come back a year later, we were wrong. But it's two publications, looks quite good on your CV. And people, your enemies particularly, love citing your papers in that case. Yeah, and you can cite yourself. Yes. These idiots did, yeah.

So I have done that. So that's the lesson today, kids. It's all about living and growing. Make sure that the first thing you do is wrong. So everyone who's doing their homework now, do it wrong, first of all. And when they say why, say, Professor Brian Cox told me, and you'll be fine. So that is the end of the show.

Thank you very much to our guests, Professor Barry Marshall, Dr Eva MacLeysa, Dr Kevin Fong, Marcus Brigstocke. Next week we'll be asking, Does size matter? With, amongst others, Andy Hamilton and Mark Miodnowicz As we have been dealing with science at the edge The BBC has requested we close the show

With some health and safety advice To ensure the corporation's indemnity from anything stupid you do And then blame on us So of course, always wear goggles At all times Only drink bacteria if it's in a delicious yoghurt drink But if the delicious yoghurt drink is sold on a stall In a field by a man

in sandals, do not have the drink. I have to read this one out. Robin wrote it. Only go kite flying in a thunderstorm with your least favourite child. You see... That's good

advice! When gazing at a mountain, always wear strong boots and ensure you have great-looking hair. Thank you very much for listening. Goodbye. Thank you very much for listening. Goodbye. If you've enjoyed this programme, you might like to try other Radio 4 podcasts, including Start the Week, lively discussions chaired by Andrew Marr, and a weekly highlight from Radio 4's evening arts programme, Front Row. To find out more, visit bbc.co.uk slash radio4.

In our new podcast, Nature Answers, rural stories from a changing planet, we are traveling with you to Uganda and Ghana to meet the people on the front lines of climate change. We will share stories of how they are thriving using lessons learned from nature. And good news, it is working. Learn more by listening to Nature Answers

wherever you get your podcasts.