Why study sewage?
The Life Scientific
BBC
4.6 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 11 October 2022
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Leon Barron monitors pollution in our rivers, keeping tabs on chemicals that could be harmful to the environment and to our health. He’s also gathered intelligence on the behaviour of millions of Londoners by studying the water we flush down the loo. His analysis of sewage revealed, for example, just how much cocaine is consumed in London every day. And he’s helped the Metropolitan Police to crack crimes in other ways too, inventing new chemistry tools that can be used by forensic scientists to uncover clues. At school he had no idea he wanted to be an analytical chemist but a short work experience placement at the fertiliser factory convinced him that this kind of detective work was fun. Producer: Anna Buckley
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Ever wondered what the world's wealthiest people did to get so ridiculously rich? |
| 0:05.5 | Our podcast Good Bad Billionaire takes one billionaire at a time and explains exactly how they made their money. |
| 0:11.9 | And then we decide if they are actually good, bad or just plain wealthy. |
| 0:15.5 | So if you want to know if Rihanna is as much of a bad guy as she claims, |
| 0:19.2 | or what Jeff Bezos really did to become the first person in history to pocket a hundred billion dollars, |
| 0:24.6 | listen to Good Bad Billionaire with me, Simon Jack, and me, Zingsing. |
| 0:28.5 | Listen on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:32.4 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts. |
| 0:36.0 | Hello and welcome to the Life Scientific, the show where I get to talk to some of our leading scientists |
| 0:41.3 | and you get to find out what gets them out of bed in the morning. |
| 0:45.4 | Please don't be put off when I tell you that the main focus of today's show is sewage. |
| 0:50.5 | Dr Leon Baron has spent a lot of his career to date testing what's in our water, |
| 0:55.5 | from drinking water to river water to his favourite of all, |
| 0:59.2 | the water we flush down the toilet. |
| 1:01.3 | He has monitored pollution in our rivers and worked in forensics, |
| 1:05.0 | helping the metropolitan police to crack crimes. |
| 1:07.8 | He's even used chemical analysis to reveal how much cocaine London has snorled every day. |
| 1:14.0 | More recently he designed a brand new laboratory at Imperial College London |
| 1:18.0 | to monitor what's in our water and identify chemicals that could be harmful |
| 1:23.1 | to human health or the environment. |
| 1:25.7 | And with more than 350,000 industrial chemicals currently licensed for global sale and manufacture, |
| 1:32.7 | the challenge now is bigger than ever. |
... |
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