Coronavirus outbreak in China; Genetic diseases in Amish communities and getting an Egyptian mummy to speak

BBC Inside Science

BBC

Technology, Science

4.5 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 23 January 2020

⏱️ 32 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

With news reports moving as quickly as the virus may be spreading, the latest coronavirus outbreak which is thought to have started in Wuhan in central China is fast becoming a global health concern. Adam Rutherford speaks to BBC Inside Science's resident virologist Professor Jonathan Ball from Nottingham University, who says one of the most urgent things to do is to find out where the virus came from, and what animal it jumped to humans from. The Anabaptist Amish communities are some of the fastest growing populations on the planet. They came to the US from the Swiss-German border in the 18th and 19th centuries and have maintained their plain, simple community-minded way of life. Partly because they all descended from the same geographical area and partly because they tend to marry within their own communities, they can suffer from a particular spectrum of genetic disorders. Professor Andrew Crosby and Dr. Emma Baple from Exeter University have been studying these diseases, including a number new to medicine, and in return they are helping the Amish to understand and treat some of these debilitating diseases. He may currently sound more like a sheep baa-ing, but in a proof of concept experiment, Professor David Howard, an electrical engineer at Royal Holloway University of London, has been able to scan, 3D print and electronically reanimate the vocal tract of Nesyamum, a 3000 year old Egyptian mummy. The eventual hope is to recreate his tongue and try to get him to sing. Producer - Fiona Roberts

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're about to listen to a BBC podcast and trust me you'll get there in a moment but if you're a comedy fan
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0:41.0	BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts.
0:45.0	Hello you, this is the podcast of Inside Science from BBC Radio 4,
0:49.0	first broadcast on the 23rd of January 2000 and 20 we are now. I'm Adam Rutherford. Today we're taking a look at a British
0:57.2	project that is investigating the genetics of the armish in the US with an eye to identifying and treating diseases in those communities.
1:05.0	And we're recreating a voice from the afterlife.
1:09.0	We'll be talking like an Egyptian with a 3D printed model of the larynx of an Egyptian mummy.
1:14.7	Note, this comes with a severe health warning because we've included a clip from what
1:19.7	I think is one of the funniest things that the BBC has ever produced. That is all coming up later. But first,
1:28.1	there is a new virus about bringing with it a new respiratory illness. It's a coronavirus, we don't have a name for it yet,
1:34.4	but it's similar to the other outbreaks in recent years such as SARS. Now this is an ongoing story and the numbers are changing on a daily basis, but as of latest reports today, that's
1:44.4	Thursday the 23rd of January, more than 500 cases have been reported and 17
1:49.8	deaths so far in China alone. The cause is thought to be a coronavirus that emerged in the
1:55.0	city of Wu Han which is in the HuBai province in central China, possibly
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