The Infinite Monkey Cage - The Infinite Monkey's Guide To… Failure

Episode Date: May 8, 2024

Brian Cox and Robin Ince embrace failure in its many forms, with a frank look at the importance of making mistakes. They examine the flaws in Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution with the anthropologist Alice Roberts, as she tells them no idea is totally watertight. And sometimes scientific error even leads to important discoveries – just ask the heart patients who took a pill that did nothing for their medical condition but did boost their libido and which we now know as Viagra. But other failures in the field of medicine have had more serious consequences, and Dr Chris van Tulleken questions why we’re not better at drug development for the poorest parts of the world.New episodes will be released on Wednesdays. If you’re in the UK, listen to the full series on BBC Sounds: bbc.in/3K3JzyFProducer: Marijke Peters Executive Producer: Alexandra FeachemEpisodes featured: Series 15: Science’s Epic Fails Series 11: Serendipity Series 25: What Have We Learnt From Covid?

This is the BBC. This podcast is supported by advertising outside the UK. BBC Sounds music radio podcasts. Hello, I'm Brian Cox. I'm Robin Ince and this is the Infinite Monkeys Guide to... Well, today is our blooper reel. Obviously not bloopers from our show as there just never are any, are there? That's very professional.

Or the alternative description I've heard is that it's a sea of confusion. Yeah, I have heard that our producers just kind of sit there and go, what are we going to do with this? Well, we'll try our best. So the bloopers that we are talking about today, not so much the newsreader not noticing his hairpiece slipping off. That's really 70s sort of script line, isn't it that newsreaders don't wear hairpieces. Well that's yeah that's all they do and they're much better hairpiece technology.

I always think back to those kind of it'll be all right in the night it will be newsreader conundrum something going wrong with the weather person and then it would be like a reporter who basically hasn't noticed that he's being chased by a Randy Bull. Again. Yeah. No, in our show it's usually when someone makes a scientific slip up, isn't it? The famous one is, looks like we've proved cold fusion. Uh-oh! I mean, this is an example of our science work. So the steady state theory,

very famously, Fred Hoyle, brilliant scientist, and it was a reasonable picture of the universe. Until we discovered, for example of the universe until we discovered, for example, the cosmic microwave background radiation which refutes that theory. That's how science works. So I wouldn't say they're mistakes. No, and I think it's also very important to say that when sometimes people say these things where they'll go, well, science got that wrong. And you say, oh, do you know who found out who got the science wrong? Some scientists. So what was that? Some scientists found out. So So it's like, you know I always like to get a bit of Ludwig Wittgenstein in. Yeah, every time. We usually edit this out. But I do love reading about Wittgenstein and he

said if people never did silly things nothing intelligent would ever get done. Yeah, and you've turned that into a life. Well I think the reason that you're able to be so clever is because I'm so silly. Here is Rufus Hound with anthropologist Alice Roberts discussing how failure is essential to science. The one thing that really came to the forefront of my mind when I was asked to be here was, is it Benjamin Franklin's quote of who invented the light bulb? I'm very impressed by this. We've done just a minute and now we're on quote unquote. This is going to be a medley of all of them.

Who was it? It was Edison. Edison. I think it was Edison. He was one of them. He did a lot of light bulb transformations. He said, I didn't fail at inventing the light bulb. I successfully proved 99 ways not to do it.

Until I eventually found the one that and that sort of underpins absolutely all science. Do you think it's until Edison, no one could have ideas because there was nothing to appear above your head. So it was. Do you think it's an unnatural way of being? Because it's certainly, as you said, central to a scientific education,

that being wrong is the means by which we learn. I think genuinely, I was thinking about this, I know we talked about it earlier, I'm delighted when I'm wrong in science because it means that I then know more about nature. And you kind of laugh, it sounds ridiculous doesn't it, but I think that's a central part of the scientific training, certainly in research. I don't think it's unnatural. I think it's about retaining a kind of childlike sense of playing with the world and accepting that some of the things you think about the world will turn out to be wrong and that you

need to preserve that into adulthood. We mentioned Fred Hall. Now, don't get too far away. Some people I was talking to earlier said, oh, well, he was a bad scientist. But how do we define, you know, as someone who could have won the Nobel Prize, how do you feel, Rufus, about the idea of someone, do they become a bad scientist

or do they merely have some areas of their knowledge where they're into bad science? There is things that we would consider to be bad science. I'm going to see if I can make Brian's head explode with this sentence. Of course, science is really just a branch of philosophy. LAUGHTER Especially physics.

Especially physics, yeah. That's what they sailed along. LAUGHTER It's philosophy with fact. Yeah. No, well, I say that to make Brian's head explode. I don't actually mean it. No, you should mean it. But what I do mean is to test anything like the nature of the universe or the physical

world around us, you have to start with the idea and therefore there has to be an idea in place. Or you have to have read about somebody else's idea, or somebody else's theory, or somebody else's proof, then have an idea yourself about how that could be tested. He's not a bad scientist because he clung... He was... he was stubborn, but human. That doesn't make you a bad scientist. Doing science badly makes you a bad scientist, I think.

Science as a process, as a cold logical process, cannot fail. Test it, look at the evidence, refine, retest. That's how progress is made. The places where science, in inverted commas, is bad, it's because it's human beings who have to do the science and we fail, but that is what being human is. Now we went on to discuss whether the exciting idea of epigenetics proves that the grandfather of evolution Charles Darwin was wrong. Here again are Rufus Hound and Alice Roberts with geneticist

Adam Rutherford. Lamarck suggested that actually traits that were acquired during a lifetime could be passed on to offspring. Say for instance if a giraffe was trying really hard to reach branches higher up to get those leaves and grew along the neck during its lifetime then that could be passed on to its offspring and the strong arms of blacksmiths, thank you very much, could again be passed on to the blacksmiths offspring which I think now seems extraordinary to us because there's a distinction between characteristics that you acquire during your lifetime

and characteristics that are there in your genes, and those are the characteristics that you pass onto your offspring. But actually Darwin believed in soft inheritance as well. So, you know, we celebrate him for being right about natural selection, but as Adam said, he was wrong about a lot of things. And Darwin also thought that there would be a blending of characteristics between the parents as well.

He absolutely didn't understand that there were units of inheritance which we now know to be genes. But having said all of that, you know, we have to be careful about dogma because we've got this interesting theory of epigenetics which has arrived in the last few years, which is still very contentious, but it raises the possibility of at least some level of acquired characteristics being passed from one generation to the next. I should say, for the radio listeners, I should say that the, I don't know how to describe Adam Rutherford's face when epigenetics was mentioned, but it was kind of a strange contorted thing. I'd like a stab at it.

Imagine... Imagine going for a wee in the woods and accidentally brushing a nettle. And not with your arm. Well, because then you'd have to pass on the slightly swollen arm to your children and their children and their... So epigenetics breaks down into two things, actually, and it's basically the fact that on the swollen arms of your children and their children. Epigenetics breaks down into two things actually, and it's basically the fact that around the DNA there are other molecules which become modified and that affects whether genes are

expressed or not, which makes a lot of difference to a cell. The more controversial aspect of it is that some of those modifications around the genes are possibly heritable, which means that things that happen to you during your lifetime could be passed on to your children without a change in the DNA itself. So there's an interesting experiment with either rats or mice being exposed to the smell of acetophenone, which apparently smells of cherry blossom, and being electrocuted at the same time. It's a nasty experiment. And then the offspring of those rodents apparently expressed fear when they smelled the same cherry blossom smell and in fact the offspring of those offspring as well.

That explains something. My mouse won't go to Chekhov with me. And now I've always wondered why. I inherited it from my mad scientist uncle. Now everything makes sense. Now there's a saying, isn't there, Robin? I know some popular sayings. Which one's this one you want to talk about? Every cloud has a silver lining. Now you know that to be inaccurate, don't you? Yeah.

They don't have silver linings. That's not the way water vapour works. There's no silver in the clouds. Yeah. If there was silver up there, it'd fall to the ground. It's too dense. Yeah, it would be an absolute disaster. I think it might be a metaphor, though. Oh, OK. So how does the metaphor work?

Run me through that. Well, we used it as an example of how scientific failures can end with incredible inventions. So the cloud would be the failure, and the silver lining would be invention. But I like clouds. I think clouds are pretty. Why is it that clouds are a negative thing? Imagine a cloudless world. I don't know who came up with this metaphor. I'm not happy. There'd be no rain. Anyway here's chemist Andrea Seller who told us about the serendipitous discovery of artificial sweeteners. One of the stories that seems remarkable is that basically one of them was discovered

because someone misread test for taste. Now that could really have gone awry, couldn't it? This is… So I think there's about four of them. His supervisor sent off the student or the co-worker and said, you know, send the samples off for tasting and an hour later the guy came back and said, hey, this one's sweet. And the boss went, what?

And now it's called Splenda. You know, there are loads of other examples. I mean, another one was a chemist who went home in the evening to have dinner, but he hadn't washed his hands. And he suddenly found that his bread roll tasted sweet. Well, hang on, this is why I don't understand this. As a chemist, the first thing I would do at the end of my day is go,

I better wash my hands. I'm a chemist. Well, I mean, if I can... Why is my tongue fizzing and exploding? Oh, I forgot to wash my hands. Well, that's how you can tell that somebody's a chemist, because they wash their hands before they go to the toilet. I think also Post-It notes, they were a failure of glue design, the 3M company, Minnesota Mining and Minerals by the way.

Oh yeah! Yeah, and an engineer invented glue that didn't work and so when they stuck something onto the wall it fell off and they realised that that might be quite useful, a very weak glue. If you've been listening to the Infinite Monkey Cage for years on end wondering where science got us, it's two achievements at artificial sweetener and post-it notes. So every time that you use weak glue think, thank you science. So when you see these people criticising science and scientists on social media, just remember that. Write that on a post-it note. Anyway, stick it on your window. Anyway, later on in that episode, particle physicist Simon Singh told comedian Lee Mack

about another failed drug that ended up being a success. Viagra was invented by Pfizer and they were working on a heart drug and so they got it to the clinical trial stage and so they kind of produced a whole box of these pills. And the idea was to treat some kind of heart condition, so they gave them back to patients. And the results were really poor, so they asked for all the pills to come back. People were very reluctant to return these pills.

And eventually, they realized that they had another effect. And gosh, it's a $2 billion industry when it was at its peak. So, so to speak. Can I ask you a question? Was that a serendipitous gag or was that... Have you been building towards that for the last 20 minutes? Now, it's interesting, we are actually going to get into Covid where there were multiple

failures and there was a show that we did about a year before the Covid epidemic, wasn't there, where someone actually said the next thing that we're going to deal with in terms of the big human battle is going to be a pandemic. You discuss apocalyptic scenarios on a radio show like this you do asteroid impact the threat of AI Pandemic disease and everyone goes And then one happens in 2022 we made an episode where we looked at what we've learned from the pandemic which according to him Dr. Chris Van Tuleken is not very much

Are we looking at a world where what we've seen in the last two years is an incredible reaction to a virus that actually there are many things out there now which if it became a pandemic situation the where with all the abilities the knowledge would be able to come together and eradicate things which are in the world now? I'd love to say yes to that. I think I said in the in the green room that I'm a natural pessimist and I'm often wrong to be a pessimist but I think we've seen in the last 40 years of the say, I don't know, two, three thousand new drugs that have been developed, we've seen around one percent or maybe slightly less have been developed for infectious disease in general and for

particularly the infections of poverty. So the diseases that affect so-called neglected tropical diseases, diseases that affect the poorest 3 billion people in the world. And I wondered for a while if this pandemic would be this incredible wake up where we'd go, we need to stop destroying the biosphere, we need to stop creating these interfaces that allow viruses to leap into the human population and cause pandemics, and we need to reduce all the sources of pandemic disease. And I'm not really sure that we are seeing that happen. I think we are going to see increased funding to people like Sarah working on, I mean I know you're working on vaccines for diseases like MERS and other coronaviruses. So we

are going to see a bit of that. But I feel like the revolution that I might have wanted hasn't quite happened. And so we are seeing monkeypox, we're seeing vaccine derived polio in our sewers, there is an ever present threat of pandemic avian influenza, which could well make, and I'm conscious, I'm the company I'm speaking in, but a pandemic avian influenza, which could well make, and I'm conscious, I'm the company I'm speaking in, but a pandemic avian flu could make this coronavirus pandemic look pretty trivial.

And MERS as a threat coming out of North Africa and the Middle East, this is a coronavirus that the reservoirs we think in camels, maybe bats, this again could be catastrophic. And this kind of viral chatter, where there is an exchange between the natural world or the wild world and the human world continues. And it may be continuing as an ever accelerating place

as we destroy our wild places. But we have to sort of think about what are the forces that are driving this? Cause it's not accidental. It's because we don't put the external costs of the risk of creating pandemics on essentially the corporations and the profits that drive them. So if we think of destroying ecosystems, that doesn't happen by accident. It happens because there's a lot of money in doing it. And there's never quite as much money in preventing a pandemic as there is in making money from the pandemic that happened. So we see that a number

of huge number of corporations and individuals have made a huge amount of money. We've increased global inequality. So poor people have got poorer but the rich have got incalculably richer over the course of this pandemic. And so until we understand that pandemics happen because forces drive them to happen, it's not accidental, we can arrest it, but it will require the exertion of political power over private interest. Next time on the Infinite Monkeys Guide 2 we'll be looking into the future. Oh you love looking into the future. We won't, I mean we won't of course.

You're quite a mystic Meg figure aren't you? We won't be looking into the future. Even though in a block universe it's there, we don't actually know what time is. All the episodes we took clips from are available on BBC Sounds and you can find all the details of those in the program description for this show. In the infinite monkey cage Turned out nice again. Hello, it's Zan Fantolican here and I'm back with my twin brother Chris.

That's me. In the third series of our radio for podcast a thorough Examination and we're gonna be talking about exercise now. I really love it and this has been really annoying for me In fact, it's gone beyond annoying. It's more like you've joined some sort of cult But I think Chris needs to do more. In fact, I think everyone needs to do more There is a general crisis of inactivity in the UK that we should all be worried about. So in this series we weigh up whether exercise really is the miracle cure for all that ails us, or whether it's been oversold and actually lounging around is just fine.

Listen to us resolving the argument on BBC Sounds.