5 years of COVID, and the hunt for Planet X
In this edition of The Naked Scientists: It’s 5 years since COVID began and the WHO hosted their first press conference. But how much have we learned and are we prepared for the next pandemic? Also, a report from the UK House of Lords points to a rapidly closing window of opportunity to capitalise on “engineering biology” - but what is that? And, is there a hidden planet lurking out past Pluto? A new telescope will soon enable astronomers to find out…
In this episode
5 years of COVID-19
Maria Van Kerkhove, World Health Organisation
It’s unlikely that COVID-19 will still make top billing on news bulletins. But almost exactly 5 years ago, the pandemic was beginning to unfold before our eyes, and we are still living with the consequences. It’s estimated that COVID claimed as many as 20 million lives, caused widespread mental health problems, kept more than one billion children out of the classroom, and hammered the global economy. The World Health Organisation’s acting director in the department of epidemic and pandemic threat management, Maria van Kerkove, has just published a comment in Science reminding us that COVID - and the threat of future pandemics, hasn’t gone away…
Maria - Five years ago, the WHO first learned of this cluster of pneumonia of unknown aetiology. Yesterday, the 14th of January, was the date of my first ever press conference. I thought it would be my first and my last. I actually found the video online. I tweeted it yesterday. At the time there were 41 confirmed cases, but by that time, WHO, we had already set up an incident management team. We had already notified our member states. We were communicating regularly with our member states, either through our official channels and through the international health regulations or publicly. We published an entire package of technical guidance for what we were calling 'N CoV' for a novel coronavirus, later to be known as SARS CoV-2 and later to be called COVID-19. We had already published the first PCR assay. We were in full force, in full swing.
Chris - If we look at the numbers now, where are we? Cases, area under the curve since then, how many people have actually succumbed to this thing. Put us in the picture and where we've got to five years on.
Maria - Five years on, there have been billions of infections. We now have a new birth cohort of children from zero to four years old who have a different immune profile, different exposure to this virus. But almost everyone on the planet has been exposed and arguably infected. In terms of deaths, reported deaths are just over 7 million. But we don't have full visibility on how many people have died from Covid. We estimate that it's at least three times higher. But the estimates that we had when we were doing excess mortality are basically from the first two years. We're actually undergoing an exercise now to look at deaths from the third and the fourth year of the pandemic, so we don't actually have an accurate measure of the true impact of Covid. I want to be clear, I don't want to talk about Covid in the past: it's still circulating, it's still infecting, it's still killing. I don't know, Chris, if you remember, at the peak of Covid, this was January, 2021 before vaccinations were rolled out, before we really had effective treatments, about a hundred thousand deaths were reported each week at the peak in terms of circulation. When omicron hit in early 2022 reported cases each week were around 23.5 million. These are staggering numbers and I think all of us who've gone through this, and you and I had talked previously about just looking at the progression of age on our own faces over the course of the last five years, it's had a massive toll on everyone. This virus has impacted everyone, and for those people who've lost loved ones, they're still grieving. Those people who are dealing with acute disease, who are dealing with Long Covid... this is not something that's in the past. Right now we have about 4,000 deaths per week. It's not gone, it's just out of the headlines.
Chris - I was asked the other day, probably because of the anniversary, are we better prepared now? Are we in much better shape? If Covid mark 2 lands tomorrow, will it be a walk in the park in comparison? I have to admit, I struggled to answer the question, and I think your own director general, Tedros Ghebreyesus, said a similar sort of thing, didn't he? There have been things we have learned, but things we haven't.
Maria - Yeah, the answer is yes and no. In many respects, we have the experience. We are better prepared because we've taken concrete measures within countries to improve surveillance systems, to increase diagnostic capacities, sequencing capacities, emergency operation centres, looking at the use of medical oxygen and sustaining the use of medical oxygen, clinical care. In some cases, better PPE, we need more work on ventilation, but those systems have been investments. We're also seeing a decline in the investment in those systems. How can we maintain those for that next one. It's not a matter of if, but when. We also have taken some concrete steps with regards to setting up, within WHO, hubs for supply chains to be able to better have those materials in locations around the world so that they can reach the people in need the most.
We've been setting up access and allocation mechanisms using a medical countermeasures network, at the direction of our member states to say, how do we better utilise the partnerships around the world to not just say we want equitable distribution of safe and effective diagnostics, therapeutics, vaccines, but how do we concretely do that? There's work on more mRNA hubs, technology hubs, tech transfer, but the question is how well we sustain this. There have been concrete efforts to be better prepared the next time, not only to earlier detect, but to mitigate what may become a pandemic if we can. But on the other hand, we're in a situation now where the world is very complex. We have huge numbers of emergencies that are climate related, war and displacement, earthquakes and floods. We have a geopolitical climate that is extremely complex. The politicisation of everything, the threats on science, there's so much misinformation, disinformation. So the complexity of the environment in which we are dealing with these constant threats is incredibly difficult. So it's yes, and it's no. I think what we want to see is concerted investments strategically and sustained like we see with the pandemic fund. This is another example of taking some concrete steps to have sustainable financing. The negotiations of the pandemic accord by the member states is absolutely critical. We need something better than a handshake to say, 'let's do better next time.' We need binding agreements between member states, driven by member states and embedded within national laws to be able to say we will do better the next time.
08:08 - UK must capitalise on bio-tech boom
UK must capitalise on bio-tech boom
Julia King
The UK prime minister Keir Starmer has declared artificial intelligence to be the "defining opportunity" of modern times in a bid to put technology at the centre of economic growth. But this comes as the UK’s House of Lords is urging decision-makers and big business to take bold steps to boost the country’s bio-tech sector; otherwise, they say, we risk being trapped in a “doom loop” where foreign competitors exploit British breakthroughs and leapfrog us economically. I’ve been speaking with Julia King, otherwise known as Baroness Brown of Cambridge; she chairs the Lords Science and Technology Committee…
Julia - The title of this report is Don't Fail to Scale: Seizing the Opportunity of Engineering Biology. Engineering biology is using organisms such as bacteria to replace industrial processes, particularly industrial chemistry. It relies on the fact that we can now read DNA and actually, if you like, write DNA, create DNA sequences. So it uses things like gene editing but also, very importantly, AI, because that gives us the ability to find, select, and indeed tailor biological organisms that can do particular jobs. Some of those jobs can be really important—for example, bacteria that can break down fatbergs and turn them into ingredients for perfume. Something terrible from the drains turning into something we can make perfume out of.
Chris - I don’t know, some people have given me some fairly questionable aftershaves in the past, Julia, for Christmas. It probably smells like it comes from that origin. But we've been doing this kind of thing—synthetic biology and so on—for many years. So why is this report coming out now, and what's new?
Julia - The UK, as you say, has been really brilliant at the science of synthetic biology. Over the last 20 years, we've been developing that science base, but now it's really starting to take off and become industrial processes—industrial processes that could be much lower energy, much more sustainable, less environmentally damaging, and could help us to solve some of the world's big problems.
It's really taking off rapidly in other countries, so if we're going to benefit from the great science we've done in the UK, we need to help UK companies—particularly small UK companies—that are starting to use this. We need to help them scale.
Chris - This is the classic UK problem though, isn't it? We're really good at grassroots innovation and getting things off the ground, but we're not good at scaling them. As you say, that has been a perennial problem, and many, many politicians and policymakers over the years have talked about it, but we never seem to solve it.
Julia - You're absolutely right, and this just seems to be such an exciting area where, if we can solve it, we can really make a difference. This is what a lot of our industries of the future will be based on. So, if we want to stimulate industry and economic growth in the UK, this is a chance we've absolutely got to grab.
As our science minister, Lord Patrick Vallance, said, we've got a small but closing window in the UK to do this. That’s why we’re publishing this report and why we conducted this inquiry now. We want to say to the government, "Come on, we've got to grab this window."
Chris - You spoke to many scientists, industrialists, and so on in compiling this report. What did they tell you they need? In other words, what recommendations are you putting in the report to say to policymakers, "This is the pain these people are suffering from, and this is the panacea they need"?
Julia - They need skills. We could do with more funding to train more people in this area. But also, of course, we need to stop losing people to places like the US and Singapore, which are moving forward rapidly. We need to be able to attract people here. That means more support for visas for scientists.
We need the right regulatory environment. At the moment, the regulatory system for this is very complicated. The government has established the Regulatory Innovation Office, but that needs to move quickly to simplify things. Small companies working in this area need a single point of contact for regulation rather than having to deal with multiple regulators, as they do now.
We also need investment. For example, the National Wealth Fund should act as a first investor, taking risks to crowd in other investors.
And we need market pull to attract those investors—not just the government showing it’s prepared to invest, but also using public procurement to create demand. For instance, the US has a
Biopreferred Program. We could have similar policies here, like requiring a certain percentage of biofuels or sustainable aviation fuels in the aviation industry, which is already set to increase gradually year by year.
If we could make that requirement more specific to engineering biology-derived fuels, or find other ways to use policy to pull through and create markets for these new processes, it would really help attract investors.
Chris - Do you think the government will go for it?
Julia - I hope so. I mean, we've been really pleased with the impact our report has had. We’re, of course, now waiting for a government response. We have Lord Vallance as our science minister and Dame Angela McLean as the government’s chief scientist, so we already have some strong voices in government.
The government is also in the process of producing an industrial strategy, so we hope we’re highlighting this very exciting opportunity at the right time. The UK has the strengths, and we need to act on them now.
Xenon counteracts aspects of Alzheimer's
Oleg Butovsky, Harvard Brain Science Initiative
A new study has found that the noble gas xenon can counteract some of the major hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease. Now this has only been demonstrated in mice engineered to develop an Alzheimer's-like pathology, as well as on cells grown in a culture dish, but it does look very interesting. Oleg Butovsky, at Harvard’s Brain Science Initiative, has found that exposure to xenon boosts the activity of the brain’s microglial cells. These are a bit like litter-pickers: they prowl around the brain clearing up rubbish. A burst of xenon gas seems to make them much more mobile so they can migrate towards mass more quickly, and they do a better clean up job in the process…
Oleg - The question was whether we can use xenon gas, which is a very rare gas in the atmosphere, to modulate immune cells of the brain in a way that would make them beneficial or reparative in Alzheimer's disease.
Chris - Why would a noble gas like xenon, A) get into the brain, and B) affect how cells in the brain work in the first place? What's the evidence that that's even possible?
Oleg - There's not much evidence, but historically, xenon has been tried for different things, including brain trauma and psychotic conditions—stuff like that. It is a very stable gas. It's actually been approved in Europe for use as anesthesia, although they don’t use it often because of the cost—it’s a very, very expensive and rare gas. But it can be used at particular dosages for anesthesia. That’s all.
Chris - Tell us about the study you did then in Alzheimer's disease. You're doing this in mice now. Mice don't naturally get Alzheimer's disease, so these must be mice that have been engineered in some way to develop something a bit like Alzheimer's.
Oleg - Yeah, that's absolutely right. These are transgenic mice that overexpress particular proteins called amyloids or tau proteins, which are pathogenic in Alzheimer's. In humans, as they age, these proteins start to aggregate and become toxic. This is how it’s done in the mice—they overexpress and have high levels of human proteins, leading them to develop signs of pathology resembling those seen in human Alzheimer’s brains.
Although, before moving to the mice, we did some simple experiments to see whether xenon had any effect related to neurodegenerative conditions. My lab, many years ago, developed an interesting experimental paradigm where we transplant a cell into a living mouse brain. Within this environment, immune cells called microglia migrate toward the transplanted cells. They recognise dying cells, migrate to them, and phagocytose them. This is a great way to test many things, including xenon.
Mice were exposed to xenon inhalation for about 40 minutes. Microglia were affected in a way that made them very quickly migrate, recognise these dying cells, and phagocytose them. This was the trigger for us to move forward and try xenon inhalation in Alzheimer’s mouse models. The microglia became more migratory and more phagocytic.
Chris - And what impact did that enhanced activity conferred on the microglia by the xenon treatment have on the progression or presentation of Alzheimer’s in these mice?
Oleg - So, we started by looking at whether we could see a reduction in amyloid plaques, and this is what we found. In addition, there was an associated reduction of so-called neuritic plaques. These aggregates are what lead to neuronal death and synaptic loss. We also found that xenon mitigates this pathological evidence.
As we move forward, we’d like to see if xenon has an effect on cognitive improvements. That’s going to be very important for its potential use as a treatment for Alzheimer’s.
18:57 - The hunt for 'Planet X'
The hunt for 'Planet X'
Matt Bothwell, University of Cambridge
Planet X - which is often called Planet Nine - is a hypothetical planetary body that some scientists believe exists out beyond Pluto and Neptune. Regular mathematical wobbles in the orbits of some of the distant bodies in the solar system point towards something we can’t account for exerting a periodic gravitational tug on them. So is there a giant planet out there? Here’s Matt Bothwell, Public Astronomer at Cambridge University’s Institute of Astronomy…
Matt - This sometimes gets called Planet X or Planet Nine. Planet X, meaning ten, of course, in Roman numerals. When we used to have Pluto, the idea of there being a mysterious, massive planet beyond the orbit of Pluto would have made it the tenth planet. Since Pluto got kicked out of the Planet Club, this mysterious planet that some people think might exist in the dark outer reaches of our solar system, if found, would be Planet Nine. The question is: is there a fairly massive planet that we haven’t found yet, lurking in the freezing darkness of the outer solar system?
Chris - Why do space scientists think there might be?
Matt - The best way of answering this is to go back in time 250 years. Astronomers had just discovered the planet Uranus in 1781. In the decades following Uranus’s discovery, astronomers noticed that it was speeding up and slowing down in ways that didn’t align with our understanding of how gravity worked. The best explanation we had was that there was another planet outside the orbit of Uranus, and it was the gravity of this unseen planet pushing Uranus around.
A mathematician did some calculations, pinpointed the planet, and it turned out to exist. That planet was Neptune. The way we found Neptune wasn’t just because we spotted something in the sky and thought, "Huh, that’s funny." It was because we saw Uranus—something we knew existed—being pushed around by something invisible.
In short, that seems to be happening again. In the outskirts of the solar system, where Pluto is, there’s a whole population of objects called TNOs—trans-Neptunian objects. When you look at the orbits of all these different TNOs, they seem to be shepherded or herded by something massive that we haven’t seen yet. Their orbits appear to be aligning in a way that goes beyond coincidence but makes perfect sense if there’s a missing planet out there.
Chris - How big would that missing planet need to be to produce those effects?
Matt - Estimates vary, but it would need to be at least a few times the size of Earth—possibly even as large as an ice giant like Uranus or Neptune.
Chris - And just one planet? Or could there be a swarm of them out there? Can the maths resolve that?
Matt - Our best guess is one, simply because it’s the simplest explanation. Once we have some new telescopes online, we’ll get a better idea of how these TNOs are behaving and be able to refine our estimates. But for now, one planet seems the most likely scenario.
Chris - You’ve sort of anticipated my next question, which is about seeing it. What’s it going to take to resolve this quandary?
Matt - It’s really tricky. In theory, there’s nothing stopping us from seeing this planet. The problem is we don’t know where it is. This is a more complicated problem than the one astronomers faced when they found Neptune. Uranus was behaving predictably, and we were able to pinpoint Neptune’s position accurately.
The TNOs that seem to be lining up in this particular way are harder to pin down. The "haystack" we’re searching for our needle in is enormous. We’re looking at a huge swathe of sky, and the planet is likely to be incredibly small and faint.
Luckily, a telescope coming online soon is perfect for this search: the Vera Rubin Observatory. The amazing thing about Rubin is that it’s doing something almost no telescope has done before.
Most telescopes are incredibly powerful but focus on tiny patches of sky. For example, the James Webb Telescope is extraordinarily powerful and can see across the universe, but it looks at an astonishingly small area of sky. If we tried to scan the possible region where this planet might be using James Webb, it would take a thousand years.
Rubin, however, will photograph the entire sky every few days at an incredible level of faintness. If Planet Nine exists, Vera Rubin will almost certainly find it.
Chris - Where is this amazing telescope, and when will it begin operating?
Matt - The telescope is in Chile, under some of the clearest skies in the world. Its "first light," which is what we call a telescope’s first glimpse of the sky, is due in July 2025.
Chris - So we’ll find out some pretty exciting stuff soon. Obviously, it wasn’t conceived to solve this particular problem—it’s just something that might be explored using it. What’s its primary purpose?
Matt - It’s designed for what we call time-domain astronomy, which is astronomers’ lingo for anything that changes over time. That includes transient events like exploding stars, gamma-ray bursts, or black holes changing how fast they consume dust and gas.
Because Vera Rubin will photograph the entire sky every few days, we’ll effectively be able to make "videos" of the sky. We’ll see stars exploding and fading, and black holes growing as they consume matter—almost in real time.
Rubin will also help us make massive strides in understanding dark energy and dark matter. It will create enormous, detailed maps of the cosmos, which are exactly what we need to study the universe on its largest scales and uncover more about dark energy and dark matter.
25:20 - Why do dreams become more vivid at altitude?
Why do dreams become more vivid at altitude?
James Tytko took on this question, with the help from Andrew Murray, Professor of Metabolic Physiology at the University of Cambridge...
James - Thanks Andrew. You and your guests are not alone. Mountaineers have long reported vivid dreams at high altitudes. There may well be a psychological component. Mountains have been a timeless source of mythological material – places where ancient Gods or dragons reside – and, for those of us who don’t see it a lot, there’s something magical and atmospheric about snowy landscapes. This heightened sensory experience could well be playing a part in those ‘high definition’ dreams.
But there’s almost certainly more to it than that. It’s worth focusing on the thinner, less oxygenated air at high altitudes to probe your question. Here to tell us more is Andrew Murray, Professor of Metabolic Physiology at the University of Cambridge…
Andrew - Thanks James. Sleep disturbances are very common at high-altitude, particularly when we first arrive and are relatively unacclimatised. In a large part, this is caused by erratic breathing patterns, which are most obvious at night when we surrender conscious control of our breathing.
Essentially there is a tussle between two different and somewhat opposing sensory
mechanisms. One set of chemoreceptors in a cluster of cells called the carotid body pick up
on low oxygen levels in our arterial blood, and send signals to our brain urging us to breath
more rapidly to bring more oxygen into our lungs.
So far, all very sensible, but breathing harder also means we exhale more carbon dioxide, making our blood less acidic. A second set of chemoreceptors senses that our cerebral spinal fluid is getting progressively more alkaline and puts the ventilatory brakes on, causing our blood oxygen levels to fall again, before the cycle continues. This is a well-known phenomenon, called Cheyne-Stokes breathing (and is also seen in patients with heart disease). At altitude, it is not uncommon to wake with a start following a period of apnoea (cessation of breathing), and a feeling that we are suffocating. This can also be disruptive for the person we are sharing a bed or a tent with.
James - This would explain why you might wake with a start during the first nights spent at altitude, but why might this lead to more vivid dreams? To answer this, we need to think about our brains during sleep. We’re accustomed in healthy sleep to cycles of 4 progressing stages lasting about 2 hours in total, from light, transitional sleep to deeper sleep, culminating in rapid-eye-movement or REM sleep.
Andrew - Rapid eye movement sleep is when we do our vivid dreaming. So does this suggest that a greater proportion of our sleep at altitude is in this lighter phase? Well quite the opposite in fact. When tested experimentally, investigators found that not only does overall sleep duration fall at altitude, but the proportion of REM sleep also falls.
Instead, it may be that we are more susceptible to sudden waking during this relatively light sleep stage, cutting short our time spent in REM sleep, but enhancing recollection of our dreams in the process, perhaps as they are within touching distance of our waking consciousness.
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