In this edition of The Naked Scientists, What did we learn from Boris Johnson’s appearance at the COVID inquiry? Then, we’ll hear from the team that’s developing a new drug in the fight against the United States' fentanyl crisis. And, We’ll hear about the discovery and fate of an ancient woodland.
In this episode
01:07 - Boris Johnson at the COVID inquiry
Boris Johnson at the COVID inquiry
George Parker, Financial Times
The UK’s former prime minister, Boris Johnson, has told the COVID inquiry that he should have realised just how serious the virus was sooner than he did. Mr Johnson added that it was necessary to lockdown the country to control the virus in March 2020, and that no other option was available. So, what did we learn? George Parker is the political editor at the Financial Times...
George - He's been striking a sort of contrite, quite a serious tone, not the kind of demeanour one necessarily associates with Boris Johnson. There was a time this week where he looked slightly emotional as he looked back at the very sad events of 2020. But generally, the big takeaway from this is that he admitted that the government vastly underestimated the danger of COVID and the threat that faced the country in those crucial weeks leading up to the pandemic arriving in the UK.
James - In response to the fact that Britain has experienced some of the worst excess deaths across Europe, he couched the fact that we've got an elderly population and the densely populated nature of our population as excuses, that's my kind of assertion. How do those stack up?
George - You're right, certainly in the earliest phase of the pandemic, Britain's excess death rates were much higher than many other comparable countries. And the fact we live in a relatively densely populated country, it's faintly risible. I mean, the previous health secretary, Matt Hancock, the guy who was in charge of the health department at the time, thinks that many thousands of lives could have been saved had Britain locked down earlier. But Boris Johnson's been admitting that basically we didn't lockdown earlier because nobody was really taking it all that seriously. And as an illustration at that point, Boris Johnson went away on holiday for a week at the end of February and didn't share his first meeting on the subject until the beginning of March, literally three weeks before the whole country was closed down.
James - He started yesterday with an apology, one that had been leaked beforehand. Now leaking is par for the course in politics, of course, but perhaps less so in the kind of legal sphere. And I wonder if that will have rubbed the inquiries up the wrong way right from the get go?
George - I think so. Look, I mean, there are other aspects of Boris Johnson's interaction with the inquiry which will have wound them up. And as you say, there was the advanced briefing of what he was going to say. There was the disclosure that some of his WhatsApp messages relating to the first lockdown had disappeared from his phone. This was the phone you probably remember, which he switched and then had to be opened by security. The fact that WhatsApp messages on his phone were unavailable to the inquiry shows that for some technical reason nobody can quite get their head around. Those are WhatsApps relating to the first crucial lockdown period. So look, I mean, they'll be glad to have him in front of the inquiry for two days, and I think he's been given a fairly rigorous going over by the legal counsel.
James - As we are on the subject, the communications going on between members of the government over the past couple of years, and their teams at the times, has also been the focus of the inquiry. There's been obscenity rid ones, there are ones questioning the faculties of the people in the top jobs. Now, Mr. Johnson, he essentially shrugged his shoulders and said 'that's just par for the course in politics.' You've covered UK and European politics for many years. Is that your analysis?
George - I think the thing is that WhatsApp has replaced, in modern politics, what used to be oral snatch conversations between colleagues in corridors and around the photocopier. The people say things in WhatsApp, messages they might say in a normal conversation, which are exposed to the harsh life that they appear temperate or unprofessional. Having said that, there's no doubt that Boris Johnson ran an extremely chaotic and dysfunctional government, which reflected his own personality. There was an atmosphere of suspicion. There was a feeling that Boris Johnson changed his mind from one day to the next. So it's not my experience of covering British politics for 30 odd years, that is normally the way things are done in government. And you know, I think it's certainly true that Boris Johnson had exactly the wrong kind of personality type for the crisis that we saw.
James - The inquiry's aim is to learn the lessons from COVID. Are you able to distil what those might be or is it too early to tell with the testimony of so many still yet to come?
George - I think it's a little bit too early. I think there's a danger. I think people have discussed that the inquiry has been seen very much through the prism of people settling scores and the lurid WhatsApp messages that you were just referring to there. And it's more like the equivalent of putting people in the stocks, which I think has a cathartic value to the country actually because people want to see people in the dock, in inverted commas, and being held to account. But in terms of lessons learned, I think the most important lesson to be learned is how do we prepare for possible pandemics in the future? And you certainly wouldn't want to prepare for it in the way that the UK government did in the early weeks of 2020. No preparation for acquiring protective personal protective equipment, no preparation for acquiring testing facilities for COVID, and basically no forward planning about the possibility that we might need to go into a lockdown, even though that policy was taking effect in other countries in the world, including China and Italy. So advanced planning is obviously going to be one of the big lessons to be drawn out this whole process.
06:34 - Antibody to fight fentanyl overdose
Antibody to fight fentanyl overdose
Andy Barrett, Cessation Therapeutics
The US president, Joe Biden, recently called his country’s fentanyl crisis an “American tragedy” and it is not hard to see why. The powerful drug contributed to 75,000 deaths in the United States last year…and there are concerns that the synthetic opioid could also soon wash up on European shores. In a bid to stop people from dying from fentanyl abuse, a company called Cessation Therapeutics has been developing novel antibody therapies designed to block the potent effects of the drug. The company’s chief scientific officer, Dr Andy Barrett, explains the dangers associated with fentanyl...
Andy - It's a highly potent opioid, and it's being made in clandestine labs, typically in Mexico, where the purity and potency of the fentanyl is not always known. So people who use the drug don't always know exactly how much they're using. And because even small changes in the dose of fentanyl can lead to toxicity and death, this creates a very dangerous environment for chronic drug use.
James - Currently, the best way to save someone who is overdosing on fentanyl is by administering Naloxone, commonly known by its trade name 'Narcan'. These canisters have been a real lifesaver, haven't they?
Andy - They absolutely have. Narcan is an indispensable medication that is widely available here in the United States and in other countries. Even with the widespread availability of Narcan, we continue to see an all time high of fentanyl related overdose deaths. One of the reasons is because it is very difficult to get to people fast enough to reverse fentanyl's effects. Fentanyl can produce life-threatening respiratory depression, or very slow breathing in a matter of two to three minutes, and it can be very difficult to get to people in time. Many drug users use drugs alone in their homes, and they're found the next morning. So we clearly need other strategies, preventative strategies, to prevent these overdoses from happening in the first place.
James - How have you worked to try and overcome the limitations of Narcan?
Andy - We're taking a novel approach. It's a paradigm shift in the management of overdoses. We're trying to prophylactically prevent these fentanyl related overdoses in high risk individuals who are already using opioids. So we're trying to administer a treatment, a monoclonal antibody that binds up fentanyl and prevents these overdoses from happening.
James - Let's dig in a little bit deeper into exactly how your new therapy works.
Andy - We have a monoclonal antibody that is targeted to fentanyl, and so if fentanyl is administered, it binds it up in the bloodstream, very avidly and prevents it from getting to the brain. Fentanyl getting to the brain is where it produces its problems. Fentanyl binds to the brainstem that's responsible for breathing and basically shuts that area down. The antibody again, prevents fentanyl, binds it up in the bloodstream, kind of pac-mans it up, and prevents those high concentrations in fentanyl from ever getting to the brain.
James - And the obvious advantage of your treatment as you've described it, is that it can be used in advance. How long does it offer protection from a fentanyl overdose for?
Andy - So we've shown in primate models that a single administration of the antibody can block potentially lethal doses of fentanyl for approximately a month, 28 days.
James - How much does it cost compared to Narcan?
Andy - We still have a lot of drug development to do. We haven't put a cost on it. Narcan is over the counter now, and so it is relatively cheap. However, we do think this can be priced in a manner that's commensurate with other once monthly products that are available for opioid use disorder. There are certain products that can contain a drug called buprenorphine that ameliorates withdrawal and craving symptoms, and we think it could be priced on par with those types of drugs.
James - Obviously, as vital as these treatments are towards saving lives of those with opioid dependency, there's still the need of course to grapple with the root causes of the current crisis, and they'll need to be addressed alongside this strategy.
Andy - So about five or six years ago, most of the fentanyl was coming from China, a lot of it via mail. There has been clamping down on raw materials there. What is happening is those raw materials are being shipped to Mexico where fentanyl is being manufactured in clandestine labs and then shipped to the United States via overland trafficking or sometimes in the mail. Some of those precursors are used in other chemicals that are important, so it's difficult to totally outlaw them with respect to variations in synthetic opioids over time and what could be next. Fentanyl is extremely easy to manufacture and it's extremely cheap. And drug users seem to really like its effects. It costs about 10% as much as heroin to produce. You don't need poppy fields, you don't need farmers as you would with heroin. You can make it in a tiny clandestine lab enough to make millions of dollars in a single batch. There have been reports of other synthetic opioids, but fentanyl still counts for the vast majority of the illicit drug supply. About 60% of all opioids that are seized contain fentanyl or structurally related fentanyl analogs for which our molecule would also work against.
13:38 - 5000-year-old forest found under the Fens
5000-year-old forest found under the Fens
Chris Beever, J.G Farms & Tatiana Bebchuk, University of Cambridge
The discovery of preserved wood by farmers in the east of England has led Cambridge scientists to determine the presence and fate of an ancient forest...
Will - Great scientific tales often come from unusual places or accidental discoveries. Just ask Alexander Fleming. And this tale of ancient trees is no different. This story begins with a lone, brave traveller, wading through harsh conditions and trying to garner sympathy by saying something like, 'I'm in the cold winds of the Fens, in the east of England.’
Brave Traveller - I'm in the cold winds of the fences in the east of England to watch a mystery unravel, usually known for being a place that is flat and somewhat featureless, unidentified and strangely shaped. Wood has been piling up on farmland in this area after being ploughed out of fields. I'm here to speak to one of the people that has been amassing a sizable collection.
Chris - I'm Chris Beever, farm manager for J.G farms managing land in this area around the other side of Boston.
Will - When I heard about this story originally and I was told that there was some mystery wood being unearthed on farms in this area, I was expecting one or two trees. This is an insane amount of wood in front of us. Just how much do you think there is?
Chris - There'll be at least 70 tonnes here. Yeah. Dragged out over a lot of years.
Will - Is it just a case of it turning up in the soil as you plough?
Chris - Basically? Yes, it does tend to move around there. So deep cultivations do pull it out, but then if we can't pull it out the first year, generally we'll mark it and go back the second year. Just being aware of where it is and it normally moves in the soil. And it's nothing but a pain.
Will - It's something I feel like we should appreciate is that there is fascinating scientific value to this, but from a practical farming side, <laugh>, this is not what you want at all.
Chris - No, no. It is just difficult to deal with on a day-to-day basis, we'll go round autumn cultivations and then we'll have to go round and pick up the bog oak trees, heap them up again. And then spring cultivation is exactly the same. It's
Will - Almost good that it turned out to be so old and unusual because otherwise this would be utterly <laugh>, utterly pointless.
Chris - Yeah, I mean there must have been some value in it, but it's a question of realising the value of it.
Will - What did you think it was when you first saw it? Did you just assume there was no real significance to it?
Chris - Everyone calls it bog oak. We know it's old. Yeah, we don't know if there's any real value in it. But at the actual age, no one was really interested.
Will - I assume it wasn't a direct line of communication with you, but did you get in contact with the university? Did the university get in contact with this group of farmers and, and how was this relationship established?
Chris - Yeah, I assume my predecessor got in contact with Tatiana about this and yeah, then she got in contact with me eventually.
Tatiana - So very luckily, one of the farmers contacted the department saying that, 'Hey guys, I have lots of wood here on the edge of my field. Is there any interest?'
Will -
This is Tatiana Bebchuk. She's a PhD student at the University of Cambridge's Department of Geography and was one of the people tasked with unlocking the secrets of this dead forest.
Tatiana - Luckily my supervisor gets very excited when he hears about the wood, so he went to the field, took a sample of the wood because he had no idea of how old it is. When the results came back, he was even more excited because it turned out that it's around 5,000 years ago when these trees were growing.
Will - Trees are very useful for telling us the recent history of the climate. Since they grow more in warmer, wetter years, the rings are further apart when you look at a cross section of the trunk. So what kind of snapshot do these preserve trees give us about the fences 5,000 years ago?
Tatiana - Since we find so many trees, it means that there were woodlands. The species that we find are yew trees and oak trees. We then see that these trees established themselves in the area around 5,200 years ago and they were growing in favourable, for them, conditions. However, we do see that some of the trunks have what is called adventitious roots. So roots that are produced when a tree starts to be buried. So it means that while these trees were growing, something was going on in the landscape, in the topography, right? Then we see that all these trees die and they get preserved. So altogether we kind of can bring these pieces of puzzle and reconstruct the environmental story, which for us now looks like this area is very flat and is basically situated at the sea level, it was very much affected by sea level. So if the sea level rises, rivers don't have as much flow to pass the water to the sea so that it gets flooded with freshwater and under fresh water logging conditions. Peat starts accumulating, so that's what was burying the trees. But then the question remains what actually killed the trees. And as we see that these trees produce adventurous roots, it means that they were not killed by peat. They could overcome it. So our current hypothesis is that these species are intolerant to salt water and salt aerosols. So the rapid sea level rise or increased storminess could lead to decline of the trees.
Will - On a geological timescale, sea levels rise and fall all the time. What do you think drove this one in particular and was there anything significant about it?
Tatiana - So I can't yet <laugh> say what drove this sea level rise, but we do see some interconnections on a global scale between the disappearance of these trees and some other major climatic events. 4,200 years ago when these trees disappeared, we know that there was a mega drought in Asia and the Middle East, which potentially led to the collapse of three major civilizations such as the Old Kingdom in Egypt, Harappa in India, and Mesopotamia. So we can kind of see that there are these teleconnections and we just have to explore if that's what was in 4,200 years ago.
Will - It is remarkable to think that relatively recently, the flat featureless fences were a sprawling forest of oaks and elms. But mega droughts, rising sea levels, collapsing civilizations. Sounds familiar, doesn't it? Should we continue to burn fossil fuels and allow climate change to shape our weather systems and landscapes, areas such as the Fens, a place of home, food, and wildlife, could well find themselves in very deep water.
20:16 - Nyx Alpha: the UK's new space telescope
Nyx Alpha: the UK's new space telescope
David Whitehouse
the UK has announced that it will build a new ground-based space telescope system in Cyprus. The project, which is known as ‘Nyx Alpha’, will monitor objects in geostationary orbit, around 36,000 kilometers above Earth’s equator. The space scientist and author David Whitehouse explains why the UK was so interested in a new telescope…
David - One thing that the United Kingdom can do as part of its contribution to the Western Alliance of space powers, is to help understand what's known as space situational awareness, which means what is up there, who's put it there and what it's doing. It's not just a question of, 'oh, our satellites, our television, our broadcast, our military satellites are in geostationary orbit. Let's just look up there.' You've got to take into account the position of the sun, the time of day or night, because there are certain times of the day when you can see into geostationary orbit and see what's there. And there's certain types of day, and indeed times of the year when you can't. So what China and Russia may well do with this type of orbit is they might use the fact that it's possible to hide in space, hide in these orbits. Therefore you've got to develop the data processing techniques and the time of observing to make sure you can spot what they're doing. So this telescope is an addition to the very important area of space situational awareness. It's not a very large telescope, but then again, telescopes these days with sensitive detectors at their focus can be very good at looking at objects orbiting the Earth.
James - Certainly seems like we're entering a new era of warfare, essentially, which is a bit of a scary thought. As well as that contribution to the Western defence space collaboration that you touch on, one of the things we know the UK is genuinely world leading on, in the domain of space, is the manufacture of satellites. So I suppose it makes sense that we're seeking to improve the accuracy with which we can monitor those precious assets and where they might be at any given time.
David - There are hundreds and hundreds more satellites being launched every year. Small satellites for specific purposes of which Britain, as you said, is very good at doing this. But we also in this country build big satellites as well. And they are expensive. Although small satellites are cheap individually, you still have to buy a rocket to launch them. You still have to launch them with another rocket and you launch a lot of them en masse. And look at the conflict in the Ukraine. Elon Musk's internet connectivity satellites fly over Ukraine very regularly, but they've been able to disable or degrade their usefulness over conflict zones so that they're not seen as assisting too much in any one particular side for political reasons. And that involves knowing where everything is, knowing what it's doing, knowing where other people are. And you could say there are signs that the American military in particular has paid a great deal of attention to everybody's space assets that fly over the Ukraine at the moment.
James - It's interesting you touch on SpaceX, a private space enterprise and how they're starting to become a prominent force in space when it's previously been the domain of the state. And this Nyx Alpha project shares that collaborative element between private and publicly funded space enterprises, doesn't it?
David - You are quite right. Nyx Alpha is done, I think, by a small startup company. It's only been around for a year or two called Spaceflux. And it's a fairly interesting startup in the sense that the technology is not fantastically advanced. You need a telescope, a clear site. That's why it's in Cyprus. Better weather, better view of the sky than you get in this country. And there is a need actually for a more widespread global array of telescopes for this space situational awareness, particularly in the Southern hemisphere where there are very few observatories, which look at this type of thing. Because if you've got a satellite that's annoying an American military satellite in geostationary orbit, you can actually move it out of the way. And at the moment you cannot track it. It literally disappears until you see, come back in and perhaps threaten or surveil the satellite again. So this small telescope is presumably going to be one of a new range of telescopes. And this is already happening in the United States where private companies provide vital information about space awareness to the military, of which Britain is becoming a part of, that's going to spread more around the world. And I think you can expect to see more satellites in the Southern Atlantic, in Australia, and perhaps even Antarctica.
25:26 - What are black holes made of?
What are black holes made of?
Thanks to Cambridge University's Ben Allanach for the answer!
David - What are black holes made of? Would it be based on subatomic particles?
James - To help us this week, I'm joined by Ben Allanach, professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge. How are you, Ben?
Ben - I'm very good. Thank you. James. I'm on holiday in Cornwall.
James - Well thank you for taking a little bit of time out to speak with us. We better start, Ben, with what a black hole actually is.
Ben - What happens is that things collapse in the universe through gravity, interstellar gas, that's just hanging around in the universe and stars. They collapse and gravity pulls it all together. And so it forms a very dense bit of matter. And sometimes that matter is so dense that it will suck light back into itself. And so that's what happens basically. The black is the absence of light because it's just been sucked back in by the gravity. So no light hits your eyeball and so the absence of light looks black. So that's what a black hole is. It's a surface around a very dense object, which is in the middle of it, probably, where the light gets sucked back into the middle.
James - So the short answer is it's made up of the things, the gas, the objects that it sucks towards the middle of it.
Ben - Exactly. But the problem is they all end up being very densely compressed in the middle, and we don't fully know what goes on there. What's likely to happen is instead of atoms and things, you've got subatomic particles. But they're at such high pressures and temperatures. We don't really know how they behave right in the middle. You can describe it with equations and the simple equations have infinities in it, and it's probably a lot more complicated than we know. So we are reaching the edge of scientific knowledge about what's happening right in the centre. But the bit that we see as a black hole that we understand, it's this sphere around it where the light gets sucked back in.
James - And you touched on the second part of David's question, which is the particles that are getting sucked into the singularity. The, for all intents and purposes, dot in the middle are getting changed into subatomic particles when they're in there. And that's up for debate.
Ben - They certainly will when they get close to the centre, because they'll get heated up. The temperature will break the atoms apart. So there will be a stage at least where they're subatomic particles. And actually we know, in the sense that we know how they behave. But when they get heated up more beyond any experiments we've been able to do and things we've been able to test, then we're not really sure how they're going to behave after that. Something quite unusual might happen. We don't know.
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