Staph Retreat

Radiolab

WNYC Studios

Natural Sciences, History, Documentary, Science, Society & Culture

4.6 • 44.5K Ratings

🗓️ 3 November 2015

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What happens when you combine an axe-wielding microbiologist and a disease-obsessed historian? A strange brew that's hard to resist, even for a modern day microbe. In the war on devilish microbes, our weapons are starting to fail us. The antibiotics we once wielded like miraculous flaming swords seem more like lukewarm butter knives. But today we follow an odd couple to a storied land of elves and dragons. There, they uncover a 1000-year-old secret that makes us reconsider our most basic assumptions about human progress and wonder: What if the only way forward is backward? Reported by Latif Nasser. Produced by Matt Kielty and Soren Wheeler. Special thanks to Steve Diggle, Professor Roberta Frank, Alexandra Reider and Justin Park (our Old English readers), Gene Murrow from Gotham Early Music Scene, Marcia Young for her performance on the medieval harp and Collin Monro of Tadcaster and the rest of the Barony of Iron Bog.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Wait, you're listening...
0:03.1	Okay.
0:04.4	All right.
0:05.6	Okay.
0:07.0	All right.
0:08.5	You're listening to Radio Lab.
0:11.4	Radio Lab.
0:11.9	From...
0:12.3	W. N. Y. Se.
0:14.8	See?
0:14.9	Yeah.
0:18.9	Okay, I'm Chad. I'm Rod.
0:20.5	I'm Robert Crulwich. This is Radio Lab. and today... Well, today... Yes. The story of an axe-wielding nun coming through a window to smack some Staphylococcus and take you back to the future. Exactly. The story comes... Does that make any sense? I don't know. Well, it will. Okay, you will. The story comes in two parts, both from our producer Latif Nasser.
0:40.1	And here is part one.
0:42.2	So the way the story goes, it starts in 1928.
0:47.6	1928, Alexander Fleming, the story goes, who knows if it's apocryphal or not, is growing
0:53.1	staff, Staphylococcus, in his lab.
0:56.7	That's Marin McKenna. She's a science writer. And staff is a bacterium.
1:01.1	It lives on our skin, and it especially likes parts of the body that are warm and damp.
1:08.3	So it likes to be just up our noses or...
1:10.5	In our genitals, in our armpits, places like that.
1:13.4	And generally, it's no big deal.
	...

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