Bugs

Off to the Royal Institution again last week to hear one of their splendid Friday Discourses, this one given by Jennifer Rohn on the subject of the revenge of the microbes. As it turned out, she was an splendid speaker for an event of this sort: good manners, good visuals and a well prepared talk. An expert in urinary tract infections, but one who was able to be sufficiently clear about the facts without being unpleasant about it - something of a feat given the unpleasant nature of such infections. Maybe it was her set piece, but it was good for me.

Audience included a group of students from what appeared to be a rather diverse part of London. Good to see them there. Plus the usual sprinkling of chaps dressed up as penguins and ladies dressed up in full-dress evening gear (including our speaker).

Various neat and nicely illustrated anecdotes about bacterial cunning, about the tricks of the bacterial trade. Some of which seem to hang on geometry, with one bit of one chemical being sufficiently alike another bit of another chemical in shape to be able to lock onto it and block anything else from locking onto it. One of the things which makes the three dimensional geometry of complicated molecules important - and not well captured by the formulae which I used to bandy about at school, formulae like CH3CH(NH2)CO2H - but perhaps that one is too simple a chemical to have interesting geometry. Is their any kind of tie in with the last lecture? See reference 2.

The core of the talk was the never-ending race with the bacteria, the race to find new antibiotics faster than they evolve - and with their short life spans they evolve very fast - defences against the old ones. A race which it seems we are presently in danger of losing - a losing which will return us to the days of lots and lots of deaths from what are presently banal infections. A race which Rohn believes we can win if we throw enough money at it. She had a few slides showing how much some people were throwing at it, and how little we in the UK were throwing at it. With a picture of Cameron announcing a new review of our strategy in this matter, which raised a good laugh. Or was it a new strategy for raising reviews? Hard to be sure.

She seems to think that the best way forward is to screen the natural world for new antibiotics, more effective than trying to invent them, So look in the sea, look in the soil. Look anywhere which has not been turned over already.

She had some words of defence for Big Pharma, pointing out that what they like were things like statins which people (including here me, as it happens) take every day for life. Lots of money in that sort of thing. A business model that works, so they do it. If people were to get scared about infections there would be lots of money for them too, but given the length of the drugs pipeline this might well be a little late. So government needs to put its hand to the tiller of the boat of market forces, not enough to just to let it drift about.

Repaired to the goat for afters, to be greeted at the door by two very forward young ladies, with whom we had discourse about fags. We decided that they were probably simply drunk, rather than ladies of the night.

Climbing out at Vauxhall, I managed to lose count of the steps on the stairs, the count until that point having been very steady at around 65, Further annoyed on the train by a gent. with the nerve to be wearing the same scarf as myself. At least I had picked mine up in the road rather than paid for it.

Home to a very clear & starry sky, but too tired by then to take a proper gander. Shame, as we do not get clear & starry skies very often.

Reference 1: https://iris.ucl.ac.uk/iris/browse/profile?upi=JROHN80.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/memory-lane.html.

PS: on the way into Epsom Station I was passed by two smart looking white vans, one Transit like and the other a little smaller, but both in the livery of Immigration Control, an organ of the Home Office in the charge of one Sir Charles Montgomery. Vans which I found slightly intimidating, albeit necessary in our world of both global inequality and global mobility, See https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/home-office.