How To Accidentally Save the World (with Fungus)
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- Опубліковано 3 бер 2024
- How did a famous lab accident end up saving more than half a billion lives…and is it even true? How did a moldy melon from Peoria, Illinois save more than half a billion lives? And what does this all have to do with using killer viruses to make people better when they’re sick?? Curiosity in the face of failure is what gave us modern antibiotics…and the viruses that just might save us from superbugs.
Fascinating Fails tells the stories of accidents in history that have resulted in some of our biggest discoveries, inventions, and breakthroughs. Following those often jaw-dropping (and sometimes hilarious) fails through time to today, host Maren Hunsberger asks: "What's next?". By talking to today's innovative young scientists, engineers, artists, and other big thinkers, we see how the mistakes of the past are leading us into the science of tomorrow...and toward a better future.
Original Production Funding Provided by National Science Foundation - Grant No. 2120006 Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
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As a microbiologist myself, I can't watch people talking over an open Petri dish!
😆
Students in my biotechnology class would have “micro wars” where they would plate multiple bacteria/fungi on one plate and see which ones took over lol
Pseudomonas aeruginosa would win every time 😂
😂@@Kadler42
PLEASE UPLOAD VIDEOS ON THIS!
Messing around and doing Germ Wars on petri dishes sounds so interesting, I've already thought about it a while ago but I've never really seen any videos on it yet.
Hopefully they didn’t accidentally create (and release) any super-plagues.
@@mythplatypuspwnedsadly my lab doesn't really have the camera equipment for this, it takes days to weeks even!
Excellent, so often the Penicillin story ends with Fleming. Antimicrobial resistance is so scary, and still antibiotics are being handed out like sweeties. The phage approach looks encouraging and, if they are bacteria specific, will not harm "good" bacteria like broad-spectrum medications 🤞
They're almost too specific. For the Artificial Bladder experiment in the video, I had to go through nearly 50 phages against only E. coli just to find a few that worked on more than one or two people's specific infections 😒 But that's why we have a huge collection in the lab, so we can pick whichever ones fit our work best!
Hey, are you in the video?
I have said this before but this is my favourite show on PBS Terra. Maren grabs your attention and keeps you locked in. Fantastic show, more of this, please!
Having gone to high school in Peoria, IL and gone to a lot of science-related events, I heard the "moldy canteloupe in a market in Peoria" story many times. Nice to finally hear it better explained, with context!
I thought that *that* was cooler than the story Fleming told
You missed a “Mold Juice” counter increment around 7:14.
Scrolled down to see if someone mentioned that! Heck, if they made this inconsequential mistake to drive the inevitable engagement caused by even a little 'oopsie', hats off to their slyness 😊
Classes JUST started our microbio chapter, this video is excellent and we will be watching and discussing!
What do you teach? I'm the PhD student from the video, would be happy to answer questions if it would help?
Wow! I had the mistaken impression that Fleming was responsible for the whole process; discovery, identification, purification, etc. Great vid.
Your rainbow glasses and microbe/virus earrings are giving SUCH Miss Frizzle vibes and I am so here for it!
Sooo...apologies to Alexander Fleming, but a medical papyrus called the Ebers Papyrus shows that the Egyptians were using fungi as antibiotics 3 millennia ago. It describes "yeast of sweet beer" being used to prevent festering of wounds. It also describes packing a wound with moldy bread. The ancient Egyptians also collected a grain mold which produced a type of Tetracycline. Most Egyptian mummy bones contain a trace amount of tetracycline.
It's NOT just a phage, mom! 😫
The natural world is far more diverse than anyone can imagine, if we treat here with respect, she can help us solve so many problems.
The comment section is also very diverse :-)
I always try to imagine what different characters are behind the comments, what their motivation is, and how many different world views there are.
I'd like to take a moment to appreciate the fact "antibiotic" caught on instead of "mold juice" (though I doubt my own nerd interest will ever be as useful)
somewhere in the universe they are saying mold juice.
Excellent video.Very well scripted and presented. Interesting subject covered in an enlightened manner. Must see video!
I haven't been this early since Dr. Fleming was just an Intern
Can we get a phage for underarm's? It would be cheaper than deodorant every day.
@@flufffycow Yes!! someone at our lab is working on it! (PS. I'm the PhD student from the episode)
That is a lie. You finished extremely early yesterday.
@@Kadler42 That's hype!
@@bimajuantarait's mostly caused by a "friendly" skin bacterium called Staphylococcus epidermidis, which only makes smells in more damp/dark areas like armpits, even though it lives all over our skin!
What's interesting is that phage therapy is quite common in Russia and there is no hype about it. The rest of the world abandoned the idea a hundred years ago because of cheap antibiotics and now is reinventing it.
Also Cold War politics, sadly
"rest of the world abandoned the idea a hundred years ago because of cheap antibiotics " - let's see... a hundred years ago would have been 1924. Tell me, of what cheap antibiotics are you going on about?
I absolutely love any content where you go into a lab/the field and chat with scientists about their lifes work
I love Maren! It's good to see you still making videos.
Yo those glasses are cool as do didddly heck
I'm not a style or clothing kinda person, but I gotta say her whole getup looks cool and beautiful, especially the glasses. I didn't hear the first bit because it distracted me 😅.
Edit: omg I truly am a hairy monkey man. I only just noticed that her nice looking earrings are actually a bacterium and a virus. And just when I'm typing this edit, she shows and tells haha.
I found them at a glasses store online and had to get them. Super wild to see them in a video.
This was incredibly fascinating to learn.Thank you so much for this video!
You accidentally swapped the names of Howard Florey and Ernst Chain with their respective images around minute 7:00
I should add though that I loved the video!!!💚
Thank you, very informative documentary.
Such a great episode! Fascinating!
Amazing video, great tone/excitement from host & guests!
In the past, I've heard bacteria trade resistance for antibiotics for phage resistance; is this no longer held to be true?
I'm the PhD student from the video - they indeed do! Other parts of my work involve finding which combinations are the best overall because the bacteria can't change resistances quick enough, some combinations are good enough to lower a bacteria from being classified as resistant to a particular Antibiotic X to being sensitive! Also, the idea for both phage therapy in general and our work in particular is to use a multi-directional approach, not only phage and antibiotic together, but also several phages together, where the bacteria will have to scramble and try to develop resistance to each part individually, and inevitably fail. (evil laugh?)
👹 I'll cackle along with you, because that's good to hear! Thank you for your valuable contributions to the field.
@@ryanwaege7251I'm glad you liked the video! It's very exciting to see my work on PBS which I grew up watching, and even before we managed to publish it as a scientific article!
So interesting!! I love these programs. 👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼
So glad to see this work going in! So many of our lil' ol' ladies need some better options :))
Bacteriaphage therapies were well developed in the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War.
Cuba has kept this research up, and is now the world leader in using phages to assist in stopping anti-microbial resistant strains in clinical situations.
My father always described humans as big fancy vehicles for bacteria . 🛻🦠
Another excellent episode. This corrected a misunderstanding I had prior that Fleming also isolated penicillin himself. It's great to see active research on phage therapy (outside of Russia) as well. I remember hearing that antimicrobial resistance tends to be inversely related to phage resistance. If that's accurate then they really do seem like the best tool to address the mess we've gotten ourselves into.
I'm the PhD student from the video - this is absolutely true! Other parts of my work involve finding which combinations are the best overall because the bacteria can't change resistances quick enough, some combinations are good enough to lower a bacteria from being classified as resistant to a particular Antibiotic X to being sensitive! Also, the idea for both phage therapy in general and our work in particular is to use a multi-directional approach, not only phage and antibiotic together, but also several phages together, where the bacteria will have to scramble and try to develop resistance to each part individually, and inevitably fail. (evil laugh?)
Such a good episode! So insightful
I love your glasses! I want a pair ❤
Yo! Peoria IL represent! That's where I am from! I love that they ate the canteloupe after they scraped the mold off it lmao
OMG. This is so cool and eye opening!
So interesting great episode
Loved this, very interesting and informative
Thank you
Really good report. Well explained.
i would love to have creepy little nano machine phages that we could program with a sample of something ailing us and then send it in to wipe it out. That’s sort of what this is like already tho lol. Phages are so cool!!! Biological stuff sure is incredible, and disgusting! Also Maren has great glasses, and is very good at being a presenter.
I came for the fungus and stayed for the positive wlw vibes
When hearing the word Phage I instantly think of the Vidiians. IYKYK.
Great video
The evil Dr. Flaming has made the world harder for peniclium mold. That is very cruel.
This is so awesome!
love this! such a fun video too!
My old hospital I used to work at dealt with the first Covid case in the USA!😂 in Chicago!
yay a way to treat resistant strain bacteria.
SCIENCE!!!!!
I wanna know about the first person who realized they're allergic to penicillin. Imagine you get an infection and know about the miracle of the newly discovered antibiotic, but then you go for treatment and have an allergic reaction.
Phage earrings!❤
16:44 "So, what are we using?" "Karen."
We are bacterial condominiums
So you’re telling me antibiotics and nuclear weapons were developed at the same time?
And for the same reason: war
Don’t they look like little Aliens??!❤👽
You should try wastewater plants.
I'm the PhD student from the video - we go there to our local one at least once a year to stock up! Sewage water is just what we call it, but it contains waste water from everything from restaurants to street flood drains to farm runoff to showers, so a good place to find phages against pretty much anything!
11:49 so the bacterio in bacteriophage is redundant because all phages are bacteriophages?
If you talked to the people who study archaeoviruses (viruses which infect the Archaea, which look exactly like phages) and called them phages they'd be BIG MAD. It just means bacteria-eater in Greek:)
this is amazing, thank you. Great video.
I'm so grateful that we're in an age where we favour science, instead of faith! Since antibiotics have already saved my life a couple of times! So it would be terrifying to go back to the dark ages, of being at the mercy of infection's!
How fungi accidentally saved the world; until humans ruined it all because we wanted to make livestock HUGE" is the whole intro but it was too long
The aurochs, ancestors of our current cattle, were much larger.
We bred them smaller to make them easier to control and smaller.
Bigger cattle wouldn't fit in the slaughter infrastructure.
more mushrooms.
we forage like 30 wild mushrooms in germany throughout the year and basically never get sick anymore, many winter mushrooms have extreme antibacterial properties.
Go science!
*Antimicrobial resistance and diet?* I know it's a thing, but don't understand it. Please look into it PBS Terra ❤
I am wondering what happen to the phages when the bacteria have been wiped out, do they die? Or hibernate? or else?
4:53 I thought this was a sponsor break
Weren’t other people around in the building Fleming was working in working on fungi? So the spores got onto a plate that wasn’t properly cleaned? 🤔
What's the genome of the bacteriophage size wise? Maybe 50K base pairs? Not a very complex little organic bot are they? Maybe simplicity is the best route since all it takes is some minute changes to the attachment structure or another critical link between the phage and the bacterium. Sort of like changing your password just one or two keystroke items each time. Just enough for the new strand to be ineffective in producing the linkage structure.
"Mod Juice" counter missed an instance at 7:12
Yay phage!
They look like some Aliens!!
Well learned more about Fleming but knew everything else all I knew was discovered it and made it happen now I know who was involved and how it got picked up by others along the way 😊
'Mold juice' counter is wrong! (You missed one at 7:12)
E. coli that's just an enteric organism. Probably quite necessary for water absorption in the large intestine or? Like they said, it's great where it belongs, but when it get's out of it's normal environment, it causes problems.
In the Soviet Union, they did decades of research, and routinely used phages in clinical practice.
Leave it to p b s to be at the for front when we save the world
Fungus eat the sour cream
What if phages adapt to kill all bacteria?
Oh man, if only. Would make my job so much easier!!! People are trying to engineer universal phages but it's sort of like trying to engineer a universal key that opens all locks without knowing exactly what the locks are and their design. Not too successful yet sadly
Universe is the the bacteria
do phages infect archea or cyanobacteria, if so, do lichens have a defense boosting mechanism?
I want her earrings
This is a great reportage... but putting such a great background check on penicillin and Flemming but on the phage not mentioning the biggest phage repository in the world, the George Eliava Institute, in Tbilisi, Georgia, it's a big fail specially by how much they are advanced already ...
The cold war is already over and we need to collaborate instead of compete...
💚
I'll be fine - it's just a phage I'm going through. tavi.
Where are your gloves?! The first minute is giving me the ick lol
I make my own antibiotics for a rat I have, which has chronic infection from a rat trap catching the lil guys arm - he was so sweet I saved him.
But the pharmaceutical antibiotics like amoxicillin, and topical vancomycin, no longer work. But a combo of elemental copper and silver, and garlic soaked in ethanol/water, will turn blue green with black stuff at the bottom, and on the silver - then I evaporate it till it's thick. I end with 1/10th the volume I started with.
But using this foul smelling stuff, I swear it saved Mr mushfoot, my rat. Soaking his arm in it was hard for everyone, and the pus from his arm turns a vivid blue, like the garlic - it's quite gross. But after this treatment, the amoxicillin began to work again.
It's an old recipe, that was used in the middle ages for styes.
The phages will save us way before garlic tho
University of Nottingham is investigating Bald's eye salve which is very much real and working, and they're trying to find out what exactly in there is the active working chemicals. a very cool project.
Can it save the emperor penguins?
Wait does that mean the penicillin vaccine was radioactive? ☢️😂
Show me the fungus that stops our sun.
Garbage foundation science in, garbage science out.
I don't know if it's how big my monitor is and how close I'm sitting from it, but for most of this video you were uncomfortably close to the camera.
Universe is bacteria. The
disappointed you failed to mention Russia has been using phage therapy for sometime now. This is a science channel not a political one, You could have disclose that information. This made me sad. I love PBS.
Great video, but I had to stop watching because the shaky camera was giving me a headache.
"Contemporaneous"? Was contemporary meant?
I'm like literally like amazed how the English language has like literally changed. Now it literally like sounds like dumb. Like literally.
Like literally yaas. Fr fr.
People have been complaining about language since time immemorial. People in the past would complain about your language,
Sorry, I'm sure you're doing a valuable job, but I find this unwatchable, and, more importantly, unlistenable-to. The reason? So much 'vocal fry' I feel positively unwell after 2 minutes! Oh for an unaffected, naturally resonant human voice...
Vocal fry is natural. Different people speak differently. Different languages too.
It's funny, it used to be considered classy in male speech.
ua-cam.com/video/Q0yL2GezneU/v-deo.html
It would have been much kinder to keep this to yourself :)
Oddly enough, reading your comment steeped in an inflated sense of importance has also left me feeling positively unwell. But fret not, Anne! We'll do our best to carry on without you.
I'm sure you accidentally found that black female doctor lol
Sadly only one doctor at the National Centre for Phage Research and it's a woman and she's black and she also has a PhD. Too bad there wasn't anyone else to choose from. /s
@@Kadler42 I am sure it was not planned
This channel is so woke! Even doing science they always think about being woke!
Only you are thinking about "woke". Politics has rotted your mind through.
Yay phages please help us 🥲🥲
13:24 Biology is wild nanotech, proteins do a lot of things but in general are nanobots or parts of larger nanobots(often both!). I'm not even talking metaphorically; life is literally wild self-replicating nanotech. kurzgesagt's video on the compliment system does a good job of illustrating this.
Molecular biology is kind of mind blowing.
One fun example; you know how your muscle cells contract? Yes electrical impulse, but what actual physical mechanism causes that motion? It's countless motor proteins acting as little hands pulling cytoskeletal ropes. Similar motor proteins, with little legs, physically walk along the surface of cytoskeletal tubes transporting certain materials around individual cells. Your cells are full of little delivery-mecha.
I’m having pleasant memories of injecting 1 ml or so pig 🐷 penicillin per liter agar 🧫 media while still molten to avoid thermal decomposition during pressure cooking…..
Yes! Magic 🍄(allegedly 20 years ago lol)